A legal functionary who defined order against a workers’ revolt
On 17 July 1956, he said the investigation would distinguish striking workers from “trouble-makers, criminals and provocateurs.”
Marian Rybicki was a Polish lawyer and communist politician who helped institutionalize the postwar state through senior party, legal, and administrative work. After the Poznań workers’ revolt in 1956, as Prosecutor General, he publicly advanced a “two currents” line distinguishing striking workers from “trouble-makers, criminals and provocateurs.” The distinction separated workers’ economic grievances from alleged criminal responsibility, but it also framed the investigations and trials that followed. He later served as justice minister and worked as a legal scholar concerned with law and governance in a socialist state.
Activities and affiliations
- 1957– Law and justice · Poland
Career Timeline
- 1937Graduated in law from the University of Warsaw
- 1945–1947Worked in the Legal Department of the Presidium of the National National Council
- 1947–1948Served on the Executive Committee and Secretariat of the Polish Socialist Party
- 1948–1954Member of the Organizational Bureau of the Polish United Workers’ Party Central Committee
- 1952–1956First Secretary of the Council of State
- 1956–1957Prosecutor General of the Polish People’s Republic
- 1957–1965Minister of Justice
- 1965–1983Professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of State and Law, and secretary of the All-Poland Committee of the Front of National Unity
Related historical events
The 'two currents' line and the Poznań trials, 1956–1957
On 28 June 1956, workers at Poznań's Stalin metalworks (ZISPO, the former Cegielski plant) struck and marched in protest at living conditions and raised work norms. The demonstration spread across the city and toward the city and party offices and the security office building; two armoured divisions, two infantry divisions and 360 tanks were brought in to put it down. Historians do not agree on the death toll: 74 was the 1981 estimate, more recent research gives 57, and the IPN investigative unit 58; about 650 people were wounded.
Mass arrests began at once: 746 people had been detained by 8 August, and interrogations used beatings to extract testimony. The authorities' official thesis was that only those who had broken the law, not the "workers' current," would be punished. It was Prosecutor General Rybicki who announced that this "two currents" theory would govern the investigation and the trials. In a press interview on 17 July 1956 he declared that the prosecutors, "with all prudence and justice," distinguished workers who had joined the strike and demonstration out of discontent at the failure to settle their largely legitimate demands from "trouble-making and criminal elements and provocateurs." The distinction separated workers' economic grievances from criminal responsibility while also setting in advance the direction of the investigation and the basis of the convictions.
Indictments were drawn up against 132 participants in Poznań June, but only three trials were actually held: the "three," the "nine" and the "ten." In each, the prosecution sought to establish a "hooligan" current and a "peaceful workers'" current, and the group indictments were constructed by placing a previously convicted person or a "hooligan" at the head of each group so as to cast a shadow over the other defendants. This served to conceal that the great majority of the accused were young Poznań workers. The defence team had to prepare in seven days for indictments that had taken more than two months, working free of charge or for low fees. The trials exposed beatings and coerced testimony and established that the first shots had been fired by security officers. The sentences were comparatively light for the time, but the two lawyers who criticised the security apparatus most sharply were ruined by heavy fines and suspension from practice. The trials drew international attention and show how the state's response to a workers' revolt was organised through the forms of law and criminal procedure.