The genesis of changes in Polish historical scholarship, for which the events of March 1968 became a catalyst, is rooted in the first half of the 1960s. It was then that the ever clearer generational splits became marked among Polish historians, related to the academic advancement of historians belonging to the younger generations, who had already obtained their education in the People’s Poland. It was some of the scholars who had made their careers in the 1950s who took a standpoint which was increasingly clearly opposed to the PUWP’s policy, the latter being tinted with nationalism. On the eve of the events of March, the Polish historians’ milieux were thus split, with the intra-community conflicts reinforced by the restrictive censorship policies of the PUWP authorities and their striving to make scholars conform to the current policy. The events of March 1968 became a catalyst of both the processes occurring in Polish historical scholarship in the 60s and the PUWP policy aimed at strengthening political control over scholarship.
The brutal dispersal, by the ‘Citizens Militia’, of the students’ rally in the courtyard of Warsaw University on 8th March resulted in protests not only on the part of the students, but also on that of the professors of Warsaw University and the Polish Academy of Sciences. Among their numbers were the historians Juliusz Bardach, Bogusław Leśnodorski, Tadeusz Manteuffel, Henryk Samsonowicz. The attitudes of the scholarly staff of Warsaw University’s Department of History were strongly influenced by the prestige of the ‘old’ professors. To a limited degree, the historians’ milieu was affected by the repressions on the part of the authorities after the March events. The institutions which suffered most were the Jewish Historical Institute and the Institute of History at the University of Łódź. The number of appointments of so-called ‘March docents’ among the historians was relatively small and most of them have later written and defended their post-doctoral dissertations. As a result of the anti-Semitic campaign, more than a dozen historians of Jewish extraction probably left Poland. Another effect that the March events had on scholarship was the re-organisation of scholarly structures and numerous personal changes in institutions and to the editorial committees of scholarly journals, as well as the acceleration of the generational change. Some liberalisation of the censorship also occurred between March and September 1968, and the assessment of the image of Poland’s history changed to to become more optimistic.