Dariusz Stola

This research aims at producing a new interpretation of the “anti-Zionist campaign”, which the communist government of Poland ran in 1967-1968. It is to verify and develop the hypothesis that the campaign was a compound of three elements: of a Soviet-type hate campaign aimed at counter-mobilization against the youth rebellion; of a populist tendency in the communist establishment, which was instrumental for both the mobilization of the masses and intra-party faction struggle; and of the eruption of bottom-up anti-elite resentment and ethnic prejudice, enabled and fueled by the campaign. It combines the factual knowledge accumulated in the last two decades in various studies of the Polish 1968 with new understandings of the communist rule and new theories of populism, which have developed in recent years.