The first of Leopold Unger’s regular columns “Widziane z Brukseli” (As Seen from Brussels) appears in Kultura. The Institute publishes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle.
POLAND
The 1970 Protests, brutally put down by the authorities, take place in December in cities on Poland’s Baltic coast. Edward Gierek becomes the first secretary of the Polish United Workers’ (i.e. communist) Party. So-called Mountaineers’ Trial takes place in Warsaw: Maciej Kozłowski, Jakub Karpiński, and Małgorzata Szpakowska are accused of smuggling Kultura and other Literary Institute publications into Poland over the Czechoslovak border, and of “transmitting defamatory information about the Polish People’s Republic to enemy agencies”.
WORLD
Death of General Władysław Anders in London. Death of Charles de Gaulle in France. In Egypt, President Nasser dies and is succeeded by Anwar Sadat. Gabriel Garcia Marquez publishes A Hundred Years of Solitude. The LCD (liquid crystal display) is invented.
