Opinia Profesora Józefa Chałasińskiego wygłoszona podczas procesów poznańskich w 1956 roku
Professor Józef Chałasiński’s Expert Opinion During the Poznań Trials of 1956

Summary/Abstract: Poznan on the 28th of June 1956 witnessed a demonstration initiated for economic reasons, which transformed itself into street riots pacified by the army. Fifty seven people died on the spot or of their wounds in hospitals and over eight hundred were arrested. Following these events, in September 1956 the authorities inaugurated trials of the riot participants. The line of defense was constructed on the expert opinions provided by three eminent Polish sociologists: Józef Chałasiński (1904-1970) and Jan Szczepański (1913-2004) from the University of Łódź and Tadeusz Szczurkiewicz (1895-1984) from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Józef Chałasiński’s opinion proved to be the most important one for the trial. He pointed to the fact that the protesting one-hundred-thousand-large crowd on that day had huge power of psychological influence on the participants and, thus, the participation in anti-regime riots was the effect of a moral impulse. Expert sociologists and psychiatrists, who played a major role during the trials of 1956, are currently marginalized and not given enough recognition in scholarly literature.

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