Demonstrations by workers demanding better working conditions began on 28 June 1956 at Poznań's Cegielski Factories and were met with violent repression.

About 400 tanks and 10,000 soldiers of the Polish People's Army and the Internal Security Corps under the command of the Polish-Soviet general Stanislav Poplavsky were ordered to suppress the demonstration and during the pacification fired at the protesting civilians.

In Poland, in addition to the criticism of the cult of personality, popular topics of debate centered on the right to steer a more independent course of "local, national path[s] to socialism" instead of following the Soviet model down to every little detail; such views were shared by many Polish United Workers' Party members in the discussion and critique of Stalin's execution of older Polish communists from the Communist Party of Poland during the Great Purge.

[4] The death of Poland's hardline Communist leader Bolesław Bierut on 12 March 1956—allegedly from shock at the content of the Secret Speech—gave further fuel to the movement for change.

Anti-communist resistance in Poland was also bolstered, and a group of opposition leaders and cultural figures founded the Crooked Circle Club (Polish: Klub Krzywego Koła) in Warsaw.

The living conditions in Poland did not improve, contrary to government propaganda, and workers increasingly found that they had little power compared to bureaucracy of the Party (nomenklatura).

[6] Between 9 and 11 a.m., about 100,000 people gathered on the Adam Mickiewicz Square in front of the Imperial Castle in Poznań, surrounded by buildings occupied by the city and Party authorities and police headquarters.

The demonstrators demanded lower food prices, wage increases and the revocation of some recent changes in the law that had eroded workers' conditions.

They further requested a visit from Polish Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz, as the local government declared that they had no authority to solve the workers' problems.

[7] Konstantin Rokossovsky, the Soviet general, and Poland's Defence Minister, then decided to take personal control, and the situation changed dramatically.

[1][7][8][9] Rokossovsky sent his deputy, the Polish-Soviet general Stanislav Poplavsky, and a group of lower Soviet officers, with orders to put down the protest in a manner consistent with Russian standards, intending to end the demonstrations as soon as possible to prevent an occurrence similar to the uprising of 1953 in East Germany, when a similar protest, not quelled in time, spread to many other regions.

The troops were told that the protesters were led and organized by "German provocateurs", who were attempting to darken Poland's image during the ongoing Poznań International Fair.

A two-hour long procession of tanks, armored cars, field guns, and lorries full of troops went through the city and surrounded it.

Nonetheless, the protests of 1956 were not motivated by clearly anti-communist ideology; the workers' demands were mostly of an economic nature, centering around better work conditions rather than any other clearly articulated political objectives.