The preventative arrest of thousands of Solidarity activists and the stubborn hunt for anyone who managed to escape the round-up of the night of December 12–13 were not carried out just to isolate those who were most active, or considered to be most dangerous. It was also the aim of this operation to cleanse the territory, so that new people could replace those who had been imprisoned—SB collaborators or individuals considered sufficiently conformist to accept the changed operating conditions of the union. From this technical point of view, it was actually the SB that was carrying out these activities, but the idea for them arose directly from the communist elite's perspective on reality. Thus, it would be difficult to claim that the police had come up with it on their own. Without referring to earlier examples—although these can indeed be found in communist Poland's history—I would like to point out that executive and analytical circles within the party had already begun differentiating between striking workers and the opposition during the strikes in 1980. This trend did not change after Solidarity was founded. Almost all the government's efforts to force the union into communist state structures were grounded in a belief that it was necessary (as the propaganda often said) to sever the “healthy, working-class current” from the “dirty, anti-socialist scum,” i.e., the anti-communist opposition. As time passed, that clear, dichotomous picture was destroyed because it turned out that some of those Solidarity activists who had previously shared nothing in common with the opposition were much more radical than people from KOR or the Free Trade Unions, who had been working for years to effect change, or even to overthrow the regime. Thus, the term “extremists” became more popular, both in official propaganda and during secret meetings. The term “extremists” now encompassed both the “new” radicals as well as the “old” oppositionists. The number of individuals who the government thought should be “cut off “ from the mass of many millions was thus increasing.