Poland: The Crisis of Opinion
G ., E.
Accused of distributing a 128-page pamphlet "detrimental to the interests of the Polish state and dealing with political and social relations in Poland," over a dozen members of the Polish...
...Reminding Gomulka that he protested "when you, Wladyslaw Gomulka, were imprisoned and slandered in the last years of the Stalin era," Deustcher goes on to say that "in their case as in yours I think I can recognize reactionary police terror for what it is and tell slander from truth...
...and then you, Wladyslaw Gomulka, apologized for having kept silent in 1938, although you had not believed the Stalinist slanders...
...This was a system which had been transplanted from the USSR to nearly all Communist parties . .. We have finished, or rather we are finishing with that system once and for all.' (Your italics...
...The cult of the personality was not a matter just of Stalin's person,' you stated then...
...And he adds: "In those far-off days, just after the 'Polish spring in October,' you held that Polish Communists ought to know my account of the havoc that Stalin made of their party, delivering nearly all its leaders to the firing squad...
...Jacek Kuron, to three...
...When the Russians invaded Eastern Poland, under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, he was arrested and spent the next 17 years in Stalin's slave camps—the first eight at the infamous Vorkuta, and the next nine beyond the Arctic Circle...
...He did not relinquish his principles, and so protested the suppression of Po Prostu, the independent student paper, and openly declared himself a Trotskyist...
...Do you wish these trials to mark the tenth anniversary of your own rehabilitation and of that 'spring in October,' during which you raised so many hopes for the future...
...For the first time since 1956, political defendants were brought into court handcuffed...
...his father had at one time been Minister of Foreign Affairs...
...On the witness stand at the first trial, Ludwik Hass proudly acknowledged the accusation that he was a Trotskyist and affirmed his revolution ary socialist convictions...
...I do not believe that you are now right in persecuting and imprisoning members of your own party and your critics on the Left...
...The fate of the others arrested is not clear from published reports...
...They appeal for the pressure of protest on the Polish government by radicals everywhere...
...E. G...
...Moscow 'rehabilitated' the Polish party and its leaders only after 17 or 18 years...
...It also attacked the clergy for its "reactionary role," declared that the workers' councils of Yugoslavia did not democratically represent the workers and called for "return to proletarian internationalism...
...It is reported that spectators at this first trial joined the defendants in protest, singing the Internationale...
...formation here presented, and to the The Militant for the excerpts from Isaac Deutscher's letter...
...But are you not to some extent re-establishing that system...
...The pamphlet, which led to the imprisonment of the five socialists, argued that the Communist state was a bureaucratic dictaorship which represented a new ruling class, and not • We are indebted to an article by William Remsen in New Politics for the in...
...Look around you, look at the crowds of time-servers that surround you, at all those opportunists without principle and honor who fawn on you as they fawned on Bierut, and as some of them even fawned on RydzSmigly and Pilsudski...
...Accused of distributing a 128-page pamphlet "detrimental to the interests of the Polish state and dealing with political and social relations in Poland," over a dozen members of the Polish Communist party were arrested in Warsaw in April 1965.* In two trials, five were sentenced to imprisonment...
...May I remind you of your own words spoken at the famous eighth session of the Central Committee in October 1956...
...A committee of 100 has been formed on the Berkeley campus to protest this attack upon freedom...
...A statement was signed by faculty members, the executive committee of the Berkeley W. E. Du Bois Club, by Hal Draper of the Independent Socialist Club, Brian O'Brien, President of Local 1570 of the American Federation of Teachers, and by others...
...and I cannot keep silent...
...continued on page 441) the working class...
...Released in 1957, under the Polish 442 Russian repatriation agreement, he promptly returned to political activity, joining the Communist party...
...Kuron was also at Warsaw University...
...Do you, Wladyslaw Gomulka, really believe that you have in your 'apparatus' and administration many people of comparable disinterestedness and idealism...
...The second trial, in January of this year, was, accordingly, held in secret...
...Modjelewski, 27 years old, had been a lecturer at Warsaw University...
...In a vigorous protest, published as an "Open Letter to WIadysIaw Gomulka," Isaac Deutscher observes that, in 1957, "No one asked him ever to renounce his past, and he did not deny his old Trotskyist views even for a moment...
...You knew that I had been one of those very few Communists who, in 1938, protested against that crime and against the disbandment and denigration of what had once been our common party...
...Ludwik Hass and Romuald Smiech, both history instructors at Warsaw University, and Kazmirez Badowski, an economist at Cracow University, were sentenced to three years...
...At the first trial, in July 1965, Karol Modjelewski was sentenced to threeandone-half years...
...A man of remarkable courage, Hass joined the Polish Trotskyists in 1938...
...This circumstance alone testifies to his courage and integrity...
Vol. 13 • July 1966 • No. 4
