Editorial Notes: The False Justifications of Gomulka

THE FALSE JUSTIFICATIONS OF GOMULKA The speech made by Gomulka on June 29th at Gdansk means that he has joined the Kremlin in its campaign against Belgrade and about the assassination of Nagy. A clear stand on these two affairs by the Polish leadership was expected, for its prolonged silence ran the risk of being interpreted as a disapproval of the Kremlin's action. And at the present time the Kremlin would hardly stand for such a disavowal on the part of Poland. Strong pressure was brought on Gomulka, both directly by the Kremlin and also by the Natolin fraction inside the party, to rejoin the "socialist camp" by approving Nagy's execution and the new campaign against Tito. Gomulka, on the road to capitulation for some time already, showed himself disposed to take a few further steps along it. With certain nuances - suitable of course to the "Polish path" to capitulation - he roughly endorsed the Kremlin's arguments on the Jugoslav and the Hungarian affairs: if there is again a conflict between the Kremlin and Belgrade, the fault this time lies with the "Jugoslav comrades,' who, with their "false revis'ionist theories," "aid and encourage reactionaries.". As for the assassination of Nagy, "it does not behoove us,' exclaims the very prudent Comrade Gomulka, "to judge either the extent of the faults with which the accused men were reproached, or the justice of the punishments inflicted. It is a purely Hungarian affair. Gomulka accuses the Jugoslavs of having the pretentiousness of "wanting to build socialism own forces" and refusing to join the "socialist camp" • led by the Kremlin. But he finds that the execution of Imre Nagy is just simply "a purely Hungarian on which he does not have any very exact opinion. In reality he incidentally found the opportunity in the same speech to reverse the evaluation he made in the past about the Hungarian revolution of October-November 1956, and to emphasize only "the counter-revolutionary wave and the forces hostile to popular power," toward which "Imre Nagy, who was a revisionist, capitulated little by little"! Gomulka and his followers justify among themselves their own capitulation "little by little" to the Kremlin by the famous "geographical" reason of their being nextdoor neighbors of the US S R, of Poland's isolation, as well as by their desire to safeguard the few individual liberties and other compromises that still exist in the country. This reasoning, however, must be rejected as disastrous. Each serious capitulation prepares the next step on a road at whose end there is only total submission. Each serious capitulation loosens the bonds between the leadership and the masses and renders the leadership more prisoner than ever of the pressure of the Kremlin and its agents on the spot. Gomulka's policy is disorienting and disorganizing the t the time of the Polish October. He risks not having ountry s revolutionary forces that carried him to powe their support tomorrow in the eventuality that he decides to resist when he draws the line for some last stand. What is more, the only way to make the Kremlin hesitate is to oppose to it, as the Jugoslavs did, the coherent force of a whole people, determined in case of need to fight for the things that it considers just as essential as "daily bread" or even as life itself. Such a force is created only on the basis of a consistent ideological line that stubbornly maintains certain essential positions. In the worst of cases, a revolutionary proletarian leader should better be able to face once. more the jailers and even the executioners of the Kremlin by refusing to carry out stupid and abject orders, than to demoralize his organization and his people by the example of a humiliating capitulation without any prospects. But where are they now, the revolutionaries capable of getting rid of their "statesmen" complex and their servitude to "higher reasons of state" in order to rediscover their genuine mission as Marxist militants bound up with the democratic organizations of their class ? Such men will be formed, not in the school of bureaucrats, "enlightened" or not, à la Gomulka, but in that of the new generation of revolutionaries who made the Polish October and will know how to lead it, despite everything, to its victorious conclusion.