[The following open letter was sent to Enrico Berlinguer, general secretary of the Italian Communist party, by dissident Polish Communist Jacek Kuron. We have taken the text from the July 22 issue of Rouge, a revolutionary communist daily published in Paris. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
I appeal to you as a leader of a workers party, a political figure who fights for a socialism compatible with human principles, as a Communist, since the Communists hold exclusive power in my country.
I appeal to you to help the Polish workers who are being buried in filth by the press, the radio, and television, beaten by the police, thrown into prison, brought before the courts on charges of sabotage, and condemned to long prison sentences.
As you no doubt know, on June 24 Polish Premier Piotr Jaroszewicz, who is a member of the Political Bureau of the United Polish Workers party* as well as a secretary of its Central Committee, presented a plan calling for a gigantic hike in the price of foodstuffs. According to this proposal, the cost of food was to be increased by 100 percent. In view of the structure of spending and prices in Poland, this meant reducing living standards below subsistence level for a large proportion of working-class families.
The discussion in parliament was limited to a report from Deputy Edward Babiuch, a member of the Political Bureau and a secretary of the Central Committee. In the name of all the parliamentary groups and clubs, he backed the government's proposal. He also announced that the workers would be consulted. No more than forty-eight hours were allotted to these consultations. This fact is sufficient to show how fictitious they were.
In these conditions, the workers reacted spontaneously, stopping work almost everywhere. In various localities, street demonstrations developed. In the course of these demonstrations, on June 25 at about 9:00 a.m., the workers at the Ursus tractor factory outside Warsaw occupied the Warsaw-Poznan railway line. In the afternoon, they tore up the tracks and derailed a locomotive.
and special police de behment hasted for
At Radom, clashes between the workers
*Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (P4PR), the Polish Communist party. The name comes from a formal fusion between the Polish CP and SP after World War II.-IP.
KURON
Jacek Kuron was expelled from the
Polish CP youth organization in 1964
for writing a study of conditions in several hours. During these confrontations, the offices of the Województwo (Provincial) Committee of the PZPR were burned and barricades were erected in the streets.
Under the pressure of the workers' demonstrations, the authorities abandoned the price-increase proposal within twentyfour hours after it was introduced. The July 14 communiqué from the Political Bureau of the PZPR announcing changes in the price-increase bill indirectly acknowledged the justness of the demonstrators' protests.
The June events were a symptom of a grave sickness in the life of our society. The entire responsiblility for this state of affairs falls on the authorities who have expropriated the working class and the entire society, depriving the population of any means to express their opinions and defend their interests.
History was repeated and not for the first time. In June 1956 in Poznan and in December 1970 on the Baltic coast, the
Poland in collaboration with Karol Modzelewski, who was expelled from the Communist party for the same reason.
In response to these expulsions, Kuron and Modzelewski wrote their Open Letter to the Polish Communist Party, giving a Marxist analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy's rule in Poland and a program for overthrowing the bureaucracy and eliminating the obstacles to building a socialist society.
Following the publication of the Open Letter, Kuron and Modzelewski were sentenced to prison, Kuron for three years. He was released in early 1968. However, after mass student demonstrations against bureaucratic repression developed in March 1968, Kuron was jailed again and not released until late 1971. He continued to take part in protests against bureaucratic rule. In 1975, he was one of the fifty-nine Polish intellectuals who signed a letter protesting openly repressive amendments to the Polish constitution.
After the accompanying open letter was published in Italy, Kuron, who is forty years old, was called up for a three-month tour of military duty on Poland's eastern frontier.
Polish workers paid the price in blood for the errors of those holding power. No lesson was drawn from these experiences. Once again, the authorities are not accepting responsiblility, but rather responding by direct repression against the workers.
The guilty should be punished, but it is inadmissible to punish the demonstrators who defended themselves against the police when those responsible for the slaughter of the Baltic coast workers have been allowed to go scot-free. Putting all the moral and legal responsibility on the demonstrators for the damage done because they could not organize their demonstration in decent conditions has nothing to do with law. This is simply vengeanceseeking by men who in the entire thirty years they have held power have learned nothing and understood nothing.
In the press and over the radio and television, the demonstrations that forced the state authorities to modify their wrong positions have been described as the actions of "hooligans," as acts of banditry and vandalism. In the cities and in the regions, a massive repression has started up aganst those who participated in the demonstrations and strikes. Since these actions were of a spontaneous nature, the authorities and the police lost their orin on authorities and the police lost their grip on the situation, and the repression has been directed essentially against persons who just happened to be in places where incidents occurred. Everwhere thousands incidents occurred. Everywhere thousands of workers are being fired from their jobs. In Radom and Ursus, many workers have been arrested, and those returning from the police stations still show the effects of mistreatment, effects that sometimes are very serious.
On July 16 and 17, seven workers at the Ursus factories were tried before the Warsaw tribunal for sabotage (article 220 of the Polish Penal Code). According to the indictment, this sabotage consisted of a group of persons derailing a forty-ton locomotive. The accused were not allowed to see their families, and a court attorney was appointed to represent one of them. The trial was not formally closed, but neither the public nor journalists were admitted, except for selected individuals. The only evidence against the accused was a picture taken by the police. One of the defendants tried on two occasions to say that he was beaten during questioning, but the presiding judge did not allow him to make a statement to this effect.
Sentence has not yet been pronounced. The public prosecutor is asking six years in prison for one of the defendants, five years for two others, four years for three others, and three years for the remaining defendant.
This is the first trial connected to the June events that has been held in Warsaw. Many workers are being held in prison under suspicion of committing the same acts as these defendants. However, they are charged with "counterrevolutionary sabotage," a crime for which the law provides penalties going from five years in prison to death. For the time being, it is impossible to say what sort of trials have been held in Radom and in other localities, but there is no reason to think that the there is any better than in situation Warsaw.
Disorganized and deprived of information, the workers are completely disarmed in the face of this repression. The reaction of the authorities is poisoning the atmosphere with hate and despair. The next explosion may become a tragedy for the Polish nation and mark the political failure of the entire European left.
In the case of the smaller towns, we have no way to monitor the pretrial investigations and the procedures of courts that are completely subordinate to the political power.
Only a general amnesty for all participants in the June demonstrations can put an end to the terror against the workers. In countries where there is an independent public opinion, the public can take up the struggle for such an amnesty.
I know that your voice carries weight both for public opinion in Western Europe and for the Polish authorities.
I appeal to your conscience. Do not turn a deaf ear to our cause.