Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, the left-Communist Polish student leaders, were sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison by a Warsaw court January 15 for their alleged role in student demonstrations in March 1968. Ihe prosecution had demanded an eight-year sentence for Modzelewski and seven years for Kuron. The two were convicted tendentious "taken part in political charge of having a movement -- founded on a political program drafted by them and hostile to the Polish People's Republic -- which sought to toment public demonstrations against the state."
They were found not guilty of the charge of collaborating with the world Trotskyist movement, a "crime" under the Gomulka regime which carries a mandatory sentence of five years in prison.
The two were free on parole at the time of their arrest last March 8. They had been released shortly before, after serving two years of sentences imposed in 1965 for their political opposition to the Gomulka regime. In the current trial they were each sentenced to three-and-ahalf years. The ten months they had been awaiting trial were credited as time held served.
The court decided, however, to ada the time that had been deducted from their previous sentences for good behavior. The full terms that each of them now face are three years and eight months for Kuron and three years and ten months for Modzelewski.
The specific activities the two critics of Polish Stalinism were accused of in the thirteen-day trial included hav-
"masterminded" a student group called
" apparently the "illegal organtzation" referred to in the charges.
The group was said to be composed largely of radical Jewish students. The prosecubeing composed tion pictured the group as of "Zionists, revisionists and stalinists." This is the standard formula used by the Gomulka regime in replying to leftwing critics. These accusations, intended to arouse prejudice against the defendants, bear no resemblance to the wellknown political views of Kuron and Modzelewski, who are revolutionary socialists.*
A Reuters dispatch from Warsaw during the trial detailed the charges on
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Kuron and Modzelewski's alleged ties with the Fourth International:
"In the first Polish press account of the activities of Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, the official news agency PAP said the indictment alleged they received propaganda material and technical equipment from an organization known as
'Fourth International.' The material the included a duplicating machine and stencils 'illegally brought from Belgium in a box with medicines marked with a Red Cross sign,' PAP said....
"It added that the two men also established contact with the Fourth International - a foreign organization -- for the purpose of acts to the detriment of the Polish state, PAP said. Ihe indictment said Messrs. Kuron and Modzelewski supplied this organization with much information on the political, social and economic situation in Poland through direct contacts and correspondence.
"They also helped an agent of the Fourth International organize meetings and recruit collaborators, the indictment said."
No public explanation was offered as to why the bureaucracy decided to drop this charge while imposing prison terms for the other. It is rather difficult, of course, to convince people that "old-line Stalinists" are at the same time "agents" of Trotskyisn. It may also be that Gomulka, already faced with an alienated student movement, decided not to call further attention to the Fourth International, thereby presenting the world Irotskyist movement in a very Iavorable lignt to revolutionary-minded Polish youth.
Finally, the bureaucracy evidently weighed the impact of handing down the harsh sentences mandatory under this charge upon conviction and decided it would be taken by the mass of Polish students as a provocation.
There is evidence for this view in the whole organization of the student trials. The government decided not to stage a mass trial of the student demonstrators being held in Polish prisons. Instead, the trials are scheduled to be spaced that two or three defendants at a time are brought into court. In addition, the sessions are closed to the public. The Paris daily Le Monde reported January 17 that two other warsaw student Leaders, Adam Michnik and Henryk Szlaifer, will go on trial on January 21.
The defense and the prosecution in the Kuron and Modzelewski case both plan to appeal the verdict.
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF FAVELA HILL
in Rio de Janeiro poripeopl" lavola," A group of who lived unexpectedly made the news international- 1y as 1968 ended.
Above the central railway station in the city is a high outcropping of rock. On top of this is a shanty town, founded In 1891, wnose name nas since been extended to similar slums as they multiplied.
outer lip of the famous cliff gave way. Iwenty shacks, along with the inhabitants, went down, plunging 600 feet into the abyss, to
• be buried by tons of rock.
The authorities rushed in heavy earth-moving equipment. Eight bodies were soon found. To recover the bodies of forty to seventy more trapped in the rock fall might take several weeks. Ihe only known survivor is a one-year-old child.
"Jorge dos Santos Generoso, an inhabitant of the Favela of My Loves [as the slum is also known], was brushing his
" Paul I. Montgomery of the New teeth, York Times reported.
"'It sounded like a
York Times reported; and then everything gunshot,' he said, was falling.' He watched the home of his sister and her eight children go over the brink.
"A policeman, Mário Matins Taveira, was chatting with a neighbor known as Doña Augusta when her shack fell. Both are presumed dead. The policeman's wife, Ismenia, saw them go over and tried
• to jump after her husband, but was restrained."
Out of Rio de Janeiro's 4,200,000 inhabitants, more than 800,000 are estimated to live in similar slums. Many of them are recent arrivals from the rural regions where the poverty is even worse.
Like their counterparts in all of the other Latin-American cities, they live in semistarvation, largely unemployed, and with a hopeless perspective under capitalism.
The Ileras Restrepo regime put the army in a state of alert January 13 after several days of clashes in Cali between police and workers and students demonstrating against the high cost of living and an increase in bus fares. The army took over in Cali and more than 300 persons have been arrested there, according to Agence France-Presse.
Photo by Joseph Hansen
FAVELA HILL. Despite the outstanding view, the lip of the 600-foot cliff is not considered by people in the upper brackets to be the choicest location in Rio de Janeiro for a home. Nevertheless, the dark stains on the rock, as the city fathers can point to with pride, show that at least in efficient disposal of its sewage "God's Hill," another name for the precinct, measures up well to the standards observed in much richer countries.
Workers organizations in the region called for a general strike on January 22. The Colombian General Confederation of Labor said that it would support the action.
l'he government accused "elements of the extreme left" of being behind the worker and student unrest.
COLOMBIAN WORKERS THREATEN GENERAL STRIKE COLOMBIAN WORKERS THREATEN GENERAL STRIKE
Laccording to reports from Prague, precensorship is to be imposed on Czechoslovak publications inclined to be independent in their thinking. The most prominent of the journals singled out for such treatment is Reportér, the weekly magazine of the Czech journalists' union, which was already banned once from November 8 to 27, 1968.
[Precensorship may spare the Kremlin interventionists and the conciliationist Dubček regime embarrassing incidents. For example, a comment in the October 9-16 issue of Reportér that dealt with the Soviet brief in defense of the military invasion, On the Events in Czechoslovakia, was suppressed only after the magazine had appeared. Inus, two issues of Reportér for that date were distributed to the newsstands, one containing the offending article and the other a replacement -- a study of currency convertibility.
LIhis hastily suppressed artic_e, "What Is It?" by Jiti Hanak, bians° 00 'What Is It?" by Jiři Hanák, is a good example of the "anti-Soviet the Czech press and of the "imprudence" which so infuriates Moscow and which the Czech liberal bureaucrats are so anxious to avoid. We are publishing it below. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
Published last month in Moscow in an edition of 300,000 copies, it is entitled On the Events in Czechoslovakia and costs 60 kopeks a copy 1100 kopeks = US$1]. More than anything else it reminds one of an anonymous letter. Out of good will, however, let us consider it a book, though the authors "forget" to put even their names on it - which, after a care- Îul reading, is hardly surprising.
If we assume that it is a book,
"What kind of then the question arises, book is it?" At any rate it is a cheap one. When for 60 kopeks you get 159 pages of text and 32 pages of pictures, you can call it a good buy. It is a lot of reading for the price, and to top it off the book is printed on high-quality paper.
But then the question arises: "How should we categorize On the Events in Czechoslovakia as to genre?" Its seriousness and solidity cannot be encompassed by any one genre. However, it might be most correctly classed as science fiction. There is some basis for such a classification.
The book apparently sets itself the task of proving the existence of a counterrevolution in Czechoslovakia. Truanaya rabota, naverno trudnaya [hard work,
A CZECH ANSWER TO MOSCOW'S WHITE BOOK
really hard work]. And so it is not surprising that in their introduction, articres (dividea into eight chapters), and conclusion. the authors had to incline to fiction. The Czech term "fikcia" [fiction] would be the most appropriate, the broad meaning of the word, however, the most precise.*
Therefore, let us say fictions, and these fictions are varied in their uniformity, because the authors used the most diverse methods to prove the existence of a nonexistent counterrevolution -- taking statements out of context (the nost common), pure invention, and the
"X said so and so to method summed up as I and if he did not say it that was only for tactical reasons." The latter method
"the acinevitably recalls Vishinsky's cused cynically admitted,"
or "the accused cynically denied" used to fit the circumstance.
Not even the capitalist press is neglected. It frequently is the Soviet journalists' star witness in testifying to the existence of a counterrevolution here. Favorite reading in particular for the authors of this book was the British sunday Times. 'Inere, among other things, is where they got their figure of 40,000 counterrevolutionaries, because some
"unnamed counterrevolutionary leader" declared in the Sunday Times that there were 40,000 people in Czechoslovakia armed with automatic infantry weapons. And with that, the proof of counterrevolution is almost complete.
After the fictionalized facts are presented, then science takes over.
Science appears in the book especially in the form of some chapters with a scientific stamp and scientific names -- "Discrediting of the KSC [komunistická Strana Ceskoslovenska -- Communist party of Czechoslovakia] and the
Undermining of
State and Social Institutions"; "Revision of the Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism and the Ideological Preparation for Counterrevolution";
"The Slogan
'Freedom of Speech' in the Hands of the Counterrevolution"; "The Counterrevolution's
Socialist Foreign Policy", "The Counter"
International Imperialism"; "The Counterrevolutionary Underground Exposes Itself"; "Nations Will Not Let Themselves Be Slandered."
All this for 60 kopeks.
Then after the invented facts are arrayed scientifically and it has been proved in this way that some dozens of our leading journalists, publicists, writers, and scholars are counterrevolutionaries, the authors document their statements with pictures of weapons belonging to the People's Militia.* Naturally, the pictoria part 1s producea with the methods used in the books featuring Unidentified Flying Objects.
Unfortunately, the book does have ome slight Inadequacies. for example. he authors lailed to grasp the principle that when you want to delame someone accuse him of something, you at leacy on accuse him of something, you at least have to remember his name. Thus, for instance, the authors write, "Ivan Sviták published a comprehensive treatise in the magazine Reporter laying out an entire program for gradually removing the Communists from power and the seizure of power by antisocialist forces."
Regretfully, I cannot corroborate this statement. Ivan Svitak never wrote a line Ior heporter, much less a comprehensive treatise. Likewise no comprehensive treatise planning the ouster of the Communists from power was ever published in our magazine. Such an essay could hardly have been published since 90 percent of Reportér's editors are Communists. But, of course, that is no argument for the authors of this soviet publication.
Perhaps it will help this book's authors in their future work if we evaluate the assertion they make on page 122. There they note that
'in the headquarters of the Prague journalists' union, whose leadership has recently been in the hands of reactionary elements, 13 machine guns, 81 submachine guns, and
150 munitions belts were found."
The truth is as follows: Before August 22 of this year, before foreign troops armed with submachine guns came to the journalists' union headquarters, there were in our editorial offices, which are in the same building, three transistor radios, three tape recorders, one television set of Hungarian make, one umbrella, one hunting cap, one wool sweater, one moth-eaten briefcase, plus two liters of first-rate cognac.
After our office and the rest of the building were taken over, none of these things could be found.
There were, however, one chewed-up office eraser two French couches,
(too many mistakes?), two quilts, one embroidered bedspread, and a oreign-make stamp album with perhaps ten postage stamps from the time of the Third
Reich bearing the portrait of
* A special armed force in the factories under direct party control.
Adolf Hitler. Ihe report about weapons then is of course correct, insofar as the foreign troops who occupied the journalists' union building on August 22 brought these weapons with them.
I confess that after reading these two pure inventions, I doubted the reliability of the rest of the book. But just because a man (a journalist, note) lies once, that does not mean he has to lie ten or a hundred times. And it is difficult to separate the lies from possible truth in the book On the Events in Czechoslovakia.
This difficulty arises also from the professional standard followed in the work. Quotations torn from context are mixed up with the authors' own assertions. Expressions are used which while convincing are a bit sweeping and imprecise, such
"as is well known, or "as the unnamed as leader declared." The counterrevolutionary attitude of our youth is measured by the Length of their nair, which is like judging the level oi a civilization by the width of the citizens' trousers.* The professional standard is simply low, very low.
Moreover, the authors must understand that while you can always lie you must at least do it competently. You must at least study and know what you are writing about. Simply this ignorance led the writers into making the embarrassing assertion that there were illegal radio transmitters here called "Ceské Budějo-
"Hradec Králové," "PIzen" and vice, "Středni Cechy" [all names of Czech cities or regions]. It is not our fault, after all, il many radio stations were not occupied by the troops of the five Warsaw Pact countries because someone quickly put up a sign in crayon over the door that said "kindergarten." It is not our if broadcasts from the ault alter all zech radio building in Prague continue long after it had been invaded by foreign troops.
The same ignorance radiates from the photographic part of the publication. This is particularly true of the two-page spread with a picture of Vinohradska Street in front of the radio station showing burning automobiles and gasoline on and on the other an idyllic shot one side, of a park showing a baby carriage and a beaming mother surrounded by foreign soldiers. Ihe text says they were taken the same day.
Notes
* See their "Open Ietter" in reply to their expulsion from the Polish Communist party, in Revolutionary Marxist students in Poland Speak Out (1964-1968), Merit
* The main meaning of "fikcia" in Czech is fakery.