letter to the party membership and Communist youth analyzing the situation in Poland and presenting their revolutionary political views. (This remarkable document has been translated into French with an introduction by Pierre Frank Paris 2. ; A forthcoming English edition has been announced by Merit Publishers of New York.
Kolakowski was one of the prominent Communist intellectuals who protested the imprisonment of Modzelewski and Kuron which has become a test case in the struggle for political freedom in Poland. The three-and-a-half hour meeting was stormy and these students who sought to defend today's Poland were shouted down by the majority. But no votes were taken on the controversial resolutions.
The’ 39-year-old Kolakowski, who has also been a Communist since his youth, has been a bone in the throat of the CP officialdom for the past ten years. He took a prom-— inent part in the events leading up to the Polish October and was an editor of the leftwing ‘weekly Po Prostu which was shut down in 1957. He was singled out as a dangerous revisionist by Gomulka himself as early as May 1957 at a plenary session of the party's Central Committee.
The following October the party newspaper, Trybuna Ludu, denounced him as an adversary of the party who wants "to substitute pious dreams for activity and moral principles for revolutionary strategy." It is true that, in revulsion against Stalinist dogmatism, Kolakowski has come to question some basic tenets of scientific socialism. But this iconoclastic Communist is being excluded, not for his heterodox philosophical views, but for his courageous opposition to the party's malpractices.
The regime had refrained from proceeding against him up to now because of his wide following among university youth and his international reputation. His best-known writings abroad are The Individual and the Infinite in the System of Spinoza, Responsibility and History, and The Individual Without Fither-Or: On the Possibility and Impossibility of Being a Marxist. This versatile scholar has also written The Keys to Heaven, a collection of rationalist tales cast in the form of biblical parables, and several plays. One of these is said to have been barred from the Polish stage.
Ironically, an article by him, entitled "Personality in a Vision of Society",
appears in the current issue of Poland, an official magazine published in six languages. It contains such sentiments as "we should excoriate concentration camps even in the event that we should be convinced of their usefulness from the point of view of economic growth."
Kolakowski has retained his chair at the university and is appealing His expulsion. ;
Meantime his expulsion has aroused alarm and anger in student and intellectual circles. When Mieczyslaw Rakowski, editor of the weekly Polityka and an alternate menber of the party's Central Committee, spoke on the problems of world communism at a November 3 meeting at the university, students turned it into a debate during the question period. The editor was forced to reply to political criticisms in the form of questions.
Party authorities are said to have demanded disciplinary action against fourteen students who spoke at the meeting Kolakowski addressed and six are reported to have been suspended from their studies pending decision on their status by a disciplinary .commis-— sion. ; .
Twenty-one Polish authors, all members of the CP, signed a letter to party authorities which, without mentioning Kolakowski's case, repeated his criticisms of the party's attitude toward writers and other intellectuals and the restrictions imposed on artistic creation and freedom. The signers have been pressured by party bodies, including the Control Commission, to retract their statements but without success.
According to an unconfirmed report in the Polish-language exile magazine Kultura, published in Paris, thirteen of the twenty-one writers have also been expelled from the CP.
‘The action of the Polish authors matches that of the sixty Soviet writers who . last spring appealed for the release of Sinyavsky and Daniel, the two Russian authors sentenced to long terms at hard labor for sending their writings abroad for publication.
The neo-Stalinist regimes in the Soviet bloc have had little success in winning the allegiance or confidence of the finest minds and talents in either the older or the younger generations. The dissident intellectuals are demanding far more freedom of expression and latitude for criticism than the bureaucratic leaderships are willing to concede. The friction between them intensifies with each passing year.