COMMUNICATIONS
475
since the late fifties been used rarely, if at aU, in the prosecution of
political prisoners, and it is significant of the strength of the Government's
reaction to the Hass pamphlet that the defendants in both trials were led
into the courtroom handcuffed-the first time since 1956 that political
prisoners have been in this way treated as common criminals.
Six members of Hass's group were tried behind closed doors in
July, 1965. Karol Modzelewski, a twenty-seven-year-old Communist and
son of a Minister of Foreign Affairs in Communist Poland, was given
a sentence of three and one half years. J acek Kuron, a young Commun–
ist intellectual, was sentenced to three years. The other defendants may
have been released (the reports are not confirmed). Hass was caUed
to testify in the July trial, and argued his position on the witness stand.
A group of demonstrators gathered outside the courtroom, singing the
Internationale, and giving the clenched fist salute. In January, 1966,
a second, and secret, trial was held. The defendants-Hass, the historian
Romuald Smiech and the economist Kasimierz Badowski- were each
sentenced to three years.
Hass himself has a remarkable history. He lived in Lemberg before
World War II and joined the Polish Trotskyists when the Polish Com–
munist Party disbanded in 1938. Arrested in 1939 after the Russian
invasion of Eastern Poland, he was sent to the U.S.S.R., where he
remained for eighteen years, the first eight of which were spent in the
Vorkuta slave labor camp. He was returned to his homeland by the 1957
Polish Russian repatriation agreement and immediately plunged into
political activity, participating in the protest against the suppression
of the magazine
Po Prostu .
Miraculously, he publicly avowed his Trotsky–
ism and got away with it.
Until his recent arrest, Hass worked in the history section of the
Polish trade unions. During the early sixties, he-along with some of the
more independent of the former
Po Prostu
intellectuals-was a leader of
the Club of the Crooked Circle, a discussion group which resisted
Gomulka's increasing imposition of cultural and political conformity.
(The Club of the Crooked Circle was finally dissolved by the police.)
Hass is a man in his late forties who is-according to people who know
him-exceptionaUy able intellectually and of an exceedingly "activist"
temperament, and the group for whose activity he has now been im–
prisoned is committed to active propaganda for its political program.
Its strength is unknown, partly because its pamphlet was suppressed
before it reached more than a handful of people.
The H ass group's Trotskyism is Trotskyism considerably updated,
a Trotskyism which views the Communist states as no longer progressive
