Letters

Polish Trotskyism

Dear Comrades

Thank you for your letter of 1 September 1990 and for the copies of Revolutionary History. My reply is delayed because I wanted to send you my article Trotsky’s Writings on Poland in the Interwar Period, and it has only just been published in Polish. Unfortunately it covers only the circumstances surrounding the Stalinists’ slander campaign against Trotskyism. Of course I have no objection to this article appearing in English. Some of Trotsky’s works were translated into Yiddish and published in Poland, but I do not have precise information about the sources, and I have language problems too.

Now here’s something new. I have found in the Polish archives files of two Polish Trotskyist papers of 1940-41 (that is during the Nazi occupation) which were published in the underground. They are:

Przeglad Marksistowski (Marxist Review)
Issues:

• No.4, September 1940;
• No.6, February-March 1941;
• No.7, April-May 1941;
• No.8, August 1941.

Altogether about 110 duplicated pages.

Czerwony Sztandar (Red Flag) Issues:

• No 2, December 1940;
• No 3, February 1941;
• No 5, June 1941;
• No 6, July 1941.

Altogether about 51 duplicated pages.

The Polish works are very incomplete in Louis Sinclair’s Trotsky bibliography, omitting all the articles that appeared in newspapers during the interwar period.

Ludwik Hass

Editor’s note

The Socialist Platform library has photocopies of these papers.