leaflet displayed on page one a woodcut of the Holy Virgin of Czestochowa ; the other pages explained why every Christian should vote for the Communist-Socialist Bloc. This was a bit too much for the local PPS chairman, Henryk Wachowicz, who stated that it had been printed without his knowledge. If everything else had failed, the fact that the Army and Security Police voted separately would have been sufficient to enable the Government to stuff the ballot boxes with as many ballots as necessary, for there were no watchers except officers. In the few districts where the PSL did succeed in having watchers, the following results were disdosed: in seven Warsaw polling places which were PPR strongholds, the PSL got 6,526, the Block 7,509; in Zgierz, the PSL got 825, the Bloc 295 ; in three places in Czestochowa, PSL 3,207, Bloc 1,489; in ·ten booths in Poznan, PSL u,931, Bloc 5,344; in five places in Leszno, PSL 3,215, Bloc 192; nine polling places· in Gniezno, PSL 7,397, Bloc 4,325. Thus in 35 polling places where an honest count was made the PSL got 33,669 votes against 20,809 for the PPR-PPS Bloc. And these were not the places where the PSL was strongest. There were PSL watchers in about three per cent of the election districts-in 296 precincts out of 6,726. And remember that of 864 PSL candidates, only 428 were allowed to run ; Mikolajczyk estimated that over 100,000 of his people were arrested (a government spokesman, Roman Romkowski, said 2, 110 as of Jan. 10) ; about 2,000,000 citizens were disfranchised. THE SHOWDOWN. The official election returns are fantastically ludicrous. They give the PPR-PPS Bloc 382 of the 444 seats in the Sejm, Polish Parliament ( 119 each to the PPR and PPS, 106 to the fake Peasant Party) and only 28 to the PSL, as compared with 53 previously. Even after the campaign of terror and all the rest of it, the PSL would surely have won a majority had there been an honest count-Mikolajczyk thinks 70 per cent.; my own estima,te is apol,lt 60 per cent. For there ;i,realways many 16 Biblioteca Gino Bianco
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