With the closure of Po Prostu magazine, the organ of the ZMP, by the authorities the following year some became so disaffected they withdrew from political action altogether while others, including Kuroń and Modzelewski, chose to bide their time within party organisations.

[2] An unofficial group critical of the PZPR soon adhered around Kuroń and Modzelewski with the intention of producing a publication that would analyse the party from a Marxist and Trotskyist perspective.

[8] The historian Wolfgang Weber has been critical of the authors of the Open Letter describing their text as “bourgeois group sociology embellished with Marxist terms”.

[9] Rather than a critique from a Marxist or Trotskyist perspective, as is often attributed to the pair, he has argued that their Open Letter espoused an ahistorical and reactionary position comparable to what he claims are pro-Stalinist arguments later put forward by the French historian Jean Elleinstein.

[10] Although the historian Norman Davies has dismissed the influence of Kuroń's ideological critique on the later opposition movement,[11] the journalist Roman Graczyk has argued that Kuroń and Modzelewski’s Open Letter and subsequent imprisonment acted as a catalyst that accelerated the political maturity of the young opposition movement within Poland.

[13] Responding to an article published in Kultura in 1977, Hass would go on to pen his own Open Letter to Ozjasz Szechter, in which he critiqued Stalinism and the communist bureaucracy in Poland.