Culture Minister Kazimierz Zygulski added in an interview that ``the underground literature is junk, useless slander without any intellectual quality.'' At the same time, though, the police have launched an offensive against subversive literature. Almost every day during the past few months, announcements are made about the arrest of ``distributors of illegal publications.'' Sentences, averaging several years each, are handed down against ``anti-state writers.'' Such close police attention suggests that, despite official statements, underground publishing has an important impact. In addition to the illegal books, Western officials say the underground puts out some 1,000 publications, ranging from amateurish photocopied four-page pamphlets to slick, expensive intellectual journals. There are also underground broadcasts by ``Radio Solidarity'' and a full-length feature video dealing with the Stalin-era trials is making the rounds of Warsaw apartments. It is called ``Investigation.'' The written material regularly reaches about 3 million Poles, according to opposition activists. Although big cities are best supplied, they say that occasional messages reaching the countryside also are important. ``When a reader gets a paper, it tells him, `We still are here,' '' one activist says. ``It picks them up.'' The underground's efforts to inform and sustain hope do not take place in a vacuum of state-controlled mass media. Much of the population listens to foreign radio: the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Voice of America, and Radio Free Europe (RFE). Despite constant jamming of broadcasts, RFE says that enough of its programming gets through to keep Polish listenership to RFE the highest in the