Bolesław Bierut

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Bierut 1950

Bolesław Bierut (born April 18, 1892 in Rury Brigidkowskie, Russian Empire , † March 12, 1956 in Moscow , USSR ) was a Polish communist politician and later President of the People's Republic of Poland and chairman of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR). His rule, based on the model of the Stalinist Soviet Union, is considered to be the most repressive period in the history of communist Poland.

Life

Görlitz Agreement : Wilhelm Pieck and Bolesław Bierut shake hands across the Oder-Neisse border , GDR postage stamp from 1951
Bierut Mausoleum

Bierut was born in 1892 as the son of a village teacher in the village of Rury Brigidkowskie, now part of Lublin , and worked as a typesetter after graduating from elementary school . At the age of twenty he joined the socialist splinter party “PPS-Lewica”, which later became part of the communist party. In 1927 he became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Poland . In the meantime he held several functions in the left-wing consumer association and stayed in Moscow from 1925 to 1926 and from 1928 to 1930, where he attended the party college for communist cadres . During this time he was recruited as an agent for the Soviet secret service GPU . From 1930–1932 he worked as a functionary of the Communist International in Bulgaria , Czechoslovakia and Austria .

In 1933 he was sentenced to seven years in prison in Poland, which he served in Rawicz prison. In 1938, however, he was pardoned and released. His stay in prison saved his life, as it enabled him to escape the Stalinist purges of 1936/38, in which a large part of the members of the relatively small Polish CP (around 30,000 members out of a population of 35 million) who had emigrated to the Soviet Union were liquidated has been. Until the start of the war in 1939 he worked as an office worker in a Warsaw consumer cooperative.

To service in the Polish army to withdraw, Bierut escaped from Warsaw to eastern Poland, which after 17 September 1939 by the Red Army occupied was. From there he went to Kiev , where he joined the Communist All-Union Party (Bolsheviks) (which was later renamed the CPSU ) in 1940. In 1941 he moved to Minsk and worked there for almost two years in the city administration during the time of the German occupation in order to camouflage his work as an agent for the Soviet secret service NKVD . On Stalin's orders, he went to German-occupied Warsaw in 1943 and soon took on important functions underground in the Central Committee and General Secretariat of the newly emerging Polish Workers' Party .

From December 1944 he was chairman of the National Council of the Land (KRN), which, directed by Moscow, was supposed to prepare the communist takeover of power in Poland. Bierut was officially non-party, but he was a secret member of the Politburo of the Communist Labor Party.

In July 1945, as KRN chairman, he was a member of the Polish delegation at the Potsdam Conference , alongside Prime Minister Edward Osóbka-Morawski , who had trained in Moscow , Foreign Minister Wincenty Rzymowski and Agriculture Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk , who had been Prime Minister of the Polish government- in- exile in London until 1944 .

Bierut was elected President of the State by the Sejm in 1947 . Supported by the Soviet foreign intelligence service, he won the power struggle against party chairman Władysław Gomułka , who was expelled from the party and imprisoned in 1948 because of “right-wing nationalist deviation”. Bierut took his place at the top of the PZPR. A personality cult based on the model of the Soviet cult for the person of Stalin developed around him. At the same time he let the general terror against actual or supposed political opponents intensify. The whole country was covered by a network of informers from the UB secret police , who opened files on around 5.2 million citizens. Several hundred thousand people fell victim to political repression, hundreds of death sentences were carried out, the party-controlled judiciary initiated and organized show trials based on the Soviet model , in which around 85,000 people were sentenced to forced labor. Torture and assassinations were part of everyday life at the University Library. Bierut initiated the collectivization of agriculture and led a fight against the Catholic Church .

In 1952, with the official renaming of the Republic of Poland to “ People's Republic ”, the office of president was abolished, Bierut replaced Józef Cyrankiewicz as chairman of the Council of Ministers. In 1954 he gave the office of head of government back to Cyrankiewicz.

In February 1956 Bierut went to Moscow to take part in the deliberations of the XX. To attend party congresses of the CPSU . After reading Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech On the Personality Cult and Its Consequences , with criticism of Stalin's crimes, he suffered a heart attack and died two and a half weeks later in Moscow. He received a state funeral and a mausoleum in the Powązki Military Cemetery in Warsaw. Soon after his death, rumors spread in Poland that he had been murdered because the new Soviet state and party leadership under Khrushchev had rejected his Stalinist course. According to his son, Bierut died of kidney failure.

Bierut decrees

The so-called Bierut decrees after him by the German expellees associations issued, similar to the Beneš decrees in the former Czechoslovakia , the resettlements, expulsions and expropriations of the German population, which were contractually made legal after the Potsdam (Berlin) conference of the three great victorious powers in 1945 in East Prussia , Silesia , Pomerania and East Brandenburg under impunity.

literature

  • Czesław Kozłowski: Namiestnik Stalina. Warsaw 1993.
  • Izabella Main: President of Poland or "Stalin's most faithful pupil"? The Cult of Boleslaw Bierut in Stalinist Poland , in: Balazs Apor among others (Ed.): The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships. Stalin and the Eastern Bloc. Palgrave, New York 2004, ISBN 978-1-403-93443-7 , pp. 179-193.
  • Anne Applebaum : The Iron Curtain. The oppression of Eastern Europe 1944–1956. (Original title: Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956 (2012), translated by Martin Richter). Siedler, Munich 2013, ISBN 3-8275-0030-3 .
  • Boleslaw Bierut , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 20/1956 from May 7, 1956, in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Web links

Commons : Bolesław Bierut  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mirosław Gliński: Bolesław Bierut. In: BIULETYN INFORMACJI PUBLICZNEJ. July 11, 2008, archived from the original on May 18, 2014 ; Retrieved July 5, 2018 (Polish). BIULETYN INFORMACJI PUBLICZNEJ
  2. ^ Piotr Gontarczyk: Polska Partia Robotnicza. Droga do władzy 1941-1944. Warsaw 2006, p. 311.
  3. ↑ Andrzej Paczkowski, Poland, the "Erbfeind", in: The Black Book of Communism. Red. Ch. Ronsac. Munich / Zurich 1998, pp. 400–401.
  4. ↑ a b Słownik biograficzny Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej XX wieku. Warsaw 2004, p. 111.
  5. ↑ Andrzej Paczkowski, Poland, the "Erbfeind", in: The Black Book of Communism. Red. Ch. Ronsac. Munich / Zurich 1998, pp. 418-421.
  6. ↑ The Truth About Comrade Stalin. His speech shook the world: In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev calculated before the XX. CPSU party congress with the monstrous crimes of the predecessor. His own involvement in Stalin's terror remains in the dark. February 16, 2006, accessed July 5, 2018 .
  7. ↑ Tajemnicza śmierć b. prezydenta Polski. Syn przerwał milczenie. Retrieved July 5, 2018 (Polish).
  8. ^ Brigitte Jäger-Dabek: Poland: a neighborhood customer for Germans. Links, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-86153-407-X , p. 118.
personal data
SURNAME Bierut, Boleslaw
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish communist politician and later President of the People's Republic of Poland
DATE OF BIRTH April 18, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Rury Brigidkowskie, Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH March 12, 1956
Place of death Moscow , USSR