Jakub Berman

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jakub Berman (1950)

Jakub Berman (born December 23, 1901 in Warsaw , then Congress Poland ; † April 10, 1984 in Warsaw) was a Polish communist politician .

Life

Born into a Jewish family, Berman attended grammar school in Warsaw and then studied law and later sociology at the University of Warsaw , where he also worked as an assistant for a time. The doctoral project on Polish urban history in the 18th century with Ludwik Krzywicki could not be completed due to the beginning of the Second World War .

At the same time, he had been a communist activist since his youth, including as a member of the Communist Party of Poland and as a youth functionary since 1928 . In 1939 he fled to the Soviet-occupied part of Poland to Białystok and then on to Minsk , where he worked as a journalist. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, he escaped to Moscow . A little later he worked as a trainer at the Comintern School, which was relocated to Ufa and attended by Wolfgang Leonhard , among others .

The majority of his family and relatives were murdered during the Holocaust . His brother Adolf Berman survived underground and eventually emigrated to Israel .

In December 1943 he was invited to the Kremlin by Josef Stalin and apparently won the dictator's trust. From August 1944 he belonged to the new Politburo , later also to the Central Committee of the Polish Workers' Party (PPR). In addition to Bolesław Bierut and Hilary Minc , he formed the leadership triumvirate of the Stalinist party leadership in the following years , where he was responsible for state security , propaganda and ideology. Berman was thus one of the main people responsible for the bloody suppression of the anti-communist opposition in Poland in the second half of the 1940s.

In December 1948, the communist and socialist parties merged to form the Polish United Workers' Party (PVAP). But representatives of the Stalinist line prevailed. The Stalinist Bolesław Bierut disempowered Władysław Gomułka and later interned him. Purges and restructuring were carried out in party and society.

Stalin died in March 1953; a process of de-Stalinization began in the Soviet Union and some other countries . In February 1956, during the XX. CPSU party congress , CPSU boss Nikita Khrushchev dealt with Stalin's crimes. Bierut, party leader of the PVAP, suffered a heart attack after this speech and stayed in Moscow after the end of the party congress.

Four high-ranking officials who had accompanied Bierut to Moscow - Berman and Jerzy Morawski, Józef Cyrankiewicz and Aleksander Zawadzki - reported on Khrushchev's secret speech to the PVAP Politburo on February 28, 1956 . The Politburo then decided to convene key party activists to Warsaw from March 3rd to 4th to inform them about the speech.

Three days after this first meeting, a large group of party cadres met in Warsaw, who voiced harsh criticism of the Bierut government, which had been in power for eight years, and the continued membership of the Stalinists in the Politburo. The full text of the Khrushchev speech was not yet officially in circulation in the PVAP; what had leaked out of its contents sparked a flood of Bierut critical comments. From Moscow, Bierut kept in close contact with Warsaw by telephone; so he learned of the rapid decline of his authority in Poland. Bierut's sudden death on March 12th - probably from heart failure and pneumonia - created a power vacuum and gave the de-Stalinization in Poland an enormous boost.

Against the wishes of the new Kremlin chief , the PVAP elected Edward Ochab as Bierut's successor.

In 1956, thousands of workers struck in the western Polish city of Poznan . This movement ( Poznan Uprising ), which initially had a material background, quickly turned into a political uprising; The party leadership had this bloodily suppressed on June 28, 1956.

The dispute over how to proceed deepened the conflict in the Politburo. The situation was exacerbated by the political developments in Hungary , where profound disputes within society became apparent. While the Stalinist faction in Poland - also known as the Natolin group after their meeting place in a former Potocki palace - pleaded for a continuation of the political course, the liberals (also known as the Puławy group ) spoke out in favor of a social reform movement, the dictatorship of the proletariat, however, did not want to touch. The latter prevailed. The Stalinist chairman of the State Commission for Economic Planning Hilary Minc had to resign, the rehabilitated former General Secretary Władysław Gomułka returned to power in triumph on October 21, although Moscow initially refused to agree, mobilized its troops and the entire party leadership for an unannounced lightning visit had arrived in Warsaw (October 19, 1956).

Berman left the party leadership in 1956. The change in October 1956 (Polish odwilż październikowa - "thaw") was also noticed in other Eastern Bloc countries . Based on the revolution of 1848 , students from the Technical University of Budapest wrote a declaration on October 22, 1956, in which they called for civil liberties and parliamentarism as well as national independence. The students were allowed a demonstration in solidarity with the Polish workers' uprising on October 23 . This demonstration marked the beginning of the Hungarian uprising.

Berman was expelled from the PVAP in May 1957 as one of the culprits for the "errors and mistakes of the Stalin era".

Until reaching retirement age, he subsequently worked for the state-owned publishing house Książka i Wiedza . Marked by the consequences of a serious car accident in 1980, he died forgotten four years later in Warsaw. His grave is in the military cemetery in Warsaw's Żoliborz district.

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Norman Stone: The Atlantic and its Enemies - A History of the Cold War. London, 2010, p. 27.
  2. ↑ De-Stalinization and the crises in the Eastern Bloc ( Federal Center for Political Education )
  3. ↑ spiegel.de: July 4, 1956
  4. ↑ Der Spiegel 4/1957 of January 23, 1957: I AM A LUMP, MR PROSECUTOR! - The hanged make a revolution / On the fate of Laszlo Rajk, Traitscho Kastoff, Rudolf Slansky and other honored dead
personal data
SURNAME Berman, Jakub
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Berman, Jakob
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish Stalinist politician
DATE OF BIRTH December 23, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Warsaw
DATE OF DEATH April 10, 1984
Place of death Warsaw