Communist Party of Poland (1918-1938)

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The Communist Party of Poland was a Polish party that was formed in 1918 and dissolved in 1938. She took a Marxist-Leninist point of view and had been a member of the Comintern since 1921 .

history

The party was founded on December 16, 1918 at the Unification Party Congress of the Social Democrats of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania and the Polish Socialist Party - die Linke in Zielna Street in Warsaw under the name Komunistyczna Partia Robotnicza Polski ( KPRP ; German  Communist Workers' Party of Poland ). Since the III. At the 1925 party conference it was called Komunistyczna Partia Polski ( KPP ; German  Communist Party of Poland ).

The party rejected the order of the new Polish state and therefore also the statehood of Poland based on it. Instead, she called for the creation of a Polish Soviet Republic within the framework of Soviet Russia or the Soviet Union and, as a result, a renunciation of the eastern border areas and the creation of Soviet republics on their territories. The aim was a dictatorship of the proletariat based on the Soviet model. In terms of economic policy, the party's policy was directed against the capitalist system and for the development of a centrally administered planned economy. The election for the National Constituent Assembly on January 26, 1919 was boycotted by the KPRP. Its associated goal was to achieve a low voter turnout (by staying away from the proletarian sections of the population influenced by it) and thereby to increase its own legitimacy vis-à-vis parliamentary democracy .

In the Polish-Soviet war from 1919 to 1921, the KPRP represented pro-Soviet positions. So she tried to form workers' councils to prepare and carry out a revolutionary seizure of power. She worked closely with the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Poland (TKRP) established in Soviet Russia. Many KPRP members fought alongside the Red Army and formed the core of the Polish Red Army. In Poland itself the call to fight against its own nation met with little echo. After the beginning of the war, thousands of members left the party, which caused the KPRP to lose influence within the Polish labor movement. In March 1919 it was banned and from then on had to work illegally. The ban was carried out in accordance with the provisions of the so-called " Little Constitution ", which had been passed on February 20, 1919. It was justified with the participation of the KPRP in the war against the Polish republic.

After the Polish victory over the Red Army and the Peace of Riga , the Comintern turned its hope towards a communist overthrow in Germany. The KPRP was therefore instructed to programmatically demand the return of the areas ceded by Germany to Poland after the First World War (Greater Poland, West Prussia, parts of Silesia) to Germany. The Polish public perceived the party as a “foreign agency” that represented Soviet interests, which contributed to its marginalization. In 1933 the party had only about 8,000 members.

The KPRP had been a member of the Comintern since July 1921 and received both financial resources and directives from Moscow , which it was obliged to fulfill under constant control by the organs of the International. From 1923 the KPRP also joined organizations such as the Communist Party of Western Ukraine and the Communist Party of Western Belarus . According to the principle that there can only be one section of the Comintern in a state, the latter were treated as autonomous districts of the KPRP. The KPRP also coordinated the activities of such organizations as the Pioneers (children's organization), the Communist Youth or the Polish section of the International Aid Organization for Revolutionaries (the so-called Red Aid ).

Sejm election shares in 1922

Until the end of the Third Republic (1939), the KPRP and the KPP were not allowed to vote. In the elections to the Sejm in 1922, therefore, the electoral list Związek Proletariatu Miast i Wsi w wyborach ( Federation of the Proletariat of Cities and Villages ) entered. This electoral list reached 1.5% of the vote and was able to send two members of the Sejm, Stanisław Łańcucki and Stefan Królikowski .

In 1926 she supported the May coup Józef Piłsudskis . In the elections to the Sejm in 1928, several legal branches of the party emerged and took part in the vote. Most of the votes won the Sel-Rob the right , the unity of workers and peasants , Sel-Rob the left , the union of the peasant left , the workers' association for the city of Łódź and the struggle for the interests of workers and peasants . In all, the organizations affiliated with the CPP garnered 829,416 votes. In the elections in 1930 (for the 4th Sejm), the branch organizations received 286,612 votes. Including the votes that were declared invalid, it would have been just over 400,000 votes (around 3.6% of all votes).

Since the mid-1920s, the CPP has been more and more infiltrated by the political police of the Polish state. Among other things, paid informers worked for them.

When the National Socialists seized power at the latest, the Comintern's hope for a communist Germany ended. The strategy of the Popular Front tactics now being pursued by the Comintern was also adopted by the CPP. Not least because of its history, the CPP could not find a partner for such a policy and remained isolated. The Comintern often intervened in the internal affairs of the CPP. Thus, on their instructions, the party was purged of “party rights” and later of alleged Trotskyists .

In the course of the Polish operation of the NKVD during the Great Terror of 1937/38, almost all CC and Politburo members of the CPP (30 of 37 CC members) were arrested and murdered, including Adolf Warski , Maria Koszutska and Bruno Jasieński . Many other members were subjected to reprisals. The party was dissolved by the Comintern in 1938 at the behest of Stalin. One of the motives for the dissolution of the CPP can be seen as the fact that its members were accused of being involved in an anti-Soviet espionage and sabotage organization. On the other hand, Polish fighters in Spain as well as other former members and functionaries of the CPP formed the personnel base for the Polish Workers' Party, which was later founded with the help of the USSR, without a renewed action against the Polish communists in a similar form.

In February 1956, a few days before Nikita Khrushchev's speech at the XX. At the CPSU party congress , in which he named some of Stalin's crimes, the CPP was rehabilitated by the Cominform , the successor organization to the Comintern.

Party press

The main press of the KPP was the Czerwony Sztandar (Red Flag) and Nowy Przegląd (New Rundschau), which appeared abroad . Among the (for a time) legal communist magazines were magazines with a high circulation, such as B. the Sztandar Socjalizmu (Flag of Socialism) (daily newspaper of the KPRP with a circulation of 10,000 to 30,000 copies), or the Dziennik Popularny (popular newspaper, published since 1936 with a circulation of 50,000 copies), as well as magazines with a smaller circulation . The CPP also coordinated the publication of a wide range of illegal publications. In an effort to reach the largest possible number of subscribers, the CPP, together with the Communist Parties of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, published propaganda materials in Polish, Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian and Yiddish languages.

Leading officials

literature

  • Andrzej Kaluza: The Polish party state and its political opponents 1944–1956 (= Studies on European Legal History . Volume 110). Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-465-02769-8 , pp. 17-20.

Footnotes

  1. ^ Gotthold Rhode : History of Poland. An overview . 3rd edition, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (WBG), Darmstadt 1980, ISBN 3-534-00763-8 , p. 462.
  2. ↑ Anna Cienciala, Natalia Lebedeva, Wojciech Materski (eds.): Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment . Yale University Press, New Haven 2007. ISBN 978-0-300-10851-4 . P. 416.
  3. ^ William B. Simons, Stephen White (eds.): The Party Statutes of the Communist World . Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague 1984. ISBN 90-247-2975-0 . P. 325.