Polish Socialist Party

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Logo of the PPS

The Polish Socialist Party ( Polish Polska Partia Socjalistyczna , PPS) is a Polish political party with a socialist character, which was founded in Paris in November 1892 as a foreign association of Polish socialists ( Związek Zagraniczny Socjalistów Polskich ) and had political influence in Poland especially in the interwar period.

history

The social policy program adopted by the party in 1893 was based on the Erfurt program of the SPD and called for the nationalization of land, means of production and transport, the eight-hour working day and minimum wages. In May 1904 the party's first combat unit ( Organizacja Bojowa Polskiej Partii Socjalistycznej , OBPPS) was established. Benefiting from the Russo-Japanese War , the party was able to receive money and weapons from Japan and thus carried out raids on banks and postal trains in the area of ​​influence of Russia . A mass demonstration in November 1904 led to fighting with the Russian military, which is considered to be the first combat action since the January uprising of 1863/64. This led to an increase in membership, so that by 1906 the party had about 55,000 members. The elections to the 1st Duma were boycotted by the PPS. Rather, the party continued to fight and carried out attacks on tsarist institutions, but also looted trains. The attacks on Bloody Wednesday were one of them, so Roman Dmowski accused the PPS of banditry. At the end of 1906 the PPS split into the so-called Revolutionary Fraction ( Polska Partia Socjalistyczna - Frakcja Rewolucyjna ) with Józef Piłsudski and the so-called Left Fraction ( Polska Partia Socjalistyczna - Lewica ).

Second Republic of Poland

In 1919 the Social Democratic Party of Galicia joined the PPS. In the Second Polish Republic , the PPS worked closely with the German Socialist Labor Party of Poland and formed a joint electoral list for the Sejm with them in 1928 . The party was a member of the Socialist International between 1923 and 1940.

The PPS first supported Józef Piłsudski, including his May coup in 1926. Later it went into opposition to his authoritarian Sanacja regime by joining the democratic “ Centrolew ” opposition movement. Many leaders and members of the PPS were tried under Pilsudski and imprisoned in the notorious Bereza Kartuska prison . Adam Ciolkocz , Herman Lieberman and Adam Pragier were imprisoned in the Brest Fortress in September 1930. At the funeral of the former prime minister and Galician Ignacy Daszynsky in 1936, the PPS leaders demonstratively gathered. The relationship with the Polish communists , which Stalin dissolved in 1938, was contentious .

The PPS supported the Polish resistance in World War II as a separate underground movement ( Polska Partia Socjalistyczna - Wolność, Równość, Niepodległość [Freedom - Equality - Independence]). The chairman was Tomacz Arciszewski . She was also involved in the formation of the Polish government in exile . Its members and supporters were among the victims of the Stalinist liquidations after the Soviet invasion of 1939 . B. in the special camp Koselsk . Party membership in the PPS was considered anti-Soviet and was recorded as with the other political directions. The victims from the PPS included z. B. the psychoanalyst Jan Nelken. The Stalinist purge also included the Trial of Sixteen in June 1945 , including the long-time underground leader Kazimierz Pużak of the PPS. Gustaw Herling-Grudziński , who was part of the PPS in exile from 1946 to 1960, was one of the first to report on his time in the Gulag from 1940 to 1942.

After 1945

In the Sejm election in Poland in 1947 , the PPS and the communist PPR were already on a list, the Democratic Bloc, which, on Stalin's order, was helped to succeed by election fraud. In 1948 the PPS finally split when the communists put further pressure on it. A group with Edward Osóbka-Morawski wanted to form a common front with the Polish Peasant Party. Another group with Józef Cyrankiewicz advocated support for the communists, with reservations about their sole power. Pre-war hostilities continued, Stanisław Mikołajczyk from the Peasant Party did not agree to the alliance with the PPS. The communists, however, made Cyrankiewicz Prime Minister, and the direction in the PPS under Cyrankiewicz was forcibly united with the PPR to form the PZPR on December 15, 1948. Remnants of the other direction remained only in the government in exile.

It was not until 1987 that the PPS was reactivated in Poland as Polska Partia Socjalistyczna by Jan Józef Lipski . The unification party congress in Warsaw in 1990 with the party in exile, at which Lidia Ciołkoszowa was elected lifelong honorary chairman, was important. Since 1989, the PPS was temporarily represented in the Sejm as part of electoral alliances , but no longer achieved its former importance, not least due to left-wing competition from parties such as Młodzi Socjaliści ( Young Socialists ) and Nowa Lewica , which split off from the PPS in 2002 also based on the PPS tradition. Above all, the concept of socialism had lost its fascination. Other left-wing democratic parties have taken their positions like Lewica . In 2020 she was represented in parliament by a single Senator Wojciech Konieczny.

Well-known activists

literature

Web links

Commons : Polska Partia Socjalistyczna  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Single receipts

  1. ↑ a b Manfred Alexander: Kleine Geschichte Polens , Stuttgart 2008, pp. 255-257, ISBN 978-3-15-017060-1 .
  2. ^ Wolfgang Templin: The fight for Poland . Paderborn 2018, p. 202 .
  3. ↑ Albin Głowacki: Sowieci wobec Polaków na ziemiach wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej 1939-1941 . 2nd Edition. Łódź 1998 (at the end of December 1939 there were 15,105 prisoners in the three special camps. More than half of them were officers (56.2%), the rest were policemen, gendarmes and others. The proportion of reservists among officers was 55 percent. The officers included 650 retired elderly soldiers, including quite a few sick and invalids. The reserve officers included hundreds of elementary, senior and university teachers, engineers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, artists, clergymen, as well as socially or politically active people - all in all a considerable part of the Polish elite of that time.).
  4. ^ Psychoanalysis in Poland during the partitions and its emancipatory ideals . ISBN 978-3-631-80223-6 ( peterlang.com [accessed February 29, 2020]).