The PZPR Warsaw first secretary whose unauthorized print run of 15,000 copies broke Khrushchev's Secret Speech out of party control
At a Central Committee plenum break in March 1956, he pressed Khrushchev on Stalin's anti-Semitism; Khrushchev, his hands trembling, disclosed that Stalin had been planning pogroms against Soviet Jews.
Born to a Jewish merchant family in Warsaw, he joined the communist youth movement at 14, studied at the International Lenin School, and alternated between underground party work in Poland and extended stays in the USSR. Arrested by the NKVD in 1938, he spent eight years in the Kolyma camps before returning to Poland in 1945, where he enforced the Stalinist line in propaganda, the press, and agricultural procurement. As PZPR Warsaw first secretary from 1955, he pivoted after the Twentieth Congress: he urged rank-and-file members to study the secret speech and authorized 15,000–20,000 unofficial copies, turning the speech from a closed party document into a global one. He clashed with Gomułka after the Polish October, was dismissed in 1957 and expelled in the 1968 anti-Semitic campaign, and later backed the democratic opposition, converting to Catholicism.
Career Timeline
- 1921Joins the Young Communist League of Poland
- 1926–1929Studies at the International Lenin School, Moscow
- 1930–1932Secretariat of the Central Committee, Communist Party of Poland
- 1938–1945Arrested by the NKVD; 8-year sentence in Kolyma labour camp
- 1945–1948Propaganda secretary, Katowice Voivodeship PPR; editor of Trybuna Robotnicza
- 1948–1954Head of the Press and Publishing Department, PZPR Central Committee
- 1955–1957First Secretary, PZPR Warsaw Committee
- 1957–1958President of the Polish Press Agency (PAP)
- 1968Expelled from the PZPR in the anti-Semitic campaign