Władysław Gomułka
Władysław Gomułka
The national communist who returned in the Polish October of 1956 to test a 'Polish road to socialism'
To the Politburo, October 1956 — 'You can govern a nation with bayonets, but whoever realizes that possibility also realizes that he has lost everything.'
Born in 1905 in Galicia, in the Austrian Partition, into a worker's family, he was a plumber from the age of fourteen. He joined the Communist Party of Poland in 1926 and became general secretary of the underground Polish Workers' Party in 1943. In 1948 he was removed for 'rightist-nationalist deviation' and imprisoned from 1951 to 1954. After the June 1956 Poznań workers' protests were harshly suppressed, he was elected first secretary on 20 October 1956; he insisted Poland would resist advancing Soviet troops but keep the alliance, and the Soviets yielded. The 1967-68 antisemitic campaign and support for the invasion of Czechoslovakia ended the reform line, and in December 1970 he ordered the army to shoot striking shipyard workers in Gdańsk and Gdynia. Death caused by lung cancer.
Career timeline
- 1926Joins the Communist Party of Poland
- 1934–35Studies at the International Lenin School, Moscow
- 1943–48General Secretary, Polish Workers' Party
- 1948–51Purged for 'nationalist deviation'; arrested 1951
- 1954–56Released, rehabilitated; returns in the Polish October
- 1956–70First Secretary, Polish United Workers' Party
- 1970.12Bloody suppression of strikes against price rises; heart attack; removed from office 20 December