A Pole who passed through the German and Russian revolutions and tried to bring revolution home
As the Red Army prepared to march on Warsaw in 1920, he joined Radek in repeatedly urging Lenin to halt — warning him not to overestimate the revolutionary consciousness of the Polish worker.
Co-founder of Polish communism, he established the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKPiL) in 1893 together with Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches. Active in the German SPD's left wing, he helped build the Spartacus League and the German Communist Party, and after the Russian Revolution joined the Bolsheviks, becoming one of Lenin's close advisers on agrarian policy. During the Polish-Soviet War of 1920 he served as chairman of the Polish Provisional Revolutionary Committee, and later became the first chairman of International Red Aid (MOPR) and first rector of the Communist University of the National Minorities of the West.
Career Timeline
- 1889Co-founded Polish Workers' Union
- 1893Co-founded SDKPiL with Luxemburg and Jogiches
- 1896Doctorate from Zurich University
- 1906–1907SDKPiL delegate to RSDLP London Congress; candidate CC member
- 1914–1918Spartacus League; imprisoned in Germany for anti-war activity
- 1920Chairman, Polish Provisional Revolutionary Committee
- 1922–1925First chairman of MOPR; first rector of KUNMZ
Related historical events
The Secret Mikaszewicze Talks of 1919
Marchlewski's role as a negotiator came into sharpest focus in the secret talks between Soviet Russia and Poland in 1919. With Denikin's White armies threatening Moscow during the Civil War, Lenin sought a breathing space on the western front that would let him concentrate his forces in the south. Marchlewski went to the frontier as the Soviet government's representative that summer, and in the autumn he met Captain Boerner, Piłsudski's emissary, at Mikaszewicze in Belarus. This was more than an armistice discussion. Piłsudski had concluded that the White generals had no intention of recognizing Poland's independence, so he regarded the Bolsheviks as the lesser immediate threat. As their interests temporarily converged, Poland agreed not to renew its offensive, and the Red Army was able to shift some 43,000 troops from the west to the south to fight Denikin.
The talks nevertheless broke down. The Soviet government would not accept the Polish conditions on borders and a halt to propaganda, and Marchlewski himself believed a European revolution was imminent and that territorial concessions would soon lose their meaning. The negotiations collapsed in December 1919, and the following spring both sides returned to war. Even so, this brief pause materially helped Soviet Russia gain the decisive momentum in the south, and it showed Marchlewski as both revolutionary and cool-headed negotiator. The two identities collided again a year later, when he led the Polish Provisional Revolutionary Committee in a frontal Soviet bid for power.