Władysław Gomułka

After the German attack on the USSR, Gomułka joined the re-formed underground Polish Workers' Party (PPR), building party cells in the Subcarpathian region under the conspiratorial pseudonym 'Wiesław'. Brought to occupied Warsaw by Paweł Finder in July 1942, he took over the PPR's Warsaw regional committee when its secretary was arrested by the Gestapo in August, and in September 1942 became a member of the PPR's Temporary Central Committee. After the murder of first secretary Marceli Nowotko late that year, he took part in the party investigation of Bolesław Mołojec that ended in Mołojec's execution; in January 1943 he entered the party's new inner leadership alongside Paweł Finder and Franciszek Jóźwiak.

As the party's main ideologist, Gomułka authored the 1943 programme brochure 'O co walczymy?' ('What do we fight for?') and supervised its editorial and publishing work. In February 1943 he led the communist side in talks in Warsaw with the London-based Polish government-in-exile's Government Delegation and the Home Army; they produced no agreement and were broken off by the Delegation on 28 April 1943. On 23 November 1943, after the Gestapo arrested Paweł Finder and Małgorzata Fornalska, he was elected general secretary (chief) of the PPR. The Polish- and English-language references give 23 November; the Russian-language reference's infobox gives 14 November, a documented discrepancy.

Gomułka originated the idea of the Krajowa Rada Narodowa (KRN), a communist-led quasi-parliamentary body, and imposed it on the party leadership without prior consent from Moscow, founding it on 31 December 1943 with Bierut as chairman. The Moscow-based grouping was pushing a competing conception, and Gomułka argued that Polish communists inside occupied Poland understood Polish realities better. His strategy of seeking a broad domestic social base for communist power, including talks with left socialists and peasant parties to bring them into the KRN, clashed with Bierut's reliance on the entry of the Red Army. The conflict was resolved in Moscow, in the Comintern, in Bierut's favour, and Moscow withheld funding and arms support from the PPR-led underground. By mid-1944 the Moscow factions nevertheless recognised the primacy of the PPR, the KRN and Gomułka. After Soviet forces crossed the Bug on 20 July 1944 the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) was set up on 21 July, and Gomułka and other PPR leaders left Warsaw for Soviet-controlled Lublin, arriving on 1 August 1944 as the Warsaw Uprising began.

Gomułka's most distinct historical contribution was articulating and, between 1956 and 1958, actively implementing a 'Polish road to socialism.' This was precisely the stance for which he had been purged for 'nationalist deviation' in 1948: opposing the mechanical transplantation of the Soviet model and insisting on a path shaped by Polish historical conditions. Upon returning as First Secretary in October 1956, he moved rapidly on three fronts. First, he effectively halted agricultural collectivization and dissolved most of the state and cooperative farms imposed under Stalinism, restoring roughly 85 percent of Polish farmland to individual farming households. Second, he introduced workers' councils that gave factory-level collectives autonomous decision-making power over production and distribution, an experiment unprecedented in the socialist bloc outside Yugoslavia. Third, he normalized relations with the Catholic Church and loosened censorship, opening a genuine, if temporary, space for cultural and intellectual life. In December 1956 he signed an agreement with the USSR codifying the legal status of Soviet troops on Polish soil, the first such pact in the Warsaw Pact, prohibiting troop movements without prior notification to Polish authorities. Gomułka repeatedly argued that 'there can be different roads to building socialism, reflecting national particularities and historical traditions.' Though steadily eroded by conservative party pressure through the 1960s, this line remained the official programme of the Polish United Workers' Party into the 1980s and served as a lasting reference point for reform-communist currents across Eastern Europe.