Communist Party of Poland
폴란드 공산당
The communist party of interwar Poland, founded on 16 December 1918 by the merger of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania and the Polish Socialist Party–Left. Until 1925 it was called the Communist Workers’ Party of Poland (KPRP). As a section of the Comintern that did not recognise the independent Polish state, it remained illegal throughout the Second Republic, and after most of its leaders were executed in the Soviet Union during the Great Purge it was dissolved by the Comintern on 16 August 1938.
In depth
The Communist Workers’ Party of Poland was founded at a unification congress in Warsaw on 16 December 1918 and took over the programme of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania. Following Luxemburg’s ideas, it aimed at a Polish Socialist Republic within a pan-European commonwealth of socialist states and did not support the formation of the independent Polish state in 1918. It organised workers’ councils in competition with the Polish Socialist Party. In March 1919 it took part in founding the Comintern; the English-language source names Unszlicht as its representative, the Polish-language source Marchlewski. According to the Polish-language source, the party never completed the registration required by the law on associations and was illegal from March 1919 (though tolerated until July 1920); in 1919 it had 7,000–8,000 members.
The party supported Soviet Russia in the Polish–Soviet War, and on 2 August 1920, at the height of the Red Army offensive, a Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee was formed from Marchlewski, Dzerzhinsky, Feliks Kon, Unszlicht and Próchniak. In the 1922 election its ‘Union of Town and Country Proletariat’ list won two seats; the English-language source gives 130,000 votes, the Polish-language source 121,000. From 1923 the Communist Parties of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia belonged to it as autonomous organisations. After the Polish Commission of the Comintern’s Fifth Congress (1924), chaired by Stalin, the Warski–Koszutska leadership was removed and Leszczyński took charge. The Third Congress of 1925 adopted the slogan of ‘Bolshevisation’ and renamed the party the Communist Party of Poland; the English-language source places it in Minsk in March, the Polish-language source near Moscow from 16 January to 5 February.
During Piłsudski’s coup of May 1926 the party backed the coup forces, which Stalin denounced as the ‘May error’. After 1927, when the Comintern representatives Kuusinen and Manuilsky joined its Central Committee, the party could no longer act independently. Under the ‘Third Period’ line it branded the PPS fascist; in the mid-1930s it pursued a popular front, which the PPS and the Bund rejected. In the Spanish Civil War the party led the Dąbrowski Battalion. According to the Polish-language source, in January 1936 the party had 17,302 members, 3,817 of them in the Soviet Union.
During the Great Purge all members of the Politburo present in the Soviet Union had been arrested by the NKVD by 11 September 1937. Dimitrov sent Stalin a draft dissolution resolution on 28 November 1937, and members of the Comintern Executive’s secretariat signed it on 16 August 1938. The party was accused of infiltration by Piłsudskiite intelligence and of Trotskyism. The Polish-language source says 46 members and 24 candidate members of the Central Committee were executed; the English-language source says 70 members and candidate members were shot. Bierut, Gomułka, Ochab, Zawadzki and others who were held in Polish prisons survived and later became leaders of People’s Poland. The party was officially rehabilitated around the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in February 1956.