Polish United Workers' Party

The party was founded at the unification congress of the Polish Workers’ Party and the Polish Socialist Party held in the main building of the Warsaw University of Technology on 15–21 December 1948. Socialists who opposed the merger had already been forced out, and PPR members accused of ‘rightist–nationalist deviation’, such as Gomułka, were removed. More than 25% of socialists are estimated to have been sidelined or driven from political life. According to the Polish-language source, the new party had 1,537,000 members at its founding (1,006,000 from the PPR and 531,000 from the PPS). Its Politburo included Bierut, Berman, Cyrankiewicz and Minc, and under Bierut, party leader from 1948 to 1956, the Stalinist system and political trials took hold.

After Bierut died in Moscow in March 1956, the leadership split into the Natolin and Puławy factions and Edward Ochab became First Secretary. After the Poznań events of June, Gomułka returned as First Secretary with his ‘Polish road to socialism’. A verification of members in 1957–1958 expelled 207,000 (15.5%). In 1968 the party waged an antisemitic campaign under an anti-Zionist banner, and Ochab resigned from the Politburo and Central Committee in protest. After shipyard workers were killed in December 1970, Gomułka was replaced by Edward Gierek.

Gierek pursued industrial modernisation and more consumer goods financed largely by foreign loans. According to the Polish-language source, membership grew from 2,320,000 in 1970 to a peak of 3,092,000 in 1980 (3,150,000 by other accounts); the English-language source gives about 3 million by 1980 and over 3.5 million at the end of the 1970s. Price rises in 1976 and 1980 set off strikes, and in 1980 the party had to legalise Solidarity. In October 1981 the Central Committee removed Stanisław Kania and elected the prime minister and defence minister Wojciech Jaruzelski as First Secretary; Jaruzelski imposed martial law on 13 December. After Solidarity’s legalisation and martial law, 850,000 members left the party (Polish-language source).

After strikes in 1988 the party entered talks with Solidarity’s leaders, and the Round Table talks were held from 6 February to 15 April 1989. Solidarity’s victory in the election of 4 June 1989 ended forty years of communist rule. The party dissolved itself at its Eleventh Congress on 27–29 January 1990, and Mieczysław Rakowski, Leszek Miller and others founded Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland (SdRP). The ‘Moscow loan’ of over one million dollars from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union used to set up the new parties caused political controversy.