Polish Workers' Party
폴란드 노동자당
A communist party founded in German-occupied Warsaw on 5 January 1942 by Polish communists sent from the Soviet Union together with local communist groups. It continued the dissolved Communist Party of Poland, but on Stalin’s instructions the word ‘communist’ was left out of its name. From July 1944 it was the ruling party of Poland under Soviet domination, and in December 1948 it merged with the Polish Socialist Party to form the Polish United Workers’ Party.
In depth
In late December 1941 an ‘initiative group’ of Polish communists including Marceli Nowotko, Paweł Finder, Bolesław Mołojec and Małgorzata Fornalska was parachuted into occupied Poland from Soviet aircraft. According to the Polish-language source, the name came from Stalin, who on 27 August 1941 told Dimitrov not to use the name ‘communist party’ because it might frighten off future members. The party was founded in Warsaw on 5 January 1942 when the new arrivals joined with local communist groups; it presented itself as an anti-Nazi patriotic front and had a military organisation, the People’s Guard (from January 1944 the People’s Army). Its membership was about six thousand by summer 1942 according to the English-language source, ‘several thousand’ in 1942 according to the Polish-language source.
After Nowotko was killed on 28 November 1942, Mołojec took over as secretary, but he was suspected of arranging the murder and executed by ruling of the party court. Finder became secretary in January 1943, and Władysław Gomułka in November 1943. Talks on cooperation with the Government Delegation and the Home Army in February 1943 made no progress, and after the Soviet Union broke off relations with the government-in-exile in April the party turned hostile to it. On 1 January 1944 the party created the State National Council, chaired by Bolesław Bierut.
In July 1944 the Polish Committee of National Liberation was set up in Lublin, promising land reform and reconstruction; it was succeeded by the Provisional Government and in June 1945 by the Provisional Government of National Unity, which the party controlled. According to the Polish-language source, membership rose from about 20,000 in July 1944 to 300,000 in April 1945, 555,000 at the end of 1946 and 820,000 at the end of 1947. Mikołajczyk’s Polish People’s Party remained the only legal opposition, and the 1946 referendum and 1947 election were rigged and declared victories for the party-led ‘Democratic Bloc’.
As the Cold War deepened, Gomułka’s ‘Polish road to socialism’ was condemned as nationalist, and in August 1948 the Central Committee installed Bierut as general secretary. In December 1948 the party merged with the purged Polish Socialist Party to form the Polish United Workers’ Party. The Polish-language source puts the party’s membership at the merger at about one million and the PPS’s at over 500,000.