Władysław Gomułka

Władysław Gomułka
First Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party
In office 21 October 1956 – 20 December 1970
Preceded by	Edward Ochab
Succeeded by	Edward Gierek
First Secretary of the Polish Workers' Party
In office 1943–48
Preceded by	Paweł Finder
Succeeded by	Bolesław Bierut
Personal details
Born	(1905-02-06)6 February 1905 Krosno, Austria-Hungary
Died	1 September 1982(1982-09-01) (aged 77) Konstancin, Poland
Nationality	Polish
Spouse(s)	Liwa (Zofia) née Szoken (1902–86)
Religion	None[1]

Władysław Gomułka (Polish: [vwaˈdɨswaf ɡɔˈmuwka]; 6 February 1905 – 1 September 1982) was a Polish communist activist and politician. He was the de facto leader of post-war Poland until 1948, and again from 1956 to 1970. American journalist John Gunther described Gomułka as "professorial in manner, aloof, and angular, with a peculiar spry pepperiness."^[2]

Gomułka was born in a worker family in Krosno. He received only rudimentary education before being employed in the oil industry of the Subcarpathian region. In 1926, he became a member of the Communist Party of Poland (Komunistyczna Partia Polski, KPP) and was arrested for political activity. Gomułka was an activist in the leftist labor unions from 1926 and in the Central Trade Department of the KPP Central Committee from 1931. In August 1932, participating in a conference of textile worker delegates in Łódź, he was arrested by the Sanation police and then shot and wounded during an escape attempt. Subsequently he was sentenced to a prison term. In 1934 Gomułka went to Moscow, where he lived and studied at the International Lenin School for a year. After his return to Poland Gomułka worked as a regional KPP secretary in Silesia. He was arrested in 1936, sentenced to seven years in prison and remained jailed until the beginning of World War II.

During the war, Gomułka became an influential Polish communist and in 1942 participated in the reformation of a Polish communist party (the KPP was destroyed in Stalin's purges in the late 1930s) under the name Polish Workers' Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza, PPR). Gomułka organized the party structures in the Subcarpathian region, but soon was brought to the capital to lead the PPR Warsaw division. After some of the PPR founders, many of whom were previously parachuted or otherwise brought from the Soviet Union, were killed in the internal struggle or eliminated by the Nazis, Gomułka became the Party's secretary general in November 1943 (and remained in that position until September 1948, when Stalin and Beria decided that his leadership no longer served their interests). In occupied Warsaw Gomułka established a national quasi-parliament (the communist version) named the State National Council and was a deputy in that body.

Gomułka was a deputy prime minister in the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland (Rząd Tymczasowy Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej), from January to June 1945, and in the Provisional Government of National Unity (Tymczasowy Rząd Jedności Narodowej), from 1945 to 1947. As a minister of Recovered Territories (1945–48), he exerted great influence over the rebuilding, integration and economic progress of Poland within its new borders, by supervising the settlement, development and administration of the lands acquired from Germany. Using his position in the PPR and government, Gomułka led the leftist social transformations in Poland and participated in the crushing of the resistance to the communist rule during the post-war years. He also helped the communists in winning the 3 x Tak (3 Times Yes) referendum of 1946. A year later, he played a key role in the 1947 parliamentary elections, which were rigged to give the communists and their allies an overwhelming victory. After the elections, all remaining legal opposition in Poland was effectively destroyed.

Gomułka became the "hegemon" of Poland. However, a rivalry between Polish communist factions (Gomułka was the leader of a home national group vs. Bolesław Bierut of Stalin's group reared during the war in the Soviet Union) led to Gomułka's removal from power in 1948 and imprisonment (from August 1951 to December 1954). He was accused of "right wing-reactionary deviation" and expelled from the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) (as the Polish Workers' Party was renamed following a merger with the Polish Socialist Party).

The Stalinist General Secretary of the PZPR Bierut died in March 1956, during the period of de-Stalinization in Poland, which gradually developed after Stalin's death. Edward Ochab became the new first secretary of the Party. In June 1956, violent worker protests broke out in Poznań. The worker riots were harshly suppressed and dozens of workers were killed. However, the party leadership, which now included many reform-minded officials, recognized to some degree the validity of the protest participants' demands and took steps to placate the workers.^[3][4]

The reformers in the Party wanted a political rehabilitation of Gomułka and his return to the party leadership. Gomułka insisted that he be given real power to implement further reforms. He wanted a replacement of some of the party leaders, including the pro-Soviet Minister of Defense Konstantin Rokossovsky.

The Soviet leadership viewed events in Poland with alarm. Simultaneously with Soviet troop movements deep into Poland, a high-level Soviet delegation flew to Warsaw. It was led by Nikita Khrushchev and included Mikoyan, Bulganin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Marshal Konev and others. Ochab and Gomułka made it clear that Polish forces would resist if Soviet troops advanced, but reassured the Soviets that the reforms were internal matters and that Poland had no intention of abandoning the communist bloc or its treaties with the Soviet Union. The Soviets yielded.^[5]

Following the wishes of the majority of the Politburo members, First Secretary Ochab gave in and on 20 October the Central Committee brought Gomułka and several associates into the Politburo, removed others, and elected Gomułka as first secretary of the Party. Gomułka, the former prisoner of the Stalinists, enjoyed wide popular support across the country, expressed by the participants of a massive street demonstration in Warsaw on 24 October.

A major factor that influenced Gomułka was the Oder-Neisse line issue. West Germany refused to recognize the Oder-Neisse line and Gomułka realized the fundamental instability of Poland's unilaterally imposed western border.^[6] He felt threatened by the revanchist statements put out by the Adenauer government and believed that the alliance with the Soviet Union was the only thing stopping the threat of a future German invasion.^[7] The new party leader told the 8th Plenum of the PZPR on 19 October 1956 that: "Poland needs friendship with the Soviet Union more than the Soviet Union needs friendship with Poland... Without the Soviet Union we cannot maintain our borders with the West".^[8] Seeing that Gomułka was popular with the Polish people, and given his insistence that he wanted to maintain the alliance with the Soviet Union and the presence of the Red Army in Poland, Khrushchev decided that Gomułka was a leader that Moscow could live with.^[7]

Gomułka was initially very popular for his reforms and seeking a "Polish way to socialism",^[9] and giving rise to the period known as "Gomułka's thaw". During the 1960s, however, he became more conservative and, afraid of destabilizing the system, not inclined to introduce or permit changes. In the 1960s he supported persecution of the Catholic Church and intellectuals (notably Leszek Kołakowski, who was forced into exile). In 1967–68 Gomułka allowed outbursts of "anti-Zionist" political propaganda,^[10] which developed first as a result of the Soviet bloc's frustration with the outcome of the Six-Day War.^[4] It turned out being a thinly veiled anti-Semitic campaign, pursued primarily by others in the Party, but utilized by Gomułka to keep himself in power by shifting the attention of the populace from the stagnating economy and mismanagement. The result was that the majority of the remaining Polish citizens of Jewish origin left the country. At that time he was also responsible for persecuting protesting students and toughening censorship of the media. Gomułka was one of the key leaders of and supported Poland's participation in the Warsaw Pact intervention in Czechoslovakia in August 1968.

A remarkable achievement of Gomułka's politics was the negotiating of a treaty with West Germany, signed in December 1970. The German side recognized the post-World War II borders, which established a foundation for future peace, stability and cooperation in Central Europe.

In December 1970, economic difficulties led to price rises and subsequent bloody clashes with shipyard workers on the Baltic Coast, in which several dozen workers were fatally shot. The tragic events forced Gomułka's resignation and retirement. In a generational replacement of the ruling elite, Edward Gierek took over the Party leadership and tensions eased.

Gomułka's negative image in communist propaganda after his removal was gradually modified and some of his constructive contributions were recognized. He is seen as an honest and austere believer in the socialist system, who, unable to resolve Poland's formidable difficulties and satisfy mutually contradictory demands, grew more rigid and despotic later in his career. He died in 1982 of lung cancer. Gomułka's memoirs were first published in 1994.

Early life and career

Władysław Gomułka was born in Białobrzegi Franciszkańskie, on the outskirts of Krosno, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (the Galicia region) on 6 February 1905. His parents met and married in the United States, where each went in search for better life in the late 19th century, but returned to the Austrian Partition of Poland in the early 20th century because Władysław's father Jan was unable to find in America a well-paying job. Jan Gomułka worked as a laborer in the Subcarpathian oil industry, while Władysław's older sister Józefa, born in the USA, returned there upon turning eighteen to preserve her US citizenship and join the extended family, most of whom had emigrated. Władysław and his two siblings experienced a childhood of the proverbial Galician poverty: they lived in an old dilapidated hut and ate mostly potatoes.^[11]

Gomułka attended schools in Krosno for six or seven years, until the age of thirteen, when he had to start an apprenticeship in a metal- and tool-working shop. Throughout his life Gomułka was an avid reader and accomplished a great deal of self-education, but remained a subject of jokes because of his lack of formal education and demeanor.^[11]

In 1922, Gomułka passed his apprenticeship exams and began working at the local refineries. He developed connections with the radical Left, joining the Independent Peasant Party first. From 1926 Gomułka was a member of the Communist Party of Western Ukraine, a branch of the Communist Party of Poland. He was interested primarily in social issues, including the trade and labor movement, and concentrated on practical activities.^[11]

Activist in the Communist Party of Poland

Already known for his activism in the Metal Workers Union, in October 1926 Gomulka became a secretary of the managing council in the Chemical Industry Workers Union for the Drohobych District. Gomułka learned on his own the basic Ukrainian language, but in mid-1927 he was brought to Warsaw, where he remained active until drafted for military service at the end of the year. After several months, the military released him because of a right leg defect.^[12]

Gomułka returned to the communist party work, organized strike actions and spoke at gatherings of workers at all major industrial centers of Poland. During this period he was arrested several times and lived under police supervision. In the summer of 1930 he illegally embarked on his first foreign trip with the intention of participating in the Red International of Labor Unions Fifth Congress held in Moscow from 15 to 30 July. Traveling from Upper Silesia to Berlin, Gomułka had to wait there for the issuance of Soviet documents and arrived in Moscow too late participate in the deliberations of the Congress. He stayed in Moscow for a couple of weeks and then went to Leningrad, from where he took a ship to Hamburg, stayed in Berlin again and through Silesia returned to Poland.^[12]

Gomułka continued his work as a member of the Trade Department of the KPP. Attending a conference of textile industry delegates in Łódź, he was arrested on 28 August 1932. During an escape attempt Gomułka was shot by a policeman and seriously wounded in the left thigh. Despite a long hospital treatment, he was left with a permanent leg disability.^[12]

On 1 June 1933 Gomulka was sentenced to a four-year prison term. In March 1934 he was temporarily released for a surgery of the injured leg. He requested the KPP to send him to the Soviet Union for medical treatment and to attend the International Lenin School. He arrived in the Soviet Union in June and went to the Crimea for several weeks, where he underwent helpful therapeutic baths. Gomułka then spent more than a year in Moscow, where he attended the Lenin School under the name Stefan Kowalski.^[12]

The ideology-oriented classes were arranged separately for a small group of Polish students (one of them was Roman Romkowski, who would later persecute Gomułka in Stalinist Poland) and included a military training course conducted by Karol Świerczewski. In a written opinion issued by the school Gomułka was characterized in highly positive terms, but his extended stay in the Soviet Union caused him to become disillusioned with the realities of Stalinist communism and highly critical of the agrarian collectivization practice. In November 1935 he illegally returned to Poland.^[12]

Gomułka resumed his communist and labor conspiratorial activities and kept advancing within the KPP organization until, as the secretary of the Party's Silesian branch, he was arrested in Chorzów in April 1936. He was then tried by the District Court in Katowice and sentenced to seven years in prison, reduced on an appeal to four and a half years. He spent time in the same cell with Romkowski again. In 1938 in a prison in Sieradz, Gomułka became the official leader of the commune of political prisoners. He stayed there until the outbreak of World War II.^[12]

Gomułka's experiences turned him into an extremely suspicious and distrustful person and contributed to his lifelong conviction that Sanation Poland was a fascist state. He differentiated this belief from his positive feelings toward the country and its people, especially members of the working class.^[12]

Conspiratorial work in occupied Poland, career in the Polish Workers' Party

The outbreak of the war freed Gomułka from his prison confinement. On 7 September he arrived in Warsaw, where he stayed for a few weeks, working in the besieged capital on the construction of defensive fortifications. From there, like many other Polish communists, Gomułka went to the Soviet-controlled territory. In Białystok he ran a home for former political prisoners arriving from other parts of Poland. To be reunited with his luckily found wife, at the end of 1939 Gomułka moved to Lviv.

Like other members of the dissolved Communist Party of Poland, Gomułka sought a membership in the Soviet All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). The Soviet authorities allowed such membership transfers only from March 1941 and in April of that year Gomułka received his party card in Kiev.

The circumstances of the Polish communists' lives changed dramatically after the German attack on the Soviet Union. Greatly impoverished in now German-occupied Lviv, the Gomułkas managed to join Władysław's family in Krosno by the end of 1941. However, a momentous development soon took place in the sphere of communist political activity: in January 1942, Joseph Stalin reestablished in Warsaw a Polish communist party under the name of the Polish Workers' Party (PPR).

Gomułka became involved in the creation of party structures in the Subcarpathian region and began using his wartime conspiratorial pseudonym "Wiesław". In July 1942, Paweł Finder brought Gomułka to occupied Warsaw. In August, the secretary of the PPR's regional Warsaw Committee was arrested by the Gestapo and "Wiesław" was entrusted with his job. In September Gomułka became a member of the PPR's Temporary Central Committee.

In late 1942 and early 1943, the PPR experienced a severe crisis because of the murder of its first secretary Marceli Nowotko. Gomułka participated in the party investigation directed against another member of the leadership, Bolesław Mołojec that resulted in his execution. Together with the promoted to secretary Finder and Franciszek Jóźwiak, "Wiesław" was included in the Party's new inner leadership, established in January 1943. The Central Committee was enlarged in the following months to include Bolesław Bierut, among others.

In February 1943, Gomułka led the communist side in a series of important meetings in Warsaw between the PPR and the Government Delegation of the London-based Polish government-in-exile and the Home Army. The talks produced no results because of the divergent interests of the parties involved and a mutual lack of confidence. The Delegation officially discontinued the negotiations on April 28, three days after the Soviet government broke diplomatic relations with the Polish government.

In 1943 Gomułka became the Party's main ideologist. He wrote the "What do we fight for?" (O co walczymy?) publication dated 1 March 1943, and the much more comprehensive declaration that emerged under the same title in November. "Wiesław" supervised the Party's main editorial and publishing undertaking.

Gomułka as the PPR's secretary, State National Council, Polish Committee of National Liberation

In the fall of 1943, the PPR leadership began discussing the creation of a Polish quasi-parliamentary, communist-led body, to be named the State National Council (Krajowa Rada Narodowa, KRN). After the Battle of Kursk the expectation was of a Soviet victory and liberation of Poland and the PPR wanted to be ready to assume power. Gomułka came up with the idea of a national council and imposed his point of view on the rest of the leadership. The PPR intended to obtain consent from the Cominterm leader and their Soviet contact Georgi Dimitrov. However, in November the Gestapo arrested Finder and Małgorzata Fornalska, who possessed the secret codes for communication with Moscow and the Soviet response remained unknown. In the absence of Finder, on 23 November Gomułka was elected secretary (chief) of the PPR and Bierut joined the three-person inner leadership.

The founding meeting of the State National Council took place in the late evening of 31 December 1943. The new body's chairman Bierut was becoming Gomułka's main rival. In mid-January 1944 Dimitrov was finally informed of the KRN's existence, which surprised both him and the Polish communist leaders in Moscow, increasingly led by Jakub Berman, who had other ideas concerning the establishment of a Polish communist government.

References

Decorations and awards

• Order of the Builders of People's Poland
• Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta
• Partisan Cross
• Order of the Cross of Grunwald, 1st class

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Władysław Gomułka.

• History of Poland (1945–89)

Party political offices
Preceded by Paweł Finder	General Secretary of the Polish Workers' Party 1943-1948	Succeeded by Bolesław Bierut (as General Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party
Preceded by Edward Ochab	General Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party 21 October 1956 - 20 December 1970	Succeeded by Edward Gierek

First Secretaries of the Central Committee of the PZPR Bolesław Bierut Edward Ochab Władysław Gomułka Edward Gierek Stanisław Kania Wojciech Jaruzelski Mieczysław Rakowski

History of the Polish People's Republic 1945–48 Early post-war Recovered Territories Polish population transfers (1944–46) Expulsion of Germans Operation Vistula Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland Polish Committee of National Liberation Provisional Government of National Unity Trial of the Sixteen Cursed soldiers Augustów roundup Polish people's referendum, 1946 Polish legislative election, 1947 Small Constitution of 1947 Amnesty of 1947 Battle for trade Three-Year Plan 1948–56 Sovietisation under Bierut's rule Polish United Workers' Party Six-Year Plan Collectivization Socialist realism in Poland 1951 Mokotów Prison execution 1952 Constitution Stalinist show trial of the Kraków Curia PAX Association Poznań 1956 protests Polish October (1956) 1956–70 Gomułka's autarchic communism Polish legislative election, 1957 Bishops' Letter of Reconciliation 1968 Polish political crisis Warschauer Kniefall Polish 1970 protests 1970–80 Gierek's international opening 1971 Łódź strikes Letter of 59 June 1976 protests Workers' Defence Committee Flying University Lublin 1980 strikes Gdańsk Agreement Jastrzębie-Zdrój 1980 strikes Solidarity (Polish trade union) Independent Students' Union Rural Solidarity Bydgoszcz events 1981 warning strike in Poland Summer 1981 hunger demonstrations in Poland 1981–89 Jaruzelski's autocratic rule and demise Martial law in Poland Military Council of National Salvation Pacification of Wujek 1982 demonstrations Fighting Solidarity Federation of Fighting Youth Orange Alternative Polish political and economic reforms referendum, 1987 1988 Polish strikes Polish Round Table Agreement

Leaders of the ruling parties of the Eastern Bloc Communist Party of the Soviet Union Vladimir Lenin Joseph Stalin Nikita Khrushchev Leonid Brezhnev Yuri Andropov Konstantin Chernenko Mikhail Gorbachev Party of Labour of Albania Enver Hoxha Ramiz Alia Bulgarian Communist Party Georgi Dimitrov Valko Chervenkov Todor Zhivkov Petar Mladenov Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Klement Gottwald Antonín Novotny Alexander Dubček Gustáv Husák Miloš Jakeš Karel Urbánek Ladislav Adamec Socialist Unity Party of Germany Walter Ulbricht Erich Honecker Egon Krenz Hungarian Working People's Party Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party Mátyás Rákosi Ernő Gerő János Kádár Károly Grósz Rezső Nyers Polish United Workers' Party Władysław Gomułka Bolesław Bierut Edward Ochab Władysław Gomułka Edward Gierek Stanisław Kania Wojciech Jaruzelski Mieczysław Rakowski Romanian Communist Party Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej Nicolae Ceaușescu League of Communists of Yugoslavia Đuro Đaković Milan Gorkić Josip Broz Tito (1980–1990, rotating leadership)