The Tragedy of the Polish Communist Party

Abstract

The Tragedy of the Polish Communist Party dates from 1957, when K.S. Karol asked Isaac for a brief outline of the history of Communism in Poland. It might be worth recalling that shortly after the dramatic Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in February 1956 (at which Khrushchev in his famous 'secret speech' revealed for the first time to a Russian audience some of Stalin's crimes and misdeeds), a communique from Moscow announced the 'rehabilitation of the Polish Party and its leaders,' who, it was stated, had fallen victims to 'provocations and slanders' during the period of the 'cult of personality'. This short announcement, hardly noticed in the West, was in fact a strange epilogue to one of the greatest tragedies of Communism, in which a whole party had been annihilated. In 1938 the Comintern announced the dissolution of the Polish Party under the pretext that it was corroded by 'Trotskyist and Pilsudskist influences' and had become merely an agency of fascism and the Polish political police. Yet all the members of the Central Committee, threatened by the very same police, escaped from Poland to seek refuge in Moscow. On Stalin's orders they were imprisoned and executed as traitors. Among them were Adolf Warski (Warszawski), the founder of the party and friend of Rosa Luxemburg; Lenski (Leszczynski), a veteran of the October Revolution and a former member of the Executive of the Comintern; Wera Kostrzewa (Koszutska), a most militant woman revolutionary. At the time not much was known about the fate of the victims: Stalin did not bother to stage even a mock trial and at the height of the terror his dealings with the 'fraternal party' were enveloped in murky silence. In Poland the remnants of the illegal party, persecuted by the police, led a precarious existence