Bolesław Bierut (; 18 April 1892 – 12 March 1956) was a Polish communist activist and politician who was the leader of communist-ruled Poland from 1948 until 1956. He was President of the State National Council from 1944 to 1947, President of Poland from 1947 to 1952, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party from 1948 to 1956, and Prime Minister of Poland from 1952 to 1954. Bierut is believed to have worked as an NKVD informant or agent prior to 1945, although his relationship with the Soviet agency has been a subject of debate among historians. As communist leader, he implemented aspects of the Stalinist system in Poland. Together with Władysław Gomułka, his main rival, Bierut is chiefly responsible for the historic changes that Poland underwent in the aftermath of World War II. Unlike any of his communist successors, Bierut led Poland until his death.
Born in Congress Poland on the outskirts of Lublin, Bierut joined the Polish Socialist Party in 1912. Later, he became a member of the Communist Party of Poland and spent some years in the Soviet Union. He was sentenced to a prison term in 1935 for conducting illegal labour activity in Poland by the anti-communist Sanation government and was later released in 1938. During World War II, Bierut was an activist of the newly founded Polish Workers' Party (PPR) and subsequently the chairman of the State National Council (KRN), established by the PPR. Trusted by Joseph Stalin, Bierut participated in the Potsdam Conference, where he successfully lobbied for the establishment of Poland's western border at the Oder–Neisse line.
After the 1947 Polish legislative election, marked by electoral fraud, Bierut was made the first post-war President of Poland. In 1952, the new Constitution of the Polish People's Republic (until then known as the Republic of Poland) abolished the position of president and a Marxist–Leninist government was officially imposed. Bierut supported the radical Stalinist policies as well as the systematic introduction of socialist realism in Poland. His regime was marked by a silent terror – he presided over the hunting down of armed opposition members and their eventual murder at the hands of the Ministry of Public Security (UB), including some former members of the Home Army. Under Bierut's supervision, the UB evolved into a notorious secret police, which was responsible for the execution of six thousand people between 1944 and 1956, according to the Hoover Institution.
As Poland's de facto leader, he resided in the Belweder Palace and headed the Polish United Workers' Party from the party headquarters at New World Street in central Warsaw, known as Dom Partii. He was also the chief proponent for the reconstruction of Warsaw (rebuilding of the historic district) and the erection of the Palace of Culture and Science. Bierut died of a heart attack on 12 March 1956 in Moscow, after attending the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. His death was sudden, and many theories arose questioning the circumstances in which he died. His body was brought back to Poland and buried with honours in a monumental tomb at the Powązki Military Cemetery.
Career
Youth and early career
Bierut was born in Rury, Congress Poland (then part of the Russian Empire), now a part of Lublin, to Wojciech and Marianna Salomea (Wolska) Bierut, peasants from the Tarnobrzeg area, the youngest of their six children. In 1900, he attended an elementary school in Lublin. In 1905, he was removed from the school for instigating anti-Russian protests. From the age of fourteen, he was employed in various trades, but obtained further education through self-study. Influenced by the leftist intellectual Jan Hempel, who in 1910 arrived in Lublin, before World War I, Bierut joined the Polish Socialist Party – Left (PPS – Lewica).
From 1915, Bierut was active in the cooperative movement. In 1916, he became trade manager of the Lublin Food Cooperative, and from 1918 was its top leader, declaring the cooperative's "class-socialist" character. During World War I, he stayed at times at Hempel's apartment in Warsaw and took trade and cooperative courses at the Warsaw School of Economics.
Already trusted by the Soviets and knowing the Russian language well, from October 1925 to June 1926, Bierut was in the Moscow area, sent there for training at the secret school of the Communist International.
Bierut left Warsaw for Lublin, from where he proceeded to Kovel. Eastern Poland was soon occupied by the Red Army and Bierut was about to spend a part of World War II in the Soviet Union. From early October, he was employed by the Soviets in political capacities, including vice-chairmanship of a regional election commission before the Elections to the People's Assemblies of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia. The two assemblies, once established, voted for the incorporation of the previously Polish territories into the respective Soviet republics.
Bierut spent the rest of 1939, 1940 and the first part of 1941 in the Soviet Union, in Kiev and Moscow, working, making efforts to sanitise his record as a communist and searching for Fornalska, whom he met in Moscow in July 1940 and again in May 1941 in Białystok, where she had moved with Aleksandra. The mother and daughter were evacuated to Yershov in the Soviet Union after the June 1941 outbreak of the Soviet-German war, but Bierut ended up in Minsk. From November 1941, he was employed there by the German occupation authorities as a manager in the trade and food distribution department of the city government. In the summer of 1943, Bierut arrived in Nazi-occupied Poland, likely dispatched there as a trusted Soviet operative. He came to join the leadership of the Polish Workers' Party (PPR), a new communist party founded in January 1942. He may have been recommended for the job by Fornalska; parachuted into the General Government in the spring of 1942, she was in charge of the PPR's radio communications with Moscow.
While there are many accounts and stories relating to Bierut during the 1939–1943 period, not much is known with certainty about his activities and the accounts are often speculative or amount to hearsay.
In a major blow to the re-emergent Polish communist party, Finder and Fornalska were arrested by the Gestapo on 14 November 1943. They were executed in July 1944. They were the only people with the knowledge of radio codes needed to communicate with Moscow and such communications were indeed interrupted for several months. On 23 November 1943, the PPR chose Gomułka as its general secretary.
In May 1944, the KRN delegation flew into Moscow. They were officially received at the Kremlin by Joseph Stalin; supremacy of the KRN was recognised by the Union of Polish Patriots, which operated in the Soviet Union under communist leadership.
After the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising, Bierut arrived in Moscow. On 6–7 August 1944, together with Wanda Wasilewska and Michał Rola-Żymierski, he conducted negotiations with Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk of the Polish government-in-exile. Mikołajczyk refused their offer of the job of prime minister in a coalition government, which otherwise would be dominated by the communists. Bierut's daughter, Krystyna, participated in the uprising as a soldier of Armia Ludowa and was gravely wounded.
In February 1945, the Yalta Conference took place in Crimea. At that time, Bierut, together with the PPR leadership and government departments, moved to the capital city of Warsaw. The city was in ruins and its rebuilding and expansion became a major concern and preoccupation for Bierut during the years that followed. Poland's newly acquired "Recovered Territories" had thus reached their maximum attainable size.
On 22 September 1946, the KRN passed the electoral rules and in November set the date; the delayed legislative elections were held on 19 January 1947. The PPR-led coalition, running as the Democratic Bloc, was opposed by Mikołajczyk's PSL. The long-standing trope of the "Judeo-Bolshevik", or Żydokomuna, was used by the far-right in anti-communist propaganda to cast Polish communism as a plot to control Poland by Russian Jews. While Stalin and Beria discouraged and ridiculed Bierut's efforts, in some cases, his exertions brought positive results.
Bierut was a gallant man, well-liked by women. His wife, Janina, did not live with him and was not known to many of his associates. She occasionally visited him in his offices and seemed intimidated by the surroundings and her husband's position. On the other hand, his son and two daughters had seen Bierut frequently; they spent holidays and vacations with him, and he appeared to genuinely enjoy their company. Bierut's actual female partner, after Fornalska's arrest, was Wanda Górska. She worked as his secretary and in other capacities, controlled access to him and visitors often thought of her as Bierut's wife. Informal political reforms, slow to take hold after Stalin's death, eventually materialised, and in December 1954, Gomułka was released. Bierut still had far more power in Poland than any of his successors as First Secretary of the PZPR. He ruled jointly with his two closest associates, Berman and Hilary Minc. Security issues he also consulted with Stanisław Radkiewicz, head of the Ministry of Public Security.
As the PZPR leadership felt ready to sanction its rule in a fundamental legal document, a new constitution was being worked on. On 26 May 1951, the Sejm passed a statute concerning the preparation and passing of the constitution. The Constitutional Committee, led by Bierut, commenced its deliberations on 19 September. In the fall of 1951, a Russian translation of the draft constitution was examined by Stalin, who inserted dozens of corrections, subsequently implemented in the Polish text by Bierut. The officially proclaimed national public discussion resulted in hundreds of other proposed changes. After all the delays and the necessary extension of the term of the Sejm, the Constitution of the Polish People's Republic was officially proclaimed on 22 July 1952.
The regime's relations with the Catholic Church kept deteriorating. The authorities imprisoned Bishop Czesław Kaczmarek and interned Poland's primate, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński.
On 3 March, during a conference of PZPR activists in Warsaw, Stefan Staszewski and others severely criticised the contemporary party leadership, including the absent Bierut.
Bierut, however, would not die until sixteen days after that speech and four members of the delegation of Polish students who studied in Moscow, who met him on 25 February 1956, told Eisler that the first secretary showed signs of physical distress already at that time.
During Gomułka's rule as first secretary (1956–70), the memory of Bierut was marginalised. After 1970, First Secretary Edward Gierek brought Bierut back into public consciousness. Some books about him were published and in July 1979, on the 35th anniversary of communist Poland, Bierut's monument was erected in Lublin.