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.Jerzy Eisler, Siedmiu wspaniałych. Poczet pierwszych sekretarzy KC PZPR [The Magnificent Seven: first secretaries of the PZPR], pp. 32–35. Wydawnictwo Czerwone i Czarne, Warszawa 2014, . 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 was employed in various trades from the age of fourteen, but obtained further education through self-study. He 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. During his tenure, Bierut rebuilt his country after the World War II, undertook major public works (including roads, monuments, and infrastructure), maintained Poland's foreign relations with other Eastern Bloc countries, and promoted education, the arts, free healthcare, Socialist Realism, the cooperative movement, as well as literacy and anti-clerical campaigns. Szwagrzyk, Krzysztof. «Prawnicy czasu bezprawia: sędziowie i prokuratorzy wojskowi w Polsce,1944–1956». Societas Vistulana. ISBN 9788388385650."Jakub Berman's Papers Received at the Hoover Institution Archives", Stanford University Hoover Institution, 11 August 2008
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).Jerzy Eisler, Siedmiu wspaniałych. Poczet pierwszych sekretarzy KC PZPR [The Magnificent Seven: first secretaries of the PZPR], pp. 38–41.
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. In Warsaw, he established contacts with Maria Koszutska and in December 1918 some form of association with the newly created Communist Workers' Party of Poland (KPRP), from which, according to his later testimony, he withdrew in fall 1919. Bierut kept assuming ever higher offices in the cooperative movement. In 1919, he and Hempel went to Prague, where they represented the Polish cooperatives at the congress of their Czechoslovak counterparts. Bierut's increasingly radical views, however, eventually hindered his cooperative career and caused his departure from the leadership of the movement, beginning in 1921. From 1921, he officially functioned as a member of the KPRP.
In July 1921, Bierut married Janina Górzyńska, a preschool teacher who had helped him a great deal when his illegal activities forced him to hide from the police. They were married by a priest at the Lublin Cathedral, even though the priest, according to Janina, excused them from the confession requirement. In February 1923, their daughter Krystyna was born, followed by their son Jan in January 1925.
Communist Party activism until 1939
In 1922–1925, Bierut was a member of the Cooperative Department of the KPRP Central Committee. He worked as an accountant and was active in Warsaw at the Polish Association of Freethinkers. In August 1923, he was sent for party work in the Dąbrowa Basin, to manage the Workers' Food Cooperative. He lived in Sosnowiec, where he brought his wife and daughter and where he experienced the first of his many arrests. Detained repeatedly in various parts of the country, in October 1924, he moved to Warsaw. He had become a full-time conspiratorial party activist and, in 1925, was a member of the Temporary Secretariat of the Central Committee and then the head of the Cooperative Department there.Jerzy Eisler, Siedmiu wspaniałych. Poczet pierwszych sekretarzy KC PZPR [The Magnificent Seven: first secretaries of the PZPR], pp. 41–48.
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.
Arrested in Warsaw in January 1927, he was released on 30 April, based on personal assurances issued on his behalf by Stanisław Szwalbe and Zygmunt Zaremba. During the Fourth Congress of the Communist Party of Poland (KPP, the new name of the KPRP), which took place from 22 May to 9 August 1927, Bierut became a member of the Temporary Secretariat of the Central Committee again. In November, the party sent him to the International Lenin School in Moscow. He received positive evaluations there, except for not being entirely free of ideological right-wing errors, characteristic, in the school's opinion, of the Polish communist party.
In 1930–1931, Bierut was sent by the Comintern to Austria, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. Many details of his activities are not reliably known, but from 1 October 1930, he was an instructor at the executive committee of the Comintern. He later claimed having lived in Moscow in 1927–32, except for a nine-month period in 1931, and having been enrolled at the Lenin School until 1930. Jerzy Eisler wrote: "[...] in light of the Soviet archival materials, in 1927–32 Bierut was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks), with his party seniority counted from 1921, the moment he formally joined the Polish communist party." In Moscow he met Małgorzata Fornalska, a KPP activist. They became romantically involved and had a daughter, named Aleksandra, born in June 1932. Soon afterwards, Bierut left for Poland, leaving in Moscow for the time being also his legal family, whom he had brought there.
For several months, Bierut was the district secretary of the KPP organisation in Łódź. After the regional organisation was demolished by arrests in 1933, he became secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish section of the International Red Aid. On 18 December 1933, Bierut was arrested and in 1935 sentenced to seven years in prison. In 1936, while imprisoned, he was excluded in absentia from the KPP for "unworthy of a communist behaviour during the investigation and the court trial". The decision was invalidated and reversed by the Comintern on 7 September 1940 (even though the KPP by that time no longer existed). Bierut was found to have been a member of the moderate "majority" faction of the KPP, and the factional infighting in which he participated was determined not to amount to acting against the party.
He was released from prison on 20 December 1938, based on an earlier amnesty. He lived with his wife and children and worked in Warsaw cooperatives until the outbreak of war. The "Sanation" prison may have saved his life: while he was incarcerated, the KPP was disbanded by the Comintern and most of its leaders murdered in Stalin's purges.
In the Soviet Union On 1 September 1939, Nazi Germany attacked Poland. On 6 September, the Polish military command issued a radio appeal for all able-bodied men to head east;Compare:
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.Jerzy Eisler, Siedmiu wspaniałych. Poczet pierwszych sekretarzy KC PZPR [The Magnificent Seven: first secretaries of the PZPR], pp. 48–56.
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. Bierut became a member of the party Secretariat on 23 November 1943.
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 occupied Poland from 1943