Edward Ochab (; 16 August 1906 – 1 May 1989) was a Polish communist politician and top leader of Poland between March and October 1956.
As a member of the Communist Party of Poland from 1929, he was repeatedly imprisoned for his activities under the Polish government of the time. In 1939, Ochab participated in the Defense of Warsaw but afterwards moved to the Soviet Union, where he became an early organizer and manager in the Union of Polish Patriots. In 1943, he joined General Berling's Polish Army on the Eastern Front as a political commissar and quickly advanced in its ranks. From 1944 he was a member of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers' Party (PPR) and a deputy in the State National Council. In 1945, he became minister of public administration and held the successive positions of propaganda chief in the PPR (1945–1946), chief of cooperative associations (1947–1948), and chief of the Association of Trade Unions (ZZZ) (1948–1949). From December 1948, he was a deputy member of the (communist) Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) Politburo, and a full member from 1954.
Between 1949 and 1950, General Ochab was deputy minister of defence and led the political branch of the Armed Forces. In Stalinist Poland, he was responsible for enlisting the so-called enemies of the people to forced labour in the mines of southern Poland. These units were called "battalions of labour".http://bazhum.muzhp.pl/media/files/Przeglad_Historyczny/Przeglad_Historyczny-r1994-t85-n1_2/Przeglad_Historyczny-r1994-t85-n1_2-s123-133/Przeglad_Historyczny-r1994-t85-n1_2-s123-133.pdf After Bolesław Bierut's death, Ochab became First Secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party and served in that capacity between 20 March and 21 October 1956.
During Ochab's rule, the process of the post-Stalinist "thaw" was well under way, but the first secretary also played a role in authorizing the violent suppression of the worker revolt in Poznań in June. In October, Ochab stood his ground against the Soviet leadership and is credited with helping to prevent a Soviet military intervention. He relinquished power during the VIII Plenum of the Party Central Committee, complying with the wishes of the majority of the Politburo members to promote Władysław Gomułka. Ochab remained a member of the Politburo until 1968 and also worked as minister of agriculture from 1957 to 1959, and later as the secretary of the Central Committee for agricultural affairs. Ochab was deputy chairman of the Polish Council of State (a collective head of state organ) in 1961–1964. He served as chairman of the Council of State in 1964–1968. In 1965–1968 he also chaired the Front of National Unity.
Edward Ochab resigned all of his party and state offices, and withdrew from politics in 1968, in protest of the antisemitic campaign conducted by factions within the Communist Party with First Secretary Gomułka as its head. In his retirement, he remained a dedicated hardline communist, but also a vocal critic of the policies pursued by the regimes of his successors.
Early life and career Edward Ochab was born in Kraków on 16 August 1906. His father was a clerical official at the central offices of Kraków police. In Kraków, Edward completed elementary and, in 1925, secondary (the Trade Academy) education. In 1926–1927, he attended and graduated from a higher course in cooperative science at the Agricultural Department of the Jagiellonian University. From September 1925, he was employed in a cooperative rural association in Wieliczka. In 1928 became manager in a cooperative enterprise in Radom.
Ochab was drafted and in June 1928 sent to a military school, but was judged there to be of a subversive attitude, apparently a declared communist, permanently employed in worker cooperatives. The school released him in October. Ochab returned to manage his Radom cooperative until February 1930.
Activist in the Communist Party of Poland Ochab became a member of the Communist Party of Poland in the summer of 1929. In the next ten years, he was arrested five times and spent six and a half years as a political prisoner in Sanation prisons, intermittently released for health reasons (suffered from tuberculosis). When not in prison, he worked in the party executive in Radom, Kraków, Katowice, Warsaw, Łódź, Toruń, Gdynia and Włocławek, frequently relocating or in hiding. Ochab was among the organizers of the miner strikes in Zagłębie Krakowskie (1932), in Zagłębie Dąbrowskie (1935) and the textile worker general strike in Łódź (1936).
Ochab married a fellow communist activist, Rachela Silbiger, a nurse from a "poor and simple" Jewish family. They had four daughters, born in the 1930s and 1940s.
On 7 September 1939, the German forces were approaching Warsaw and the guards in the Warsaw prison where Ochab was held fled. Released by fellow inmates, he traveled toward Garwolin, but having found out about Warsaw's defense preparations, returned to the capital to participate. On 11 September, Ochab joined a workers' defense regiment and fought in the poorly armed unit until the city's capitulation.
To continue his party work and to protect his wife, Ochab then decided to move into the territories controlled by the Soviet Union. He had met "thousands of comrades" (although many perished in Stalin's purges), was thoroughly familiar with the situation on the Polish Left and was ready to get engaged in the rebuilding of the Polish revolutionary movement. With others who shared their point of view, the Ochabs on 2 October embarked on a trip to Siedlce, and from there went to Lwów.
In the Soviet Union Ochab lived and worked in Lwów until June 1941. He organised there a small circle of Polish communist sympathisers, but in June approached the Soviet authorities, declaring readiness to return to Nazi-occupied Poland for conspiratorial work. However, Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Ochab volunteered for the Red Army and was assigned to an auxiliary unit. In winter, his health problems reappeared and caused him to return to civilian work in the Polish section of a Soviet foreign language publishing institute. In May 1943, the enterprise was moved to Moscow. Ochab became active in the newly formed Union of Polish Patriots there, leading its administrative-economic department.
As the pro-Soviet and communist controlled Polish armed forces were being formed in the Soviet Union, in June 1943, Ochab joined the 1st Tadeusz Kościuszko Infantry Division and was enlisted as a political officer with the rank of second lieutenant. In October 1943, he fought valiantly in the Battle of Lenino, for which he was decorated with both the Polish and Soviet medals for valor. In the summer of 1944, Lieutenant Colonel Ochab was already a member of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers' Party.
Party and state official 1944–1956 In July 1944 in Lublin, Ochab became an official plenipotentiary of the command of the First Polish Army. In September, he was promoted to the post of the Army's deputy commander for political affairs. He claimed to have participated in the military struggle for Warsaw and in the drive to push across the Vistula at that time. In November, Ochab was discharged from the army and directed to work for the Polish Committee of National Liberation, the nascent communist government, where he became deputy chief of the Public Administration Department. From the beginning of 1945, the PKWN was turned into the Provisional Government and Ochab was an undersecretary in the Ministry of Public Administration, advancing in April to the post of minister. As the plenipotentiary general for the Recovered Territories (previously German lands assumed by Poland), on 25 June 1945, Ochab issued a directive banning and threatening penalties for persecution of Germans still present there or applying repressions like the ones used by the Nazi Germany against Poles. He left the government at the end of June, when it became the Provisional Government of National Unity.
Afterwards, Ochab was a member of the Secretariat and held the position of propaganda chief of the PPR (1945–1946) and of first secretary of the regional PPR branch in Katowice (1946–1948). He returned to his cooperative and worker activities, as chief of worker cooperative associations in 1947–1948, and chief of the Central Council of Trade Unions in 1948–1949. In December 1948, the PPR and the Polish Socialist Party became the single Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR), which was to rule Poland until 1989. In the new party, Ochab became a deputy member of the Politburo (1948–1954).
In one more turn of Ochab's military career, on 1 April 1949, President Bolesław Bierut named him a general and first deputy minister of defense. Minister Michał Rola-Żymierski was replaced in November 1949 by Konstantin Rokossovsky, a Soviet marshal of Polish origin. From January 1950, at the time of increasing Sovietization of the Polish military, Ochab led the political division of the armed forces. In June, Rokossovsky discharged him from active military service and from his assignments at the Ministry of Defense.
In 1950–1952, Ochab chaired the Polish–Soviet Friendship Society. He was secretary of the Central Committee from 1950, responsible for the area of ideology. From 1952, he also led the Central Committee's supervision of the military's political division.
At that time and later in his career, Ochab had a tendency to express his views in radical and uncompromising terms. When Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński was arrested on 25 September 1953, Ochab published an article fiercely critical of the primate in Trybuna Ludu, the party's official newspaper. In regard to the persecution and imprisonment of Władysław Gomułka, Ochab later blamed Stalin and Beria, rather than Bierut or Jakub Berman.
At the PZPR's Second Congress in March 1954, Ochab finally became a full Politburo member. By many in the party, he was considered an "heir apparent" and was ready to take over when First Secretary Bierut died in Moscow in March 1956.
First secretary of the Polish United Workers' Party First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union attended Bierut's funeral and stayed in Warsaw to participate in the deliberations of the PZPR Central Committee's 6th Plenum, charged with electing a new first secretary. Aleksander Zawadzki was the other major candidate, but in the end Edward Ochab was chosen unanimously on 20 March 1956. Ochab was seen as a compromise candidate by the rival Puławy and Natolin factions of the party. Soon, he was perceived as connected with the more liberal Puławy group.
In June 1956, Ochab attended a Comecon gathering of leaders in Moscow. He displayed his confrontational style when responding to accusations of the supposedly inadequate supplies of coal from Poland. But the encounter also made him doubt his long term suitability as a first secretary.
After the PZPR's 6th Plenum and Ochab's election, the processes of de-Stalinization in Poland entered their accelerated phase. The press critically discussed the previously prohibited subjects. The party was split and preoccupied with its internal affairs. The Sejm (national legislature), until then unable to exercise any real influence, used the opportunity and declared a wide amnesty, which included, in the first place, the trespasses of political nature. By 20 May, half of the 70,000 prisoners nationwide found themselves free. Numerous officials deemed responsible for the Stalinist abuses were removed from their positions, including Berman, who resigned as a Politburo member in early May. Segments of Polish society, including intellectuals, youth (especially academic), and even heavy industry workers, were in a state of agitation and reclaiming their inherent and sovereign rights, known in Polish as podmiotowość.