Władysław Gomułka

Władysław Gomułka (born February 6, 1905, Białobrzegi, near Krosno, Poland, Austria-Hungary—died September 1, 1982, Warsaw, Poland) was the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, the ruling communist party of Poland, from 1956 to 1970.

Before Gomułka’s birth his parents had emigrated to the United States but had returned disillusioned. His father, Jan, was a socialist and worked in the oil fields. Gomułka completed primary school in 1917 and afterward was trained as a locksmith. At the age of 16 he joined the youth socialist movement. In 1926 he entered the clandestine Communist Party of Poland and in the same year was first arrested for revolutionary activity.

At that time Gomułka became a professional trade union organizer, and in 1930 he was elected a national secretary of the Chemical Workers’ Union. Thereafter he organized workers’ strikes throughout the country. During the textile strike at Łódź in 1932, he was seriously wounded in the leg by the police and was left with a permanent limp. He was arrested and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment but was released for reasons of health in 1934. In 1934–35 Gomułka studied at the International Lenin School in Moscow. After his return to Poland he continued revolutionary activity in Silesia, and in 1936 he was again arrested and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. When the Communist Party of Poland was dissolved on Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s orders in 1938 and most of its leaders exterminated in the Soviet Union, Gomułka stayed in prison in Poland. He was released when Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939. After participating in the defense of Warsaw, he moved to the Soviet-occupied eastern part of the country, where he worked as a minor official in a paper mill in Lwów.

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With the outbreak of war between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1941, Gomułka resumed his political activities. At first he returned to his native region of Krosno and organized the communist underground there. In July 1942 he moved to Warsaw, where he became district secretary and a member of the Central Committee of the newly founded Polish Workers’ Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza; PPR). There he organized daring attacks by the underground on the Nazi German occupiers. In November 1943, after the arrest of his predecessor, Gomułka became secretary-general of the PPR. He is credited with writing the party’s ideological manifesto and helping to establish the National Home Council (Krajowa Rada Narodowa; KRN) in cooperation with other leftist groups. When Soviet troops entered Poland in July 1944, Gomułka moved to Lublin, where the communist-dominated provisional government had been set up. In January 1945 he was appointed deputy premier, and in June he also assumed the portfolio of the Recovered Territories, with responsibility for the administration of all Polish lands that had been held by Germany. In December 1945, at the First Congress of the PPR in Warsaw, Gomułka was elected a member of the Politburo and secretary-general of the Central Committee.

Gomułka was ruthless in eliminating all opposition to communist rule. He personally led the struggle to crush the Polish Peasant Party (PSL), and he was a strong advocate of the merger, on communist terms, of the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and the PPR. At the same time, however, he came out against forcible collectivization of agriculture and spoke favorably of the socialist tradition. In opposing the formation of the Cominform in September 1947, he was even critical of the Soviet line. That led to his political eclipse. On Stalin’s orders, Gomułka was accused of “nationalist deviation,” and in September 1948 he was replaced as secretary-general of the PPR by Bolesław Bierut. After the communist and socialist parties merged into the Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza; PZPR) in December 1948, Gomułka was also dropped from the Politburo. In January 1949 he was relieved of his government posts, and in November of the same year he was stripped of his membership in the communist party. Finally, he was arrested in July 1951. Throughout his persecution—even when imprisoned, his life clearly in peril—Gomułka acted in a dignified and courageous manner and refused to admit guilt.

Toward the end of 1954, more than a year after Stalin’s death, Gomułka was released, and he was politically rehabilitated in 1956, after Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had launched the de-Stalinization campaign in February and Bierut had died in March. In April the new party secretary, Edward Ochab, reiterated the charges of “nationalist deviation” against Gomułka but admitted he should not have been arrested. After the Poznań workers rioted against the communist government in June, Gomułka’s political fortunes started to rise once again. His persecution by Stalin had turned Gomułka into a popular figure among the Poles, and they now demanded that he be restored to power. In the tense atmosphere prevailing in the country, the communist leaders acceded to the popular wishes. In August 1956 Gomułka was readmitted to the party and in October was reelected to the Politburo and to the position of first secretary of the Central Committee. Soon he was also elected a member of Poland’s collective presidency, the Council of State. His return to power was a moment of great personal triumph for Gomułka. Hoping that he would undertake substantial reforms, the people gave him their almost universal support.

The reforms adopted by Gomułka were halfhearted. The most oppressive Stalinist features were eliminated: the rule of terror was curbed, the persecution of the Roman Catholic Church was ended, and the collectivization of agriculture was abandoned. Several objectionable features of the older system were, however, preserved: intellectual freedom remained restricted, and no major economic reform was carried out. His retrogressive course led to disillusionment among the Poles, but in the late 1950s many people still believed his policies resulted from pressure from Moscow.

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In 1961, after Khrushchev launched his second de-Stalinization campaign, Gomułka failed to exploit that opportunity to undertake further reforms, and the situation in Poland remained stagnant. From then on, Gomułka’s popular support declined rapidly. Seemingly angered by the sympathy expressed by elements of the Polish population and army for the success of Israel against Soviet-supported Arab countries in the Six-Day War, Gomulka referred to a “fifth column” of Polish Jews in a speech on June 19, 1967. Although that phrase was removed from the written version of the speech, some historians point to the remarks as having opened the door to increasingly overt expressions of anti-Zionism and antisemitism by Poles within and outside the ruling party. By the early 1970s, growing intimidation and harassment had resulted in the exodus from Poland of at least 13,000 Jews. Meanwhile, discontent among Poles steadily gathered strength until it culminated in March 1968 in the open defiance of the Gomułka regime by intellectuals and students, with riots in Warsaw and several other Polish cities.

Gomułka survived the crisis and at the Fifth Party Congress in November 1968 was reelected first secretary, but his political influence was clearly on the wane. He was discredited among a large segment of the people and was challenged by powerful rivals within the party leadership. Gomułka tried to stave off defeat by belatedly adopting some new policies. In 1969 he changed Poland’s policy vis-à-vis West Germany, leading to the signing early in December 1970 of a Polish–West German treaty normalizing relations between the two countries and sanctioning the Polish western boundary. At the same time, he launched substantial economic reforms, but by then the Polish economy was severely run down. The announcement of increased food prices on the eve of the Christmas holidays led to workers’ riots in the cities of Gdańsk, Gdynia, and Szczecin. This ferment in the country resulted in a change in the top party leadership, and on December 20, 1970, Gomułka was ousted as first secretary.

Although he officially continued to be a member of the Council of State until 1971 and of the Sejm (national legislature) until 1972, Gomułka had entered a retirement from public life. It was not until 1980 that the party again officially recognized Gomułka, publishing a tribute to him on his 75th birthday.