Everything about Boles Aw Bierut totally explained
Bolesław Bierut (real name
Bolesław Biernacki,
April 18,
1892 -
March 12,
1956) was a
Polish Communist leader, a
Stalinist who became
President of Poland after the Soviet occupation of the country in the aftermath of
World War II.
Life
Bierut was born near
Lublin, the son of a village teacher Henryk Rutkowski and his wife Barbara (hence his later adopted name "Bie(r)-rut"). In 1925 he went to
Moscow to be trained at the school of the
Communist International.
Beginning in
1933 he was a secret agent of
Soviet military intelligence, the
GRU. When the
Communist Party of Poland was dissolved by
Joseph Stalin in 1938, he was lucky in that he'd been sentenced to 10 years in a Polish prison for his antistate political activity, and therefore couldn't travel to the
Soviet Union (USSR), and undergo the
Great Purge, which included the execution of most of the leaders of the
Communist Party of Poland. After an amnesty from the Polish government in 1938 he settled down in
Warsaw and worked as a bookkeeper in a cooperative.
After the outbreak of World War II Bierut fled to Eastern Poland (soon occupied by the
Red Army) in order to avoid military service. Bierut would spend most of the war in the USSR, and was recalled to head the new
Polish Workers' Party in 1943. He functioned as head of the Polish provisional quasi-parliament (
State National Council,
Krajowa Rada Narodowa), created by Soviet adherents, from 1944 to 1947.
Bierut was instrumental in the Soviet takeover of Poland and the installation of a Stalinist regime. From 1947 to 1952, he served in the
People's Republic of Poland as President and then (after the abolition of the Presidency) Prime Minister. He was also the first Secretary General of the ruling
Polish United Workers Party from 1948 to 1956.
Bierut oversaw the trials of Polish military leaders such as
General Stanisław Tatar, along with 40 members of the
Wolność i Niezawisłość (Freedom and Independence) organisation, and various church officials. Many more opponents of the new regime, such as "the hero of
Auschwitz",
Witold Pilecki, were sentenced to death in
secret trials. Bierut signed many of Stalinist Poland's death sentences.
A prominent Polish historian and professor,
Paweł Wieczorkiewicz, argued in recent times that it isn't out of question that there could have been two persons claiming to be Bolesław Bierut. One of them, either the real person or his alias, was shot by an unidentified gunman in the French Hotel in
Kraków,
Poland in
April 1945 or in
1947. According to this theory, the assassination was kept under secrecy by the authorities and the dead "Bierut" was replaced by his double within an hour.
Death
Bolesław Bierut died under mysterious circumstances in
Moscow in 1956 during a political visit to the Soviet Union, shortly after attending the
20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during which
Nikita Khrushchev denounced the
personality cult and
dictatorship of Stalin.
Bierut's death, which was speculated to be a
poisoning or a
suicide, symbolically marked the end of the era of
Stalinism in Poland.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Boles Aw Bierut'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://boles__aw_bierut.totallyexplained.com">Bolesław Bierut Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
