Stanisław Radkiewicz

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R.I.P
Stanisław

Stanisław Radkiewicz (Polish pronunciation: [staˈɲiswaf ratˈkʲevit͡ʂ]; 19 January 1903 – 13 December 1987) was a Polish communist activist with Soviet citizenship, a member of the pre-war Communist Party of Poland and of the post-war Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR). As head of the Ministry of Public Security of Poland (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa or UB) between 1944 and 1954, he was one of the chief organisers of Stalinist terror in Poland. He also served as a political commissar and was made a divisional general in Communist Poland. Unlike other individuals responsible for the Stalinist terror in the 1940s and 1950s, Radkiewicz was never held responsible for his crimes, although in 1956, after the Poznań protests and his official "self-critique", he was removed from his post as Minister of Public Security and made Minister of State Agricultural Farms (PGRs).

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Stanisław

Early life Radkiewicz was born in the village of Rozmierki in the Slonimsky Uyezd of the Grodno Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Belarus). He was the son of farmer Franciszek and Paulina née Lenczewska. He finished third grade. In 1915, during World War I, together with his family he was evacuated by the retreating Imperial Russian Army to Buzuluk in the Samara Governorate, where he worked on local farms. After the Bolshevik Revolution, he joined the Komsomol. After the Polish-Soviet War, in 1922, his family moved back to their home village, but Stanisław soon moved to the Soviet Union where he worked in the Polish Bureau of the Communist Party of Byelorussia. In 1925, he was sent clandestinely by Moscow back into Poland to take charge of the youth section of the illegal Polish Communist Party (KPP). Three years later, he was arrested for activity against the sovereignty and independence of the Polish Republic and sentenced to four years in prison. After being released, he served as a functionary of the KPP. He was arrested again in 1937 and served half a year in prison. In 1938, on the orders of Joseph Stalin, the KPP was disbanded and many…Citește mai mult

Stanisław Radkiewicz a adăugat o fotografie

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R.I.P
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World War II During World War II, he volunteered for the Red Army, but was later transferred and made a political commissar of the Polish 1st Tadeusz Kościuszko Infantry Division and later a division general. He was also a delegate to the first Polish Sejm under Communist rule.

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Head of secret police Radkiewicz was made head of the UB secret police in 1944, shortly after the formation of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) "Lublin Committee" explicitly with Stalin's approval. On 31 December 1944, the PKWN was transformed into the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland and the UB was renamed Ministry of Public Security of Poland (MBP), although it continued to be known by its UB acronym partly because local offices continued under the old name. In the period after 1945, the secret police grew rapidly under Radkiewicz's direction, with twelve thousand agents in April 1945 and twenty-four thousand in December 1945. At its height, in 1953, the organisation had thirty-three thousand agents. Radkiewicz's UB focused its activities on several main areas: agitation and armed terror, including secret murders, directed at the only legal political opposition to the Communists, the Polish People's Party (also known as "Polish Peasant Party", PSL) (which was forced to merge into the Communist controlled satellite United People's Party (ZSL) in 1949) tracking down, arresting and executing members of the anti-communist underground organisations, such as Freedom and Independence (WiN), National Armed Forces (NSZ) or other "Cursed soldiers" and non-violent civilian organisations.…Citește mai mult

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Action against the Polish People's Party In December 1945, Radkiewicz directed a general action against the only legal opposition party in Poland at the time, the PSL. The purpose of the action was to ensure a Communist victory in the upcoming elections and in the Polish people's referendum of 1946. On Radkiewicz's orders, PSL candidates in the elections were harassed and removed from electoral lists, ballots sent to areas of high PSL support were intercepted and never delivered so that voting never took place, PSL town hall meetings were attacked by units of Milicja Obywatelska (MO) and UB and, finally, particularly active members of the party were murdered. Radkiewicz issued an order to his agents in which he instructed them to prepare an action of "liquidating" members of the PSL which, according to him, opposed Communist rule in Poland and which supposedly supported the anti-Communist underground. The order also stated that these liquidations were to be made to look as the work of the anti-Communist underground, combined with a press campaign directed against "anti-government terrorist bandits", which would place the blame for the murders on various anti-Communist organisations. As a result, between the spring of 1945 and January 1947, at…Citește mai mult

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Party membership In December 1954, Radkiewicz was removed from the position of Minister of Security, and in July 1955 he stepped down from the Political Bureau of the PZPR. After workers' unrest in Poznan in 1956 and the Polish October reforms, several other members of the security services responsible for the Stalinist terror in Poland were put on trial (among others Roman Romkowski, Józef Różański and Anatol Fejgin), but Radkiewicz went unpunished. After he made a public critique of his actions, he was made the Minister of State Farms. In May 1957, he was removed from the Central Committee of the PZPR and, for three years, from the Party itself. From 1960 until 1968, he served as the general director of the Bureau of State Reserves and retired in 1968. He died on 13 December 1987, aged 84, in Warsaw. Over the years, he had been awarded the Order of the Cross of Grunwald and the Order of the Banner of Labour (Order Sztandaru Pracy).

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Awards and decorations Order of the Banner of Labour, 1st Class Commander's Cross with Star of Order of Polonia Restituta Order of the Cross of Grunwald, 2nd Class Medal "For participation in the fights in defense of the people's power"

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Medal for Warsaw 1939–1945 Order of Merits for the People with Golden Star (Yugoslavia) Order of the Star of the Romanian People's Republic (Romania)