Stanisław Radkiewicz
Stanisław Radkiewicz 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. As head of the Polish communist secret police 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 some 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.
Early life
Radkiewicz was born in the village of Rozmierki in the powiat of Kosów Poleski in the Polesie Voivodeship. 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 deported by the retreating Tsarist army to Buzuluk, Orenburg Oblast, where he worked on local farms. During 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. 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 of its leaders were executed as part of the Great Purge. Radkiewicz, however, was spared as he enjoyed Stalin's confidence and was in fact put in charge by Stalin of liquidating KPP's party cells.
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.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 "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, although it continued to be known by its UB acronym partly because of the fact that 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 Communist Party, the Polish People's Party
- tracking down, arresting and executing members of the anti-communist underground organisations, such as Freedom and Independence, National Armed Forces or other "Cursed soldiers" and non-violent civilian organisations.
- attacking and suppressing the activity of the Catholic Church in Poland, as well as other, non-Catholic, religious organisations.
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 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 least 140 members of the PSL were murdered by the UB, among them notable figures such as Narcyz Wiatr and Władysław Kojder. The leader of the PSL, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, in the face of widespread election fraud and growing state terror against his party, fled Poland in April 1946.Action against the Catholic Church in Poland
As early as September 1945, Radkiewicz ordered the organisation of the 5th Department of UB whose task was to "counter organisations and groups active against the interests of the Party". Within the 5th Department, Section V was charged with investigating and building actions against the Catholic Church. Within the section, Sub-Section I was charged with investigating those active in the Catholic Church while Sub-Section II's focus was to be on the Catholic press and secular Catholic organisations.The head of the 5th Department was Julia Brystiger who, together with Radkiewicz, organized the secret police's operations aimed at the Catholic Church in Poland. In October 1947, Brystiger - who was an interrogator of political prisoners widely known for her sadism and Gestapo-like methods of torture during questioning - presented a seminar entitled On the Clergy's Offensive Against Our Task at a conference for secret police chiefs and Radkiewicz was the main discussant. In her presentation, Brystiger stated that the "final time of merciless fight with the Church" was coming soon and that, in order to win it, the secret services of the Communist Party would need to employ "any means necessary". Radkiewicz, in his follow up remarks, noted that, "The clergy is not like the PSL. With them it won't be as easy as it was with the PSL". As a result, in the autumn of 1950 Radkiewicz split Section V of the 5th Department into its own department whose purpose was exclusively the "fight against the clergy".
The actions against the Catholic Church took several forms, including harassment of priests and nuns, attempts to alienate the Polish church from the Vatican via the use of moles and agent provocateurs, seizure and expropriation of church property, and staging of incidents which were meant to embarrass the Catholic hierarchy in the eyes of the public and Western opinion. In particularly "difficult" cases of politically active priests and Catholics who "didn't get the message", Radkiewicz ordered their elimination from public life, or, if all else failed, murder.