Mieczysław Broński

Last updated • 4 min readFrom Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

Mieczysław Broński (also known as Warszawski-Broński or Broński-Warszawski, and M. J. Braun; [1] Russian : Мечислав Генрихович Бронский (Варшавский); Mechislav Genrikhovich Bronsky; 1882 – 1 September 1938) was a Russian-Polish communist, Soviet diplomat, economist and academic, and a victim of the Great Purge.

Contents

Early career

The Bronski family were industrialists, who owned a cotton factory in Łódź. After leaving school in 1900, he emigrated to Munich to study at the Technical University of Munich, and later at the Munich University, and joined the Polish Progressive movement. In 1902, he joined the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), led by Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches. On the outbreak of the 1905 revolution, in February, he moved to Warsaw, to work first as a propagandist for the SDPKiL, then as a member of the Warsaw city party committee. In 1906, he edited the party newspaper Czerwony Sztandar ("Red Flag"). He was arrested in Lublin in autumn 1906, and held in prison until the end of 1907. After his release, he emigrated to Switzerland, and joined the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland. [2] When the SDKPiL split in 1911, he joined the 'rozlamovist' faction, led by Jacob Hanecki and Karl Radek. [3]

Bolshevik career

Bronski was a founder of the Zimmerwald anti-war movement, and a Polish delegate to the second Zimmerwald conference in Kienthal in April 1916. By then, he had become part of the Zimmerwald left, and an ally of the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin. [4] By 1916, they were near neighbours in Zurich: it was Bronski who brought Lenin news in 1917 that the February Revolution had broken out in Russia. [5] In June 1917, he reached Petrograd, where he joined the Bolsheviks, worked in the party's Agitprop department, and edited the Polish-language newspaper Trybuna. [2] After the Bolshevik Revolution, in November 1917, he worked for the state bank, and April supervised the first conference for prisoners of war (such as Bela Kun and Josip Broz Tito) who had converted to Bolshevism. [4] From March 1918 until November 1918 he was the acting People's Commissar of Trade and Industry and until spring 1919, he was Deputy People's Commissar for Trade and Industry. In 1919, he was sent to Germany as an agent of Comintern, and addressed the founding congress the Young Communist International in a beer hall in Berlin in November 1919, and took part in a secret communist conference in Frankfurt and was a member of the Western Europe Secretariat. [1] However he was very critical of Paul Levi's leadership of the Communist Party of Germany during the Kapp Putsch and was then recalled to Moscow. [1]

In 1920–24, he was the Soviet envoy in Austria, [2] but was in Germany during the attempted revolution known as the March Action, but left soon afterwards. [4] In 1924, he returned to Russia and held a senior post in the People's Commissariat for Finance. In 1927–37, he was Professor of Political Economy at Moscow University. From 1928 he was a full member of the Communist Academy and was also a senior researcher at the Institute of Economy at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

Arrest and death

Bronski was arrested on September 9, 1937, and accused of being part of a terrorist plot, during a mass round-up of Polish nationals living in the Soviet Union. The former French communist, Boris Souvarine, thought it inevitable that he would be a victim of the purges because "a man like Bronski – cultured, polite, irreproachable – could not help but attract the murderous animadversion of the Despot." [6] He was shot and buried at Kommunarka, near Moscow, on 1 September 1938. He was formally rehabilitated on July 21, 1956. [7]

Family

Bronski had a daughter, Wanda Brońska-Pampuch  [ de ] (1911–1972), from his first marriage. Brought up in Switzerland and Germany, she joined her father in the Soviet Union in 1931. She was arrested in 1938 and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag, in Kolyma. She was released in 1946, moved to Germany in 1952, and became known as a writer. [8]

In Vienna, in 1920, he married Susanne Leonhard  [ de ], a German communist and the mother of Wolfgang Leonhard, later renowned as a historian and critic of communism. She was arrested in 1936, and survived twelve years in the Gulag, in Vorkuta. With the help of her son, she was released in 1948, moving to East Berlin. A few month later, in the spring of 1949, mother and son decided to leave Stalinist East Germany for good, relocating to West Germany. Upon arrival, the U.S. Army's Counter Intelligence Corps interned her, but refusing to work as a spy, she was released in 1950. Susanne Leonhard died in Stuttgart in 1984.

Works

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Communist International</span> Political organization (1919–1943)

The Communist International (Comintern), also known as the Third International, was a political international which existed from 1919 to 1943 and advocated world communism. It was led and controlled by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and maintained strict conditions of affiliation in order to exclude social democratic parties and more moderate or non-Marxist socialists. The international was intended as a replacement for the Second International, which had dissolved in 1916 during World War I.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eugen Varga</span> Hungarian economist

Eugen Samuilovich "Jenő" Varga was a Soviet economist of Hungarian origin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vasil Kolarov</span> Bulgarian communist politician (1877–1950)

Vasil Petrov Kolarov was a Bulgarian communist political leader and leading functionary in the Communist International (Comintern).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Levi</span> German politician (1883–1930)

Paul Levi was a German communist and social democratic political leader. He was the head of the Communist Party of Germany following the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919. After being expelled for publicly criticising Communist Party tactics during the March Action, he formed the Communist Working Organisation which in 1922 merged with the Independent Social Democratic Party. This party, in turn, merged with the Social Democratic Party a few months later and Levi became one of the leaders of its left wing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pēteris Stučka</span> Latvian and Soviet politician

Pēteris Stučka, sometimes spelt Pyotr Stuchka;, was a Latvian jurist and communist politician, leader of the pro-Bolshevik puppet government in Latvia during the 1918–1920 Latvian War of Independence, and later a statesman in the Soviet Union.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adolf Warski</span> Polish politician (1868–1937)

Adolf Warski, was a Polish communist leader, journalist and theoretician of the communist movement in Poland. During Stalin's Great Purge he was arrested and executed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maksymilian Horwitz</span> Polish communist leader and theoretician

Maksymilian Horwitz was a leader and theoretician of the Polish socialist and communist movement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julian Leszczyński</span> Polish political activist (1889–1939)

Julian Leszczyński, also known by pseudonym Leński, was a Polish communist political activist, publicist, and leader of the Stalinist faction in the Communist Party of Poland (KPP).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jules Humbert-Droz</span>

Jules-Frédéric Humbert-Droz was a Swiss pastor, journalist, socialist and communist. A founding member of the Communist Party of Switzerland, he held high Comintern office through the 1920s and also acted as Comintern emissary to several west European countries. He was involved in the Right Opposition in 1928. He rejoined the Swiss Socialist Party in the 1940s and served as its secretary from 1946 to 1965.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Osip Piatnitsky</span> Russian revolutionary and politician (1882–1938)

Osip Aaronovitch Piatnitsky was a Russian revolutionary and Soviet politician. Piatnitsky is best remembered as head of the International Department of the Communist International during the 1920s and early 1930s, a position which made him one of the leading public faces of the international communist movement.

Heinrich Brandler was a German communist, trade unionist, politician, revolutionary activist, and political writer. Brandler is best remembered as the head of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) during the party's ill-fated "March Action" of 1921 and aborted uprising of 1923, for which he was held responsible by the Communist International. Expelled from the Communist Party in December 1928, Brandler went on to become co-founder of the Communist Party of Germany Opposition, the first national section of the so-called International Right Opposition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">László Rudas</span> Hungarian philosopher, academic, and politician (1885–1950)

László Rudas was a Hungarian communist newspaper editor, philosopher, professor and politician who become director of the Central Party School of the Communist Party of Hungary.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elena Stasova</span> Soviet politician (1873–1966)

Elena Dmitriyevna Stasova was a Russian Soviet revolutionary, Old Bolshevik and an early leader of the organisation that would go on to become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2nd World Congress of the Communist International</span>

The 2nd World Congress of the Communist International was a gathering of approximately 220 voting and non-voting representatives of communist and revolutionary socialist political parties from around the world, held in Petrograd and Moscow from July 19 to August 7, 1920. The 2nd Congress is best remembered for formulating and implementing the 21 Conditions for membership in the Communist International.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karl Radek</span> Polish revolutionary (1885–1939)

Karl Berngardovich Radek was a revolutionary and writer active in the Polish and German social democratic movements before World War I and a Communist International leader in the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jan Antonovich Berzin</span> Latvian diplomat

Jan Antonovich Berzin was a Latvian village teacher, later Bolshevik revolutionary, journalist and Soviet diplomat. He was Ambassador of the Soviet Union to Austria between 1925 and 1927. He was executed during the Great Purge and posthumously rehabilitated in 1956.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sergey Ivanovich Gusev</span> Russian revolutionary and politician

Sergei Ivanovich Gusev was a Russian revolutionary, a founding member of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), and Soviet politician.

Wacław Bogucki was a Polish revolutionary, Soviet politician and high-ranking official of Communist International who served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Byelorussia from 1922 to 1924.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Max Levien</span> German politician and journalist

Max Levien was a leading German-Russian communist politician. He was one of the co-founders of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). As the first party chairman of the KPD in Bavaria, he was in April 1919 one of the protagonists of the Bavarian Soviet Republic that emerged in the wake of the German November Revolution of 1918.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henryk Domski</span> Polish communist politician and activist

Henryk Stein-Domski was a Polish communist politician and activist. He led the Communist Party of Poland in 1925, before being ousted and repressed as a suspected Trotskyist.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Glossary of People: Br". www.marxists.org. Marxist Internet Archive. Retrieved 22 June 2020.
  2. 1 2 3 Shmidt, O.Yu. (1927). Большая советская энцйклопедия Volume 7. Moscow. pp. 631–2.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  3. Nettl, J.P. (1966). Rosa Luxemburg, volume two. Oxford U.P. p. 496.
  4. 1 2 3 Lazitch, Branko, in collaboration with Milorad M. Drachkovitch (1973). Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern. Stanford, C.A.: Hoover Institution Press. p. 40. ISBN   0-8179-1211-8.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  5. Krupskaya, Nadezhda (Lenin's widow) (1970). Memories of Lenin. Panther. p. 286.
  6. Milorad M.Drachkovitch, and Branko Lazitch (eds) (1966). The Comintern - Historical Highlights: Essays, Recollections, Documents. New York: Fredrick A. Praeger. p. 179.{{cite book}}: |first1= has generic name (help)
  7. "Бронский Мечислав Генрихович" . Retrieved 10 October 2019.
  8. "Wanda Bronska-Pampuch". IMDb . Retrieved 10 October 2019.