Zbigniew Stypułkowski (26 March 1904 – 30 March 1979) was a Polish lawyer and politician, Member of the Council of National Unity. He was sentenced by the Soviets in the infamous Trial of the Sixteen in 1945.
Zbigniew Stypułkowski (26 March 1904 – 30 March 1979) was a Polish lawyer and politician, Member of the Council of National Unity. He was sentenced by the Soviets in the infamous Trial of the Sixteen in 1945.
In 1944 he took part in the Warsaw Uprising. In March 1945, he was arrested by the NKVD and brought to Moscow. After 3 months of interrogations, he was sentenced to 4 months in prison in a staged trial of 16 leaders of the Polish Underground State held by the Soviet Union in Moscow. In August he came back to Poland. Fearing arrest, he escaped from Poland in November 1945.
The arrest, imprisonment, and trial of Polish leaders is described in his 1951 book Invitation to Moscow. The book was soon translated into French (Invitation à Moscou), Italian (Invito a Mosca), Portuguese (Convite de Moscobo), Spanish (Invitation a Moscou), Burmese and Arabic. The Polish version of the book was published outside Poland in 1951 (W zawierusze dziejowej). In 1991 the book was re-published in Warsaw. Hugh Trevor-Roper, professor at the University of Oxford, wrote that the book was "of unique value" and that "there is no other evidence known to me from which we can learn, as here, the psychology and method behind these Communist trials". [1] He died and was buried in London.
In 1927 Stypułkowski married Aleksandra Rabska, a fellow lawyer and legal partner and later, a notable émigré political commentator and activist. They had a son, Andrzej, who also became an émigré activist in the United Kingdom.
The film, I Am Not Alone, depicts Stypułkowski's story during his incarceration at the Lubyanka prison.
Bolesław Bierut was a Polish communist activist and politician, leader of communist-ruled Poland from 1947 until 1956. He was President of the State National Council from 1944 to 1947, President of Poland from 1947 to 1952, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party from 1948 to 1956, and Prime Minister of Poland from 1952 to 1954. Bierut is believed to have worked as an NKVD informant or agent prior to 1945, although his relationship with the Soviet agency has been a subject of debate among historians. As communist leader, he implemented aspects of the Stalinist system in Poland. Together with Władysław Gomułka, his main rival, Bierut is chiefly responsible for the historic changes that Poland underwent in the aftermath of World War II. Unlike any of his communist successors, Bierut led Poland until his death.
Władysław Gomułka was a Polish Communist politician. He was the de facto leader of post-war Poland from 1947 until 1948, and again from 1956 to 1970.
Józef Unszlicht or Iosif Stanislavovich Unshlikht was a Polish and Russian revolutionary activist, a Soviet government official and one of the founders of the Cheka.
The Trial of the Sixteen was a staged trial of 16 leaders of the Polish Underground State held by the Soviet authorities in Moscow in 1945. All captives were kidnapped by the NKVD secret service and falsely accused of various forms of 'illegal activity' against the Red Army.
Boris Viktorovich Savinkov was a Russian writer and revolutionary. As one of the leaders of the SR Combat Organization, the paramilitary wing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, Savinkov was involved in the assassinations of several high-ranking imperial officials in 1904 and 1905.
General Leopold Okulicki was a Polish Army brigadier general and the last commander of the anti-Nazi underground Home Army during World War II and the German occupation of Poland (1939–1945).
The Ministry of Public Security, was the secret police, intelligence and counter-espionage agency operating in the Polish People's Republic. From 1945 to 1954 it was known as the Security Office, and from 1956 to 1990 as the Security Service.
Jan Stanisław Jankowski was a Polish politician, an important figure in the Polish civil resistance during World War II and a Government Delegate at Home. Arrested by the NKVD, he was sentenced in the Trial of the Sixteen and murdered in a Soviet prison.
The Montelupich Prison, so called from the street in which it is located, the ulica Montelupich, is a historic prison in Kraków from early 20th century, which was used by the Gestapo in World War II. It is universally recognized as "one of the most terrible Nazi prisons in [occupied] Poland". The Gestapo took over the facility from the German Sicherheitspolizei at the end of March 1941. One of the Nazi officials responsible for overseeing the Montelupich Prison was Ludwig Hahn.
Stanisław Jan Patek, Polish lawyer, freemason and diplomat, served as Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1919 to 1920.
Łukasz Ciepliński was a Polish soldier who fought in the Polish anti-Nazi and anti-communist resistance movements. He used various aliases: Pług, Ostrowski, Ludwik, Grzmot, and Bogdan. Ciepliński was executed at Mokotów Prison in Warsaw, with a shot to the back of the head by the Polish secret police, Urząd Bezpieczeństwa.
Kazimierz Pużak (1883–1950) was a Polish socialist politician of the interwar period. Active in the Polish Socialist Party, he was one of the leaders of the Polish Secret State and Polish resistance, sentenced by the Soviets in the infamous Trial of the Sixteen in 1945.
Karol Chmiel (1911–1951) was born on 17 April 1911 in the village of Zagorzyce to the peasant family of Antoni and Katarzyna née Charchut. He graduated from high school in Dębica, and was admitted to the prestigious Jagiellonian University in Kraków, where he studied law. After graduation, in 1935, Chmiel settled in Wojslaw, a village near Mielec; his wife Irena Suchodolska was a school principal, and he worked for the Town Hall in Mielec.
The anti-communist resistance in Poland, also referred to as the Polish anti-communist insurrection fought between 1944 and 1953, was an anti-communist and anti-Soviet armed struggle by the Polish Underground against the Soviet domination of Poland by the Soviet-installed People's Republic of Poland, since the end of World War II in Europe. The guerrilla warfare conducted by the resistance movement formed during the war, included an array of military attacks launched against communist prisons, state security offices, detention facilities for political prisoners, and prison camps set up across the country by the Stalinist authorities.
Roman Romkowski born Menasche Grünspan also known as Nasiek (Natan) Grinszpan-Kikiel, was a Polish communist official trained by Comintern in Moscow. After the Soviet takeover of Poland Romkowski settled in Warsaw and became second in command in the Ministry of Public Security during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Along with several other high functionaries including Stanisław Radkiewicz, Anatol Fejgin, Józef Różański, Julia Brystiger and the chief supervisor of Polish State Security Services, Minister Jakub Berman from the Politburo, Romkowski came to symbolize communist terror in postwar Poland. He was responsible for the work of departments: Counter-espionage (1st), Espionage (7th), Security in the PPR–PZPR, and others.
Anatol Fejgin was a Polish communist activist before World War II, and after 1949, commander of the Stalinist political police at the Ministry of Public Security of Poland, in charge of its notorious Special Bureau. During the Polish October of 1956, his name – along with a number of others including his colleague Col. Józef Różański, and Minister Jakub Berman – came to symbolize communist terror in postwar Poland.
Stefan Michnik was a military judge of the Soviet-dominated regime in post-World War II Poland, and a captain in the communist Polish People's Army. He was involved in the politically-motivated arrest, trial, imprisonment and/or execution of a number of Polish anti-communist fighters and activists. Many of those persecuted by Michnik also fought against Nazi Germany during World War II, as members of the Polish resistance.
Stanisław Józef Dubois was a Polish journalist and political activist in the Second Polish Republic, member of the left wing of the Polish Socialist Party as well as the Youth Organisation of the Workers' University Society.
Witold Leder was a Polish military intelligence officer, activist, translator, and author. He shared in the ups and downs of the anti-Stalinist current of Polish communism, in which he was a lifelong participant.
Operation B refers to the arrest of 199 Evangelical clergymen by the Ministry of Public Security in September 1950 in Poland. The objective of this operation was to weaken Evangelical Protestantism in Poland by eliminating churches that did not have a regulated legal status with the state. The arrested individuals belonged to three churches: the United Evangelical Church, the Church of Christians of Evangelical Faith, and the Union of Christ Churches. 87 clergymen were released a few days after their arrest, while others were released after several months. 16 were sentenced to prison. Some of them were included in the amnesty of 1952. These arrests influenced the expansion of the United Evangelical Church in 1953.
(in English) at the Internet Archive
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