The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Gomułka, Władysław

(party pseudonym. Wiestaw). Born Feb. 6. 1905, in Krosno. Active in the Polish and international workers’ movement.

Gomulka was born into a worker’s family. In 1926 he joined the Communist Party of Poland. From 1926 to 1932 he was a leader of the trade union of chemical workers. In 1932 he was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, from which he was freed in 1934 for reasons of health. From 1934 to 1935 he studied at the Lenin International School in Moscow, after which he returned to Poland to work in the party. In 1936 he was again arrested, and he remained in prison until World War II (1939—45). After the occupation of Poland by fascist German troops he emigrated to the USSR. Early in 1942 he returned to Poland and took part in the organization of the Polish Workers’ Party (PWP). In 1942 he became secretary of the Warsaw Committee of the PWP and in the same year was chosen a member of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers’ Party (CC PWP). From 1943 to 1948 he was general secretary of the CC PWP. After the creation of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PUWP) in 1948. he was elected to the Central Committee (CC PUWP). He was removed from the CC PUWP at its third plenum in November 1949. From October 1956 to December 1970, Gomulka was first secretary of the CC PUWP.

References in periodicals archive

Notwithstanding Dubcek's inclination towards gradualism, the freedom of expression and the indiscriminate right to travel abroad that Czechoslovakia had offered its citizens perturbed the party patriarchs in neighbouring states, not least Wladyslaw Gomulka in Poland and Walter Ulbricht in East Germany.

Czechs and balances

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviets intervened in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia supposedly to save the local regimes against "enemies of Socialism." Wladyslaw Gomulka in Poland, Janos Kadar in Hungry and Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia were first saved and then dumped.

There's no free lunch in politics

In June, Polish citizens were the first eastern-bloc people to riot against their Stalinists, and by the fall had a new revisionist government under Wladyslaw Gomulka. But when the Hungarians had their 'revolution', Russian tanks rolled into Budapest and crushed it.

In St. Laurent's shadow: Stephen Harper and the end of an era

Before the year was out, the Polish party had elevated Wladyslaw Gomulka, a "national communist," to the position of party first secretary; by affirming loyalty to the Soviet Union, he managed to forestall a Red Army intervention.

Red Europe

Professor Kula remembers by name party leader Mieczyslaw Moczar, the Soviet "scientist" Trofim Lysenko, Marxist indoctrinator Adam Schaff [portrayed by Czeslaw Milosz in The Captive Mind, Ed.], party leader Wladyslaw Gomulka, the so-called revisionist Marxism, Marxist propaganda and society's jokes about it, as well as the so-called volks-dozents (my recollection is that they were called "March dozents").

One step forward and two steps backward at the institute of national remembrance?

Pilch creates a series of sweet, sad, funny, Hrabalian vignettes on the events leading up to the day our adolescent hero, Jerzy, tries to dispatch Wladyslaw Gomulka (then first secretary of the Communist Party in Poland) with the aid of his dad and his dad's best friend, the desperately alcoholic Mr.

Jerzy Pilch. A Thousand Peaceful Cities

The next day, Nixon met with Wladyslaw Gomulka, the communist leader of Poland, for five hours and twenty minutes of hard give-and-take on U.S.-Polish relations.

Nixon in Warsaw

They had recently succeeded in getting their deposed liberal leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, returned to power.

'Huge, liberating leap forward,' says Adams

The '50s-era government of Wladyslaw Gomulka was a peculiar (and very Polish) mixture of Soviet autocratic rule, Polish nationalism and vaguely liberal cultural and economic tendencies.

Ludwik Flaszen and the Pragmatics of Grotowski: the legendary director's one-time partner talks about the secret politics of the Polish Laboratory Theatre

The uprising began as a rally in central Budapest, to express solidarity with Polish demonstrators who had recently succeeded in getting their deposed liberal leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, returned to power.

Remember When? 1956

The mildly iconoclastic ideas of Polish Communist leader Wladyslaw Gomulka had spilled over to other Soviet Bloc countries during the hot summer and stormy fall of 1956.

Anniversary