Poland’s prosecutor general, Zbigniew Ziobro, who also serves as justice minister, has moved to have the Polish Communist Party (KPP) outlawed, saying that it advocates totalitarian methods in violation of the constitution.
According to the Polish public prosecutor’s office, the KPP, which was founded in 2002, “has identical goals to other communist parties in the 20th century”. These aims include introduction of a system “modelled on Soviet Russia” with “totalitarian methods and practices”.
The prosecutor’s office claims that the KPP openly “expresses admiration for the political system of the Soviet Union” and “questions the democratic order in Poland”. Its “members explicitly call for a revolution similar to the October Revolution in Russia, after which the Bolsheviks took power”.
Article 13 of Poland’s constitution prohibits the existence of political parties or other organisations “whose programmes are based upon totalitarian methods and the modes of activity of Nazism, fascism and communism”. Ziobro has therefore made a request to the Constitutional Tribunal that the KPP be outlawed.
The prosecutor’s office also claims that the KPP downplays historical communist crimes. Its members “point to the superiority of the system prevailing in the USSR in the period of ‘red terror’, the great famine and Stalinist terror”.
“All that is Soviet is glorified and justified in the KPP’s manifesto, including Soviet commanders” who fought Poland’s underground resistance and attacked Poland in 1939 as well as during the Polish-Bolshevik war in 1920, according to the prosecutor’s office.
The office also notes that in its publications, members of the party “do not condemn even such traumatic events for the Polish nation as the Katyn Massacre” of 1940, during which roughly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia were murdered by Soviet secret police.
“Far-fetched” and “completely untrue” allegations
In a statement to Notes from Poland, the chairman of the Communist Party’s national executive committee, Krzysztof Szwej, denied the allegations.
“We fully respect the constitution and act in accordance with its provisions, including Articles 11 [which guarantees the freedom of political parties] and 13,” he said, adding that his party “supports democratic methods” (although the KPP has not run in elections for over a decade).
Some of the allegations made by the public prosecutor’s office are “far-fetched, taken out of context, taken from of publications which do not serve as the party’s manifesto documents, or completely untrue”, Szwej continued. These charges include the claim that the party “express admiration for the political system of the Soviet Union”.
The prosecutor’s office is misinterpreting its revolutionary calls, he maintains. “We are definitely not in favour of armed revolution and civil war. The situation is completely different than in 1917”.
“When we write ‘revolution’, we mean radical social changes leading to a significant improvement to the situation, because we believe that the present system is not able to solve many problems,” said Szwej.
“We have never incited violence or hatred. The KPP refers to the idea of communism, equality of justice, as well as each person’s right to development and freedom of opinion. We refer to the Communist Manifesto. We strive for change using democratic methods,” he added.
When asked about claims that his party glorifies historical figures including Stalin and Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Polish noble who became leader of the Soviet secret police, Szwej says that Dzerzhinsky was “working in conditions of chaos and lawlessness after the war” and hence used “adequate means” to “normalise” the situation.
As for Stalin, Szwej concedes that he introduced a “dictatorship” and a “personality cult” as well as “repression, labour camps, persecution of the opposition incompatible with the ideals of communism”.
But this was only half the story, Szwej claimed. He lauds Stalin’s military successes in the Second World War and points to Poland receiving “western lands, which were more developed and industrialised, than those in the east which were attached to the Soviet Union” as a result of the Red Army’s westward march and post-war agreement amongst the Allies.
Asked about the Katyn massacre – which was carried out on the orders of Stalin – Szwej refused to take a position.
Today died in 1953 Józef Dżugaszwili STALIN, great leader of CCCP.
— KPP (@cpofpoland) March 5, 2012
The KPP claim to be the heir of the Communist Party of Poland (also KPP) which operated in the inter-war period. Its founders were formerly part of the Union of Polish Communists “Proletariat”, which functioned between 1990 and 2002 and considered itself to be the heir of the Polish United Workers Party (PZPR), which ruled Poland between 1948 and 1989.
The party only had an estimated 300 members in 2017, according to Gazeta Wyborcza. In parliamentary elections in 2005 and 2007, its members ran on the ticket of the Polish Labour Party (PPP). In 2010, the party backed Grzegorz Napieralski, the Democratic Left Alliance’s (SLD) candidate for president.
The prosecutor general’s bid to outlaw the KPP is not the first such attempt.
In 2013, Bartosz Kownacki, a member of parliament for Law and Justice (PiS), the main party currently in government with Ziobro’s United Poland but in opposition at the time, asked the public prosecutor’s office to look into the KPP’s “promoting of a totalitarian system”.
This came after the KPP published the report of the so-called Burdenko Commission on Katyn, which blamed Nazi Germany for the massacre, absolving the Soviets of guilt, reports Rzeczpospolita.
The motion was dismissed, however, with the prosecutor’s office saying that “the activity of the party is based on peaceful and voluntary convincing of society” and that the law forbids the promotion of a “totalitarian system” but not of “communism,” reported Gazeta Wyborcza at the time.
In January 2018 deputy justice minister Patryk Jaki, also a member of United Poland, submitted a request for the public prosecutor’s office to investigate the party, but without any conclusive results, according to Rzeczpospolita.
Main image credit: Komunistyczna Partia Polski/Facebook
Maria Wilczek is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She is a regular writer for The Times, The Economist and Al Jazeera English, and has also featured in Foreign Policy, Politico Europe, The Spectator and Gazeta Wyborcza.
