Editing Polish Workers' Party (section)

==Communist Party of Poland and its demise==

The [[Communist Party of Poland]] (KPP, until 1925 the Communist Workers' Party of Poland) was an organization of the [[Far-left politics|far-left]]. The views adhered to and promulgated by its leaders ([[Maria Koszutska]], [[Adolf Warski]], [[Maksymilian Horwitz]], [[Edward Próchniak]]) led to the party's difficult relationship with [[Joseph Stalin]] already in 1923–24.<ref name="Duraczyński Stalin 172-175"/> The [[Communist International]] (Comintern) condemned the KPP for its support of [[Józef Piłsudski]]'s [[May Coup (Poland)|May Coup]] of 1926 (the party's "May error").<ref name="Brzoza Sowa 288"/> From 1933, the KPP was increasingly treated with suspicion by the Comintern. The party structures were seen as compromised due to infiltration by agents of the Polish military intelligence. Some of the party leaders, falsely accused of being such agents, were subsequently executed in the [[Soviet Union]]. In 1935 and 1936, the KPP undertook a formation of a [[popular front|unified worker and peasant front]] in Poland and was then subjected to further persecutions by the Comintern, which also arbitrarily accused the Polish communists of harboring [[Trotskyism|Trotskyists]] elements in their ranks. The apogee of the [[Moscow]]-held prosecutions, aimed at eradicating the various "deviations" and ending usually in death sentences, took place in 1937–38, with the last executions carried out in 1940. The KPP members were persecuted and often imprisoned by the Polish [[Sanation]] regime, which turned out to likely save the lives of a number of future Polish communist leaders, including [[Bolesław Bierut]], [[Władysław Gomułka]], [[Edward Ochab]], [[Stefan Jędrychowski]] and [[Aleksander Zawadzki]]. During the [[Great Purge]], seventy members and candidate members of the party's [[Central Committee]] fled or were brought to the Soviet Union and were shot there, along with a large number of other activists (almost all prominent Polish communists were murdered or sent to labor camps). The Comintern, in reality directed by Stalin, had the party dissolved and liquidated in August 1938.<ref name="Brzoza 237–238"/><ref name="Brzoza Sowa 350–354"/><ref name="Kochanski 368"/>