President of Poland or ‘stalin’s most faithful pupil’? The cult of bolesław bierut in stalinist Poland

Abstract

This chapter analyses the ways in which the communist regime in Poland created and propagated the cult of Boleslaw Bierut. The Polish Communist party faced a formidable obstacle in seeking to legitimise its rule in Poland. The party at the end of the war was numerically small and had only a very limited base of popular support. It had been devastated by the Great Purges in 1937-38, its leadership shot and, on Stalin’s instructions, the party itself was disbanded.1 It was only re-established during the war. Coupled with this it faced the problem of winning the support of a Polish public that was strongly antithetical to the Russians and to the whole communist experiment. Socialism was brought to Poland in the wake of the Red Army. It is against this background that we need to examine the role of Bierut’s cult as a device intended to overcome this antipathy and to broaden the base of public support for the reconstruction of Poland along socialist lines.