Adolf Warski ( Адольф Варшавский) (born Adolf Jerzy Warszawski; 20 April 1868 – 21 August 1937), was a Polish communist leader, journalist and theoretician of the Communism movement in Poland. During Stalin's Great Purge he was arrested and executed.
Warski was active in the Communism movement from 1889, when he co-founded the Union of Polish workers, with Julian Marchlewski and Bronislaw Wesolowski. In 1893, he was one of the four founders of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), with Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches, and Marchlewski. In 1897, he moved to Munich, where he became close to leaders of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, In July 1903, during the second congress of the RSDLP in Brussels, Warski pleaded for the SDPKiL to be recognised as the autonomous Polish section of the Russian party.
In 1918, Warski was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Poland (KPP), formed by a merger of the SDPKiL and the left faction of the Polish Socialist Party. Warski held positions in the KPP's Central Committee (1919–29) and Politburo (1923–29, with an interruption).
After the failure of the Hamburg Uprising in Germany, and similar but smaller-scale disturbances in Poland, the three Ws vigorously defended the leaders of the German party, who were accused of passivity, and as a power struggle developed in the Kremlin between during Vladimir Lenin's terminal illness, pitching Joseph Stalin and the chairman of Comintern, Grigory Zinoviev against Trotsky, they issued a statement in December 1923 declaring that the name of comrade Trotsky is for our party, for the whole International, for the whole revolutionary world proletariat, indissolubly bound up with the victorious October Revolution." Warski and his allies then under attack from a left wing faction, led by Julian Lenski.
The record of the Polish leadership was subjected to a three-day examination during the Fifth Comintern Congress in June 1924, chaired by Stalin, after which Warski capitulated and wrote a recantation, published in Pravda in January 1925.
Unlike Walecki and Kostrzewa, he was allowed to continue as an active member of the Polish CP. In 1926 was elected as a member of the Polish Parliament (Sejm), but in March 1929, he was forced to emigrate to the Soviet Union where he worked in the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute on the history of the Polish labour movement.
At the age of 69, Warski was one of the oldest victims of the Great Purge. In June 1937, the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov told a plenum of the Central Committee that the police had uncovered a 'Polish Military organisation', whose members had infiltrated the USSR by posing as political refugees.
Warski was fully rehabilitated in 1956, during the De-Stalinization process that followed Joseph Stalin's death, and the Szczecin shipyard, Stocznia Szczecińska Nowa, was renamed in his honor ( Stocznia im. Adolfa Warskiego) by the authorities of the People's Republic of Poland.
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