THE COMMUNIST MOVEMENT 405Popular Front against the Sanacja regime. In the USSR, where many of the lead-
ers resided, their failures were greeted with derision. Although the specifically
Trotskyte line, together with the unrepentantly schismatic Isaac Deutscher
(1907—67), was purged at the final Sixth Congress in 1932., the Party's
Luxemburgist past, its largely Jewish leadership, and its strong advocacy of
Comintern, as opposed to Soviet, interests, inevitably aroused Stalin's suspi-
cions. Ignoring the simple fact that Soviet-style Communism was repugnant to
the vast mass of the Polish people, Stalin chose to explain the KPP's distress by
its supposed infiltration by Polish counter-intelligence agents. In the middle of
the Soviet Union's own Great Purge, a series of political trials of alleged 'Polish
spies, provocateurs, and diversionists' led inexorably to the official liquidation
in 1938 of the Party as a whole. At the XVIII Congress of the CPSU in 1939 a
Soviet spokesman made a rare and oblique reference to the fateful decision
which was already being put into effect:
In order to split the Communist movement, the Fascist and Trotskyite spies attempted to
form artificial 'factions' and 'groups' in some of the Communist parties and stir up a fac-
tional struggle... The party that was most contaminated by hostile elements was the
Communist Party of Poland, where agents of Polish fascism managed to gain positions
of leadership. These scoundrels tried to get the Party to support Pilsudski's Fascist Coup
in May 1926. When this failed, they feigned repentance for their 'May Error', made a
show of self-criticism, and deceived the Comintern just as Lovestone and the police 'fac-
tionalists' of the Hungarian and Yugoslav parties had once done. It was the fault of the
Comintern workers that they allowed themselves to be deceived by the class enemy, and
failed to detect these maneuvers in time... The Communist Parties have investigated
their leading workers, and have removed those whose honesty was questionable. They
have dissolved illegal organisations which were particularly contaminated, and have
begun to form new ones in their place...^11
The KPP disappeared from the list of Comintern's affiliated parties. First the
leaders, then the rank and file, were summoned by the Soviet GPU. They too dis-
appeared. Adolf Warszawski (pseudonym Warski), Jozef Unszlicht, Maria
Koszutska (pseudonym, Kostrzewa), Maksymilian Horwitz (pseudonym,
Walecki), Juliusz Leszczyfiski (pseudonym, Leriski), Stanislaw Bobiriski, Jerzy
Heryng (pseudonym, 'Ryng'), Wtadystaw Krajewski-Stein, all of them veterans
of the SDKPiL or the PPS (Lewica) and lifelong devotees of Communism, were
shot out of hand or otherwise done to death in the Gulags. In all, some five thou-
sand Polish communists, practically the entire active membership of the Party,
were killed. The only ones to survive were those fortunate enough to find them-
selves in Polish gaols, or those who had been recruited into the Soviet security
service. This Soviet game-bag must be compared to the two or three dozen
Communist victims of the Sanacja regime, and to the hundreds of Polish
Communists who died during the War at the hands of the Nazis. Trotsky, from
his Mexican exile, saw the tragic episode, like the Nazi-Soviet Pact which it pre-
ceded, as a death-blow to internationalist communism. 'Poland will resurrect',
he wrote, 'but Comintern never'. On this point, he was exactly right.^12