Stanisław Radkiewicz (; 19 January 1903 – 13 December 1987) was a Polish communist activist with Soviet citizenship, a member of the pre-war Communist Party of Poland and of the post-war Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR). As head of the Ministry of Public Security of Poland (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa or UB) between 1944 and 1954, he was one of the chief organisers of Stalinist terror in Poland. He also served as a political commissar and was made a divisional general in Communist Poland.
Unlike other individuals responsible for the Stalinist terror in the 1940s and 1950s, Radkiewicz was never held responsible for his crimes, although in 1956, after the Poznań protests and his official "self-critique", he was removed from his post as Minister of Public Security and made Minister of State Agricultural Farms (PGRs).
Early life
Radkiewicz was born in the village of Rozmierki in the Slonimsky Uyezd of the Grodno Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Belarus). He was the son of farmer Franciszek and Paulina née Lenczewska. He finished third grade. In 1915, during World War I, together with his family he was evacuated by the retreating Imperial Russian Army to Buzuluk in the Samara Governorate, where he worked on local farms. After the Bolshevik Revolution, he joined the Komsomol.
After the Polish-Soviet War, in 1922, his family moved back to their home village, but Stanisław soon moved to the Soviet Union where he worked in the Polish Bureau of the Communist Party of Byelorussia. In 1925, he was sent clandestinely by Moscow back into Poland to take charge of the youth section of the illegal Polish Communist Party (KPP). Three years later, he was arrested for activity against the sovereignty and independence of the Polish Republic and sentenced to four years in prison.
After being released, he served as a functionary of the KPP. He was arrested again in 1937 and served half a year in prison. In 1938, on the orders of Joseph Stalin, the KPP was disbanded and many of its leaders were executed as part of the Great Purge. Radkiewicz, however, was spared as he enjoyed Stalin's confidence and was in fact put in charge by Stalin of liquidating KPP's party cells.
World War II
During World War II, he volunteered for the Red Army, but was later transferred and made a political commissar of the Polish 1st Tadeusz Kościuszko Infantry Division and later a division general. He was also a delegate to the first Polish Sejm under Communist rule.
Head of secret police
Radkiewicz was made head of the UB secret police in 1944, shortly after the formation of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) "Lublin Committee" explicitly with Stalin's approval.
On 31 December 1944, the PKWN was transformed into the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland and the UB was renamed Ministry of Public Security of Poland (MBP), although it continued to be known by its UB acronym partly because local offices continued under the old name. In the period after 1945, the secret police grew rapidly under Radkiewicz's direction, with twelve thousand agents in April 1945 and twenty-four thousand in December 1945. At its height, in 1953, the organisation had thirty-three thousand agents.
Radkiewicz's UB focused its activities on several main areas: agitation and armed terror, including secret murders, directed at the only legal political opposition to the Communists, the Polish People's Party (also known as "Polish Peasant Party", PSL) (which was forced to merge into the Communist controlled satellite United People's Party (ZSL) in 1949) tracking down, arresting and executing members of the anti-communist underground organisations, such as Freedom and Independence (WiN), National Armed Forces (NSZ) or other "Cursed soldiers" and non-violent civilian organisations. attacking and suppressing the activity of the Catholic Church in Poland, as well as other, non-Catholic, religious organisations.
Additionally, the UB played a significant role in organising Operation Vistula, and in consolidating Communist control of the Polish education system.