Bolesław Gebert


Bolesław Konstanty "Bill" Gebert was a top Communist Party official, remembered as one of the organization's top Polish-language speaking leaders. He was a Soviet agent during the years of World War II and was an official of the Polish Communist government after the war.

Biography

Early years and family

Bolesław Konstanty Gebert was born July 22, 1895 in Tatary, near Tykocin, in the Białystok region, near the current border of Poland and Belarus. His family were farmers who lost their noble status and landed estates after Gebert's grandfather, Adolf Gebert, took part in the January Uprising in 1863–1864.
Gebert's father, Konstanty Gebert, was a soldier in the Polish Legions in World War I and later fought in the Polish–Soviet War, taking part in the defence of Warsaw. A farmer by trade, he was an active member of the peasant Polish People's Party "Wyzwolenie", for which he was imprisoned in 1923. He continued his military service during the Invasion of Poland in 1939 and was a prisoner of war in the Kozielsk Soviet camp. After his release, Konstanty Gebert was a member of the Home Army resistance movement during World War II, along with three of his four brothers, Mieczysław, Henryk, and Aleksander. The latter brother and Bill Gebert's uncle, Aleksander Gebert, was later persecuted for his resistance service by the Communists in post-War Poland.

Political career

Gebert immigrated from Poland to the United States prior to the Russian Revolution and found work as a miner. He was an active member of the Socialist Party of America working in the SPA's Polish Federation by 1915. He took part in the creation of the Kosciuszko League. Gebert was active in the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party In 1919 and a founding member of the Communist Party of America, and edited a Polish socialist newspaper. He was arrested in the Palmer Raids at the end of 1919 but was not deported. He was named to the governing Central Executive Committee of the CPA as an ostensible representative of the Polish Communist Federation in the wake of the deportation of Polish leader Daniel Elbaum in 1920.
Gebert was in Detroit, Michigan by 1920, where he was editor of the three primary Polish-language publications: Głos Robotniczy, Trybuna Robotnicza, and Głos Ludowy.
As well as working in his editorial capacity, Gebert was the Secretary of the Polish Bureau of the Workers Party and was a fraternal delegate to the party's 6th National Convention, held in New York City in March 1929.
In 1932, Gebert was a founder of the Polonia Society from the existing Polish-language section of the International Workers Order, an organization for which he remained as a national officer. He also served in the first half of the 1930s as District Organizer of the CPUSA's Chicago and Pittsburgh districts. Louis F. Budenz wrote of a conflict between Gebert and Morris Childs, District Organizer for Illinois, over Gebert's intrusion into Chicago and, in particular, over a "Czech comrade who was doing vital underground work for Gebert."
In 1936 he went to work for the Steel Workers Organizing Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in charge of efforts to organize fraternal organizations of foreign-born Americans. As such, Gebert organized a conference of said organizations in Pittsburgh at the end of 1936 — a gathering attended by 447 representatives of various national origins. The gather was addressed by Phillip Murray and greeted by John L. Lewis of the SWOC.
Gebert was a frequent contributor to the theoretical monthly of the CPUSA, The Communist, between the years 1933 and 1939.
Gebert appears in nine intercepted KGB messages between May and October 1944. Gebert was the contact of fellow Soviet agent, Oskar Lange, a Polish economist who was a personal emissary from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Joseph Stalin on the "Polish question". Another Venona message reports Gebert's demand for a $500 balance the KGB still owed him on a one thousand dollar contract to publish a Polish-language book.
After World War II, Gebert returned to the now Communist-dominated Poland, where he assumed a leading position in the state-controlled labor unions. From 1949 to 1950, Gebert was Secretary of the World Peace Council and from 1950 to 1957, the editor of Glosu Pracy.
He returned to the United States in 1950 as United Nations representative of the World Federation of Trade Unions.
From 1960 to 1967 Gebert served as the Polish People's Republic's Ambassador to Turkey.

Death and legacy

Bill Gebert died in 1986 in Warsaw. He was married two times, first in 1920 in the US, with Romanian-born Elvira Koenig, with whom he had one son, Armand Gebert, a journalist who lived and died in Detroit. He was survived by his second wife, Krystyna Poznańska-Gebert, of Jewish origin, and was the father of two children with her: a daughter and son, Konstanty Gebert, a prominent Polish journalist and Jewish activist.

Footnotes

Works

Books and pamphlets