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the Polish Worker’s Party, representing it as a domestic socialist movement. Within months he consolidated his grip on power by establishing the quasi-legislative National Council of the Homeland, earning Stalin’s complete trust. With Russian help he annexed the German provinces of Pomerania and Silesia to Poland, expelling 5 million Germans in the process. This was as compensation for the eastern third of Poland that Stalin had absorbed at his western border as a buffer zone in the event of a future war. Bierut complied as ordered and finally announced creation of an interim Polish government with himself as provisional president on June 28, 1945. At the Potsdam Conference the following month, Bierut assured British prime minister WINSTON CHURCHILL that the new Polish political system would evolve along democratic lines. Two years later he directed shamelessly rigged elections that formalized communist control over the country. By a vote of 408 to 24, the party-controlled legislature elected Bierut president for a seven-year term in office. Finally in charge, Bierut rounded up and eliminated the last remnants of the noncommunist Polish Home Army, while also purging the polity of socialists and other leftists not sufficiently beholden to Stalin. Those not executed or imprisoned were forced to join the newly created Polish United Workers (Communist) Party, now the sole legitimate organization. He also began the forced Sovietization of his country with collectivized agriculture, centralized economic planning, and greater emphasis upon industrialization. To further augment Communist control of the social apparatus, laws were enacted against the Catholic Church while the party-dominated Polish Youth Movement was organized. When a leading politician, WLADYSLAW GOMULKA, dissented from such harsh measures, Bierut arranged his dismissal from the government. This deliberateness included a general purge of cadres to weed out potential Titoists, who sympathized with Yugoslavia’s independence leader Josip Broz, MARSHAL TITO. So closely did Bierut adhere to Moscow’s line, including adoption of his own personality cult, that he was widely regarded as the “Little Stalin.” Bierut, now firmly at the helm, ensured that Poland functioned as a loyal Soviet satellite. In 1949 he joined the Warsaw Pact, a defensive alliance intending to counter the newly organized North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Taking his cue from Moscow, he also refused to accept American aid in the form of the /
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Marshall Plan, which communists feared might undermine their authority. In 1952 Bierut resigned as head of the Polish United Worker’s Party to serve as the new prime minister. The turning point in his career came with the death of Stalin in 1953, when he was forced by more moderate interests to resign as head of state. A gradual process of de-Stalinization then swept Eastern Europe as hard-liners were invariably replaced by reformers. But Bierut remained loyal to his idolized leader to the end. In the spring of 1956 he traveled to Moscow to attend the Soviet Communist Party’s Twentieth Congress, and was aghast at Premier NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV’s secret speech denouncing Stalin. The age of political terror had finally passed and, as if on cue, Bierut died suddenly on March 12, 1956, three years after the tyrant that he had served so slavishly. Further Reading Dziewanowski, M. K. The Communist Party of Poland: An Outline History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976. Kemp-Welch, A. Stalinism in Poland, 1944–1956. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Kenney, Padraic. Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945–1960. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997. Kersten, Krystyna. The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland, 1943–1948. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Simoncini, Gabriele. The Communist Party of Poland, 1918–1929: A Study in Political Ideology. Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1993.
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Bishop, Maurice (1944–1983) prime minister of Grenada Maurice Bishop was born on Aruba, Netherlands Antilles, on May 29, 1944, the son of Grenadian immigrants. He was raised on Grenada and became an exceptional student, eventually studying law at the University of London. Bishop became a lawyer in 1969 and commenced practicing in Grenada the following year. He was enamored of the American black power movement then in vogue, and gravitated toward Marxist politics. Grenada was then controlled by ERIC GAIRY, who ran the island as a personal fiefdom and ruthlessly suppressed all opposition. In time, Bishop became engaged in politics as an anti-Gairy activist. This brought him severe beat-