57 Facts About Wanda Wasilewska

Wanda Wasilewska was a socialist who became a devoted communist.

Wanda Wasilewska fled the German attack on Warsaw in September 1939 and took up residence in Soviet-occupied Lviv and eventually in the Soviet Union.

Wanda Wasilewska was a founding member of the Union of Polish Patriots and played an important role in the creation of the 1st Tadeusz Kosciuszko Infantry Division.

Wanda Wasilewska was born, the second of three daughters, on 25 January 1905 in Krakow, Austrian Poland.

Wanda Wasilewska's father was Leon Wasilewski, a Polish Socialist Party politician and first foreign minister of the newly re-emerging independent Poland.

Wanda Wasilewska's mother, Wanda Zieleniewska, was a PPS member and the young Wasilewska had gotten to know the party leaders at home.

Wanda Wasilewska's attitude was exemplified by her own personal conduct as well as her work in the Women's Section of the PPS.

Wanda Wasilewska served there with her father, whose connections turned out helpful at the various stages and vicissitudes of her career in Poland.

Wanda Wasilewska's radicalism grew gradually from the early 1930s and she began viewing the socialists as former revolutionaries turned conformists, compromised by collaboration with state authorities.

Wanda Wasilewska found employment in the Editorial Division of the Polish Teachers' Union.

Wanda Wasilewska was often criticised for her radical left-wing views and supported an alliance of all the left-wing parties, including the communists, against the ruling Sanation.

Wanda Wasilewska was closely associated with the communists from the mid-1930s.

Wanda Wasilewska left the congress convinced that "today the place of the writer, of the artist is among the proletariat of towns and villages, fighting for its liberation".

Wanda Wasilewska was highly regarded and accomplished in the field of social work.

Early in the period of her studies Wanda Wasilewska met Roman Szymanski, a mathematics student and popular PPS activist.

Later the same year Wanda Wasilewska met Marian Bogatko, a construction worker active in the PPS.

At that time Wanda Wasilewska was already a delegate to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union.

Nikita Khrushchev later wrote: "Wanda Wasilewska believed that it was not the case of premeditation and continued active work"; according to him, Bogatko was killed by mistake.

Wanda Wasilewska prevented a complete Ukrainization of the University of Lviv: because of her intervention part of the Polish prewar faculty remained there and teaching in Polish was retained in some departments.

Wanda Wasilewska soon came into prominence as a Soviet loyalist and diplomatic arrangements were made to bring members of her immediate family and her associates from Warsaw to Lviv.

Wanda Wasilewska was involved with various communist organisations uniting local Polish and Ukrainian communists.

Wanda Wasilewska was a journalist for Czerwony Sztandar, a pro-Soviet newspaper printed in Lviv in Polish from October 1939.

Czerwony Sztandar published a declaration signed by Polish writers, including Wanda Wasilewska, welcoming the "unification of Ukraine", meaning the incorporation of the southern part of Kresy into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Wanda Wasilewska became literary director of the Polish Theatre in Lviv, replacing Broniewski, who was arrested by the NKVD.

Wanda Wasilewska was one of the founders, together with Jerzy Putrament, of the social-literary monthly Nowe Widnokregi, published from March 1941 and revived in May 1942 with Alfred Lampe.

Wanda Wasilewska joined the Red Army as a war correspondent and functionary of the Political Commandment, with the military rank of colonel.

Wanda Wasilewska soon wrote the war novel Tecza, instantly translated into Russian.

The ZPP, where Wanda Wasilewska functioned as "Stalin's great trustee", was oriented toward the establishment of socialism in Poland; it facilitated the development of Poland's post-war government.

Wanda Wasilewska was very involved in organizing material help for Poles dispersed in many parts of the Soviet Union and Polish schools for children.

On 6 May 1943, in Wanda Wasilewska-edited Wolna Polska periodical, the formation of the Polish 1st Tadeusz Kosciuszko Infantry Division was announced.

Nevertheless, Wanda Wasilewska was appalled by the losses and had the division withdrawn from combat for further training and expansion, until the middle of 1944.

In July 1944, Wanda Wasilewska became deputy chief of the Polish Committee of National Liberation, a provisional government sponsored by the Soviet Union and established in Lublin, in opposition to the Polish government-in-exile in London.

Wanda Wasilewska explained away Stalin's deadly purges by arguing that death of an innocent person was preferable to the risk of demise of the Soviet Union.

Wanda Wasilewska intervened when Poles whom she knew were deported to distant regions of the Soviet Union and engaged in relief activities, such as sending parcels to deportees.

Wanda Wasilewska's interventions freed her fellow Polish communists, the poet Broniewski and his by then estranged wife Janina Broniewska.

Wanda Wasilewska was involved in a long-term relationship with Ukrainian playwright and Soviet state official Oleksandr Korniychuk, with whom she moved to Kyiv.

Wanda Wasilewska had limited Russian and Ukrainian language abilities, but was a member of the Supreme Soviet for six terms.

Wanda Wasilewska often visited Poland, where a room was kept for her use at the villa of Broniewska in Warsaw.

Wanda Wasilewska was highly influential in the affairs of Poland and consulted by the country's top leaders, including Bierut and Berman.

Wanda Wasilewska made frequent foreign trips as an activist in the peace movement, including one to Stockholm in 1956.

Wanda Wasilewska was often visited by family members and friends from Poland.

Wanda Wasilewska spent time with her husband in their dacha not far from Kyiv, but the relationship eventually deteriorated.

Wanda Wasilewska died on 29 July 1964 in Kyiv and is buried in the Baikove Cemetery.

Wanda Wasilewska has "her place in Polish collective memory as a symbol of the establishment of the communist order after World War II".

Wanda Wasilewska was "strongly embedded in the historical and geopolitical context of her era" and blurred in her daily activities and works she produced the distinction between the public or political, and private aspects of her life.

Wanda Wasilewska accused Sanation Poland of gross discrimination of its citizens based on their rank and ethnicity.

Wanda Wasilewska pointed to a combination of economic and nationalistic oppression of the working classes and the minorities by the industry and land owners and by people of the dominant Polish language and culture.

Wanda Wasilewska "played her role till the end", but in a letter to her mother complained about the many ailments she suffered from, ascribing them all to "nerves".

Wanda Wasilewska was a revolutionary icon of the new order and an embodiment of progress under Stalinism.

Wanda Wasilewska patronizingly described Wasilewska as a well-meaning, even if sometimes rebellious woman of proper upbringing but limited intellectual ability and emotional maturity, who at the time of the Soviet invasion of Poland succumbed to a sudden onset of infatuation with the Soviet Union.

Wanda Wasilewska's biography, according to Mrozik, has been "continuously rewritten and corrected" by those who wanted to "inscribe into her their own content".

Such processing of Wanda Wasilewska narrative corresponded with the dominant at a given place and time historical narrative.

Wanda Wasilewska was one of the first Polish writers to follow the rules of socialist realism.

Wanda Wasilewska wrote several novels and a handful of poems.

Wanda Wasilewska was a triple recipient of the Stalin Prize for literature.

Wanda Wasilewska's "collected works" were published in Moscow in six volumes in 1955.

However, after the death of Stalin, Wanda Wasilewska was largely forgotten as a writer.