page_title: Edward Gierek
section_title: Katowice industrial district leader
hierarchical_section_title: Edward Gierek / Katowice industrial district leader
caption_attribution_description: Edward Gierek visiting PGR in Rząśnik, Poland. On his left: director of PGR.
context_page_description: Edward Gierek was a Polish communist politician and de facto leader of Poland between 1970 and 1980. Gierek replaced Władysław Gomułka as First Secretary of the ruling Polish United Workers' Party in the Polish People's Republic in 1970. He is known for opening communist Poland to Western influence and for his economic policies based on foreign loans, which ultimately failed. He was removed from power after labour strikes led to the Gdańsk Agreement between the communist state and workers of the emerging Solidarity free trade union movement.
  Born in Upper Silesia to a devoutly Catholic family, Gierek emigrated with his relatives to France at a young age. In 1934, he was deported to Poland for communist advocacy and campaigning, but subsequently moved to Belgium to work as a coal miner in Genk. As a result, he was proficient in French, which benefited in pursuing his future political career. During the Second World War, Gierek was active in the Belgian Resistance against the Germans. He returned to post-war Poland only in 1948 after spending 22 years abroad.
context_section_description: In March 1957, in addition to his Central Committee duties, Gierek became first secretary of the Katowice Voivodeship PZPR organization, and he kept this job until 1970. He created a personal power base in the Katowice region and became the nationally recognized leader of the young technocrat faction of the party. On the one hand Gierek was regarded as a pragmatic, non-ideological and economic progress-oriented manager, on the other he was known for his servile attitude toward the Soviet leaders, for whom he was a source of information concerning the PZPR and its personalities. Both the industrial supremacy of Gierek's well-run Upper Silesia territory and the special relationship with the Soviets he cultivated made many believe that Gierek was a likely successor to Gomułka. 
  The Warsaw University law professor Mieczysław Maneli who knew Gierek from 1960 onward wrote about him in 1971: "Edward Gierek is an old‐fashioned Communist, but without fanaticism or zealousness. His Marxism is encumbered by few dogmas. It is almost pragmatic. He believes profoundly in the leading role that history conferred upon Communist parties and lives by the maxim that a government should be strong and rule unshakably...Gierek's party nickname was “Tshombe,” and Silesia was the “Polish Katanga.” There he operated almost as a sovereign prince, a talented organizer with a real gift for finding efficient and loyal henchmen. All professions were represented in his court: engineers, economists, professors, writers, party apparatchiks and security agents".
  Gierek may have tried to make his move during the 1968 Polish political crisis. Soon after the student rally on 8 March in Warsaw, on 14 March in Katowice he led a mass gathering of 100,000 party members from the entire province. He was the first Politburo member to speak publicly on the issue of the protests then taking place and later claimed that his motivation was to demonstrate support for Gomułka's rule, threatened by Mieczysław Moczar's intra-party conspiring. Gierek used strong language to condemn the purported "enemies of People's Poland" who were "disturbing the peaceful Silesian water". He showered them with propaganda epithets and alluded to their bones being crushed if they persevered in their attempts to turn the "nation" away from its "chosen course." Gierek was supposedly embarrassed when participants of the party conference in Warsaw on 19 March shouted his name along with that of Gomułka, as an expression of support. The 1968 events strengthened Gierek's position, also in the eyes of his sponsors in Moscow.
caption: First Secretary Edward Gierek (second from left)
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