Boleslaw Piasecki's Game for Life

The Institute of World Politics

This lecture event is part of the 11th Annual Kościuszko Chair Spring Symposium in honor of Lady Blanka Rosenstiel sponsored by the Kościuszko Chair in Polish Studies and the Center for Intermarium studies. Lady Blanka Rosenstiel and the American Institute of Polish Culture (AIPC) established the Kościuszko Chair of Polish Studies at IWP in 2008. The Kościuszko Chair serves as a center for Polish Studies in the broadest sense, including learning, teaching, researching, and writing about Poland's culture, history, heritage, religion, government, economy, and successes in the arts, sciences, and letters, with special emphasis on the achievements of Polish civilization and its relation to other nations, particularly the United States. We remain grateful for Lady Blanka’s leadership in founding this Chair at IWP. About the lecture: Bolesław Piasecki is considered one of the most controversial Polish politicians of the 20th century. A few years ago, I had the honour of presenting a critical review of one of Piasecki's newer biographies at the Kościuszko Chair symposium at the IWP. As I write a biography of this politician, I wish to share my findings with you. I want to focus on one of the least known episodes in Piasecki's biography – his eight-month stay in a communist prison at the turn of 1944-1945 and the meeting with Stalin's governor in Poland's occupied territories NKVD General Iwan Sierow. This event, both mysterious and sensational, is considered the beginning of Piasecki's agent involvement in cooperation with the Soviets and the foundation of his later position in communist Poland. I will try to verify this view and how these talks could have looked like, and whether Piasecki's last activities' agent-based nature is possible. About the speaker: Wojciech J. Muszyński, PhD, is a historian and a researcher at the Institute of National Remembrance (Warsaw, Poland). His research focuses on the history of political and ideological movements in the Second Polish Republic, Polish-Jewish relations, and military history. He is a Member of the Team to Assess Requests to Recognize Opposition Activity during the People's Republic of Poland at the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland. He is the author or co-author of many monographs, including Białe Legiony 1914–1918. Od Legionu Puławskiego do I Korpusu Polskiego (2018); Białe Legiony przeciwko bolszewikom. Polskie formacje wojskowe w Rosji 1918–1920 (2019), Toreadorzy Hitlera. Hiszpańscy ochotnicy w Wehrmachcie i Waffen-SS 1941–1945 (2019). He is also the co-author of the 2018 Award-Winning History Book on the history of the National Military Union, Przeciwko PAX Sovietica (2018).