Ludwik Waryński

Ludwik Tadeusz Waryński (born 24 September 1856 at Martynówka-- died 2 March 1889 in Shlisselburg) was an activist and theoretician of socialist movement in Poland.

Biography

He was born at Martynówka (Martynovkoje in Ukraine), the son of a January uprising combatant. In 1865, he started his education at the gymnasium at Biala Cerkiew. From 1874 he studied in Saint Petersburg. At the Technological Institute he met socialists, and joined the Polish Socialist Youth. Because of the students' riots of 1875, he was forced to leave the Institute. He started to educate himself.

In 1876, Waryński went to Warsaw, and was the founder of the first socialist magazine in the lands of the Russian-occupied Poland. Then, he joined the Agronomical School in Puławy but was still leader of the Warsaw worker's movement. In 1879 Tsarist police found him in Warsaw and he was forced to leave Russia.

He moved to Lvov, and, one year later, to Krakow, where he continued his socialist work. He was arrested by Austro-Hungarian police in February 1879 and jailed till his trial in February 1880, at which he was acquitted (after making a long speech defending the socialist ideas). Nevertheless, he was forced to leave for Switzerland, where his socialist ideas and international contacts developed further. Waryński was the author of the Brussels Program, an ideological declaration of Polish socialists. During his stay in Switzerland, he also met his future wife Anna Sieroszewska, with whom he had a son, Tadeusz.

In 1882, Waryński returned to Warsaw, where he created the first Polish worker's party, called The Proletariat. In 1883 he was arrested by the Tsarist secret police and, after a trial with 29 co-defendants in 1885, sentenced to 16 years in prison in Shlisselburg. He died there of tuberculosis 6 years later.

Legacy

During the times of the People's Republic of Poland, the socialist movement pioneered by Waryński was conventionally presented as the starting point of the Polish socialist tradition. Countless Polish schoolchildren memorized the powerful poem of Waryński's death by Władysław Broniewski.