Bronisław Euzebiusz Wesołowski (14 August 1870 – 2 January 1919) was a Polish communist revolutionary and labor leader.

Biography

A Pole, born in a village near Warsaw, he became a committed socialist while in his teens. He studied at Zurich Polytechnic as an electrical engineer. In 1889, together with Adolf Warski and

Julian Marchlewski Julian Baltazar Józef Marchlewski (17 May 1866 – 22 March 1925) was a Polish communist politician, revolutionary activist and publicist who served as chairman of the Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee. He was also known under the aliase ...

, he founded the Union of Polish Workers. In 1893, the Union was disbanded and its members joined the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDPK - later the SDPKiL), founded in Zurich by

Rosa Luxemburg Rosa Luxemburg ( ; ; ; born Rozalia Luksenburg; 5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919) was a Polish and naturalised-German revolutionary and Marxist theorist. She was a key figure of the socialist movements in Poland and Germany in the early 20t ...

and

Leo Jogiches Leon "Leo" Jogiches (Russian: Лев "Лео" Йогихес; 17 July 1867 – 10 March 1919), also commonly known by the party name Jan Tyszka, was a Polish Marxist revolutionary and politician, active in Poland, Lithuania, and Germany. Jogich ...

. Wesolowski returned to Poland, and was the only member of the Zurich-based leadership to attend the founding congress of the SDPK in March 1894. He was arrested soon afterwards, and spent more than ten years in Siberia. Released during the

1905 revolution The Russian Revolution of 1905, also known as the First Russian Revolution, was a revolution in the Russian Empire which began on 22 January 1905 and led to the establishment of a constitutional monarchy under the Russian Constitution of 1906, t ...

, he returned illegally to Warsaw, where he was arrested again in 1908. After another nine years in prison and exile, he was released after the

February Revolution The February Revolution (), known in Soviet historiography as the February Bourgeois Democratic Revolution and sometimes as the March Revolution or February Coup was the first of Russian Revolution, two revolutions which took place in Russia ...

, in 1917, and joined the

Bolsheviks The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, were a radical Faction (political), faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split with the Mensheviks at the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, ...

. On 20 December 1918, Wesolowski arrived in Warsaw as head of a five-member Soviet Red Cross mission, to discuss the repatriation of former Russian prisoners of war, who had bene held in Poland by the Germans during

World War I World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...

. All five were arrested by the Polish authorities, who suspected that they had come to spread communist propaganda, and were expelled from Poland. Near the border with Soviet Russia, on the night of 1/2 January 1919, they were seized by Polish gendarmes, taken to a wood and shot. Wesolowski and three others were killed, while one member of the delegation survived by pretending to be dead.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wesolowski, Bronislaw 1870 births 1919 deaths Polish communists