[2] Together with Władysław Gomułka, his main rival, Bierut is chiefly responsible for the historic changes that Poland underwent in the aftermath of World War II.

Influenced by the leftist intellectual Jan Hempel, who in 1910 arrived in Lublin, before World War I Bierut joined the Polish Socialist Party – Left (PPS – Lewica).

[2][6] In Warsaw, he established contacts with Maria Koszutska and in December 1918 some form of association with the newly created Communist Workers' Party of Poland (KPRP), from which, according to his later testimony, he withdrew in fall 1919.

[6] In July 1921 Bierut married Janina Górzyńska, a preschool teacher who had helped him a great deal when his illegal activities forced him to hide from the police.

[7] Already trusted by the Soviets and knowing the Russian language well, from October 1925 to June 1926 Bierut was in the Moscow area, sent there for training at the secret school of the Communist International.

During the Fourth Congress of the Communist Party of Poland (KPP, the new name of the KPRP), which took place from 22 May to 9 August 1927, Bierut became a member of the Temporary Secretariat of the Central Committee again.

On 6 September the Polish military command issued a radio appeal for all able-bodied men to head east;[9] Bierut left Warsaw for Lublin, from where he proceeded to Kovel.

The Secretariat had three members: General Secretary Paweł Finder, Franciszek Jóźwiak and Władysław Gomułka, whom Bierut did not know, but who quickly became his principal rival.

[11] On 31 December 1943, Bierut assumed an important office: chairmanship of the State National Council (Krajowa Rada Narodowa, KRN), a communist-led body established by Gomułka and the PPR.

[11] Continuing as the KRN president, from August 1944 Bierut was secretly a member of the newly created Politburo of the PPR; he was officially presented to the public as a nonpartisan politician.

Stalin, assisted by Wasilewska, had two meetings with the leaders from Poland, during which he lectured them on a number of issues, but was especially displeased by the lack of progress in implementing the land reform decree passed by the PKWN on 6 September.

Stalin urged them to proceed forcefully with the agrarian revolution and to eliminate the great land owners class without further delay or undue legal concerns; Bierut felt that the remarks were addressed to him in particular.

The proceedings were interrupted to allow the deputies (including Bierut), together with officials of the PKWN and Nikolai Bulganin representing the Soviet Union, to participate in a field mass celebrated for the occasion and in the military parade that followed.

In July, Bierut and other Polish leaders participated in the Potsdam Conference, where, together with Stalin, they successfully lobbied for the establishment of Poland's western border at the Oder–Neisse line.

[17] Mikołajczyk's Peasant Party, although it also had progressive overtones, had grown to be publicly associated with the traditional Polish right, which had engaged in antisemitic and anti-communist repressions before the war.

[18] The long-standing trope of the "Judeo-Bolshevik", or Żydokomuna, was used by the far-right in anti-communist propaganda to cast Polish communism as a plot to control Poland by Russian Jews.

[17] On 16 November 1947, during the opening ceremony of the Polish Radio broadcasting station in Wrocław, President Bierut made a speech entitled For the dissemination of culture.

He repeatedly and at different times asked Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria about the whereabouts of the missing Polish communists (former members of the disbanded KPP), many of whom were murdered in the Great Purge in the 1930s, but others may have survived.

[17] Besides the communists, mostly surviving women, Bierut was able to bring back to Poland many other Poles, including former Home Army soldiers exiled in the Soviet Union.

[13] Gomułka, general secretary of the PPR (and until that time the principal figure in post-war Polish communist establishment),[21] was accused of a "right-wing nationalistic deviation" and removed from his position during a plenary meeting of the Central Committee in August 1948.

[15] According to Edward Ochab, though, Stalin and Beria ordered the arrest and trial of Gomułka, while Bierut and Jakub Berman tried to protect him and caused delays in the proceedings.

In the fall of 1951, a Russian translation of the draft constitution was examined by Stalin, who inserted dozens of corrections, subsequently implemented in the Polish text by Bierut.

Afterwards, Bierut did not return to Poland with the rest of the Polish delegation, but remained in Moscow, hospitalized with bad influenza, which turned into pneumonia and heart complications.

[26] On 3 March, during a conference of PZPR activists in Warsaw, Stefan Staszewski and others severely criticized the contemporary party leadership, including the absent Bierut.

[27] Bierut, however, would not die until sixteen days after that speech and four members of the delegation of Polish students who studied in Moscow, who met him on 25 February 1956, told Eisler that the first secretary showed signs of physical distress already at that time.

Large crowds of people gathered and joined the funeral procession, which began at the Palace of Culture and Science and proceeded toward the Powązki Military Cemetery, where the burial took place and where, for logistic reasons, only invited guests and delegations could enter.

[26] According to historian Andrzej Garlicki, Bierut died just in time to make possible the political demise of Berman and Minc and the triumphal return of Gomułka.

[28] During the brief but turbulent Solidarity period, the University of Wrocław attempted to reclaim its original name, but the Ministry of Higher Education declined to implement the faculty resolution in January 1982.

[21] Eisler countered this argument by writing of "the brutal and bloody persecution of soldiers of the independence-seeking underground, clandestine murders, fake political trials, and also the falsified referendum of 1946 and the elections of the following year, and finally the Sovietization of Poland in practically all areas of public life".

In 1974, suffering from material hardship, she wrote to First Secretary Edward Gierek of the PZPR, introducing herself as a "friend, wife and helper of his great fellow countryman, the outstanding party activist Bolesław Bierut".