During Ochab's rule the process of the post-Stalinist "thaw" was well under way, but the first secretary also played a role in authorizing the violent suppression of the worker revolt in Poznań in June.

He relinquished power during the VIII Plenum of the Party Central Committee, complying with the wishes of the majority of the Politburo members to promote Władysław Gomułka.

[3] Ochab was drafted and in June 1928 sent to a military school, but was judged there to be of a subversive attitude, apparently a declared communist, permanently employed in worker cooperatives.

When not in prison, he worked in the party executive in Radom, Kraków, Katowice, Warsaw, Łódź, Toruń, Gdynia and Włocławek, frequently relocating or in hiding.

He organized there a small circle of Polish communist sympathizers, but in June approached the Soviet authorities declaring readiness to return to Nazi-occupied Poland for conspiratorial work.

In winter his health problems reappeared and caused him to return to civilian work in the Polish section of a Soviet foreign language publishing institute.

[5] As the pro-Soviet and communist controlled Polish armed forces were being formed in the Soviet Union, in June 1943 Ochab joined the 1st Tadeusz Kościuszko Infantry Division and was enlisted as a political officer with the rank of second lieutenant.

In November Ochab was discharged from the army and directed to work for the Polish Committee of National Liberation, the nascent communist government, where he became deputy chief of the Public Administration Department.

From the beginning of 1945 the PKWN was turned into the Provisional Government and Ochab was an undersecretary in the Ministry of Public Administration, advancing in April to the post of minister.

When Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński was arrested on 25 September 1953, Ochab published an article fiercely critical of the primate in Trybuna Ludu, the party's official newspaper.

The Sejm (national legislature), until then unable to exercise any real influence, used the opportunity and declared wide amnesty, which included in the first place the trespasses of political nature.

Numerous officials deemed responsible for the Stalinist abuses were removed from their positions, including Berman, who resigned as a Politburo member in early May.

[8] What was happening under Ochab's watch turned out not to be a semi-controlled evolution of the system, because on 28 June workers in Poznań's Cegielski industrial enterprise, frustrated with their inability to redress grievances through official channels, went on strike and rioted.

At the military airfield Khrushchev first greeted a separate group of Soviet generals, then approached the Polish comrades, shaking his fist and shouting derogatory comments.

[8] After their return the Soviets displayed a more friendly approach, but Khrushchev was worried that Gomułka, the presumed next Polish communist party leader, might be a social democrat.

Ochab told Khrushchev that under the circumstances Gomułka was the best choice to lead the country, denying the Soviets the hope of taking advantage of a split within the Polish party.

In October 1959 Ochab gave up his ministerial position, but continued his supervisory role in the same area as a secretary of the Central Committee responsible for agricultural affairs.

He wrote of the "antisemitic campaign organized by the various reactionary elements, yesterday's phalangists and their today's highly placed protectors" (Mieczysław Moczar's faction in the party).

He witnessed Gomułka's fall from power in 1970 and the generational change in the PZPR and later expressed highly critical opinions regarding the use of force against the protesting workers, even though he himself had made comparable decisions in 1956.

When the Party Guidelines were published before its Sixth Congress and the rank and file was asked to debate them, Ochab took advantage of the opportunity and typed up on 30 September 1971 several pages of Introductory Critical Comments.

The letter, which included reformist, revisionist or social democratic ideas, caused an uproar because it was soon published by the Polish émigré Kultura journal in Paris under the title Edward Ochab in the Opposition.

The peculiarities of Ochab's proposed solutions included advocating the original "Leninist" ways, such as an establishment of Worker Delegate Councils in enterprises, and his belief that old comrades from the prewar Communist Party of Poland ought to be returned to power.

Stripped of its Leninist phraseology, the idea of powerful Worker Councils could be interpreted as a call for a massive labor union movement (delegates elected in all institutions employing one hundred or more people would collectively constitute a second chamber of parliament), something attempted several years later by Solidarity.

Free elections to the Sejm and local councils and especially close partnership with labor unions were urged as prerequisites to any real improvement in the country's precarious internal situation.

[11] In November 1979, as the PZPR's Eighth Congress was approaching, Ochab wrote a ten-page letter To Comrades Communists, which Jerzy Eisler characterizes as highly ideological, detached from practical usefulness.

"Such works clearly lead to a whitewashing of the reactionary rule of our capitalists and big landowners, to the slighting of the historic role of the communists in the fight against fascism and the hostile to the masses terrorist policies of the Piłsudskiites, National Democrats, ONR.

The former first secretary, who had spent a considerable part of his younger years in Sanation prisons, wrote also of the responsibility for the "spilled blood of thousands of workers and peasants murdered during the strikes and occupations, in antisemitic and anti-Ukrainian pogroms, prison and Bereza Kartuzka persecutions" resting with the "dull military regime, blinded by the hatred for the Soviet Union, the subjugated nations and the Polish masses".

Ochab felt uneasy about both the emerging great independent worker movement, the future Solidarity, and his own "communist" party that he had found so much fault with.

[11] Edward Ochab died on 1 May 1989, between the conclusion of the Round Table groundbreaking negotiations and the historic elections of 4 June, which marked the beginning of the systemic change in Poland.

At Ochab's funeral on 8 May at the Powązki Military Cemetery, Stefan Jędrychowski stressed his role in the dissemination of Khrushchev's secret report among the PZPR members in March 1956.