r/BalticSSRs

Photo 1: Halina Sadowska-Wasilewska (later years)

Photo 2: Bohdan Czeszko (photo taken sometime before 1950, likely in 1948 or 1949.

I must also mention that some leftists even joined AK because sometimes it was the only resistance group in their respective areas, not all AK engaged against Soviet forces militarily, and leftists of the Syndicalist Brigade within AK refused to drop the red-and black flag on orders of reactionary Polish leadership of the AK, and the Syndicalist Brigade was even militarily honored by the USSR and incorporated into People’s Poland’s government structures. It is important to understand these nuances regarding the AK and their relationship to the communist movement.

Zofia was born into a working class Polish family in Guzów on October 2nd, 1887. She worked in a sugar factory in Żyrardów for her first job. Then, she worked at the Kipra shoe factory in Warsaw. She joined the revolutionary faction of the Polish Socialist Party. This was a faction that was friendly to many early Polish socialists, such as Rosa Luxembourg. This faction of the PPS is not to be confused with the nationalist, more right-liberal party of a similar name of PPS. Jagodzińska was a leftist in every sense of the word. On August 18th, 1906, Jagodzińska and two associates, Wanda Krahelska and Albertyna Herbertówna, hatched a plot to kill the Tsarist governor-general of Warsaw, Georgy Skalon. Jagodzinśka and company had ties to Polish leftists in other cities such as Vilnius and Lviv (today Lithuania and Ukraine). Krahelska is also especially notable, for being an early founder of the Zegota society, founded by Poles for the mutual aid of Jews during the German occupation of Poland.

Skalon was also known, but for reactionary, insidious reasons. Skalon was born in St. Petersburg in 1847 to Anton Skalon (originally Scallon, later changed to Skalon) and Yuliya Sievers. His father was a French Huegenot who fled France to Sweden and later Russia, joining the Tsarist military. His mother Yulia was a Baltic-German of the prominent Sievers family, which were one of many notable colonial nobility families in the Tsarist military of the Russian Empire. Skalon was particularly brutal in his repression both of Polish aspirations for independence as well as of Polish leftists in particular. He also possessed proto-Nordicist beliefs, believing that Baltic Germans should become the dominant ruling class of the Russian Empire and enter into a military alliance with Prussia. Despite being half French and having Russian national citizenship, he also maintained a German ethnic and cultural identity, to the point of ethnic nationalism, as well as practicing Lutheran Christianity like most Germans. He also stacked much of his administration in Poland in the Vistula region with other Baltic Germans , and kept especially close ties to another Russian Baltic-German general, Sergei Witte, and even maintained ties to the German consul in Warsaw, August Brück. According to his deputy, a Russian named Alexei Brusilov, he even expressed that not only should Russia enter an alliance with Germany, but that the Germans should rule all of it. Disgusted by this, Brusilov reported Skalon’s comments to the Tsarist Minister of War, Vladimir Sukhomlinov. However it had no consequences for Skalon; Sukhomlinov was already friendly with him and took his side, and demoted Brusilov to a lower post job and forcibly transferred him to Kiev.

Skalon remains one of the most brutal Russian Empire figures in Polish history. In a letter from July 4th, 1906 addressed to the Tsarist Minister of internal affairs, Skalon wrote “Fighting revolutionary terrorist attacks, in my opinion, is possible only with the help of even stronger terror on the part of government authorities, that is, the way of full realization of Article Twelfth Martial Law, up to the application of the death penalty without a court sentence. This drastic policy contributed to the gradual elimination of the revolutionary boil in Polish lands.”

Skalon also believed in prominent anti-Semitic theories in the Russian Empire, including believing that socialist parties, trade unions, and Polish liberation movements were all created by Jews. Between 1905 to 1908, Skalon ordered executions of roughly 1,000 people in the Vistula region. About 300 were executed in Warsaw. On November 1st 1905, Skalon ordered a demonstration broken up, and dozens were killed and hundreds injured. Robotnik (“Worker”), a Polish socialist magazine, blamed Scalon personally, claiming Skalon ordered a Cossack garrison to disperse the protest and shoot those who ran. This claim was later established to be correct, as per documented secret instruction, Skalon ordered garrisons “to consider the crowds of demonstrators as gangs of insurgents and to fire to complete extermination, not to allow any rallies and rallies, if detected, to disperse with firearms.”

With all of this, Jagodzinśka and company knew something had to be done about Skalon to liberate the people. On August 18th, 1906, in Warsaw, on 9 Natolinska Street, Jagodzinśka and her team placed two bombs into his carriage. When he entered, the bombs detonated, and he was badly injured with a head injury, but not killed. However, this proved a point, as, fearing possible assassination, Skalon later decided to decline handing out death sentences to activists. A few months later, she attempted to kill him again in Vilnius, failing again. This time, she was caught and imprisoned for life in the Warsaw citadel, later transferred to the notorious Butyrka prison in Moscow. She was later freed in the February Revolution by the Bolsheviks and returned to Poland. She lived the rest of her life outside of prison, marrying a fellow Polish leftist revolutionary whom she met in activism, whose name was Piotr. She unfortunately died in Nazi occupied Warsaw in 1940, never living to see Poland be free of fascism and liberated by socialism.