Wanda Vasilevsky biography

Wanda Vasilevskaya, the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of the World, Source: The National Digital Archive of Poland copied the most hated Polka - this is the most capacious characteristic of Vasilevskaya Vanda. Today the writer is surrounded by a black legend, and once she was officially considered a national heroine. People gossiped that she was Stalin’s mistress, but she deserved a censure not by a fictional novel, but by the fact that in September she betrayed Poland.

Could her life turn out differently? Wanda Vasilevskaya. At the turn of the XIX -XX centuries, they devoted themselves to the case of independence of the country, divided between three invaders. Leon Vasilevsky, the father of Wanda, in the year became the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the first government of the revived Poland. During the Soviet-Polish war, in the years, he negotiated under the terms of the Riga Treaty, which established the border between the countries.

The unusual socialist Wanda’s father hated the Soviet Union and despised everything that was connected with imperial Russia. This country was associated with him exclusively with the oppression of Poland. Because of this, he subsequently quarreled with his daughter. Wanda Vasilevskaya’s mother, also Wanda, was by no means a typical woman of that era.

From a year, she attended the highest women's courses in St. Petersburg-one of the first higher educational institutions in Russia for women. At the same time, Leon and Wanda Sr. were members of the Polish Socialist Party. From her Krakow childhood, their daughter was especially vividly remembered by the May Day demonstrations, to which they went with the whole family.

And the workers were at home with Vasilevsky as often as well -known politicians. Even a student, young Wanda Vasilevskaya joined the Polish Socialist Party. This organization was completely different from the Communist Party of Poland. The socialists intended to improve the world democratically, and the Communists - revolutionary. For socialists, the independence of Poland meant a lot, and the Communists felt like internationalists, for whom Polishness means nothing.

These two forces competed greatly with each other in the working environment. Over time, Vasilevskaya became a supporter of the so -called common front, that is, cooperation between socialists and communists. Source: Wikipedia The first husband from whom she gave birth to a daughter EVU died early, and soon Wanda met Marian in a rich man - a mason who exceeded other intellectuals in terms of knowledge.

By the standards of that time, their marriage was a kind of mesalliance: Wanda graduated from the university, Marian formally was generally without education. It was he who became the prototype of the protagonist of the debut book of the Vasilevskaya "The appearance of the day." This story, telling about the poverty and hard life of workers, is essentially its own published reports, united together.

From the point of view of the plot, they are weakly interconnected, but individual scenes are written in a wonderful living language - this is the colloquial speech of workers, sometimes a special slang of masons. Vasilevskaya generally had an exceptional reporter hearing. Some considered this debut to almost a continuation of the outstanding novel by Stefan Jerome, “The Evens of Spring”, but rather the opinion that Vasilevskaya’s work was the level of cheap novels.

That is how Cheslav Milos, the future Nobel laureate, appreciated him. Vasilevskaya, otherwise, was little worried about the recognition of professionals. She felt primarily a public figure, a book that should be understandable to the simplest people. They say that then Joseph Stalin read it. Since then, Vandu financially supported the Soviet embassy in Poland. Officially, it was a fee for books, but no one led a detailed accounting for sales.

In total, up to a year in Russian, three of her works came out: in addition to the “appearance of the day” this is the story “The Earth in Yarm” and the novel “Homeland”. Among the socialists, Wanda and Marian found the reputation of the extreme left, but Vasilevskaya never entered the pre -war Polish Communist Party. The new homeland when Germany attacked Poland on September 1, Vasilevskaya and her husband were evacuated to the east, along with thousands of other refugees.

On the road, she ran into the detachments of the Red Army - on September 17, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east. Vasilevskaya accepted the Soviet invasion as liberation. Just as Soviet propaganda inspired. She sincerely believed that the Polish oriental chips should belong to Belarus and Ukraine, because most of the population there are Belarusians and Ukrainians. She probably held these views before the war.

In the year, she began her performance at the Congress of Culture in Lviv with the words: "Greetings Ukrainian Lviv on behalf of Warsaw." However, she understood the liberation specifically. When these lands belonged to Poland, they were occupied. When the Soviet Union captured them, they, according to Vasilevskaya, became free. Although they became part of not independent Belarus and Ukraine, but the Belarusian and Ukrainian republics.

Vasilevskaya already felt like part of the international communist movement, for which the Soviet Union was the birthplace.In the eyes of public opinion, she remains a supporter of Poland as another Soviet republic. During the war, the writer, speaking of the Soviet Union, called him "our homeland." In the USSR there were lists of Poles, whom the authorities considered their potential allies.

Already in September, the Soviet authorities on the radio called on the Polish leftist writers who fled from the Germans to arrive in Lviv. Vasilevskaya was especially mentioned in these appeals. In Lviv, she was advised to meet with Nikita Khrushchev, then the first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, or writer Alexander Kornechuk, who was instructed to patronize Polish writers.

She was immediately attracted to the propaganda campaign associated with a referendum, which supposedly had to decide the fate of the Polish eastern stars. Vasilevskaya campaigned for their accession to the Belarusian and Ukrainian republics. It was then that her great career began. It was Stalin who made Vasilevskaya the most important among the Poles. At the end of the year, she arrived in Moscow and asked him for an audience.

The writer wanted to talk about the position of the Poles in Lviv, in particular, to protest against the fact that Ukrainian, which many Polish teachers did not know at the University of Lviv University. A few days later, Stalin agreed to accept it, and then they met repeatedly. We do not have an exact answer to this question, but on the basis of scraps of memories of different people, we can build hypotheses.

He undoubtedly appreciated her work. And perhaps she made an impression on him also with her insolence?

Then, however, Stalin admitted that her idea was good. During the first meeting with Vanda, he called it "dialectics." In addition, formally she was not a communist, but a socialist. Stalin dismissed the Communist Party of Poland before the war and for several years after that did not trust those who were in it. Vasilevskaya, before the war, was not a member of the checkpoint.

The Polish Communists began to be accepted at the CPSU B only at the end of the year and this happened - which is simply amazing - after the personal application of Vasilevskaya before Stalin. She herself was only officially recognized as a communist and entered the party in an accelerated mode at the direction of Stalin: “Well, his candidate experience, - accept in the party! That is why at the beginning of the year he decided to bet on a socialist - after all, socialists in Poland were always considered patriots.

From the point of view of the age difference, Stalin could rather be the father of Vanda than a lover. And in a sense, he really became her “ideological father”, replacing the biological, with which Wanda diverged in opinion on political issues long before his death. They did not talk about politics at home-this led to scandals: father and daughter quarreled because of the attitude to the Soviet Union, Communism and Stalin itself.

The newspaper “Red Banner” quoted one of the agitators: “We will give our voices for the servant of the Soviet people! Vasilevskaya’s merits to the Soviet regime were so great that the USSR with a diplomatic way achieved the export of Eva’s daughter from the Warsaw’s occupied by the Germans. It was assumed that Wanda’s mother would go with her, but she did not agree then to come to Lviv occupied by the Soviet Union.

Between and years, four waves of the export of the Poles deeper into the USSR were organized, which covered hundreds of thousands of people. Vasilevskaya reacted positively to deportations, believing that they are necessary to ensure the security of the borders of the USSR. But at the same time, she saved individuals - those who, as she believed, would be useful to Soviet power in Lviv.

She almost daily intervened in the activities of the police and the NKVD who engaged in evictions. It happened that Vasilevskaya at the last moment pulled out people from the trains. In May, several unknown men knocked on the door of the mansion, the first floor of which was shot by Vasilevskaya. They opened Marian richly. The next instant there was a shot - Vasilevskaya’s husband was killed.

There were different versions who were guilty of murder. The first thing that came to mind was Polish underground: maybe it was an unsuccessful attempt on Vasilevskaya? Years later it turned out that the Poles really prepared an action against it, but did not carry out the plan. The action of Ukrainian nationalists? Or get rid of her husband? After all, Marian richly was not so fascinated by the Soviet Union as his wife.

He drank vodka for a day with the famous Polish poet Vladislav Bronsky and complained about Soviet poverty. When Vande and Marian organized a trip around Ukraine, Wanda returned in admiration for how the republic develops, and Marian in horror from the position of people. In the same places, they saw something different, because, figuratively speaking, Marian looked carefully, and Wanda looked away.

The truth about this death was even more strange than you can imagine. Secret agents, looking for some criminal, mixed up the address.