The article analyzes relations between communist forces and legal Ukrainian political parties on the territory of the Eastern Galicia and Volhynia during the period of 1920s. Ukrainian communists were ready to cooperate only with socialist parties (mainly Ukrainian Social Democratic Party (USDP). Their particular goal was to subordinate these structures and organizations and coordinate their activities. This was the main way to take part in the legal political life of the region. In the middle of 1920s, it was clear that procommunist tendencies would not dominate in other, even left, parties. None of the Ukrainian legal political parties wanted to cooperate with left radical movement, considering them as agents of Moskow and Warsaw, and enemies of Ukrainians in Poland. This position defined the character of the relation between Ukrainian forces in the inter-war period in Poland.

The article is depicts the Soviet government’s policy on higher education on an example of the Petrograd medical institute. During the first decade Bolshevik’s policy has evolved, at first it had “Decree” character and has not affected the internal life of universities and institutes. In the mid1920s started the second phase, characterized by displacement of the old professors, admission of students on the class principle and the formation of the new Soviet intelligentsia. By the end of the 1920s, students became obedient media for the Bolsheviks, that allowed to completely abandon all of the higher school pre-revolutionary heritage.

The article discusses the position of Władysław Gomułka, the leading Polish communist official, the leader of the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) and later of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), on the Katyń crime committed by the Soviets on Polish prisoners of war – officers of the Polish Army. Throughout his political career, Gomułka consistently and by various means acted to hide the truth on the Soviet responsibility for Katyń crime. When in April 1943 Germans announced to the world that in 1940 the officers of the Polish Army were murdered by the Soviets in the Katyń forest, Gomułka gave his support to the untruthful version of events presented by the Soviet authorities. Soviet communists, followed also by Polish communists, falsely blamed the German Third Reich for the Katyń massacre and accused German authorities of staging in 1943 an anti-Soviet provocation, allegedly supported by the Polish Government in exile in London and the Underground Movement in Poland. From 1943 till 1948 Gomułka, as an activist of PPR, promoted Katyń lie, in particular highlighting the thesis on participation of Polish right-wing circles in the provocation against the Soviet Union. During the German occupation he did it mainly in communist underground press, and from mid-1944 he also used his public speeches to propagate the lies. From 1956 till 1970, as the leader of PZPR, Gomułka still supported the Katyń lie by using censorship to suppress any discussion on it, while not abandoning the false Soviet version of the events blaming Germans for the massacre. Only when he lost power and finished his political career in 1970, Gomułka conceded in his diaries that the Soviet story about Katyń was false, but he still insisted that he did the right thing when he supported the lies about Katyń.