Ludwik Warynski

Born Sept. 24, 1856; died Feb. 13, 1889. Prominent figure in the Polish socialist movement. Born in the village of Martynovka, in present-day Kanev Raion, Cherkassy Oblast, into a family of the dvorianstvo (nobility or gentry).

In November 1875, Warynski was expelled from St. Petersburg Institute of Technology for participating in student disorders and sent to enforced residence at his home. In the autumn of 1876 he went to Warsaw, where he became an organizer of workers’ circles and of groups to collect funds for the resistance. He also helped to work out the first printed program of the Polish socialists, the Brussels Program of 1879. In late 1878 he lived in L’vov and then in Kraków. In February 1879 he was arrested by the Austro-Hungarian police. At his trial, in February-April 1880, he defended the ideas of socialism. By decision of the court he was expelled from Austria-Hungary. In 1880 and 1881 he lived in Geneva, where he studied the works of Marx and Engels and became a member of the Polish socialist group Równość. Late in 1881 he returned to Warsaw, where he united the socialist and workers’ study circles then existing in Poland into a single party, the Proletariat Party. In September 1883 he was arrested and sentenced by a tsarist court in 1885 to 16 years of penal labor. He died in prison in the Schlissel’burg Fortress.