Word: bierut
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...scene was Warsaw's renovated, horseshoe-shaped Parliament Hall. One by ore, the members walked to a wicker basket in front of the speaker's dais to vote in Poland's first postwar presidential election. Everyone knew that the winner would be Boleslaw Bierut, who for 24 months had been the Communist-stooge Provisional President...
Stubborn, glum Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, the Polish Peasant Party's leader, tried, amidst jeers, to block the steamroller. Although he and 25 members of his party, now the sole opposition in Parliament, dropped blank votes in the basket, the result was foregone. Next day Bierut named husky, hard-faced, 35-year-old Josef Cyrankiewicz, an able and energetic left-wing Socialist, as Premier. Egg-bald Cyrankiewicz is a onetime artillery officer who was liberated by U.S. troops from the infamous German prison camp at Mauthausen. He has come up fast. Right-wing Socialists accuse him of double-crossing them...
...Bierut's seven-year term as President began with much ceremony, flecked with U.S. and British icicles. Britain's Ambassador Victor Cavendish-Bentinck and U.S. Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane stayed away from the Parliament's opening, a mild underscoring of their Governments' protests that it was unfairly elected.* To answer that charge, Poland's Government announced that 68 of its Electoral Commission members and guard had been killed "by the underground" during the election campaign. Mikolajczyk had said that 18 of his party's workers had been killed or died of "mistreatment...
...niceties of diplomacy were not entirely ignored. President Bierut held a formal reception (the invitations specified le cutaway). Britain's Cavendish-Bentinck and the U.S.'s Lane (in a dark business suit) showed up, shook Bierut's hand, drank his health, sat for an hour at a big round table and exchanged pleasantries with Bierut, Berman and others of the ruling clique. There was no hint of tension or mention of terror. Explained a Pole: "Everyone was extremely cordial and polite; after all, we are all gentlemen...
...banned from the election lists in ten districts, others had been imprisoned, 24 had been killed (TIME, Jan. 13). Mikolajczyk himself, though he was a Vice Premier of the Government, waited two and a half hours amidst a booing and jeering crowd to cast his vote. Provisional President Boleslaw Bierut and other Government members were whisked in & out of the same polling place by a phalanx of police...