In a country where communist ideology and symbols face legal persecution and repeated attempts to outlaw their party, Polish communists refuse to retreat into silence. Openly honouring their revolutionary heritage, members and supporters of the Communist Party of Poland (KPP) paid tribute to fallen comrades, anti-fascist fighters and Soviet soldiers on 1st November, demonstrating political courage in the face of relentless anti-communist pressure.

In Kraków, communists visited the graves of prominent militants of the pre-war Communist Party, including Jan Hećko, a former prisoner in the notorious Bereza Kartuska detention camp; Józef Łabuz, a member of the anti-Nazi People’s Guard; and Jonasz Stern, a communist painter and intellectual. Similar com memorations took place in Dąbrowa Górnicza and Warsaw, where party members honoured communist militants, Polish volunteers who fought fascism in Spain, People’s Guard partisans who fought the Nazis in the Second World War and the People’s Army of the old Polish People’s Republic that was dissolved by counter-revolutionary forces in 1989. They also remembered deceased members of the contemporary KPP.

In Hajnówka, communists paid tribute at the Soviet military cemetery, where more than 3,000 Soviet soldiers who died during the Second World War are buried.

These acts of remembrance carry particular significance in Poland, where the reactionary political establishment has repeatedly sought to criminalise communist activity and erase the revolutionary traditions of the working-class movement. In December 2025, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled that the KPP was unconstitutional, leading to its removal from the official register of political parties. Following a legal challenge, the party secured its reinstatement in April 2026, although its legal struggle has not been definitively resolved.

Against this background, the public commemorations represent more than a tribute to fallen comrades. They are an act of defiance against the anti-communist campaign that seeks to suppress the party and rewrite Poland’s revolutionary and anti-fascist history.