After Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky and Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, Ivan Aleksandrovich Serov was the number one figure in Soviet security. Serov was the only official in the Soviet Union to be the head of both the “civilian” Committee for State Security (KGB) and the military Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU). He is the author of diaries, which he kept — on an ongoing basis and in secret — for almost a quarter of a century. Shortly after the release of the Russian version (Записки из чемодана. Тайные дневники первого председатёля КГБ, найденные черёз 25 лет после его снерти, 2016), Serov’s diaries were published in Polish, under the title Tajemnice walizki generała Sierowa. Dzienniki pierwszego szefa KGB. 1939—1963 [Secrets out of General Serov’s Suitcase. Diaries of the First Head of the KGB, 1939—1963] (ed. A. Hinsztejn, tr. A. Janowski, J. Cichocki, published by REA-SJ, Konstancin-Jeziorna 2019, pp. 863). For historians, this is an invaluable source of knowledge. Adam Lityński has supported his arguments in this article primarily on this document.
Serov conducted the forced resettlement (“pacification”) of the eastern half of Poland and the Baltic states when, in 1939, as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact (Ribbentrop-Molotov), they had fallen under Soviet occupation. Then, after 1944, he went on to conduct a bloody resettlement of the whole of Poland when Soviet troops had entered there. Next, he was sent to Germany when Berlin was being stormed in April 1945. His tasks included: finding the living or dead leaders of the Third Reich, capturing German experts in charge of the construction of modern weapons and bringing them to the Soviet Union, and supervising the dismantling of important factories and transporting them to the USSR. He performed all these tasks perfectly.

After World War II, in 1945, the Military Legal Review — a law journal known and valued before 1939 — was reactivated.
The reactivated quarterly was one of the many tools which the communist regime used for ideological struggle. The journal promoted a new, revolutionary approach to the theory of law and the practice of jurisprudence.
The content of the publications in the Military Legal Review was addressed not only to military lawyers, but also to military commanders and representatives of the communist political apparatus. The journal propagated the “proper” worldview in the readers, one that was consistent with the party line.

In the years 1950—1955, “secret sections” operated in the common judiciary. Commonly referred to in the literature on the subject as the “secret court”, they aere informal units designed for a special way of dealing with criminal cases. At the beginning of 1950, a “secret section” was organized in the Department of Judicial Supervision in the Ministry of Justice as a body adjudicating in cases in the first instance. In the second half of 1950, a similar section was established in the Court of Appeal in Warsaw. And on January 1, 1951, in the Voivodship Court for the city of Warsaw, Section III was created in Department IV and referred to as the section for matters of particular importance. In mid-1951, a “secret section” was created in the Supreme Court as an appellate organ. Between 1950 and 1955, a total of 506 criminal cases against 626 people were heard in this way. These cases were tried by judges trusted by the party, with the participation of public defenders elected from a list drawn up and approved by the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party. The penalties imposed by the “secret court” were very severe: 1/3 of these sentences are sentences of 10 years and longer; also, nine death sentences were carried out.

The article examines the course of the debate on the draft criminal code of the Polish People’s Republic of 1969 in the context of the law on misdemeanors. Two issues have been analyzed. The first is the influence of the material element of the prohibited act (social danger) on the distinction between misdemeanors and crimes. The second is the problem of qualifying the act of driving a motor vehicle in land traffic under the influence of alcohol or other intoxicants. The analysis has shown that the distinction between crime and misdemeanor was associated not so much with theoretical concerns, but primarily with ideological and political ones. In the case of a negligible social danger of a prohibited act in the sense stipulated by the Criminal Code, the legislator provided the possibility of the offender being held liable before another authority, including for a misdemeanor. This mechanism was consistent with the ideological approach to the alleged disappearance — or the “withering away” — of crime in the people’s state as the socialist revolution progressed. On the other hand, the issue of driving a vehicle under the influence of alcohol or another intoxicant was treated as a misdemeanor exclusively due to the need to keep the statistics of convictions down, and not because of this act’s low harmfulness (danger).

Dorota Nowicka’s aim in this article is to discuss the genesis, basics of activity, competences, and structure of the apparatus of repression of the Polish People’s Republic, which undoubtedly was the Department of Security (Resort Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego, RBP), subsequently the Ministry of Public Security (Ministerstwo Bezpieczeństwa Publicznego, MBP). Nowicka presents both the events of World War II, which for the following years decided the fate of the country and Polish society, marking them with human tragedies, as well as those which strengthened the new regime.
The article is divided into several parts. In the first section, Nowicka discusses Poland’s situation during the war in the context of the implementation of Stalin’s plans. In the second section, she discusses the process of creating an apparatus of repression both in terms of structure and legal regulations. This part is thematically related to the annex, which contains examples of “legal” acts, which not only regulated the activities of the ministry, but also imposed obligations and penalties on society, including the death penalty. These acts had little to do with law-making and they contradicted all rules and regulations. This fact, however, was not important, as each operation was based on a regulation. The third section presents the organization of the department and its successor at the central and field level. It also contains information about individuals who systematically and with full commitment implemented Stalin’s criminal policy. The concluding section brings a summary of the position of the RBP and then the MBP in the process of enslaving the Polish nation.

Recently, Marcin Łyska published a monograph entitled Prawo wykroczeń Polski Ludowej [The Law of Misdemeanors of the Polish People’s Republic] (Białystok 2020, pp. 136). Łyska begins his reflections in 1918. He presents the French system with the tripartite division of crimes (felonies, misdemeanours, and petty offences), the Austrian system, and the German system. The Polish codification of the substantive law of offences of 11 July 1932 was the result of many years of scientific debate by the members of the Criminal Department of the Codification Commission of the Second Republic of Poland.

The introduction of the socialist model of penal and administrative jurisprudence began with the act of 20 March 1950. On the other hand, the pre-war mandate and prescriptive procedures were preserved in an unchanged form. The final codification of the law of misdemeanors of the Polish People’s Republic took place on May 20, 1971. The provisions of some of the acts analyzed here are still in force today. The third stage of the codification of the law on misdemeanors took place in the Third Polish Republic.