Scout, soldier, publicist, socialist. On 5th January 1901, Adam Ciołkosz, one of the leaders of the Polish Socialist Party and an intransigent anti-communist, was born in Krakow.

He grew up in a patriotic family fostering the memory of the January Uprising, in which his grandfather had participated. From a young age, Ciolkosz was involved in the scouting movement. In September 1918, he organised a scout group called “National Emergency”, helping members of the Polish Military Organisation to disarm Austrian posts, after which he took part in the battles for Lwów.

During the Polish-Soviet War, he fought in the defence of Grodno, Vilnius and Warsaw, being wounded in the Battle of Niemen. As a participant in the Third Silesian Uprising, he took part in the Battle of St. Anne’s Mountain, for which he was awarded the Cross of Silesian Ribbon of Valour and Merit.

During his studies at the Faculty of Law and Administration of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, he became involved with the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), soon becoming editor of the daily “Forward”. In 1928, when he was 27, he was elected deputy from the PPS list in the parliamentary elections. He was re-elected in November 1930, but this time on the Centrolew list, even though he was a prisoner in the Brest Fortress at the time. As a declared political opponent of the ruling party, he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment.

After the outbreak of World War II, Ciołkosz stayed in exile, co-directing the PPS exile structures in Great Britain. From 1940 to 1941, he was a member of the National Council of the Republic of Poland – a consultative and opinion-forming body of the President and the Polish Government in Exile. He opposed the decisions of the Yalta Conference (1945), demanding truly free, democratic parliamentary elections in Poland. He sought economic aid for the country, striving for the broadest possible integration of Poland with the West. To the end of his days, he regarded the communist system as an ideological degeneration, claiming that “socialists reject any dictatorship, including the dictatorship of the proletariat, which in practice takes the form of the tyranny of the communist party shielding the rule of the bureaucracy and the ‘apparatchiks’ of the ruling monoparty”. His uncompromising stance earned him a place on the list of publicists whose articles were banned from publication altogether during the communist period.

He died on 1 October 1978 in London.