Włodzimierz Sokorski
Quick Facts
Biography
Włodzimierz Sokorski (2 July 1908, Oleksandrivsk – 2 May 1999, Warsaw) was a Polish communist official, writer, military journalist and eventually a Brigadier General in the Soviet-dominated People's Republic of Poland. He was the minister of culture responsible for the implementation of the Stalinist doctrine in Poland during the darkest period of gross human rights violations committed by the state security forces. During World War II he escaped to the Soviet Union.
In 1948 at the Congress of Polish Composers in Łagów he banned jazz, after a four-and-a-half-hour diatribe on the "imperialist rot" poisoning people's minds. Following the socialist thaw of the Polish October revolution, Sokorski headed the Polish radio and television committee of the Polish United Workers' Party in the 1960s, and later, the Miesięcznik Literacki ideological monthly magazine (dismantled in 1990). He wrote fake memoirs, novels with strong sexual undertones, and was showered with state medals and awards.