He joined the Communist Party of Poland in 1920. In November 1921 he was stripped of his immunity as a member of the parliament and arrested for anti-state agitation. Sentenced to six years in prison in July 1922, he was exchanged for Polish prisoners in the Soviet Union in 1923. In October 1923 he became vice-president of the Peasant International. After Stalin's rise to power, he moved to Minsk where he became vice-president of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences. From 1932 to 1937 he also was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Byelorussia.[1] Like most of the Polish communist activists in the Soviet Union he was arrested and executed during the Great Purge - after a confession was extracted from him in which he claimed to have directed the Polish Military Organization in the entire Soviet Union.[2] He was exonerated in 1956.