Jan Cieplak was a Polish Roman Catholic archbishop who served as the head of the Church in the Soviet Union during the early 1920s. Born in 1857 in Dąbrowa Górnicza, he studied at the Saint Petersburg Roman Catholic Theological Academy and later served as an auxiliary bishop. He rose to prominence as the highest-ranking Catholic representative in the new Soviet state, where he faced intense persecution and a high-profile show trial conducted by Bolshevik authorities in Moscow.