Legends don’t Die...

Jacek Kuron, a noted public and political figure, one of the leading champions of the European humanistic tradition, known in Poland and far beyond its borders, died June 17 in Warsaw, after a grave disease.

Jacek Kuron was born in Lviv, in 1934. He graduated from the history department of Warsaw University and was a member of the Polish United Workers Party for some time before he was expelled for his principled civic stand, lost his job, and was even thrown behind bars after writing an open letter to the party members. In 1988, Kuron became a member of the Solidarity’s organizing committee headed by Lech Wa l ю

esa. Under Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, he became minister of labor and social policy. He was elected to the Sejm and chaired the national and ethnic minorities commission; he was an active researcher and journalist, and the author of several books. In 2002, Jacek Kuron was the third Pole (after John Paul II and Zbigniew Brzezinski) to become an honorary citizen of Lviv. He was also awarded the Ukrainian Order of Saint Volodymyr.l

Jacek Kuron cut a significant figure for Ukraine as well; he was among the first to show understanding of the Ukrainian stand in the Lviv military cemetery conflict. He wrote an article titled I Understand the Ukrainians , carried by the Den’ (March 2002). Radio Liberty informed about his death, stressing that he was one of those Polish dissidents who tried to establish contact with Ukrainian anticommunist dissidents even under the communist rule. In the late 1980s, he acted as a go-between when arrangements were made for an informal meeting between Solidarity, Ukrainian Helsinki Committee, and Czechoslovak anticommunist movement activists in the Polish mountains. Later, as a veteran chairman of the parliamentary ethnic minorities commission, Jacek Kuron actively defended the rights of the Polish Jews, Germans, White Russians, and perhaps above all, of the ethnic Ukrainians...

Visnyk UVKR quoted Kuron as saying, in an interview with the Polish newspaper Nasze Slowo (June 7, 2002), “Each of us has the great Fatherland, whose language he speaks and thanks to which he has his self-identity. Each of us also has a small homeland, where his home stands and his ancestors are buried... This homeland is the source of strength of every human being... I am proud to have the same small homeland as the Ukrainians, that we are sons of one homeland.” “This common homeland is our strength that must be enhanced and expanded,” he wrote in an open letter to the City Council of Lviv, adding that “animosity is aimed against the independence of our nations,” that Polish-Ukrainian friendship grows with the younger generations in both countries, and that the future belongs to them.

In another article carried by the Den’ (March 2003), dedicated to the anniversary of the events in Volyn, Jacek Kuron wrote that Western Ukraine and Southeast Poland have been close neighbors for 1,000 years. Their history has beautiful pages, but is still permeated with grievances and revenge. The land has not absorbed all the blood; this blood begets avengers and no one can tell now who was the first to start all that and when. In the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, when mass national self-consciousness was forming almost simultaneously in Poland and Ukraine, Poland had on two occasions made it impossible for Ukraine to achieve independence. Ukraine has never done that to Poland. Despite all this, the Poles and Ukrainians profess the same Word and Jesus says, addressing all of us, Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thy own eye. This is precisely why (Kuron wrote) the Ukrainians should forgive the Poles. Although neither the Ukrainians nor the Poles have reached that stage of perception, they are moving in that direction every day, every year.

COMMENTARY

Prof. Stanislav KULCHYTSKY, D.S. (History):

Electronic and printed media carry materials about Jacek Kuron after he died, June 17, at age 70, after a grave disease.

He was referred to as the Polish Andrey Sakharov. Indeed, his role and importance in the intellectual life and dissident movement of Poland, in the 1960s-1980s, matched those of Andrey Sakharov in Soviet public and political life.

Jacek Kuron could also be described as a Polish shistdesiatnyk (man of the sixties’). He joined the ruling Polish United Workers Party in 1957, but quickly disowned communist ideology. In 1964, hr set up a political debating club at the Warsaw University (where he worked at the time) and published a manifesto condemning the national economic policy. After he was expelled from the party, Kuron addressed an open letter to his former comrades. This cost him three years in jail. In 1968, he took an active part in antigovernment student rallies and was jailed again. He was released in 1971 and became one of the most reputed leaders of the democratic opposition.

In 1976, Kuron and a group of dissidents founded the Workers’ Defense Committee (known as KOR) that would serve as the basis of Solidarity in 1980. After the martial law was enforced in Poland (December 1980), he was interned and then arrested. Pressured by world public opinion, the authorities released him in 1984 (formally under an amnesty).

In 1989, Jacek Kuron was among the organizers of a round table between the organized opposition and the government, that would commence the velvet revolution. In the joint elections of 1989, he became a member of the Sejm and minister of labor and social policy in Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s first noncommunist government, later to join Hanna Suchocka’s cabinet.

He was an historian by training and often published excellent newspaper articles. Now and then he would compile them and publish them as books abroad, or as samizdat editions in Poland. In 1995, he ran for presidency, but lost the campaign to Alexander Kwasniewski.

Jacek Kuron enjoyed marked respect at home and abroad. On the thirtieth anniversary of the events of March 1968, he was conferred the highest Polish award, the Order of the White Eagle. The French government awarded him a Legion d’honneur, the German government, the Cross of Merit, and the President of Ukraine, the Order of Yaroslav the Wise.

Jacek Kuron was born in Lviv and he was always a good friend of the Ukrainian people. The City Council of Lviv conferred on him the status of an honorary citizen of Lviv; he was the third Pole to receive it — after John Paul II (Karol Wojtyla) and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

For as long as his health permitted, he worked for the Ukrainian-Polish Forum, founded in 1996 as a nonprofit organization aimed at expanding Ukrainian-Polish cooperation. His passing is a great loss for both the Polish and Ukrainian peoples.