Jacek Kuron, one of the most outstanding Polish politicians and social activists, died on June 17. He was 70 years old. He was a member of the group of co-founders and main activists of the Polish democratic opposition. Because of his intransigence, courage and devotion, he enjoyed the greatest social respect and trust among all Polish politicians. (29-JUN-04)
Jacek Kuron was born in Lvov /currently in the Ukraine/ in 1934. After the war, he became involved in a scouts´ movement linked with the structures of the Polish United Workers´ Party, of which he was a member. However, at the beginning of the 1950s, he was expelled from the party for criticising the system. He rejoined it following the turning point of 1956. He studied history at the Warsaw University, and in 1957 he obtained a doctorate at this school´s Pedagogic Department. The 60s brought about an increase in Kuron´s critical attitude towards the socialist system. He joined the Political Discussion Club at the WU, where he and others debated, first and foremost, on the means of repairing socialism. In 1965, he was arrested, along with Karol Modzelewski, and sentenced to a 3-year imprisonment in association with the distribution of their “Open Letter to the Members of PZPR (the Polish United Workers´ Party) and the Warsaw University´s ZMP (Socialist Youth Union)”, in which they criticised the lack of democracy in Poland. After being released in 1968, he joined in the students´ protests against the regime and was once again arrested. In the 1970s and 80s, despite further arrests, surveillance and threats, he did not seize in his efforts to support democracy and human rights: he was the co-founder of the Committee for the Defence of Workers, a Solidarity activist, the author of articles for the underground press. In 1989, he was one of the participants of the historical Round Table proceedings, during which the opposition and the communist authorities jointly discussed the extent of political reforms in Poland. After the fall of Communism, Jacek Kuron was a four-term representative of the Sejm and the Minister of Labour and Social Affairs in the democratic Poland´s first two cabinets. He took over the most difficult department in order to help those, who lost the most in the new social and political reality. /He introduced, among others, an unemployment benefit, which is currently commonly known in Poland as “kuroniowka”./ During that period he initiated a series of social activities, which were aimed at subduing the results of the economic transformation. In 1995, following his defeat in the presidential elections – he was third behind Aleksander Kwasniewski and Lech Walesa – he withdrew from political life and concentrated on social work and writing. One of his final ventures was the Open University, an educational project, a kind of “school of life” for young people from villages and small towns, from areas troubled by unemployment, who have difficulties in finding their way in the surrounding reality.
Jacek Kuron published, among others: an autobiography “Faith and Guilt: Toward and Away from Communism”, “My Soup” /as the Minister of Employment and Social Policies he became famous for the action, which involved cooking a soup for the poorest/, “Star Time”, “The Polish People´s Republic for Beginners” /co-written together with Jacek Zakowski/, “Seven Years or Who Stole Poland”, “Activism. If we do not control our life, it controls us”. In April 2004, in association with the European Economic Forum, which took place in Warsaw, he published the “Letter to my Friends the Alterglobalists”, in which he discussed the educational revolution: the possibilities created by the development of technology and globalisation in the area of the common access to education and the challenges associated with this.
