Jacek Kuroń

Jacek Kuroń ( born March 3, 1934 in Lviv, † June 17, 2004 in Warsaw) was a Polish civil rights activist, journalist, historian, educator and politician.

Biography

Jacek Kuroń, one of the leaders of the democratic opposition in the People's Republic of Poland, co-founded the Committee for the Defense of the workers in the 1970s, and Solidarity, one of the closest collaborators of Lech Wałęsa. He was a member of the opposition side in the round table conference in 1989. During the first democratically elected government was Kuroń 1989-1993 Social Affairs and Labour. In 1992 and 1993 he joined the political party Unia Wolności ( German: Freedom Union ) to. In the presidential election in 1995, he received more than nine percent of the vote.

Kuroń had a long career as an opposition in communist Poland, which was marked by numerous detentions. First, however, he was a functionary of the Communist Youth League Związek Młodzieży Polskiej in the period of Stalinism. From 1952 to 1953, from 1956 to 1964 he was a member of the communist Polish United Workers' Party ( PZPR ), was expelled twice for open criticism. In 1964 he was first arrested by the Polish security service for 48 hours. In 1965 he was sentenced to three years in prison, but in 1967 released.

In 1964 he used together with Karol Modzelewski and with the help of Adam Michnik, a Marxist critique of the communist system, the open letter to the members of the underground organization of the Polish United Workers' Party and members of the college organization of the Association of Socialist Youth at Warsaw University. During the student riots in March 1968 in Warsaw, he was arrested again and sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison and 1971 released. In 1975 he was involved in organizing protests against the new version of the Constitution of the People's Republic of Poland.

During the August 1980 strikes in Gdansk he was taken preventively detained and came to the August agreement between the regime and Solidarity released in September. After the imposition of martial law from 1981 to 1984 he was imprisoned for three years.

12 September 1989 to 14 December 1990 and of July 11, 1992 to October 26, 1993, he was labor minister in the governments of Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Suchocka. He ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 1995.

At the request of the children, he received the International Award as a Cavalier of the Order of the Smile.

Kuroń died on the night of June 17, 2004 after a long cancer.

Writings

• Karol Modzelewski with: Open Letter to the United Polish Workers' Party. Agitprop pressure, Kiel 1968.
• Karol Modzelewski with: monopoly socialism. Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg 1969.
• Faith and guilt. Once communism and back. Build, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-351-02148-8.
• Dilemmas of social policy. Neue Kritik, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-8015-0270-8.