Communist-era dissident Jacek Kuron dies
By MONIKA SCISLOWSKA

ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
June 17 2004

WARSAW, Poland -- Jacek Kuron, who led the struggle against Poland's communist leaders as a dissident in the 1970s and later became a popular government minister, died Thursday. He was 70.

Kuron died at the Warsaw Interior Ministry hospital after a long illness, hospital spokesman Zdzislaw Kruszynski said. Details of the illness were not immediately known.

Kuron was believed to have played an important role in the founding of Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement, which went on to play a central role on post-communist Polish governments. Walesa said Kuron brought "extraordinary merit to Poland."

"He was the unquestionable leader of anti-communist struggle in the 1970s and '80s," Walesa told The Associated Press. "There would have been no success or victory without him, without his intellect."

Vaclav Havel, who led the peaceful Velvet Revolution that brought down communism in Czechoslovakia, said Kuron had also been an inspiration to dissidents in his country.

"When we met for the first time, we were shining with energy, ideas and ideals, and we were lucky to live long enough to see the implementation of at least some of them," Havel said. "Jacek Kuron can leave this world with honor and with the feeling that he has achieved a great deal."

Born March 3, 1934 in the eastern Polish city of Lvov, now in Ukraine, Kuron became a strong supporter of the communist regime imposed by the Soviet Union following World War II.

But he had become disenchanted by 1964, and wrote a letter to the party accusing its members of betraying communist ideals and infringing on people's freedoms. The party reacted by expelling Kuron and jailing him for more than three years.

Many other incarcerations followed between 1966 and 1984, as Kuron took on a leading role in organizing student and worker demonstrations and other pro-democracy agitation.

While Walesa was the popular leader of the Solidarity movement, Kuron was widely seen as the intellectual driving force behind its founding in 1980.

He was jailed Dec. 13, 1981 in a nationwide nighttime sweep that netted hundreds of Solidarity leaders after the country's communist leader, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, imposed martial law.

Kuron played a major role in the 1989 round table talks between Solidarity and the communist authorities that led to Poland's first free elections and the ouster of communists.

He went on to became labor minister in the first democratic government, between 1989 and 1990 under Solidarity Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, gaining wide popularity in his fight to help the country's poor.

In that role, he introduced welfare programs for the unemployed and opened outdoor soup kitchens to feed people - starting the program by himself taking to the streets to serve the food.

In a nod to his efforts, welfare payments became popularly known as "Kuron's Money" and the food as "Kuron's Soup."

Kuron, who was almost always clad in jeans and a denim jacket no matter the occasion, served again as labor minister under Solidarity's third government, under Prime Minister Hanna Suchocka, between 1992 and 1993.

Kuron made an unsuccessful bid for president in 1995, after which his health deteriorated significantly and he retreated from public life.

He is survived by his second wife Danuta, who spent days at his hospital bedside, and son Maciej. Funeral arrangements have not yet been set.

Jacek Kuron, led Polish resistance

New York Times
Posted on Sat, Jun. 19, 2004

Jacek Kuron, who inspired and tutored generations of Poles to struggle against Communist rule, serving as the ultimately successful godfather of a resistance that coalesced around the Solidarity labor union movement, died Thursday in Warsaw. He was 70 and had been ill for more than a year.

A spokesman for the Hospital of the Interior Ministry announced his death, the Associated Press reported.

Mr. Kuron's death came under the jurisdiction of the same ministry that had been his host for an imprisonment of almost 10 years in the Communist era. At the end, however, it was a benevolent ministry in a democratic Poland that cared for him as an honored citizen who had helped to bring about Poland's emergence from totalitarian rule, a man who went on to serve in Parliament and as labor minister, and who also ran for president, winning 10 percent of the vote in 1995.

On Thursday, his old partners in resistance joined with current political leaders in praising Mr. Kuron, who had challenged Communist rulers first as an ardent and ideological young party member in the 1950s and then kept training generations of dissidents as an outcast who was continuously hounded and imprisoned.

``Without him, the events of August 1980 would have been impossible,'' said Lech Walesa, the leader of Solidarity and democratic Poland's first president, referring to the strikes at the Gdansk shipyard and the union's historic victory.

In the final chapter of his fight against the Communist system, in the 1980s, Mr. Kuron gained national prominence and international attention as the senior organizer and guiding spirit of KOR, the Committee to Assist Workers, which first mobilized support for striking workers in 1976. It soon became a rallying point for many of the country's intellectuals, cultural figures and students who provided support and resources to the industrial workers, miners and farmers then trying to build an independent labor federation