An intellectual force behind the Solidarity movement

Jacek Kuron Jacek Kuron, who has died aged 70, was one of the serious brains behind the Solidarity trade union in Poland, almost…

Jacek KuronJacek Kuron, who has died aged 70, was one of the serious brains behind the Solidarity trade union in Poland, almost from the moment it was formed in 1980; emerging, with steadily increasing stature, in the tumultuous years after Lech Walesa became the shipyard workers' leader in Gdansk in 1970.

If Walesa was the right man at the right time, with a thick skin and an untutored willingness to take the lead as the struggles with the communist authorities grew in intensity, then Kuron, and a handful of others, were precisely the right people to have behind him.

Their role was to provide a sort of intellectual brute force, an educated and calculating recklessness and the sort of irreverence for the communist system that only a one-time party member such as Kuron could provide.

They had the imagination and the humanity, which too many Polish party leaders tended to lack, and - at least as important - they had their own inside knowledge of the party's workings, its personnel and its intentions. This gave them an almost sophisticated capability, which the demagogic Walesa lacked, to assess realistic possibilities for political action in Poland.

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Kuron was born in Lvov (now Lviv, in Ukraine) and educated at Warsaw University. He had been, when the ascetic Wladyslaw Gomulka had been in the springtime of his political career immediately after the death of Stalin, an ardent member of the Polish United Workers' Party. He had joined aged 19 in 1953, then lapsed for a few years before rejoining in 1956.

He remained in the party until 1964, but even by then had become a marked man. In 1965 he was sent to prison for writing an open letter to leading party members advocating the overthrow of the Gomulka regime, whose leader had in the intervening years become a self-preserving conservative.

In the early months of 1968, during neighbouring Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring, Kuron was seen as a spiritual instigator of student demonstrations in Poland and was sent back to prison for three years.

The increasingly clueless Gomulka was replaced as Polish party leader in 1971 by Edward Gierek, one of whose (initially successful) slogans was "I am a worker like you". As a seeming moderniser, however, he also lacked the imaginative touch.

In June 1976 his prime minister, Piotr Jaroszewicz, later denounced for corruption, announced swingeing price rises. Inevitably, given the deteriorating political climate, workers downed tools across the country. The riot police took the law into their own hands, and the government cancelled key subsidies, leading to deprivation.

The reaction of Kuron, together with Adam Michnik, another formidable intellectual, was to form the Workers' Defence Committee, known as KOR, which campaigned in public and through the underground newspaper, the Worker, for the release of prisoners and an inquiry into police violence. There was no turning back.

Throughout the turmoil that ensued, Kuron constantly pleaded for sanity, warning against provoking what could be seen - in Moscow as well as Warsaw - as any threat to the leading role of the party, and anything that could bring in Soviet tanks.

Under the martial law regime imposed by Gen Wojciech Jaruzelski in December 1980, Kuron was consistently keen to avoid what he insisted would be unnecessary strike action, although he was willing to concede the implicit support for the people's cause in the visits of the Polish-born Pope John Paul II.

In 1980 Kuron became a member of Solidarity's national committee and remained a member of Walesa's inner circle, joining the talks to reach an understanding with the Jaruzelski government in 1988-89.

By then he had once again been sentenced, in 1981, for "attempting to subvert the political system". But he had been released under an amnesty in August 1984 and, within a few years, was a member of a key group looking at the feasibility of political reforms in Poland.

In the 1989 elections, held at a time when regimes throughout eastern Europe were experiencing political subsidence, Kuron was elected to the Polish parliament, the Sejm, as a Solidarity candidate.

In the first post-communist administration he served as minister of labour, an appointment greeted in the Sejm with a standing ovation. He introduced welfare programmes for the unemployed, set up soup kitchens and was active on key policy committees.

He continued writing intermittent tracts on social and political themes and produced a two-part autobiography. In 1995 he failed, probably because of poor organisation, to secure nomination in the Polish presidential elections.

Jacek Jan Kuron: born, March 3rd, 1934; died June 17th, 2004