Jerzy Urban papers, 1927-2006

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Summary

Creators:
Urban, Jerzy, 1933-
Abstract:
Correspondence, writings, personal documents, printed matter, and photographs, relating to political conditions and journalism in Poland.
Extent:
8 manuscript boxes (3.2 Linear Feet)
Language:
Polish
Preferred citation:

[Identification of item], Jerzy Urban papers, [Box no., Folder no. or title], Hoover Institution Library & Archives.

Background

Scope and content:

Collection contains correspondence, writings, personal documents, printed matter, and photographs, relating to political conditions and journalism in Poland. It includes family documents, materials from his unsuccessful parliamentary run in June 1989, as well as a lot of published and unpublished texts. Most valuable perhaps are copies of political strategy memoranda submitted by Urban to General Jaruzelski during 1987-1989.

Biographical / historical:

Jerzy Urban (1933-1922) was a Polish journalist, writer, commentator and politician. He was born as Jerzy Urbach to a Polish-Jewish family in Lodz. After the Second World War outbreak, he fled with his parents the German-occupied Lodz to the Soviet-controlled Lviv. After the German army invaded Lviv in the summer of 1941, the family went into hiding and survived the war under the false name "Urban."

Jerzy Urban was then educated in the People's Republic of Poland and began his journalistic career in the mid-1950s in the weekly Po prostu, during the political "thaw" that ensued after Stalin's death. A natural contrarian, stubborn, and provocative, Urban was frequently in trouble with communist censors. He found stable employment and relative security on the weekly Polityka, run by a relative liberal, Mieczyslaw Rakowski.

When the Solidarity trade union movement emerged in 1980, Urban criticized and ridiculed its leaders in dozens of columns he signed as "Rem". In 1981, General Jaruzelski, the first secretary of the Polish Communist Party and prime minister, made Urban a government spokesperson. Urban initiated the tradition of weekly press conferences, transmitted by Polish television and attended by Polish and foreign journalists.

After the "Roundtable Talks" between the communists and the opposition and the June 1989 national elections, which ended the Party's monopoly of power, Urban returned to private life. In 1990, he founded an anticlerical tabloid-like newspaper Nie (Polish for No).

Jerzy Urban died in Konstancin-Jeziorna on October 3, 2022, at the age of 89. He was buried at the Powazki Military Cemetery in Warsaw on October 11, 2022.

Acquisition information:
Acquired by the Hoover Institution Library Archives in 2011.
Physical location:
Hoover Institution Library & Archives
Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Access and use

Restrictions:

The collection is open for research; materials must be requested in advance via our reservation system. If there are audiovisual or digital media material in the collection, they must be reformatted before providing access.

Terms of access:

For copyright status, please contact the Hoover Institution Library & Archives.

Preferred citation:

[Identification of item], Jerzy Urban papers, [Box no., Folder no. or title], Hoover Institution Library & Archives.

Location of this collection:
Hoover Institution Library & Archives, Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6003, US
Contact:
(650) 723-3563
hooverarchives@stanford.edu
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