Jerzy Urban

Before 1989

Urban was born into an assimilated Polish-Jewish family in Lodz. His father was an activist of the Polish Socialist Party as well as the Bund. In 1939, during the issuing of his Soviet ID in Soviet-occupied Lwow, an official confused the letters in his name (ch – h in Russian, was transcribed as n – corresponding to the Latin n). Nevertheless his parents decided not to correct the error, a move which possibly saved their lives when Germany seized Lwow in 1941.

Jerzy Urban reportedly attended 17 different primary and high schools and completed his senior high school exams as an external student. He also studied at the University of Warsaw but was expelled. He started his journalistic career at the Nowa Wies.

From 1955 to 1957, he was a reporter and commentator for the weekly Po prostu, which started during the "rehabilitation" of Wladyslaw Gomulka, who eventually became communist party leader. However, the newspaper was closed by the personal initiative of Gomulka; this symbolized the end of the thaw which the premiere had himself started. The newspaper was shut down mainly because of the biting, uncompromising opinion articles by Urban. Urban himself was officially banned from publishing under his own name. From 1961, he worked for the weekly Polityka, continuing his opinion pieces under pseudonyms. He was eventually totally forbidden from carrying out any journalistic activities. This ban continued until Gomulka lost power as party leader.

From August 1981 to April 1989, Jerzy Urban was a government spokesman and press secretary to General Wojciech Jaruzelski's . He created the tradition of weekly press conferences, transmitted by the Polish television and attended by both Polish and foreign journalists.

In September 1984, during the month before the murder of the priest Jerzy Popieluszko, he wrote a column "Seanse nienawisci" (hate session), criticizing the priest as an anti-communist Savonarola.

In 1986 Urban masterminded a media story that the United States had betrayed the Solidarity movement. On 3 June he met with a Washington Post reporter and told him that a Polish spy for the CIA, who was later identified as Ryszard Kuklinski, was aware of the plan to install martial law in 1981 and had passed that information on to Washington. "The US administration could have publicly revealed these plans to the world and warned Solidarity," Urban said, "Had it done so, the implementation of martial law would have been impossible." At a 6 June press conference Urban alleged that "Washington ... did not warn its allies. It did not boast of its agent as it customarily does." According to Urban, the Reagan administration had "lied to its own people and to its friends in Poland," when it denied having prior knowledge of martial law.

After 1989

During the semi-free elections in 1989, Urban campaigned as an independent (he was actually never a member of the PZPR). He suffered a landslide defeat and since then gave up attempts to actively participate in politics.

In 1989 he established Nie, a satirical weekly newspaper, infamous for often employing profanity in its pages. He has been the chief editor ever since and the newspaper itself has sizable audience.

In 2005, he was fined by a Polish court for insulting the visiting Pope John Paul II.

Personal life and views

Urban married three times. He describes himself as atheist.