Mieczyslaw Rakowski, Poland’s Last Communist Premier, Dies at 81
Mieczyslaw Rakowski, the last leader of the Polish Communist Party and the last Communist prime minister of Poland, who deftly — inscrutably, some said — juggled his reputation as a reformist with what became open antipathy toward the Solidarity movement, died Friday in Warsaw. He was 81.
Mieczyslaw Rakowski
Polish Radio said the cause was cancer.
Mr. Rakowski (his full name is pronounced MY-cheh-slav Rah-KOF-skee) was for decades the editor of an influential weekly newspaper and was known for his carefully calibrated criticism of the Communist government.
Early on, he urged the government to recognize Solidarity, which started as a labor union and grew into a democratic political force and ultimately Poland’s government.
After becoming deputy prime minister in January 1981, Mr. Rakowski pushed for liberalizing reforms, telling a party congress in July that the alternative, in the face of mounting dissent, was a bloodbath.
The next month, he tried to strike a deal with Solidarity to give labor unions a formal role in Polish society, but the talks collapsed in acrimony.
On news broadcasts, Poles saw an angry Mr. Rakowski shaking his finger in the face of Lech Walesa, the Solidarity leader.
Less than a year later, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the de facto head of government, imposed martial law to crush Solidarity. Thousands were arrested without charge and more than 100 were killed.
Mr. Rakowski defended the “state of war,” which lasted until July 1983, as necessary to forestall the Soviets from invading to re-establish order.
Mr. Rakowski became prime minister in September 1988 and held the post until August 1989. In July 1989 he was appointed first secretary of the Polish Communist Party, succeeding General Jaruzelski, who stayed on as president.
In his leadership posts, Mr. Rakowski presided over “round-table” negotiations that led to the legalization of Solidarity, the dissolution of the Communist Party and Poland’s becoming a pluralist democracy.
For many years, Mr. Rakowski, with his superb connections, his facility in languages (German, Russian and English) and a flair for sartorial style then unusual in Eastern Europe, was a magnet for visiting foreigners, particularly politicians and journalists, who liked his candor. He steadfastly defended Communist governance as necessary to avoid a Russian invasion.
Mr. Walesa — whom Mr. Rakowski used to call “Doctor,” a sarcastic reference to his lack of formal education — said in an interview with The Washington Post last year that he had understood Mr. Rakowski’s view. Polish Communists, he said, thought that the Russians “had directed missiles at every Polish city.”
“I do not punish people for faith, and they believed in that,” Mr. Walesa added. “I’m leaving the judgments to God.”
Mieczyslaw Franciszek Rakowski was born on Dec. 1, 1926, in the western Polish village of Kowalewko. His father, a farmer, was shot by a Nazi firing squad.
The younger Mr. Rakowski worked in a railway repair shop and then earned a doctorate in history. He joined the Communist Party in 1946 and was assigned in 1949 to the Central Committee to write party documents and propaganda.
In 1956, Wladyslaw Gomulka became party leader and pushed for a relaxation of some of the more repressive policies of Stalin. In this new atmosphere of de-Stalinization, Mr. Rakowski helped found Polityka, a weekly. He was editor in chief from 1958 to 1982 and developed a talent for criticizing officials in metaphors.
In the mid-1960s, as repression returned, Mr. Rakowski refused to follow others in attacking the Roman Catholic Church and Jews. He ignored orders to fire Jews.
“If I am prepared to give up one tooth, I’ll have to give up all of them,” he said of his refusal to compromise on such issues, The Wall Street Journal reported in 1982.
Mr. Rakowski’s first marriage was to Wanda Wilkomirska, a gifted Polish violinist. She was Jewish, was active in dissident groups and helped shape his liberalism by introducing him to artists and intellectuals who resisted Communism. They divorced in 1977. His second wife was Elzbieta Kepinska, an actress who was barred from performing by the theatrical establishment in protest of her husband’s association with martial law. After the first multiparty elections in 1989, she was able to resume her career.
Mr. Rakowski is survived by Ms. Kepinska and two sons.
In 1987, Mr. Rakowski was appointed the Central Committee’s secretary for propaganda, one of several party jobs he held between being deputy prime minister and prime minister.
As chief propagandist, he controlled the same press censorship he had fought for a quarter-century.
After the Polish Communist Party dissolved itself in January 1990, The Washington Post sent a reporter to the office of the party’s last leader. Mr. Rakowski sat facing an empty wall. He had taken down the portrait of Lenin that had hung there for years.
“The Communist Party should be relegated to history,” he said.中國共產黨的優秀黨員，久經考驗的忠誠的共產主義戰士，卓越的黨的工作領導者，中國共產黨第十三屆中央政治局委員，第八屆全國人民代表大會常務委員會副委員長，中共北京市委原書記李錫銘同志，因病醫治無效，於2008年11月10日13時48分在北京逝世，享年82歲。
Li Ximing, Supporter of Tiananmen Crackdown, Dies at 82
BEIJING (AP) — Li Ximing, Beijing’s Communist Party boss during the bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protests, died Saturday in Beijing, Chinese state media reported Tuesday. He was 82.
No cause was given in the announcement by the official Xinhua News Agency.
Mr. Li had been a leading member of the group of conservative veteran cadres who supported the military assault on the student-led protests in the capital’s central Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3-4, 1989. Hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed in the action, most of them ordinary citizens seeking to block the troops’ advance.
The defiance and bloodshed marked the last serious challenge to the party’s authority.
Although Mr. Li did not play a particularly prominent role in the assault on pro-democracy protests, he was credited with advocating it, alongside Beijing’s mayor, Chen Xitong, in a compilation purporting to be internal documents on the crackdown published overseas.
According to “The Tiananmen Papers,” published in 2001, the two men endorsed a document labeling the protests as an “anti-party and anti-Socialist political struggle,” all but eliminating the possibility of dialogue.
Mr. Li was removed from his post as part of efforts by the paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, to revive free market economic reforms in the years after the crackdown and given the largely ceremonial post of vice chairman of China’s rubber stamp legislature. He had earlier been a longtime bureaucrat in the power and water conservancy fields. He retired from public life in 1998.
Mr. Chen, who replaced Mr. Li as Beijing party chief, was later sentenced to 16 years in prison for corruption as part of a purge of political opponents by Jiang Zemin, Deng’s successor as top leader.
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