Polish communist era propaganda spox dies at 83

WARSAW, Poland - Jerzy Urban, a spokesman for Poland's communist era government in the 1980s who masterminded state propaganda and censorship for the regime in the final years before its collapse, has died. His death was announced on Monday by the satirical weekly magazine NIE Polish for No, which Urban founded and led in the post- 1989 era.

In the early 1980s, Urban earned a reputation for sarcasm when he served as the spokesman for the government of Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski. He served from 1981, the year of a harsh communist crackdown, to 1989, when communist regimes across central and eastern Europe began to collapsing.

Urban launched weekly government news conferences that were broadcast by Polish television and attended by Polish and foreign journalists, making him one of the most prominent and despised faces of the regime.

After dozens were killed in 1981 in the martial law crackdown, he seemed to embody the government's brutality, as well as its cynicism and contempt for the Solidarity movement, led by Lech Walesa, and the millions yearning for freedom.

In 1986, Urban announced that Poland was collecting blankets and sleeping bags for the homeless in New York City, in a time of shortages in the communist economy.

Poland's offer to New York followed the U.S. government offering to send powdered milk to Poland to replace fresh milk tainted by radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. The U.S. Senate stipulated that nongovernmental agencies in Poland distribute the powdered milk to make sure it gets to the people.

The Polish government responded to the stipulation by giving sleeping bags and blankets to the New York s homeless on the condition that the goods be distributed by private groups. Then-New York City Mayor Edward I. Koch rejected the offer, calling it foolish.

Jerzy Urban was born on August 3, 1933 in the central Polish city of Lodz, the year Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, to a Jewish family so closely assimilated that he didn't learn of his Jewish roots until after World War II had started. Urban survived the Holocaust hiding in the countryside.

In the 1950s he made his debut as a journalist and had a reputation for being so provocative that he had to write under a pseudonym.

He spoke about his early commitment to socialism in an interview with the Polish edition of Newsweek in 2020.

I was a zealous Stalinist, but that did not mean that I approved of the crimes, he said.

In the first semi-free elections in 1989, Urban's reputation was so bad that he didn't win a seat in parliament - even as some other former communist functionaries entered post- 1989 political life.

Instead, he made a new role as publisher of the anti-clerical NIE and became a successful and wealthy businessman. He continued to be a provocateur, facing legal suits for publishing pornographic photos and insulting religious feelings in the predominantly Roman Catholic nation.

In 2005, Urban was convicted of insulting Polish-born Pope John Paul II - who was made a saint by the Vatican in 2002 for a 2002 article in which he mocked the pontiff for continuing to appear in public despite his ailing health.

According to Polish media reports, Urban is survived by a daughter, two grandchildren and his third wife, Malgorzata Daniszewska.