Paid liar Jerzy Urban once had the most famous face in Poland

Jerzy Urban wasn’t as dumb as he looked. Abusive and coarse, the voice of Poland’s communist government was as cleverly manipulative as he was deeply unpleasant.

Jerzy Urban in Warsaw in 2009. Picture: Axel Springer Poland

OBITUARY

Jerzy Urban

Journalist. Born Lodz, Poland, August 3, 1933. Died Warsaw, October 3, age 89.

Jerzy Urban wasn’t as dumb as he looked. How could he have been? His ears stuck wildly out from a self-satisfied meaty face that resembled a pink cast for a rejected Toby Jug. And what you saw was what you got: a crude, nasty, manipulative, self-serving liar. But he was brilliant with a sharp mind that could instantly analyse any political situation, often in the most course manner and always for his benefit.

For eight years he twisted the truth on behalf of the communist government of the thuggish General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who infamously proclaimed martial law for Poland in 1981 in an effort to crush Lech Walesa’s pro-democracy Solidarity movement which had attracted the support of then Pope John Paul II, himself a Pole.

Jaruzelski’s state security officers decided to rid their boss of a troublesome, pro-Solidarity priest, Jerzy Popiełuszko. In 1984 the Catholic clergyman was kidnapped, beaten, bound and, with a rock tied to him, dropped into a dam. Urban would have been aware what he was provoking when, as government spokesman, a few weeks before he called Popieluszko: “A political fanatic, the Savonarola of anti-communism,” a reference to Girolamo Savonarola, the activist Dominican priest tortured and hanged in Florence in 1498. Urban accused Popieluszko of holding “black masses” and “sessions of hatred” and described him as “political rabies”.

The priest’s killing was just one of the uncountable deaths over those years. Popieluszko was declared a martyr by the Catholic Church and in 2010 beatified by Pope Benedict on his way towards sainthood.

Urban, right, with vice-premier Janusz Obodowski in 1981.

By the time of the murder, Urban was perhaps the best-known person in Poland. His press conferences were pure theatre in the manner of the inadvertently funny Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the Iraqi government spokesman who during the 2003 invasion denied Americans were in Baghdad when US tanks could be seen over his shoulder. As word spread, the foreign press corps began turning up at Urban’s conferences. Then they were televised with transcripts published in full by sympathetic newspapers. Every word. Every week.

He was formidably aggressive towards any query he thought expressed support for Solidarity or “the electrician from Gdansk”. (He planned the conferences with Jaruzelski much like our ministers prepare for Question Time). Undaunted, he would accuse journalists of being propagandists who told lies – but sometimes he entertained them over drinks in the back office with a facade of amusing self-deprecation. Too many Western reporters fell for it.

Urban once said that “a difficult childhood never ends”. And his was particularly hard. In 1939, with poor timing, his family moved to what is now Lviv, the town in western Ukraine that has been bombed again as part of Russia’s invasion. They changed their name from Urbach, perhaps to disguise their Jewishness when Nazis overran Lviv.

After the war, he apparently began two courses at Warsaw University, but was reportedly expelled from both. It was the case then, and remains so, that few people are expelled from university. Then began his enduring and tumultuous career as a newspaper journalist during which he pursued communist ambitions (although, notwithstanding four applications, the party would not accept him as a member). In the clamorous, febrile politics of the era he found himself banned but reported and commented on politics under various pseudonyms. His beliefs and motives were hard to pin down, but reliably self-serving. Emerging in the nation’s consciousness when working for Jaruzelski, he became a star of sorts amid the colourless landscape of communist functionaries.

And he thrived in the post-communist Poland, writing an insider’s book on his experiences with Jaruzelski’s government. Urban’s Alphabet was a mix of rumour and gossip with a few facts, but not too many, thrown in. It became a national bestseller. With the money from this he started the newspaper Nie (Polish for No) whose nudity and lurid content saw sales boom.

Before one of Pope John Paul’s nine visits to his homeland, Urban, whose newspaper had long taunted the Catholic Church, wrote a column mocking the pontiff, among other insults, writing that he was senile and the “Brezhnev of the Vatican”. In any other democracy such slights would pass almost unnoticed, but Poland’s strict publishing laws were engaged against Urban and he was found guilty of “illegally insulting” a head of state, received a suspended jail sentence and was fined almost $8000.

After deriding his second wife, Kayna Andrzejewska, she responded with a book: Urban – I Was His Wife! He ran a report on Walesa’s son and published the Walesa family’s home phone number, and once even dismissed his own daughter as “the unaborted”.