Polish communist government spokesman Jerzy Urban, dies at 89

• Jerzy Urban was a spokesman for Poland’s communist-era government.
• aHe masterminded state propaganda and censorship for the regime in the 1980s.
• Urban launched weekly government news conferences that were broadcast by Polish television.

Jerzy Urban, a spokesman for Poland’s communist-era government in the 1980s who oversaw state propaganda and censorship in the final years before the regime’s demise, has died. He was 89.

On Monday, the satirical weekly magazine “NIE” (Polish for “No”), which Urban founded and led after 1989, announced his death.

When he was the spokesman for Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski’s government in the early 1980s, Urban developed a reputation for sarcasm. He held that position from 1981, the year of a harsh communist crackdown, until 1989, when communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe began to crumble.

Urban established weekly government news conferences that were broadcast on Polish television and attended by Polish and foreign journalists, making him one of the regime’s most visible and despised figures.

To many Poles, he embodied the government’s brutality in the aftermath of the 1981 martial law crackdown, as well as its cynicism and contempt for the Solidarity movement, led by Lech Walesa, and the millions yearning for freedom.

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In 1986, during a period of scarcity in the communist economy, Urban announced that Poland was collecting blankets and sleeping bags for New York City’s homeless.

Poland’s offer to New York came after the United States offered to send powdered milk to Poland to replace fresh milk contaminated by radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in Ukraine, which was then a part of the Soviet Union. The US Senate required that nongovernmental organisations in Poland distribute the powdered milk to ensure that it reached the people.

In response to the stipulation, the Polish government offered sleeping bags and blankets to New York’s homeless on the condition that they be distributed by private groups. The offer was rejected by then-New York Mayor Edward I. Koch, who called 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 well assimilated that he did not learn of his Jewish roots until after World War II had begun. Urban hid in the countryside during the Holocaust.

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