Stanisław Kot

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Stanisław Kot
Polish history
InstitutionsJagiellonian University

Stanisław Kot (22 October 1885 – 26 December 1975) was a Polish

Reformation in Poland
.

As a

Polish Government in Exile, including those of Minister of the Interior (1940–1941), Minister of State (1942–1943), and Minister of Information (1943–1944). He also served, during the war, as Polish ambassador to the Soviet Union
(1941–1942); and shortly after the war, as Polish ambassador to Italy (1945–1947).

In 1947, in the wake of the communist takeover of Poland, he became a political refugee, living in France and later in the United Kingdom, where he was the leader of the People's Party in exile.

Early life and education

Kot was born into a peasant family in

Austrian-partition Galicia region of Austro-Hungary.[1][2] His father Marcin, a leading citizen of the village, could read and write, and was involved in the patriotic movement of Lesser Poland, the historic region to which Ruda belonged.[3][4] Kot attended elementary school in Czarna and Sędziszów and gymnasium in Rzeszów,[5][6] and became active in Polish-independence youth groups in Galicia, part of the Austrian partition of Poland.[7]

In 1904 he matriculated in law at

socialist movement, and clashed with right-wing National Democrats over his insistence on respecting the rights of the region's ethnic Ukrainian citizens. Kot also rejected the National Democrats' antisemitism.[9]

Career

Schoolteaching and World War I

In 1908–1912 he taught at secondary schools in Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine) and Kraków.[2][7] In 1911 he married Ida Proksch.[7] In 1912–1914, thanks to a scholarship from the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, he studied in France and made several study trips to Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium.[2][7]

During World War I he was active in politics, culture, and education, working with the Polish Legions.[10][7] From 1915 he headed the Press Department of the Polish Supreme National Committee.[7] From 1914 to 1917 or 1919 (sources vary) he published a newspaper, Wiadomości Polskie (Polish News);[2][7] during that time, his political views shifted from left-leaning to centrist. However, he preferred scholarly over political work, and during the 1920s he took little part, if any, in politics.[11]

Historian

Kot published his first scholarly work in 1910, about

history of culture, in particular the Reformation in Poland.[13] After Poland had in November 1918 regained independence, incarnated as the Second Polish Republic, Kot in 1919 began publishing the book series, Biblioteka Narodowa [pl] (The National Library), which continues to the present; up to the outbreak of World War II, he oversaw the publication of 177 volumes.[2] He also edited another book series, Biblioteka Pisarzów Polskich (The Library of Polish Writers).[7]

In 1920 Kot

chauvinists has been attributed to the political activism that he had begun in his student days.[9]

In 1919 Kot published a biography of Modrzewski which, as of 1999, was still considered the most exhaustive and reliable work on the subject.[1] In 1932 he published a book on Socinianism in Poland: The Social and Political Ideas of the Polish Antitrinitarians in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries – a detailed monograph on the Polish Brethren – which appeared in English in 1957 and is considered his most influential monograph.[16][1] He also published a well-received textbook, Historia Wychowania (History of Education; first, single-volume edition, 1924; second, revised, two-volume edition, 1933–1934).[17][18][19][20]

From 1921 until 1939 he edited the quarterly, Reformacja w Polsce (The Reformation in Poland), which he had established; it was published by the Society for Research into the History of the Reformation.

Oxford University, where he also lectured that year; and in 1959, from the University of Basel.[2][7]

Kot's main scholarly expertise comprised the politics, ideologies, and literature of the 16th- and 17th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

history of education in Poland, Poland's cultural contacts with the West, historical Polish political thought and doctrines, and observations of Polish national characteristics.[2][6] His studies of Polish emigrations to Western Europe and to cities in France, Germany, and Italy were trailblazing.[2]

Wiktor Weintraub writes that Kot was a university professor for a period of only thirteen years, cut short by the consequences of his political activities; and that, in assessing Kot the scholar, "one cannot avoid a certain feeling of frustration" since, while he produced substantial research in the decade following his 1909 Ph.D. degree, despite the disruptions of World War I, his subsequent scholarship lost its initial drive and was not as productive.[13]

Politician

1930s

In the early 1930s Kot participated in protests directed against the government. One protest opposed a reform of the educational system.[18] In 1933, when the Sanation government controlled by Józef Piłsudski was mistreating political prisoners at the Brześć fortress, Kot was a principal organizer of a protest by university professors.[13]

Soon after, in September 1933, due to the Sanation government's pressure Kot, then aged 48, was forced to take early retirement from Jagiellonian University; this was widely seen as retribution for his political activities, such as his connection with professors' resistance against the suppression of university autonomy and in connection with protests against the government's imprisonment of Centrolew politicians.[2][21][7][6] From that point on, Kot would focus an increasing amount of his time on politics, and less and less on scholarly activities.[13][21]

In 1933 Kot joined the People's Party and from 1936 to 1939 was a member of its executive committee.[7] He was aligned with the party's right wing,[7] and was also involved in the Front Morges political alliance.[7] He acted on Wincenty Witos' behalf in Poland (Witos then being in foreign exile) and helped organize a 1937 rural strike, leading to his two-day arrest by Polish authorities.[1][21][6]

World War II

In 1939, after the

Fund for National Culture.[2][6] In New York City in 1942, he cofounded the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA).[2][6]

Stalin signs the Soviet-Polish declaration, 4 December 1941. Poles include Sikorski, Anders, Kot (behind Stalin, in dark suit).

Following the

Anders Army – a question that divided the Jewish community itself.[28]: 17, 21 

Kot (front left), Sikorski
's funeral, 1943

After Kot's tour of duty as Poland's ambassador to the Soviet Union, until 1943 he served as Polish Minister of State in the Near East, where substantial Polish armed forces were stationed.[7][6] From March 1943 Kot was the Polish exile government's Minister of Information.[7][6] One of his most memorable acts in this capacity was the public disclosure, on 17 April that year, of the Katyn Massacre.[7][29][18][30] In that communiqué, the Polish government asked for a Red Cross investigation. This was rejected by Stalin, who used the fact that the Germans had also requested such an investigation as "proof" of a Polish-German conspiracy, and turned it into a pretext for breaking off Polish-Soviet diplomatic relations.[31]: 108–109  After Prime Minister Sikorski's death on 4 July 1943 at Gibraltar, President Władysław Raczkiewicz asked Stanisław Mikołajczyk, who had been acting Prime Minister in General Sikorski's absence, to form a government. Kot retained his post as Minister of Information in Mikolajczyk's cabinet until 1944.[7]

Post-World War II

In July 1945 Kot returned to Poland with a number of politicians, including Stanisław Mikołajczyk, who hoped to establish a dialogue with the

staged elections and of trials suppressing People's Party activists deemed insufficiently cooperative with the Soviet-backed communists – events that marked the effective takeover of Poland by the communists – Kot, fearing persecution, resigned his post and went back into exile.[1][7]

Kot was a political refugee in Paris, before moving to the United Kingdom.

Szymon Budny.[32] He received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to publish a study on the Reformation in Poland, but was unable to finish it before his health deteriorated.[1] In January 1964 he suffered a stroke that left him in a coma for two years and thereafter bedridden and unable to work for the rest of his life.[33][2] 1965 saw the publication of his memoirs, Conversations with the Kremlin and Dispatches from Russia.[34] He died in London, England, on 26 December 1975, soon after turning 90.[7] His funeral took place in London on 7 January 1976 at the North Sheen Cemetery.[35][36]

Legacy

Peter Brock and Zdzisław Pietrzyk [pl] write: "Like a long line of historians beginning in antiquity, Stanisław Kot was both a writer of history and a politician who helped to shape events. Whereas in his scholarly writings he preserved a calm impartiality, with any polemical thrust usually concealed from the reader's view, Kot from his [secondary]-school days emerged as 'a passionate politician, evoking strong emotions and partisan prejudices'."[37]

Polish communist-era historiography described him as a reactionary leader of the extreme nationalist right, even calling him "the greatest enemy of communism and of the revolutionary currents of worker-peasant collaboration."

Pilsudskiites, who predominated among the exiles".[33]

Kot the politician could be maladroit, with a tendency to suspect hostile conspiracies, especially on the part of the Sanation political movement. In 1928, Sanation founder Józef Piłsudski had relieved Władysław Sikorski of his army command; the latter would go on to become Kot's colleague in the wartime exile government. Also, in 1933, Sanation had pressured Kot into retiring prematurely from his Jagiellonian University professorial chair.[1][2][38] Critics have seen Kot's last official appointment, as the Polish communist government's ambassador to Rome, as a disappointing end to his political career.[38] Janusz Tazbir comments that "it is a tragedy" that, too often in Kot's life, especially after 1939, "the mediocre politician stole the limelight from the magisterial scholar".[38] Tazbir writes that many of Kot's history writings remain valuable and continue to be reissued, as opposed to his writings on contemporary politics, which Tazbir considers properly forgotten.[38]

According to

Waclaw Soroka writes that "in Kot, the intellectual history of Poland and Eastern and Central Europe gained an outstanding researcher and exponent."[7] Lech Szczucki has called him "likely the most influential and industrious Polish historian of the interwar period", and writes that his contribution to the study of the Polish Reformation is of extreme value.[1] Wiktor Weintraub has termed him "one of the leading 20th-century Polish historians" and writes that "in the Polish scholarly community... Kot secured [a] position as a first-rank historian."[13]: 267, 270  Brock and Pietrzyk have assessed him to be a "historian of major stature".[39] Wojciech Roszkowski and Jan Kofman [pl] summarized his life: "He left a vast scholarly legacy in the history of education and history of culture, including particularly the history of the Reformation."[18]

Kot won high praise for his organizational activities, including his work with committees, his founding and editing of scholarly journals and book series, his organizing of conferences, his mentoring of numerous graduate students.[13][1] During his years at Jagiellonian University, Kot's disciples included Henryk Barycz [pl], Stanisław Bednarski [pl], Wanda Bobkowska [pl], Stanisław Bodniak [pl], Maria Czapska, Józef Feldman, Jan Hulewicz [pl], Alodia Kawecka-Gryczowa [pl], Bogdan Suchodolski, Stanislaw Szczotka [pl], Marek Wajsblum [pl], Wiktor Weintraub, Ignacy Zarębski, and Jerzy Zathey.[13][2][7] Kot also influenced foreign scholars, including his Italian student Delio Cantimori.[1] Having inspired hosts of scholars, mostly through his students, many of whom became academics, he is regarded as the founder of his own historical school ("Kot's school" of the Polish Reformation).[6][2][1][40] The periodical, Reformacja w Polsce (The Reformation in Poland), which he started before World War II, was revived after the war and continues to this day as the academic journal Odrodzenie i Reformacja w Polsce [pl] (The Renaissance and the Reformation in Poland).[13]

Kot wrote 95 major studies, books, and articles.[2] His work, however, was published in Polish and thus had less influence on international, particularly English-language, scholarship. Only one of his books was translated into English (Socinianism in Poland, 1957).[1] Particularly after World War II, a number of his scholarly articles were published in, or translated into, languages other than Polish.[1] During Poland's communist era, with few exceptions, censorship did not allow his works to be reprinted, discussed, or even cited.[1][2]

In 1976 Jerzy Giedroyc, editor of Kultura, in Paris, called for a monograph on Kot's life.[38] Such a work (in the form of a Festschrift) had in fact been in preparation before World War II, but the manuscript had been badly damaged during the war, and efforts to reconstruct it had been stopped by Poland's communist authorities.[38][41] In December 1997 a conference on "Stanisław Kot – uczony i polityk" ("Stanisław Kot – scholar and politician") was held in Kraków, organized by Jagiellonian University. The conference included an exhibit on Kot's life and work.[42] Conference materials were published in a 2001 book of the same title, whose cover note described Kot as "undeniably a great scholar and politician".[43] In 2000 Tadeusz Rutkowski [pl] published a biography of Kot, Stanisław Kot 1885-1975. Biografia polityczna (Stanisław Kot 1885-1975: A Political Biography).[38] Janusz Tazbir wrote in a review of Rutkowski's book that he himself was working on a biography of Kot the scholar, but Tazbir had not finished it before his 2016 death.[38]

Selected bibliography

  • 1910: Szkoła lewartowska: z dziejów szkolnictwa ariańskiego w Polsce (The Lewartów School in the History of Arian Schools in Poland).
  • History of Poland's Cultural Relations with other Countries.
  • 1919: Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski
  • 1924: Historia wychowania (The History of Education), 2 vols.; 2nd revised edition, 1933/34.
  • 1932: Ideologia polityczna i społeczna braci polskich zwanych arianami (1957 English translation by E.M. Wilbur: Socinianism in Poland: the Social and Political Ideas of the Polish Brethren, Called Arians).
  • 1958: Chyliński's Lithuanian Bible: Origin and Historical Background, Poznań, Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk: Komisja Filologiczna, 1958, 25 pages.

Notes

  1. ^ Kot's most influential teachers at Lwów included Wilhelm Bruchnalski [pl], Józef Kallenbach, Ludwik Finkel, and Bolesław Mańkowski [pl].[8]: 57 

References

Citations

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v Szczucki, Lech (1999). "Stanisław Kot". Odrodzenie I Reformacja W Polsce (in Polish). 43: 95–212.
  2. ^
    JSTOR 25777374
    .
  3. ISBN 978-83-7181-165-4
    .
  4. ^ Wilk, Franciszek (1976). Profesor Stanisław Kot: życie i dzieło [Professor Stanisław Kot: Life and Work] (in Polish). Jutro Polski. p. 27.
  5. ^ Brock & Pietrzyk 2006, p. 408.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Archiwum Stanisława Kota (Stanisław Kot collection). United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives
  7. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah Hurło, Lucyna (2015). "Kot Stanisław" (PDF). Zeszyty Pedagogiczno-Medyczne: Słownik Pedagogów Polskich I Polskiej Myśli Pedagogicznej XIX I XX Wieku (in Polish). 35 (5): 93–94.
  8. ^
    S2CID 161336236. Jak powszechnie wiadomo Stanisław Kot zaliczany jest nie tylko do grona twórców historii wychowania jako dyscypliny naukowej w Polsce, jest także określany mianem mistrza i kreatora 'autentycznej szkoły naukowej' (As is generally known, Stanisław Kot is counted not only among the founders of the history of education
    as a scholarly discipline in Poland, he is also considered the master and creator of 'an authentic school of scholarship')
  9. ^ a b Brock & Pietrzyk 2006, p. 409.
  10. ^ Brock & Pietrzyk 2006, p. 412.
  11. ^ Brock & Pietrzyk 2006, pp. 412–413.
  12. ^ Brock & Pietrzyk 2006, p. 410.
  13. ^ a b c d e f g h i Weintraub, Wiktor (1980–1981). "Charting New Ways for Polish Cultural History: Stanisław Kot" (PDF). Organon. 16/17: 267–281.
  14. ^ Brock & Pietrzyk 2006, p. 413.
  15. ISBN 83-89729-71-7, p. 99: "[M]any outstanding Polish scholars of Jewish descent, when up for promotions, ran into difficulties for 'extra-scholastic' reasons... One of the most outstanding historians, Józef Feldman, had trouble getting through his habilitation
    because one of the [examining] professors had maliciously prepared questions that were impossible to answer (Prof. Stanisław Kot came to [Feldman's] rescue, declaring that if Feldman were not given his habilitation, he [Kot] would resign his own [professorial] chair, because he did not know the answers to the questions either)"
  16. ^ Brock & Pietrzyk 2006, p. 415. Early in this new decade, Kot produced what was undoubtedly to become, due to its translation into English, his most widely known work: his monograph on the political and social doctrines of the Antitrinitarian Polish Brethren.
  17. ^ Brock & Pietrzyk 2006, p. 415.
  18. ^
    ISBN 978-1-317-47594-1
    .
  19. ISBN 978-83-87288-11-2
    . prace Stanisława Kota z głośnym podręcznikiem Historia wychowania (1924) na czele
  20. ISBN 978-83-7306-057-9
    . drugie wydanie w 1934 r. znakomitego podręcznika akademickiego S. Kota pt. Historia wychowania, w którym w porównaniu z wydaniem jednotomowym, z 1924 r.
  21. ^ a b c Brock & Pietrzyk 2006, p. 416.
  22. ISBN 9781107014268
    .
  23. ISBN 978-1-107-06279-5
    .
  24. ISBN 0-8032-5637-X
    .
  25. S2CID 159589629
    .
  26. ^ Herman Kruk, Benjamin Harshav, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939-1944, Yale University Press, 2002, p. 43, [2]
  27. ISSN 0038-545X
    .
  28. ^ Gutman, Yisrael (1977). "Jews in General Anders' Army In the Soviet Union" (PDF). Yad Vashem Studies. 12.
  29. ^ Stanisław Mikołajczyk w dokumentach aparatu bezpieczeństwa, t. 1: Działalność w latach 1945–1947, ed. Witold Bagieński, Piotr Byszewski, Agnieszka Chrzanowska, Franciszek Dąbrowski, Franciszek Gryciuk, Jolanta Mysiakowska-Muszyńska, Warszawa 2010. P. 106. Quote: "nieszczęśliwym zbiegiem okoliczności Sikorskiego nie było w Londynie, a on sam był chory w momencie, kiedy dowiedziano się o Katyniu. Bez czekania na powrót generała, bez porozumienia się Rettingerem, Kot, Kukiel i Raczyński zredagowali komunikat, który oddali do PAT i rozesłali Anglikom"
  30. ISBN 978-83-65409-90-4
    . to Kot zredagował słynny komunikat katyński gen. Kukiela z 17 kwietnia 1943 po komunikacie radia niemieckiego o odkryciu grobów katyńskich.
  31. S2CID 159589629
    .
  32. ^ Brock & Pietrzyk 2006, p. 420.
  33. ^ a b Brock & Pietrzyk 2006, p. 419.
  34. ^ Wagner, Wolfgang. "Kot, Stanislaw: Conversations with the Kremlin and Dispatches from Russia (Book Review)." Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 13 (1965): 141-142.
  35. ^ Wilk, Franciszek (1976). Profesor Stanisław Kot: życie i dzieło [Professor Stanisław Kot: Life and Work] (in Polish). Jutro Polski. p. 4.
  36. ISBN 978-83-904926-8-1
    .
  37. ^ Brock & Pietrzyk 2006, p. 407.
  38. ^ a b c d e f g h Tazbir, Janusz (2001). ""Stanisław Kot 1885-1975. Biografia polityczna", Tadeusz Paweł Rutkowski, Warszawa 2000: [recenzja]" (PDF). Dzieje Najnowsze: [kwartalnik poświęcony historii XX wieku] (in Polish). 33 (4): 161–165.
  39. ^ Brock & Pietrzyk 2006, p. 422.
  40. ^ Brock & Pietrzyk 2006, p. 421.
  41. ^ Brock & Pietrzyk 2006, p. 417.
  42. ISSN 1233-2224.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2024 (link
    )
  43. Stalinist
    propaganda and – still more painful – by our postwar [Polish] émigrés.)

Sources cited

Further reading

External links

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