Jerzy Giedroyc

Jerzy Władysław Giedroyc (27 July 1906 – 14 September 2000) was a Polish writer and political activist.

Giedroyc was born into a Polish-Lithuanian aristocratic family; with the title of the kniaź, prince, his studies in Moscow were interrupted by the October Revolution, when he returned home, and during the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921 his family left Minsk for Warsaw, where he graduated from the Jan Zamoyski gymnasium in 1924 and studied law and Ukrainian history and literature at the University of Warsaw. As a journalist and civil servant in interwar Poland, he maintained contacts with leading Ukrainians and urged the Roman Catholic Church to improve relations with the Greek Catholic Church to which most Ukrainians belonged, insisting that Poland's success as a national state depended on satisfying the aspirations of minorities so that minority nationalists would not have convincing arguments against Polish statehood; he thus took the side of Józef Piłsudski as against the National Democrats. In 1930 he took over as editor of the weekly "Dzień Akademicki" (Academic Day) which he soon transformed into the biweekly "Bunt Młodych", renaming it Polityka in 1937.

During World War II he served under General Władysław Anders in the Polish Army and kept up friendly contacts with representatives of other nationalities. After the war he moved to Paris, where he published and edited a leading Polish-émigré literary-political journal, Kultura (1947–2000), which promoted a peaceful settlement of Poland's eastern borders, accepting the results of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Yalta Conference, even though many Poles regarded these as betrayals of Poland; this helped lay the groundwork for Poland's successful eastern policy after the fall of communism. His closest collaborator was Juliusz Mieroszewski, who provided the theoretical justification for Polish recognition of the borders with Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania (whose future independence he predicted long before it came about).

In 2006 the Polish Sejm declared the year 2006 to be the "Year of Jerzy Giedroyc."

He died in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, Île-de-France, France.