Collection Guide
Collection Title:
Collection Number:
Get Items:
View entire collection guide
Search this collection
Table of contents
Title: Zdzisław Rurarz papers
Date (inclusive): 1967-2008
Collection Number: 2014C27
Contributing Institution: Hoover Institution Library and Archives
Language of Material:
Polish
Physical Description:
10 manuscript boxes
(4.5 Linear Feet)
Abstract: Correspondence, writings, biographical data, and photographs, relating to political conditions in Poland, the defection of
Zdzisław Rurarz to the United States in 1981, and international relations.
Creator:
Rurarz, Zdzisław
Physical Location: Hoover Institution Library & Archives.
The collection is open for research; materials must be requested in advance via our reservation system. If there are audiovisual
or digital media material in the collection, they must be reformatted before providing access.
For copyright status, please contact the Hoover Institution Library & Archives.
Materials were acquired by the Hoover Institution Library & Archives in 2014.
[Identification of item], Zdzisław Rurarz papers, [Box no., Folder no. or title], Hoover Institution Library & Archives
Zdzisław Maciej Rurarz was born in 1930 in Pionki, a small town south of Warsaw. He joined a communist youth organization
at sixteen and the Polish United Workers' Party (PUWP) several years later. He earned degrees in economics, and taught at
the Warsaw School of Economics through the 1970s, and for a while served as economic adviser to the first secretary of the
PUWP, Edward Gierek. By the time Rurarz was appointed ambassador to Japan, however, he was thoroughly disillusioned with communism
and Poland's role as a Soviet dependency. The rise of the Solidarity trade union and the looming threat of a military crackdown
hastened his decision to defect. In December 1981, when Poland's communist authorities declared martial law and arrested thousands
of Solidarity activists, Rurarz and Romuald Spasowski, Polish ambassador to the United States, protested by renouncing their
allegiance to the Moscow-dominated government in Warsaw and seeking political asylum in the United States. After contacting
US diplomats in Tokyo, Rurarz made a daring escape to the US embassy, along with his wife and daughter. He was immediately
declared a traitor and tried in absentia by a military court in Warsaw. The sentence was death, revocation of his Polish citizenship,
and confiscation of all property.
When, after the negotiated 1989 "round-table" agreement between the communist regime and the opposition, and the first semifree
elections in the Soviet bloc, Rurarz was again sadly disappointed. One act of the new, Solidarity-led government was a revising
of the case against him, commuting his death penalty to twenty-five years in prison. Instead of embracing prominent Polish
defectors such as Rurarz, Spasowski, and the CIA's top agent in the Warsaw Pact, Colonel Ryszard Kukliński, the new Polish
authorities regarded them as traitors. Eventually, the court annulled the sentence and declared complete "rehabilitation,"
but Rurarz never reconciled himself to the strange mixture of the new and the old represented by the governments of postcommunist
Poland and its political elites. He never went back to Warsaw and spent his remaining years writing and speaking his mind,
mostly to émigré audiences. Rurarz's death in 2007 was practically unnoticed by the Polish media.
The Rurarz papers consist mostly of his articles and other publications, speeches, and interviews, as well as correspondence,
virtually all from the period after his defection.
Subjects and Indexing Terms
Poland -- History -- 1980-1989
Poland -- Foreign relations -- Japan
Japan -- Foreign relations -- Poland
Diplomats -- Poland