Obituary of Lech Kaczynski

Lech Kaczynski Lech Kaczynski who has died aged 60, had been Poland's president since 2005, its fourth since the country broke free from the Soviet bloc in 1989. A government Tu-154 plane carrying the president, his wife, Maria, a group of close collaborators and senior political and military officials crashed near Smolensk, in western Russia, on Saturday. All passengers and crew members died. Kaczynski was on his way to Katyn, the village where thousands of army officers and members of the Polish intelligentsia were executed in 1940 by Red Army troops, as the Soviets joined forces with Nazi Germany. Since 1989, Poland had been struggling to obtain access to classified documents, as well as an official acknowledgment of the massacres, from Russia. Kaczynski was a fierce proponent of making Katyn a pivotal element in Poland's relations with Russia. Last week, Russia's prime minister, Vladimir Putin, and Poland's prime minister, Donald Tusk, were the first leaders in both countries' history to mark the anniversary of the massacres together. Kaczynski, whose support for Ukraine's Orange Revolution and for Georgia's president Mikheil Saakashvili had led to difficult relations with Russian leaders, had chosen to participate in a separate ceremony. Lech Kaczynski and his twin brother Jaroslaw were born in Warsaw, sons of Rajmund Kaczynski, an engineer and a member of the Polish resistance during the second world war, and his wife Jadwiga, a philologist. Both parents participated in the Warsaw uprising of 1944 and wanted to pass on their patriotism to the brothers. In this they succeeded - their mother recalled her sons singing the national anthem each night after saying their prayers. It was undoubtedly this passion for his nation's tragic history, combined with admiration for his father, that prompted Lech Kaczynski to create the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising in 2004, while he was the city's mayor. In 1962, Kaczynski and his brother appeared as twin troublemakers, Jacek and Placek, in a popular Polish film, Two Boys Who Stole the Moon, but neither chose to pursue acting as a career. In 1971 Kaczynski graduated in law from Warsaw University, and subsequently moved to Gdansk, in northern Poland, were he was hired as a researcher at Gdansk University's faculty of law. He obtained his PhD from the same university in 1979 and continued to lecture there for the next 20 years. He first became involved in politics in 1977, when he made contact with the democratic opposition and joined its foremost organisation, the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR). He organised lectures on labour law for workers and wrote for dissident publications. During the democratic outbreak of August 1980, when the communist authorities sat down to negotiate with the democratic Solidarity trade union, he served as a key adviser to the union's leaders. From December 1981 to January 1982 he was detained along with other leading opposition figures. In 1989, when the regime agreed to a round table with the democratic opposition, he participated in the talks, and, in June 1989, he was chosen as a senator in the country's first free elections since the war. In the early 1990s he was initially a close collaborator with president Lech Walesa, but later, after a sharp rupture, became his fierce political opponent. Between 1992 and 1995 Kaczynski headed the government's Central Audit Commission, and in 1996 he returned to Gdansk University, where he was made professor. It was not until 2000 that he returned to politics, becoming justice minister in Jerzy Buzek's cabinet. In 2001, building on his mounting popularity and with a tough anti-crime stance, he and Jaroslaw started the Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc - PiS), which entered parliament the same year. A year later, Lech Kaczynski won the mayoral elections in Warsaw. Then, in 2005, against all expectations, he beat his rival, Tusk, in the electoral race to become the country's president. The Kaczynskis' party won parliamentary elections the same year and soon formed a coalition government with two nationalist and populist parties. Kaczynski appointed his brother prime minister; Jaroslaw served for a year, and was succeeded by Tusk. Kaczynski's presidency was marked by a distinctive foreign policy agenda, often perceived as distrustful of the European Union, as well as of Poland's neighbours, Germany and Russia. During the Russian-Georgian war of 2008, Kaczynski supported Georgia's president Saakashvili and was not afraid to travel to Tbilisi, calling for international intervention. He backed Ukraine's and Georgia's bids to join Nato, and pushed for closer co-operation between the EU and post-Soviet states from eastern Europe and the Caucasus. "We often differed in political views," wrote Adam Michnik, a leading dissident in communist times, and later the editor of the Gazeta Wyborcza, which has been highly critical of Kaczynski's presidency. "However, I've always remembered what a great patriot Lech Kaczynski has been all his life. This was the first thought that came to my mind when I heard about this terrible accident." Kaczynski is survived by his daughter, Marta, Jaroslaw and Jadwiga. • Lech Aleksander Kaczynski, politician and academic, born 18 June 1949; died 10 April 2010