Stanisław Kot

Stanisław Kot
Born	(1885-10-22)22 October 1885 Ruda, Austria-Hungary
Died	26 December 1975(1975-12-26) (aged 90) London, England
Nationality	Polish
Known for	studies in Reformation in Poland
Academic background
Alma mater	Lviv University
Academic work
Institutions	Jagiellonian University

Stanisław Kot (22 October 1885 – 26 December 1975) was a Polish historian and politician. As a professor at the Jagiellonian University (1920-1933), he held a chair in the History of Culture. His principal expertise was in the politics, ideologies, education, and literature of the 16th- and 17th-century Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; he is particularly credited with advancing knowledge of the Reformation in Poland.

As a Second Polish Republic politician, he was a member of the People's Party; and he held several high positions in the Polish Government in Exile during World War II, including Minister of 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.

Life

Early life

Stanisław Kot was born on 22 October 1885 to a peasant family in Ruda, in the Galicia region of Austro-Hungary. He attended elementary school in Rzeszów and became active in Polish-independence youth groups in Galicia, part of the Austrian partition of Poland. In 1904 he matriculated in law at the University of Lwów, but after about two years he switched to history and literature, obtaining a PhD in 1909. At university he was active in the student socialist movement, and clashed with right-wing nationalist National Democracy groups.

In 1908–12 he taught at secondary schools in Lviv (Lwów) and Kraków. In 1911 he married Ida Proksch. 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.

During World War I he was active in politics, culture, and education, working with the Polish Legions. From 1915 he headed the Press Department of the Polish Supreme National Committee. From 1914 to 1917 or 1919 (sources vary) he published a newspaper, Wiadomości Polskie (Polish News); over 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.

Historian

Kot published his first scholarly work in 1910. His early research was about the history of education in Poland, but over time it gravitated toward the history of culture, in particular, the Reformation in Poland. After Poland had in November 1918 regained independence, incarnated as the Second Polish Republic, Kot in 1919 began publication of the book series, Biblioteka Narodowa (The National Library), which continues to the present. Kot oversaw the publication of 177 volumes up to the outbreak of World War II. He also edited another book series, Biblioteka Pisarzów Polskich (The Library of Polish Writers).

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. For a while he also edited another journal, Archiwum do dziejów literatury i oświaty (Archive for the History of Literature and Education), published by the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 1919 he habilitated his doctorate, and from 1920 he was a professor at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, earning a full professorship in 1924 and holding a chair in the History of Culture which was newly created for him. In 1919 he published a biography of Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski which, as of 1999, was still considered the most exhaustive and reliable work on Modrzewski. In 1932 he published a book on Socinianism in Poland, which is considered probably his most influential monograph. He also published books on the history of education (1924, 1933, 1934).

Kot was popular with his students, particularly those from ethnic minorities, and has been described as "a strong opponent of nationalism and antisemitism". His opposition to the antisemitism then common among Polish chauvinists has been attributed to his political activism begun during his student days.

From 1921 he was a member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, first a corresponding member, and from 1928 a full active member. In 1927 he became a member of the PEN Club. In 1929 he was inducted as a member into the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences. In 1930 he organized a large academic conference dedicated to the study of Jan Kochanowski. In 1932 he published a detailed monograph on the Polish Brethren.

From 1929 to 1939 Kot was chairman of the Commission for the History of Education and Schools in Poland. In 1935 or 1937 (sources vary) he was a guest lecturer at Paris' Collège de France. In 1941 he received an honorary degree from Oxford University, where he also lectured that year; and in 1959, from the University of Basel.

As a scholar, Kot's main area of expertise was the politics, ideologies, and literature of the 16th- and 17th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In particular, he specialized in the Reformation in Poland, the history of education in Poland, Poland's cultural contacts with the West, historical Polish political thought and doctrines, and observations of Polish national characteristics. His studies of Polish emigrations to Western Europe and to cities in France, Germany, and Italy are considered to be trailblazing.

Writing after Kot's death, Wacław W. Soroka writes that while those who knew Kot considered him a great scholar, writing about Kot's scholarship is difficult due to his politics. Likewise, Wiktor Weintraub in a note after Kot's death, writes that Kot was a university professor for only thirteen years interrupted by his political career. Overall Weintraub writes that in evaluating Kot the scholar "one cannot avoid a certain feeling of frustration" as while he produced significant output, despite the interruption of World War I, the decade between obtaining his degree in 1909 and 1919 his subsequent scholarship lost this initial drive and he was not as productive.

Politician

1930s

In the early 1930s Kot also participated in protests directed against the current government. One protest opposed a reform of the educational system. In 1933 he was one of the main organizers of a protest of university professors against the mistreatment of political prisoners at the Brześć fortress by the Sanation government controlled by Józef Piłsudski. Soon after, in September 1933, due to the 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. From that point on, he would focus an increasing amount of his time on politics, and less and less on scholarly activities.

In 1933 Kot joined the People's Party and in 1936-1939 was a member of its Executive Committee. He was aligned with the party's right wing, and was also involved in the Front Morges political alliance. 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.

World War II

Joseph Stalin signing Soviet-Polish common declaration on 4 December 1941, in presence of the Polish delegation including Polish Prime Minister General Władysław Sikorski, General Władysław Anders, Stanisław Kot and others

In 1939, after the German invasion of Poland and the start of the Second World War, Kot escaped to Romania, then through Hungary and Switzerland to France, where in October 1939 he took part in forming the Polish Government in Exile, in December becoming its (sources vary) Deputy Prime Minister or Deputy Secretary of State. He worked closely with Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski and was a vocal opponent of Sanation (which was now in the political opposition). In the spring of 1940 he made a controversial remark suggesting that most Jews would have to leave Poland once the war was over; this incident aside, the civilian administration under Stanisław Kot has been described as "much more open and helpful to the Jews" than were the Polish military authorities. From October 1940 to August 1941 he was the Minister of the Interior. Kot was also active in preserving Polish culture, supporting Polish artists through the Fund for National Culture. In 1942 he cofounded in New York City the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and the subsequent reestablishment of diplomatic relations between Poland and the Soviet Union, which had been severed after the Soviet Union's participation in the invasion of Poland, from November 1941 until July 1942 Kot was Polish ambassador to the Soviet Union in Moscow. In that capacity he was very active in helping Polish refugees in the Soviet Union. Next, until 1943 he served as Polish Minister of State (Minster Stanu) in the Near East, where substantial Polish armed forces were stationed.

From March 1943 Kot was the Polish exile government's Minister of Information. One of his most memorable acts in this capacity was the public disclosure of the Katyn Massacre. After Prime Minister Władysław 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. In Mikolajczyk's cabinet, Kot retained his post as Minister of Information until 1944.

After 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 new communist authorities. From 1945 to 1947 Kot worked with the Provisional Government of National Unity, which sought to bring together the Polish Government-in-Exile and the Soviet-sponsored Polish communist government. Throughout most of that period Kot served as Poland's ambassador to Italy. In 1947, in the wake of the staged elections and of trials suppressing People's Party activists deemed insufficiently cooperative with 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.

Kot was a political refugee in Paris, before moving to the United Kingdom. In France he became involved with the International Rescue Committee. He supported the London-based Polish Government in Exile, and from 1955 was the leader of the People's Party in exile. He was also active in the International Peasant Union. He published scholarly articles in international academic journals, and memoirs of his time as Polish ambassador to the USSR. Some of his final research concerned the Polish Reformation, interactions between Polish and Western cultures, medieval proverbs, and biographies of Yuri Nemyrych and Szymon Budny. 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. In 1964 he suffered a stroke, remained in a coma for two years, and was bedridden thereafter. He died in London, England, on 26 December 1975.

Legacy

Peter Brock and Zdzisław Pietrzyk write that, "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'."

Kot's political legacy remains controversial. Wacław Soroka writes that 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." In the West, some Polish emigrés criticized him for opposing Józef Piłsudski's interbellum Sanation political movement and for attempting to find a modus vivendi with communist authorities during and after World War II. Brock and Pietrzak write that, while Kot was respected among the international community, he was ostracized by many Polish exiles, as "the Polish exiled community... never forgave him for his return to Poland in 1945; while he, for his part, waged a relentless – and almost obsessive – war against the National Democrats and Pilsudskiites, who predominated among the exiles".

Kot's political career has been a subject of critical analyses, many agreeing that, while Kot the scholar may have been unexceptionable, Kot the politician could be maladroit, with a tendency to suspect hostile conspiracies, especially on the part of interbellum adherents of the Sanation political movement, whose founder Józef Piłsudski had in 1928 relieved Władysław Sikorski – Polish World War II premier and commander-in-chief in exile, with whom Kot collaborated closely – of his army command, and which in 1933 had forced Kot to relinquish his Jagiellonian University professorial chair. Many critics see Kot's last official appointment, as the communist government's ambassador to Rome, as a disappointing end to his political career. 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". 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.

According to Agnieszka Wałęga, Kot was "one of the creators of the [field of] history of education as a [scholarly] discipline". Lucyna Hurło writes that "his works in the... history of education, culture, literature, and [the R]eformation and Antitrinitarianism exemplify [scholarly] reliability." Waclaw Soroka writes that "in Kot, the intellectual history of Poland and Eastern and Central Europe gained an outstanding researcher and exponent." 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. 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." Brock and Pietrzyk have assessed him to be a "historian of major stature". Wojciech Roszkowski and Jan Kofman summarized his life as follows: "He left a vast scholarly legacy in the history of education and history of culture, including particularly to the history of the Reformation."

Kot has 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. During his years at the Jagiellonian University, Kot's disciples included Henryk Barycz, Stanisław Bednarski, Wanda Bobkowska, Stanisław Bodniak, Maria Czapska, Józef Feldman, Jan Hulewicz, Alodia Kawecka-Gryczowa, Bogdan Suchodolski, Stanislaw Szczotka, Marek Wajsblum, Wiktor Weintraub, Ignacy Zarębski, and Jerzy Zathey. Kot also influenced foreign scholars, including his Italian student Delio Cantimori. 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). 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 (The Renaissance and the Reformation in Poland).

Kot wrote 95 "major studies, books, and articles". 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). A number of his scholarly articles, particularly after World War II, were published in, or translated into, languages other than Polish. During Poland's communist era, with few exceptions, censorship did not allow his works to be reprinted, discussed or even cited.

In 1976 Jerzy Giedroyc, editor of Kultura, in Paris, called for a monograph about Kot's life. Such a work (in the form of a Festschrift) had in fact been in preparation before the war, but the manuscript had been badly damaged during World War II, and efforts to reconstruct it had subsequently been stopped by Poland's communist authorities. In December 1997 a conference on "Stanisław Kot – uczony i polityk" ("Stanisław Kot – scholar and politician") was held in Kraków, organized by the Jagiellonian University. The conference included a temporary exhibition on Kot's life and work. Materials from the conference were published in a 2001 book of the same title, whose blurb described Kot as "undeniably a great scholar and politician". In 2000, Tadeusz Rutkowski published a biography of Kot, Stanisław Kot 1885-1975. Biografia polityczna, focusing on him as a politician. At the time, Janusz Tazbir announced that he was working on a biography of Kot, focusing on him as a scholar; however, Tazbir passed away in 2016 without having finished his book.

Select 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 (English edition translated by E. M. Wilbur, 1957: 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.

See also

• List of Poles

Further reading

• Tadeusz Paweł Rutkowski (January 2000). Stanisław Kot, 1885-1975: biografia polityczna (in Polish). Wydawn. DiG. ISBN 978-83-7181-165-4.
• Alina Fitowa (ed.), Stanisław Kot - uczony i polityk. Pokłosie sesji naukowej, Wydawnictwo UJ, 2002, ISBN 83-233-1519-1, Polish language. Contains among others the following articles (ToC):
  • Franciszek Ziejka, O drodze Stanisława Kota spod Ropczyc w daleki świat..., p.7-11
  • Halina Florkowska-Francić, Działalność Stanisława Kota w Naczelnym Komitecie Narodowym, p.15-21?
  • Eugeniusz Duraczyński, Na czele Ambasady Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej w ZSRR, p. 33?
  • Tadeusz Paweł Rutkowski, Działalność polityczna Stanisława Kota w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym (1918-1939), p. ?
  • Aleksander Łuczak, Stanisław Kot w czasie II wojny światowej, p. 64-71?
  • Tadeusz Kisielewski, Druga emigracja profesora Stanisława Kota - działalność polityczna na tle emigracyjnego ruchu ludowego, p.71-88
  • Michał Śliwa, Stanisław Kot - historyk idei społecznych, p. 89-98
  • Alina Fitowa, Stanisław Kot w świetle prywatnej korespondencji, p.99-156
  • Renata Dutkowa, Stanisława Kota z Polską Akademią Umiejętności, p. 157-166
  • Andrzej Borowski, Stanisław Kot jako badacz kultury staropolskiej, p. 167-172
  • Julian Dybiec, Stanisław Kot jako historyk szkolnictwa i autor podręczników historii wychowania, p.177-190
  • Andrzej Kazimierz Banach, Działalność uniwersytecka Stanisława Kota, p. 191-198
  • Jan Okoń, Włochy w badaniach naukowych Stanisława Kota, p. 199-212
  • Zdzisław Pietrzyk , Marek Wajsblum : ulubiony uczeń Stanisława Kota, p. 213-224
  • Jakub Niedźwiedź, Stanisław Kot : twórca serii wydawniczej "Biblioteka Narodowa", p. 225-230
  • Marek Kornat, Stanisław Kot a historiografia zachodnia, p. ?
  • Franciszek Ziemski, Stanisław Kot o roli i zadaniach historii wychowania na studiach pedagogicznych (W świetle jego podręcznika: Historia wychowania"), p. ?
  • Wacław Urban, Badania Stanisława Kota nad reformacja ̨ w okresie II Rzeczpospolitej, p. ?
    • Review of the above book
• Alina Fitowa, Podróże i badania naukowe Stanisława Kota wspomagane na emigracji przez Fundację Rockefellera [Stanisław Kot's scientific journeys and research during the period of his emigration supported by Rockefeller Foundation], in Przestrzeń informacji i komunikacji społecznej, UJ, p.333-338
• Mazur Grzegorz, Stanisław Kot [in:] Jubileuszowa księga nauk politycznych. Instytut nauk politycznych i stosunków międzynarodowych Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego / red. Andrzej Zięba, Kraków 2015, p. 223-234
• Franciszek Wilk (1976). Profesor Stanisław Kot: życie i dzieło (in Polish). Jutro Polski.
• Barcik M., Próba powołania Stanisława Kota na Katedrę Historii Literatury Polskiej w Uniwersytecie Jagiellońskim, „Ruch Literacki”, 1993, v. 5, p. 631-642
• Draus J., Profesor Stanisław Kot – portret polityka, [in:] Chłopi, naród, kultura, t. 2: Działalność polityczna ruchu ludowego, Rzeszów 1996, p.61-72; 94
• Stanisław Kot [in:] Kultura wsi, 1997, no 1, p. 189
• Śliwa M., Stanisław Kot – historyk idei społecznych, „Zdanie”, 1997, no 3/4, p. 59-63.

External links

• Biography in the Alma Mater magazine of the Jagiellonian University, in Polish, photo
• Arkadiusz Adamczyk, "Stanisław Kot 1885-1975 : biografia polityczna", Tadeusz Paweł Rutkowski, Warszawa 2000 : [recenzja, Piotrkowskie Zeszyty Historyczne, 2003, 5, , s. 423-430 ]