- ^ First published in the American Scholar.
- Shils, Edward Portraits : A Gallery of Intellectuals, University Of Chicago Press 1997.
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| National | |
| Academics | |
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Leopold Łabędź | |
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| Born | January 22, 1920 |
| Died | March 22, 1993 (aged 73) London, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | Polish. |
| Occupation | Journalist |
| Known for | Championing human rights in the Eastern Bloc |
Leopold Łabędź (22 January 1920 – 22 March 1993) was an anti-communist Anglo-Polish commentator on the Soviet Union.
Łabędź was born to a Polish Jewish doctor in Russia. The family soon returned to Warsaw and the young Łabędź decided to follow his father into the medical profession. He studied medicine in Paris. In 1939, he fled to the Soviet zone of occupation and was imprisoned by the Soviets in the Gulag.
He left the Soviet Union in 1942 as part of the Polish Army led by General Władysław Anders. After the war he studied at the University of Bologna before settling in London, where he studied at the London School of Economics. Strongly anti-communist, Łabędź edited Survey journal and headed the London office of Committee for the Defense of Workers known by its Polish abbreviation as KOR.
Łabędź often campaigned for the Solidarity union in Poland, and for political prisoners in the Soviet Union. Łabędź was one of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's principal champions in the West and often defended the Russian writer against the charge of antisemitism.
