Leopold Labedz

Who was Leopold Labedz?

Leopold Labedz was an anti-communist Anglo-Polish commentator on the Soviet Union.

Labedz was born to a Polish Jewish doctor in Russia. The family soon returned to Warsaw and the young Labedz 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. Many of Labedz's relatives died in the Holocaust.

He left the Soviet Union in 1942 as part of the Polish Army led by General Władysław Anders. After the war he studied at Bologna University before settling in London, where he studied at the London School of Economics. Strongly anti-communist, Labedz edited Survey journal and headed the London office of Committee for the Defense of Workers known by its Polish abbreviation as KOR.

Labedz often campaigned for the Solidarity union in Poland, and for political prisoners in the Soviet Union. Labedz was one of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's principal champions in the West and often defended the Russian writer against the charge of anti-semitism.