The Fate of Father Józef Majewski and the Significance of His Letter to the Editorial Board of “Kultura”

Abstract

The article addresses one of the key documents that have shaped the Polish Eastern doctrine. It is based on the new archival studies as well as the author’s previous research. Priest Józef Majewski, the author of List do redakcji „Kultury” [Letter to the Editorial Board of “Kultura”], was born in 1928 in Husiatyn, in the eastern part of the Second Polish Republic, and died in 2020 in Beckon, United States. His life experiences included a soviet deportation and, subsequently, emigration to Africa, the United States, and Canada.

In the 1950s, Jerzy Giedroyc, the editor of “Kultura”, fruitlessly searched for an author of the editorial that would present the political arguments for a new approach to Polish eastern policy in the complicated political environment. The potential theses of such an article had to balance the positions of the Polish government‑in-exile in London and the communist government of the Polish People’s Republic. Majewski’s Letter to the Editorial Board of “Kultura”, written and published in 1952, became a pretext for Jerzy Giedroyc and the editorial board of “Kultura” to formulate a new line for the journal based on the postulate of accepting the post‑war borders of Poland.

That, in turn, was an implied and necessary condition of the participation of the (future) free Poland as well as Ukraine (after the assumed collapse of the Soviet Union) in the European integration. The journal’s new political line, formulated after 1952 by Juliusz Mieroszewski, one of the two main publicists of Kultura, and Jerzy Giedroyc himself, became the basis of the political doctrine of the Third Polish Republic post‑ 1989. After writing the letter to “Kultura”, Priest Majewski did not publish again and did not participate in Polish public life, neither in the country nor outside of its borders.