Polish journalist Adam Michnik at the 2016 Ortega y Gasset Awards ceremony.
Polish writer and journalist Adam Michnik (Warsaw, 75 years old), historical director of Gazeta Wyborcza and intellectual who is a reference in the transition to democracy in the Central European country, was awarded the Princess of Asturias Prize for Communication and Humanities excellent. A former dissident leader and always committed to freedom, he is one of the most prominent human rights defenders in Poland. He was one of the founders of the KOR movement (Committee for the Defense of Workers) and has been a member of the Solidaridad de Lech Walesa trade union since its formation in 1980. His militancy paid for this with several jail terms, before and after the fall of the communist dictatorship in 1989, when the progressive reference newspaper in Poland was founded, of which he is still the editor-in-chief. A lover of Spain, where he met the main players in the transition, he has always been committed to national reconciliation and dialogue in the democratic processes.
The arrival of democracy in Poland in 1989 did not neutralize Michnik’s involvement, who has always been highly critical of authoritarian currents in Eastern Europe and the growing influence of Vladimir Putin’s Russia on the territory. As a connoisseur of Russian politics, he has closely followed and commented on this year’s invasion of Ukraine, being extremely critical of Putin’s decisions. “Putin’s Historical Politics [en Rusia]Kaczynski [en Polonia] and Orban [en Hungría] They worked in the sense that they made people believe that the story was different than what it was. That means saying that the past was full of nobility, that for example Russia did no harm to anyone and was always a victim. When he entered a place, it was never an act of aggression but of liberation, he helped the persecuted,” he developed in an interview with The New Yorker last month.
For the past decade he has been an opponent of Law and Justice, a populist and right-wing party that currently governs Poland. An EL PAÍS columnist at a forum last February denounced authoritarian reflexes in Poland, where he assured the government was trying to strangle the press “using Putin-Orbán’s tactics.” “30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the abolition of censorship and the collapse of the USSR, Polish civil society is once again defending the democracy it worked so hard to earn against a state determined to take it away from it,” he warned . However, in a recent interview with The New Yorker, he admitted that he took “a reasonable and decent approach” to the Ukraine case. Poland’s executive branch, which has always firmly opposed immigration from the Middle East and Africa, has joined forces with other European states against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, taking in more than two million Ukrainians in recent months, according to the UN.
In an interview in EL PAÍS in 2016, the year he received the Ortega y Gasset Prize in journalism for his professional career, Michnik said: “You cannot compare what is happening now with the communist dictatorship, but Putin is not Stalin either. It’s a new phenomenon that doesn’t have a name yet. Just like fascism, when it appeared, had no name either.” He has received numerous prizes and awards, both for his journalistic career and for his defense of human rights, including the Legion of Honor in France, the Francisco Cerecedo Journalism Award and the Robert F Kennedy Award for Human Rights.