Piotr Ogrodziński

Piotr Andrzej Ogrodziński (born 7 September 1951) is a Polish diplomat, activist and philosopher.

Activist Ogrodziński was born in Paris where his father, Przemysław Ogrodziński, was serving as the Polish charge d'affairs at the Polish embassy. Ogrodziński's father was a senior diplomat under the Communist regime. Ogrodziński's mother, Halina Jacuńska-Ogrodzińska, was recognized by the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem as one of Righteous Among the Nations on 28 June 1979 for hiding two Jewish women, Maria Glass and Olga Lilien during the Holocaust.

In a 2008 essay, he recalled about his generation: "My generation, born into the Polish People’s Republic, took the meagerness of life under socialism as a given, but, step by step, discovered that it didn’t work because of its economic inefficiency and its false ethics. Initially, we lived practicing opportunism by pretending to believe in the ruling ideology and being preoccupied by small things. It was the grayness of “a little stability” or – as the Czech writer Milan Kundera called it – the unbearable lightness of being. Our experience and sense of history were based on a chain of strikes and political upheavals of 1956, 1968, 1970, 1976 and 1980–81."

As a five-year old in Warsaw, Ogrodziński witnessed the Polish October revolution of 1956 where a nationalist faction of the Communist Party under Władysław Gomułka overthrew the Stalinist leadership as he remembered seeing huge crowds of workers march down the streets of Warsaw demanding a new government. Gomułka had spoken of a "Polish Road To Socialism", promising greater independence from the Soviet Union and a de-Stalinizing "thaw" similar to the one in the Soviet Union. Initially popular, Gomułka's authoritarian style of leadership had made him unpopular by the late 1960s. As a high school student in January 1968, Ogrodziński attended the celebrated theater production of the play Dziady (Forefathers) by Adam Mickiewicz. Forefathers was set in the 19th century Congress Poland and featured Russian villains, leading to Varsovian audiences of 1968 to see the play as a metaphor for Soviet domination of Poland. The banning of Dziady on 30 January 1968 after playing for only 14 times set off the "March events" in Poland that severally threatened Gomułka's hold on power. Ogrodziński recalled that the principal problem with opposition to the Communist dictatorship was the divide between the working class and the intelligentsia. During the March events of 1968, it was university students and intellectuals who protested while the working class assisted the police. In December 1970 a workers revolt broke out in Gdańsk, leading to the Polish Army being deployed against the working class of Gdańsk with at least 44 workers shot down while the intellectuals and students stayed passive.

From 1971 to 1975, he attended the University of Warsaw, where he graduated from the Institute of Economic Sciences. As a student, he become involved in opposition to the Communist dictatorship, working for a transition to a democracy. As an young anti-Communist activist, Ogrodziński worked to bridge the gap between the working class and the intelligentsia, believing that an alliance of the workers and intellectuals was the best way of bringing down the Communist regime. Ogrodziński felt that the protests and strikes of June 1976 were the turning point in the struggle against the regime as for the first time the workers and intellectuals worked together. From 1977 onward, he worked to provide logistical support for the underground newspaper of Robotnik. In a 2013 interview, Ogrodziński stated: "For me, I was Left-oriented, but quite critical of the Polish People’s Republic. Already in the 1970s, I was in the gray zone of KOR [Komitet Obrony Robotników-Workers Defense Committee]. They had a bulletin called Robotnik (Worker). Their archives were at my flat. The editorial board met at my flat. So, I knew them...I was not part of KOR, but they were my friends. They were not happy with my leftish orientation, but they turned out to a large extent to be leftists too." Keenly interested in the philosophy of politics, Ogrodziński worked at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences from 1978 to 1990.

In September 1980, he joined the newly founded Solidarność union, which had just staged a successful strike at the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk in August 1980.

From 2004 to 2009, he served as the Polish ambassador to Canada. The killing of Dziekanski, which was recorded live by a man named Paul Pritchard at Vancouver International Airport caused much controversy in Poland where it was widely felt to be a case of excessive force.

In December 2008, when Tomasz Lis, the Polish consul in Vancouver, was alleged to have crashed his automobile while driving drunk, Ogrodziński told the Canadian media that Lis had been suspended as a consul while his diplomatic immunity had been waived, meaning that Lis would face prosecution for the incident. Ogrodziński stated: "Whatever the legal procedures and requirements of the Canadian legal system, he will be facing them. He'll be available...Suspension is because the benefit of the doubt is there. You don't make final decisions before you are in possession of all possible information about what has happened. We are now in the process of clarification where we need to be very open for the benefit of the doubt in the sense to evaluate Mr. Lis's story, but I think the replacement of Mr. Lis is very likely. I couldn't imagine a situation where he would continue his function...At the same time, I know him personally. I believe he is a very nice person. I am really in great distress that things went so bad." The three ambassadors expressed their appreciation for Lester Pearson, who as the Canadian minister of external affairs, insisted on including as part of the North Atlantic Treaty article 2 which stated that its members "should be bound together not merely by their common opposition to totalitarian communist aggression, but by a common belief in the values and virtues of...democracy and a positive love of it and their fellow men.", leading to Article 2 being known as the "Canada clause". In an email he sent about the dispute, Ogrodziński wrote: "With all due respect to Canadian sensitivities we cannot change history. Many millions lost their lives because of the policies of communist regimes and we have to be also sensitive and remember the victims of these crimes...Many innocent Polish people perished because of Stalin during the communist rule in Poland. These are historical facts that will never be forgotten by Polish Canadians". Ogrodziński felt there was a conflict of interest with the RCMP investigating the constables responsible for Dziekanski's death.

During his five years in Ottawa, Ogrodziński successfully negotiated an agreement to allow visa free travel between Canada and Poland. One of Ogrodziński's principal duties in Ottawa was protesting against the term 'Polish camps' to describe the Nazi death camps in Poland, leading him to write 30 letters of protest to various Canadian media outlets during his five years in Canada. He also awarded the badge of Distinguished Cultural Activist. In its founding statement, the Conference of Ambassadors declared: "Our geopolitical position forces us to choose: integration with the West or submission to the revisionist empire from the East. History has shown that daydreams about a third way in the middle of Europe lead to dire consequences. Let us not get pushed out of the European Union, let us not allow our ties with NATO to be weakened." The same letter accused Russia of sponsoring populist movements of both left and right in Europe and North America as part of a gambit to break up both the European Union and NATO. The letter accused Kaczyński of having suggested "a new model of the administration of justice, unknown in democratic countries: Polish judges, regardless of the applicable law, should always adjudicate in favor of Poles." On 22 June 2020, Ogrodziński signed a public letter on behalf of the Conference of Ambassadors criticizing the visit of President Andrzej Duda of Poland during the middle of his re-election campaign to meet President Donald Trump in Washington as violating the unwritten rule that American presidents do not meet with Polish presidents during the course of an election campaign, arguing that the visit was being portrayed as an endorsement of Duda by Trump, and thus was a sort of American interference in Polish domestic affairs.

On 9 September 2020, Ogrodziński together with Ryszard Schnepf, the former Polish ambassador to the United States and Jan Truszczyński, the former Polish ambassador to the European Union published a public letter expressing the hope that Joe Biden would win the United States presidential election, writing: "It is with great warmth and hope that we welcome your candidacy for president of the United States, a country that has played a unique role in our history. From the moment of its birth, the United States of America wanted to be a "city upon the hill" – a beacon of hope for those who desired freedom and democracy, justice and equality. This is how, as a role model, the United States was perceived by five and a half million Poles who signed a letter of thanks to the American people in 1926. For it was the United States which, after World War I, successfully raised the issue of Polish independence, and at the end of the 20th century played a vital role for us by supporting the wave of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, shedding the yoke of communism." The letter criticized "a wave of populism" as threatening "pluralistic democracies, creating the illusion in societies that an authoritarian system can deal more effectively with current problems". The letter stated that more 50 ambassadors in Warsaw had criticized the government's statements about gay Polish people and went on to state: "President Andrzej Duda cynically used homophobia in his election campaign. From public finances, the minister of justice supports local governments which declare themselves an "LGBT-free zone" with the approval of other PiS officials. These are shameful and blameworthy actions. The current 'anti-LGBT' campaign is beginning to recall the terrifying beginnings of discrimination leading to crimes in 20th century history."

On 18 December 2020, Ogrodziński as a member of the Conference of Ambassadors signed a public letter criticizing President Andrzej Duda as being of the world leaders together with President Vladimir Putin of Russia who took their time to congratulate Biden for winning the 2020 election, apparently out of the hope that Trump might remain in office. The letter expressed the fear that Duda might had damaged Poland's reputation in the United States, and denounced what it called Duda's "infantile friendship with Donald Trump".

Books and articles