Jerzy Urban, General Jaruzelski’s press officer under communism in Poland who embraced capitalism to the full as editor of Nie – obituary

Jerzy Urban, who has died aged 89, was the press spokesman for the Polish Communist leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski during and after martial law in the 1980s, and one of the most hated symbols of the dictatorship.

After the end of communism in eastern Europe, Jerzy Urban became one of Poland’s most famous converts to capitalism and, as founder and editor-in-chief of Nie (“No”), a scabrous tabloid scandal sheet that made Viz look like House & Garden, found himself hailed as a champion of press freedom.

From 1981 to 1989 the bald, jug-eared Urban was perhaps the best-known figure in the government, after Jaruzelski. In television broadcasts during martial law (1981-83) Urban would cheerfully boast that grain-harvest quotas had been exceeded, while neglecting to mention that hundreds of protesters had been arrested or crushed beneath tanks.

Every Tuesday millions of Poles would also tune into his televised news conferences for western reporters, a unique event in the Soviet bloc. They would laugh at – and deplore – his witty, often sarcastic, answers to questions, his scornful attacks on the independent Solidarity union and its leader Lech Walesa, and the insults and ridicule he dished out to all and sundry – women, children, priests, journalists, dogs, sport and even, sometimes, himself.

In 1989 Urban represented the government in the “Round Table” talks with Solidarity that paved the way for Poland’s first partially free elections for more than 40 years. He stood for parliament as an “independent”, but was crushed under the Solidarity juggernaut and then watched in horror as Walesa, the primary butt of his ridicule, won the presidency.

Nothing daunted, Urban decided to return to his original calling, journalism, and launched his satirical weekly which would pour scorn on Poland’s new leaders and their allies in the Catholic Church.

The first edition of Nie rolled off the presses in October 1990 and was like nothing Poles had ever seen before. Its language was coarse and provocative, its cartoons and pictures scurrilous and often sexually explicit, and its mockery of Walesa (“the Great Electrician”, frequently depicted in Napoleonic headgear) was brutal and relentless.

Before long, and to Urban’s delight, came the first of several brushes with the law. In July 1991 he was hauled before the courts on charges of disseminating pornography after publishing what purported to be a primer on how to have sex and avoid pregnancy – complete with the raunchiest of photographs – in what Urban claimed was a protest against an anti-abortion bill being promoted by the Church.

When he was found not guilty, Urban expressed disappointment, claiming that a guilty verdict would have boosted his popularity. Photographs of women in varying stages of undress became a regular feature thereafter.

In 1996 when a Warsaw court sentenced Urban to a one-year suspended prison term for publishing secret government documents in Nie (under a 1983 press law enacted while he was responsible for the Communist Party’s propaganda machine), he waxed indignant, accusing the court of revoking his freedom of speech by banning him from journalism for the duration of his sentence.

Poland’s mainstream media jumped to his defence, publishing front-page editorials condemning the court’s decision and depicting Urban as a champion of press freedom.

Much to Urban’s initial surprise, Nie proved a phenomenal success, becoming Poland’s biggest-selling publication, with a weekly circulation in 1995 of more than 700,000. In 1994 Urban saw a pre-tax profit of more than £1.6 million – enough to allow him to enjoy a lifestyle that infuriated Poles impoverished by the transition to capitalism.

There were his-and-her Jaguars for Urban and his third wife Małgorzata, an art-filled mansion with indoor swimming pool, and a small army of bodyguards. There were also debauched parties, where guests typically ended up in the swimming pool filled with bobbing vodka bottles and scantily clad women.

At one of Urban’s most notorious bashes, a “Post-Communist Anti-Lent Ball”, members of the old nomenklatura were required to wear sackcloth and invited to sprinkle themselves with ashes in mock-penitence for the wrongs they had committed against the Church. In the middle of proceedings three Warsaw call-girls took to the floor and writhed to the disco beat of an updated Gregorian chant, in front of three kneeling men, then, egged on by Urban, slowly stripping off to reveal edible knickers, which were then devoured by the men.

There was an obvious irony in the fact that a former mouthpiece for Polish communism had been so skilful in making full use of Poland’s new found press and entrepreneurial freedoms. Urban’s relentless lampooning of the politicians of the Right, moreover, undoubtedly helped pave the way for the success of the “reformed” communist Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), the major coalition party in Poland between 1993 and 1997, and from 2001 to 2005.

Urban, observed the Catholic writer Stefan Kisielewski, “deals blows with both fists at whatever he can hit to score points. However, this sort of fighter… can sometimes execute a direct blow to the liver.”

He was born Jerzy Urbach into a family of assimilated Jews on August 3 1933 in the central Polish city of Łódź, where his father was a co-owner and editor of a socialist newspaper. When the Germans invaded in 1939 the family fled to Lvov (aka Lviv) in the Soviet-controlled zone where, during the issuing of his father’s Soviet ID, an official confused the letters in his name (“ch” became “n”), an error that probably saved the family’s lives when the Germans seized the city in 1941.

After the war, the family returned to Łódź and a few years later Jerzy moved to Warsaw, where he reportedly studied in two faculties of the University but ended up being expelled from both.

He became a journalist with the journal Nowa Wieś then, in the mid-1950s, during the so-called “Polish thaw”, he was one of a group of brilliant young men connected with the iconoclastic Po Prostu magazine, which was challenging post-war Stalinist dogmas. He became a biting critic of the regime of Władysław Gomułka, who ordered the magazine’s closure in 1957, putting an end to the thaw.

Banned from publishing under his own name, Urban worked from 1961 for the weekly Polityka, writing opinion pieces under pseudonyms. He was eventually banned from publishing altogether, a ban only lifted when Gomulka lost power in 1970.

Although Urban ended up on the government side of the barricades in the 1980s, many a Communist bigwig felt he was far too abrasive to join the club. He never became a party member, despite repeated applications, a fact some attributed to anti-Semitism in the old elite.

Urban continued to edit Nie until his death and continued to cause ructions. In 2005 he was fined 20,000 zlotys (£3,400) and given a suspended 10-month prison term for insulting Pope John Paul II in an article entitled “The Walking Sadomasochist”. Published in 2002, shortly before the Polish Pontiff’s visit to Kraków, the article mocked him as the “Vatican’s Brezhnev” and called him “a senile man” who should “go to bed, pick his nose… or gobble caviar”.

The verdict caused an international outcry, with groups such as Reporters Sans Frontières warning that Poland was violating EU guarantees of freedom of expression.

Urban was married three times and had a daughter. His first wife was reported to be an active member of Solidarity, and Urban himself claimed to have beaten his second wife Karyna when she wore a Solidarity badge (she retaliated in a book entitled Urban… I Was His Wife!). He referred to his daughter as “the unaborted”.

She survives him with his third wife Małgorzata Daniszewska.

Jerzy Urban, born August 3 1933, died October 3 2022