After the collapse of communist-led governments in central and eastern Europe in 1989 most of those regimes’ leading figures disappeared into disgraced retirement. Not so Jerzy Urban.
The man who had been the public face of the Polish regime in the 1980s swiftly reinvented himself as a millionaire media tycoon and free speech advocate financing the comeback of the old political left. His new newspaper Nie (No), combining scandalous attacks on politicians, satire, nudity and criticism of the church, rapidly became the most-read publication in the country.
Urban, who always loved the limelight, relished remaining as provocatively as possible in the public eye. After the 1993 election in which ex-communists in the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) became the largest party, he was pictured at SLD