Stanisław Kot (22 October 188526 December 1975) was a Polish historian and politician. A native of the Austrian partition of Poland, early in life he was attracted to the cause of Polish independence. As a professor of the Jagiellonian University (1920–1933), he held the chair of the History of Culture. His principal expertise was in the politics, ideologies, education, and literature of the 16th- and 17th-century Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. He is particularly known for his contributions to the study of the Reformation in Poland.
As a Second Polish Republic politician, he was a member of the People's Party; and, during World War II, he held several posts in the Polish Government in Exile, including those of Minister of the Interior (1940–1941), Minister of State (1942–1943), and Minister of Information (1943–1944). He also served, during the war, as Polish ambassador to the Soviet Union (1941–1942); and shortly after the war, as Polish ambassador to Italy (1945–1947).
In 1947, in the wake of the communist takeover of Poland, he became a political refugee, living in France and later in the United Kingdom, where he was the leader of the People's Party in exile.
Early life and education Kot was born into a peasant family in Ruda, in the Austrian-partition Galicia region of Austro-Hungary. His father Marcin, a leading citizen of the village, could read and write, and was involved in the patriotic movement of Lesser Poland, the historic region to which Ruda belonged. Kot attended elementary school in Czarna and Sędziszów and gymnasium in Rzeszów, and became active in Polish-independence youth groups in Galicia, part of the Austrian partition of Poland.
In 1904 he matriculated in law at Lwów University, but in 1905 he transferred to Kraków's Jagiellonian University, where in 1909 he obtained a Ph.D. in classics for a thesis on The Influence of the Political Theories of Classical Antiquity on the Political Ideas of Sixteenth-Century Poland, with Special Reference to Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski. At university he was active in the student socialist movement, cooperating with the Polish Social Democratic Party of Galicia, and clashed with right-wing National Democrats over his insistence on respecting the rights of the region's ethnic Ukrainian citizens. Kot also rejected the National Democrats' antisemitism.
Career Schoolteaching and World War I In 1908–1912 he taught at secondary schools in Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine) and Kraków. In 1911 he married Ida Proksch. In 1912–1914, thanks to a scholarship from the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, he studied in France and made several study trips to Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium.
During World War I he was active in politics, culture, and education, working with the Polish Legions. From 1915 he headed the Press Department of the Polish Supreme National Committee. From 1914 to 1917 or 1919 (sources vary) he published a newspaper, Wiadomości Polskie (Polish News); during that time, his political views shifted from left-leaning to centrist. However, he preferred scholarly over political work, and during the 1920s he took little part, if any, in politics.
Historian Kot published his first scholarly work in 1910, about Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski's views on education. His early research thus began with the history of education in Poland, but over time his interest gravitated toward the history of culture, in particular the Reformation in Poland. After Poland had in November 1918 regained independence, incarnated as the Second Polish Republic, Kot in 1919 co-founded a publishing house, , best known for publishing the book series, (The National Library), which continues to the present; up to the outbreak of World War II, he oversaw the publication of 177 volumes. He also edited another book series, Biblioteka Pisarzów Polskich (The Library of Polish Writers).
In 1920 Kot habilitated his doctorate and was appointed a professor at Kraków's Jagiellonian University, in 1924 earning a full professorship and holding a chair in the History of Culture newly created for him. Kot was popular with his students, particularly those from ethnic minorities, and has been described as "a strong opponent of nationalism and antisemitism".Anna Landau-Czajka, Syn będzie Lech... Asymilacja Żydów w Polsce międzywojennej (The Son Will Be a Pole... The Assimilation of Jews in Interwar Poland) , Warsaw, Wydawnictwo Neriton, 2006, , p. 99: "[M]any outstanding Polish scholars of Jewish descent, when up for promotions, ran into difficulties for 'extra-scholastic' reasons... One of the most outstanding historians, Józef Feldman, had trouble getting through his habilitation because one of the [examining] professors had maliciously prepared questions that were impossible to answer (Prof. Stanisław Kot came to [Feldman's] rescue, declaring that if Feldman were not given his habilitation, he [Kot] would resign his own [professorial] chair, because he did not know the answers to the questions either)" His opposition to the antisemitism then common among Polish chauvinists has been attributed to the political activism that he had begun in his student days.
In 1919 Kot published a biography of Modrzewski which, as of 1999, was still considered the most exhaustive and reliable work on the subject. In 1932 he published a book on Socinianism in Poland: The Social and Political Ideas of the Polish Antitrinitarians in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries – a detailed monograph on the Polish Brethren – which appeared in English in 1957 and is considered his most influential monograph.. Early in this new decade, Kot produced what was undoubtedly to become, due to its translation into English, his most widely known work: his monograph on the political and social doctrines of the Antitrinitarian Polish Brethren. He also published a well-received textbook, Historia Wychowania (History of Education; first, single-volume edition, 1924; second, revised, two-volume edition, 1933–1934).
From 1921 until 1939 he edited the quarterly, Reformacja w Polsce (The Reformation in Poland), which he had established; it was published by the Society for Research into the History of the Reformation. For a while he also edited another journal, Archiwum do dziejów literatury i oświaty (Archive for the History of Literature and Education), published by the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1921 he became a corresponding member of the said Academy, in 1928 advancing to a full active member. In 1927 he became a member of the PEN Club. In 1929 he was inducted into the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences. In 1930 he organized a large academic conference dedicated to the study of the 16th-century Polish poet Jan Kochanowski. From 1929 to 1939 Kot was chairman of the Commission for the History of Education and Schools in Poland. In 1935 or 1937 (sources vary) he was a guest lecturer at Paris' Collège de France. In 1941 he received an honorary degree from Oxford University, where he also lectured that year; and in 1959, from the University of Basel.
Kot's main scholarly expertise comprised the politics, ideologies, and literature of the 16th- and 17th-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In particular, he specialized in the Reformation in Poland, the history of education in Poland, Poland's cultural contacts with the West, historical Polish political thought and doctrines, and observations of Polish national characteristics.Archiwum Stanisława Kota (Stanisław Kot collection). United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives His studies of Polish emigrations to Western Europe and to cities in France, Germany, and Italy were trailblazing.
Wiktor Weintraub writes that Kot was a university professor for a period of only thirteen years, cut short by the consequences of his political activities; and that, in assessing Kot the scholar, "one cannot avoid a certain feeling of frustration" since, while he produced substantial research in the decade following his 1909 Ph.D. degree, despite the disruptions of World War I, his subsequent scholarship lost its initial drive and was not as productive.
Politician 1930s In the early 1930s Kot participated in protests directed against the government. One protest opposed a reform of the educational system. In 1933, when the Sanation government controlled by Józef Piłsudski was mistreating political prisoners at the Brześć fortress, Kot was a principal organizer of a protest by university professors.
Soon after, in September 1933, due to the Sanation government's pressure Kot, then aged 48, was forced to take early retirement from Jagiellonian University; this was widely seen as retribution for his political activities, such as his connection with professors' resistance against the suppression of university autonomy and in connection with protests against the government's imprisonment of Centrolew politicians. From that point on, Kot would focus an increasing amount of his time on politics, and less and less on scholarly activities.
In 1933 Kot joined the People's Party and from 1936 to 1939 was a member of its executive committee. He was aligned with the party's right wing, and was also involved in the Front Morges political alliance. He acted on Wincenty Witos' behalf in Poland (Witos then being in foreign exile) and helped organize a 1937 rural strike, leading to his two-day arrest by Polish authorities.
World War II In 1939, after the German invasion of Poland and the start of the Second World War, Kot escaped to Romania, then through Hungary and Switzerland to France, where in October 1939 he took part in forming the Polish Government in Exile. That December he became its Deputy Prime Minister or Deputy Secretary of State. He worked closely with Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski and was a vocal opponent of Sanation, which was now in the political opposition. In February 1940, Kot met in Paris with the resistance envoy Jan Karski, who had just arrived from Poland. Karski's report stated that German policies were oppressive, and that the Polish Jewish community was being singled out for especially harsh treatment. In the spring of 1940, meeting with representatives of British Jewry in France, Kot criticized the bulk of Poland's Jews for failing to assimilate into Polish society and suggested that, after the war, most Jews would have to leave Poland. From October 1940 to August 1941 Kot was Minister of the Interior. He was also active in preserving Polish culture, supporting Polish artists, educators, and scholars through the Fund for National Culture. In New York City in 1942, he cofounded the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America (PIASA).
Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and the subsequent reestablishment of diplomatic relations between Poland and the Soviet Union (severed upon the Soviet invasion of Poland), from November 1941 until July 1942 Kot was Polish Ambassador to the Soviet Union in Moscow. In that capacity he was very active in helping Polish refugees in the Soviet Union. One of his main responsibilities was to ensure the "rapid release of all Poles held in Soviet prisons and camps" and to establish Polish consulates on Soviet territory. Despite his attempts, he failed to secure the release of some, including Polish-Jewish Bund and Second International executive-committee members Viktor Alter and Henryk Ehrlich.Herman Kruk, Benjamin Harshav, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939-1944, Yale University Press, 2002, p. 43, He objected to the creation of a separate Jewish Legion within the Anders Army – a question that divided the Jewish community itself.