Lech Kaczynski was a Polish nationalist virtually from birth. Born to parents who took part in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, Lech and his identical twin brother, Jaroslaw, sang the Polish national anthem each night after saying their bedtime prayers. As adults, the brothers founded Poland’s conservative Law and Justice Party, which, with Lech as its standard-bearer, captured the presidency in 2005.
Kaczynski, who died last week when an airplane carrying him and dozens of other Polish dignitaries crashed in western Russia, grew up loathing the communist government that ruled the country from the end of World War II until its collapse, in 1989. “At home I learned a conviction that Poland was under oppression, that the communist system had been forced upon us,” he told an interviewer. A promising scholar, Kaczynski studied law in the early 1970s at the University of Warsaw and the University of Gdansk—“a propitious choice of vocation and location,” said the London Times, because the Solidarity labor union was founded at the Gdansk shipyards in 1980. “A natural colleague and advisor to the charismatic Solidarity leader Lech Walesa,” Kaczynski was one of many labor leaders imprisoned when the government declared martial law in 1981.
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