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Aleksander Smolar - Resisting my father's career plans for me (102/201)

105 views · Published 19 December 2018 · 2:16 · Indexed 6 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2018 · News & Politics

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To listen to more of Aleksander Smolar’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwlxPLurqAOCrabBgGrqLA7

Aleksander Smolar (b. 1940) is a Polish writer, political activist and adviser, vice-president of the Institute for Human Sciences and president of the Stefan Batory Foundation. [Listener: Vitek Tracz]

TRANSCRIPT: But on my level, I mean the level of a schoolboy and then later as a university student, this was natural. I found myself at university, I'd left school and spent an unhappy year at the Polytechnic. My father pushed me which is interesting. Despite being a communist, my father felt permanently threatened by communists and didn't trust them. I'm assuming that he rationalised it, somewhat in the way of the great Witold Kula, who wrote that this system was passing through a phase of barbarism; the fact that it was introduced in the Soviet Union was the reason why it had adopted such a barbaric form and that we were paying the price for this. Nevertheless, it would inevitably move in the right direction. In any case, he didn't want me to be involved in so-called social sciences, meaning he wanted me to have a proper profession. He bought me some Zündra tools and I had a beautiful set of them and I became a very skilful handyman partly thanks to this, I expect. He also pushed me towards… as soon I'd finished primary school he pushed me towards a vocational course for car mechanics. Luckily, I quickly escaped to high school without losing a whole [academic] year; after six months, I had caught up. Once I'd graduated, he pushed me into a polytechnic and since I didn't have a clear plan of my own, I enrolled on this communications course where I wasted a year but after that, I put up a fight and then went back to university. I chose to study economics and then sociology. My passion had always obviously been politics and these were the two subjects that provided me with what I needed to understand the world, Polish reality – Poland and the world. I later supplemented this by going abroad. I studied international relations at Johns Hopkins University so you could say that my passion was always – not any sense of usefulness but my passions, intellectual as well as political, propelled me in this direction.

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