Karol Jaroszyński (1878-1929) : an European financier and visionary from the Borderlands

The article is devoted to the life and activities of Karol Jaroszyński, one of the richest and most influential people in czarist Russia at the time of its twilight. K. Jaroszyński was descended from a Polish family settled in the Borderlands (in the Kiev region). Educated within the sphere of Western and Catholic culture, he owed his financial prosperity to successful investments in the banking system of the Romanov family, and also to wide contacts and connections. K. Jaroszyński personally knew czar Nicholas II’s family, and also influential financiers and entrepreneurs who were active in Russia before the outbreak of the I World War (inter alios Emanuel Nobel, Boris Abramovich Kamienka, Vladislav Zhukowsky). He was an adherent of a theory that as a result of the domination of German capital and its “tacit” collaboration with the Bolsheviks in 1917-1918, the consolidation and eventual victory of the “red” dictatorship occurred. K. Jaroszyński took part in a plot to save the czar’s family from the hands of Bolshevist murderers (the plot was unsuccessful). He also explored, together with the British intelligence, the chances of deposition of communist dictatorship on the basis of available economic and organisational resources. In 1919 he left Russia and travelled across Western Europe, where his great determination was met with even greater lack of understanding as he attempted to form a front against the communist dictatorship in Russia which he considered, similarly to W. Churchill, as a great danger to mankind. Eventually he settled in Poland where he became famous as the founder of the Catholic University of Lublin, a Polish institution of education modelled after the Catholic University of Leuven. K. Jaroszyński was unsuccessful in his business matters conducted in his fatherland; he did not start a family. He died in poverty and solitude in Warsaw on 8 September 1929. The article features two never-before-published memoirs of people who were friends with K. Jaroszyński. These are the accounts of Kazimierz and Karol Górski, father and son. Karol Górski went on to become a professor of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń.

The writing of the article was possible thanks to the kindness and assistance of K. Jaroszyński’s family and relatives: Józef Jaroszyński, Paweł Dembinski, Teresa Bisping née Starowieyska and Wojciech Starowieyski.