Born in Warsaw, Kon was the son of Yakov (Jakub) Kon and a
Georgian Jewish woman who was brought up in
Russia. His parents were both patriotic revolutionaries and took part in the Polish national movements such as the
January Uprising. He was trained as a
historian and a
journalist, but was involved in politics. He had limited knowledge of Polish affairs at first, but intuitively felt the revolutionary element among Polish workers that he could mobilize. He was exiled to
Irkutsk and began working on the progressive newspaper "Vostochnoye Obozrenie" (Eastern Review). ,
Felix Dzerzhinsky,
Julian Marchlewski, Feliks Kon) As the
Bolsheviks began to prepare for the
Polish-Soviet War, they summoned an increasing number of Polish communists, active elsewhere in Soviet service, to Moscow in order to form a cadre of party and state officials to move into ethnographic Poland with the Red Army. He was put on the
Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee (formed in
Białystok on 30 July 1920 – dissolved 20 August 1920) during the
Polish-Soviet War. During this period he was
editor-in-chief of the
Goniec Czerwony newspaper, the official organ of the temporary revolutionary committee. The first issue appeared on 7 August. Its purpose was to agitate and it printed all the appeals issued by the Communist
puppet government, as well as distinctly skewed news from the war. Twelve issues appeared, the last on 20 August as the Polish army approached the city. In the last issue he triumphantly proclaimed in an article entitled "Dwa światy" (Two Worlds):
The old world disappears, but a new one is born: great, powerful and a genuinely independent Polish Socialist Republic will hold the prominent post in this world. In the 1930s, he held various positions in the Soviet and party apparatus. in 1930–1931 he was head of the arts sector of the People's Commissariat of Education and from 1931 to 1933 he served as the first chairman of the All-Union Committee on Radio Broadcasting at the People's Commissariat of Posts and Telegraphs of the USSR and 1933 head of the museum department of the People's Commissariat for Education of the RSFSR. He was also among the founders of the
International Red Aid. After the war, he decided to remain in the
Soviet Union, where he was an activist in the
Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine and the
Comintern. However, letters written by
Vladimir Lenin referred to Kon, whom he "couldn't stand", as simply an "old fool" (
staryi duren). Kon also served as an editor at several newspapers including
Krasnaya Zvezda. In 1941, he became the director of the Polish-directed propaganda section at
Radio Moscow. The first broadcasts in
Polish were on 22 June 1941. However, he died a natural death shortly afterwards at age 77, at Moscow's Khimki water station during the evacuation of the city before the advancing German army and the
Battle of Moscow. Many of the other prominent members of the Polish Socialist Party-Left were later liquidated by the
NKVD. Many had also been liquidated earlier, in particular during the Great Purge. ==Arts==