Leopold Łabędź was an anti-communist journalist and one of the principal champions of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the West. After a period of imprisonment in a Soviet gulag, he served in the Polish Army during WWII, afterward settling in London, where he attended the London School of Economics and later served as Editor of the journal Survey. He frequently campaigned for the Polish Solidarity (Solidarność) union and for political prisoners in the Soviet Union.