Born in Warsaw, Kon was the son of Yakov Kon and a Georgian Jewish woman whom was brought up in Russia. 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 a member of the anti-Piłsudski faction of the Polish Socialist Party and gravitated towards the anti-independence & pro-communism point of view. In January 1897 the Tsarist government at last taken took an administrative decision to banish him. He was exiled to Irkutsk and began working on the progressive newspaper "Vostochnoye Obozrenie". 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 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 August 7. 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 August 20 as the Polish army approached the city. In the last issue he triumphantly proclaimed in an article entitled "Dwa światy" : 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. After the war, he decided to remain in the Soviet Union, where he was an activist in the Communist Party of Ukraine, Comintern. However, letters written by Vladimir Lenin referred to Kon, whom he "couldn't stand", as simply an "old fool". 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 June 22, 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. All the other members of the Polish Socialist Party-Left were later liquidated by the NKVD.
Arts
During his exile for revolutionary activity turned to ethnographic research although he had no preparation for it. He also recorded literature possessions in Siberia. During the late 1920s and 1930s, he was the head of the museum department in the People's Commissariat for Education. As an "old Bolshevik" he managed to secure many pictures for the Kyrgyz Gallery. In 1936, he published his memoirs entitled Za Pietdziesiat Let.
