Michael Kuczynski, who died on October 10th in Lima, came from a colourful and fabled family. His father, Maxime Kuczynski, was cousin to Jurgen Kuzcynski, known to many as the author, among innumerable other works, of a leading Marxist history of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe, and to Ursula Kuczynski who worked in support of Soviet intelligence in many places including England, where she was part of the network supporting atomic spy Klaus Fuchs during and after the Second World War. Both lived in and outlived the German Democratic Republic.
Maxime, too, was adventurous and self-sacrificing, but in a very different way, working in close proximity with the extremely deprived and undertaking brave initiatives to improve their lot in Peru, a country ruled by an impervious oligarchy. After training as a doctor and fighting in World War I, he became a professor in the Humboldt University of Berlin and led medical missions to Siberia, Mongolia, China, West Africa and Brazil, where he was part of a team that developed a vaccine against yellow fever. In 1933, as the Nazis were consolidating their power, he went to Paris, where he met and married Madeleine Godard, from a wealthy French banking family and who had studied ‘Lettres’ at the University of Geneva. Through her, Michael was cousin to Jean-Luc Godard. They travelled to Venezuela and after two years he was invited to Peru to work in the Instituto de Medicina Social of San Marcos University, something which appealed to his aspiration to work in the Amazon, which he did, taking his wife and two sons to a place called San Pablo deep in the tropical forest where he was to take charge of the management of leprosy and much besides. The first thing he did was to remove the fencing and convert a leper’s colony into a farm.Years later, Che Guevara was to visit San Pablo – an episode re-enacted in the film The Motorcycle Diaries.
Maxime Kuczynski’s dedication to the cause of medicine for the Amazonian and highland populations, undertaken under the auspices of the Ministry of Health, foreshadowed what later became the orthodoxy of integrated health provision for impoverished populations in developing countries, prioritizing treatment of the social and environmental causes of ill health. Eventually, his progressive views and practice brought him into conflict with the establishment when an authoritarian regime took over in Peru after World War II and he spent almost a year in jail, after which he seems to have given up working with the Peruvian government.
Although the family had no prior connection with Britain, save through Maxime’s brother and sister, Maxime and Madeleine sent their sons to school in Britain, and Michael, the younger of the two, went on to study Economics at Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1959. Subsequently, he worked at the IMF, returning to Pembroke as a Fellow in 1971, where he remained until his retirement. During the following decades, he was an invaluable collaborator of the Centre of Latin American Studies, teaching Economics to MPhil students and assiduously attending the Centre’s seminars whenever the topic was Peru – or indeed beyond. Without him, that aspect of the subject would have been non-existent, for area studies were not attractive to members of the Economics Faculty. His approach was steadfastly structuralist, in the lineage of Keynes and Raul Prebisch, though it is doubtful that he would ever have described himself as left-wing – or for that matter right-wing. For Michael was at once the most affable and most mysterious of people. An expression of benign goodwill and contentment was etched into his face with a slightly enigmatic yet beatific smile. He was anything but talkative or gossipy. And the face never aged.
Already when Michael returned to Cambridge in the early 1970s, his elder brother Pedro Pablo was making waves in Peru. He had held a high position in the country’s Central Bank and, for some reason, had to make a rapid escape when the military staged a nationalist and left-wing coup in 1968. Pedro Pablo went on to a successful career in the world of finance in the US and as head of the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, returning occasionally to hold a Ministerial position when conservative Presidents were elected in Peru. Finally, he himself was elected President in 2016, but after two years joined the very long list of Presidents whose stint in office was cut short due to allegations of corruption and influence-peddling amidst disputes with the country’s notoriously venal Parliament.
Apart from his unaccented, if slightly dated, English and his native Spanish, Michael also spoke faultless French. He returned regularly to Peru and at times stayed with Jean-Luc Godard in his New York apartment, but did not seem to travel anywhere else except to the French side of Lake Geneva to the home of his other Godard relatives. Michael was also an avid art collector, although little is known about the details of his possessions. He was keen on Japanese and Chinese ceramics, especially of the late 19th and early 20th century, as well as Peruvian art of different ages and formats. With art, as with much else of his personal life, he was a man of undisclosed depths.
The Centre of Latin American Studies owes its thanks to Michael for contributing a sense of security and permanence over many decades – a true friend of CLAS without whom the Centre would be much poorer.
This notice has been written with the help of David Lehmann, Pedro Mendes Loureiro and Gabriela Ramos.
Sources include:
An invaluable article by the Peruvian medical historian Marcos Cueto: ‘Un medico alemán en los Andes: la vision medico-social de Maxime Kuczynski-Godard’, Allpanchis, 56 (2000), pp. 39-74
an article by Luis Esteban G. Manrique in El País, 27 July 2016: ‘La Gran Familia Kuczynski’
and a report by Willax on 10 October 2025, ‘Miguel Kuczynski, hermano del expresidente Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, falleció este viernes en Lima’
Photo credit: Tony Jedrej