Martial law in Poland

• 1. Introduction

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  Martial law in Poland descended on the country at exactly midnight on the 13th of December 1981. Within hours, 70,000 soldiers and 30,000 security functionaries were in the streets. Around 1,750 tanks had been mobilized. Telephone lines were severed, borders sealed, airports closed, and a curfew locked citizens indoors before dawn. General Wojciech Jaruzelski appeared on Polish Radio and state television to announce what he called a necessary act of salvation. Millions watched the broadcast despite the early hour.

  How had a nation arrived at this moment? Poland had spent the late 1970s accumulating a foreign debt that by 1980 exceeded US$23 billion, nearly half of the country's entire economic output. A trade union called Solidarity had emerged in 1980 as the first anticommunist labor movement in the Eastern Bloc. Its members numbered in the millions and its strikes threatened the state's ability to repay creditors and export coal. Now the question was whether Jaruzelski was rescuing Poland from Soviet invasion or simply crushing a democratic movement with the army his Soviet patrons had helped him equip.

• 2. Gierek's Gamble

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  Edward Gierek took power in 1970 promising to turn Poland into the wealthiest communist state in Eastern Europe. He loosened the grip on state-owned enterprises, permitted small private businesses, and borrowed heavily from Western creditors to finance a modernization drive. Agricultural output rose by nearly 22% between 1971 and 1975. Industrial production grew at 10.5% annually. The first highway linking Warsaw with industrial Silesia opened in 1976. Over 1.8 million large-panel apartment units were built to house a growing population.

  The debt, however, compounded faster than the exports could repay it. By 1976 ration cards for sugar had appeared, with meat, dairy, and processed food following. Ordinary cigarettes became a black-market currency because tobacco was so scarce. The 1973 and 1979 oil crises hit an economy already straining under the weight of imported fuel and materials. In 1980, national income fell 6% compared to the previous year; in 1981, it dropped a further 12%. Exports declined 4.2%. On the 6th of September 1980, Gierek was dismissed from office and eventually placed under house arrest. On the 10th of September 1981, Soviet authorities told Warsaw that the USSR would cut oil supplies to Poland by 64% and gas by 47%, terminating diesel imports immediately. That same year Poland notified the Club de Paris, a group of Western European central banks, of its insolvency.

• 3. The Secret Machinery

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  On the 22nd of October 1980, before he had even formally assumed the top post, Jaruzelski ordered the Polish General Staff to update its contingency plans for nationwide martial law. By November 1980, the Ministry of Internal Affairs was already identifying detention facilities to hold thousands of opposition activists. Stanislaw Kania, Jaruzelski's predecessor, traveled to the Warsaw Pact Summit in Moscow on the 5th of December 1980 and proposed a quieter approach: heavy propaganda, secret service infiltration of Solidarity, and manufactured internal conflicts.

  Jaruzelski found that insufficient. By February 1981, a joint exercise between the Ministry of National Defence and the Ministry of Internal Affairs had rehearsed how martial law would unfold in practice. The ministries concluded that the announcement needed a pretext emphasizing social stability, and that it had to happen before Fighting Solidarity could organize a paralyzing general strike. In July 1981, the Soviets sent over 600 tanks to the military base at Borne Sulinowo without notifying Polish authorities. Warsaw Pact commander Viktor Kulikov then asked that Soviet military advisors be embedded in the Polish General Staff and assigned to nearly every Polish regiment. The Polish government refused, but the pressure was unmistakable. More than 25,000 posters announcing martial law were printed secretly in the Soviet Union, flown to Poland, and hidden inside the Ministry of Internal Affairs building. Even some members of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party had no idea the plans existed.

• 4. Operations Fir and Azalea

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  At 22:30 on the night of the 12th of December 1981, Operation Azalea began. Security forces stormed 451 telecommunications exchange facilities across Poland, cutting phone lines under the cover story of preventing misinformation. The real purpose was to stop Solidarity from alerting its regional branches. Radio and television stations were occupied. Any willing volunteers were conscripted into the ORMO auxiliary militia.

  At precisely midnight, Operation Fir followed. The first Solidarity members were arrested and taken to pre-prepared detention facilities. The Military Council of National Salvation, known by its Polish acronym WRON, was formally established at the same time. Because "Wrona" is the Polish word for crow, the generals on the council quickly became known to the opposition as evil "Crows." Twenty-five percent of all deployed units concentrated in or around Warsaw. By morning, intercity travel without a permit was forbidden, a curfew ran from 19:00 to 06:00, mail was subjected to censorship, all independent political organizations were criminalized, and schools and universities were suspended. The government imposed a six-day workweek and placed coal mines, seaports, hospitals, and railway stations under direct military management. Employees who defied orders faced court martial. Thousands of journalists, teachers, and professors were subjected to a political "verification" process, and those who failed lost their jobs.

• 5. Blood on the Streets

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  Three days after the declaration, miners at the Wujek Coal Mine in Katowice refused to stop striking. Coal was not simply a fuel; it was one of the state's primary export earners, and Solidarity's boycott of Silesian mines was draining the revenue used to service the foreign debt. Jaruzelski authorized eight ZOMO squads, seven water cannons, three infantry regiments, and a tank regiment to pacify Wujek. The operation used a "shoot to kill" method. Eight miners were killed on the spot, one died in hospital, and twenty-one were wounded. The youngest victim was 19 years old. Miners fought back with their work tools, wounding dozens of soldiers and militiamen.

  On the same day, the 16th of December, a 30,000-strong crowd gathered in the northern port city of Gdańsk. ZOMO fired machine guns from the roof of the Polish United Workers' Party headquarters, wounding four people and killing one. In Lubin, a copper-mining town, a rally of 2,000 people on the 31st of August 1982 was surrounded by Militia armed with AK-47 rifles. ZOMO opened fire, killing two men; a third died in hospital days later. Security forces spent the night of the 31st of August through the 1st of September clearing the streets, collecting shell casings, and covering bullet holes with plaster. The investigation was closed despite consistent witness testimony. On the night of the 29th to the 30th of April 1982, miners in Wodzislaw Slaski bombed a monument to Soviet soldiers, the only use of explosives during the entire period. The perpetrators, later called the "Bombers from Silesia," were jailed, and hundreds of other miners across Silesia were dismissed. A parliamentary commission examining the full period of martial law, working between 1989 and 1991, put the total death toll above 90.

• 6. Foreign Hands

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  Ronald Reagan declared the 30th of January 1982 a Day of Solidarity with Poland, and the following day television and radio stations across multiple countries broadcast a joint program called Let Poland be Poland, carried by Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and Radio France Internationale. The United States had imposed economic sanctions on Poland after the Wujek massacre, and by 1982 had suspended Poland's most favored nation trade status, a suspension that lasted until 1987. Washington also vetoed Poland's application to join the International Monetary Fund.

  The CIA transferred around $2 million per year to Solidarity through third parties, totaling roughly $10 million over five years. CIA officers were barred from direct contact with Solidarity's leaders. Separately, the AFL-CIO raised $300,000 from its members and gave it directly to Solidarity with no strings attached. The National Endowment for Democracy allocated a further $10 million. Congressman Henry Hyde described the combined American effort as supplying "clandestine newspapers, broadcasting, propaganda, money, organizational help and advice." Pope John Paul II wrote a letter to Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, Primate of Poland, calling for peace talks and defending the workers' "undeniable right to resolve their problems by themselves." The Reagan administration's economic sanctions, layered on top of the existing debt and Soviet supply cuts, pushed the Polish economy further toward collapse.

• 7. Legality and Legacy

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  Martial law was suspended on the 31st of December 1982 and formally lifted on the 22nd of July 1983, the National Day of the Rebirth of Poland. Yet the political prisoners arrested during the crackdown were not freed until a general amnesty in 1986. Between 1981 and 1989, roughly 700,000 Poles emigrated to the West, driven by the combination of economic hardship and political repression. Between December 1980 and October 1983 alone, 11 Polish flights were hijacked to Berlin Tempelhof Airport by people trying to escape. A group calling itself the Polish Revolutionary Home Army seized the Polish Embassy in Bern on the 6th of September 1982, taking diplomats hostage; the event later appeared to have been a provocation staged by the communist secret services to discredit Solidarity.

  After communism fell in 1989, a parliamentary commission ruled that the Council of State had been constitutionally barred from imposing martial law while the Sejm was in session, which it was in December 1981. The Sejm formally declared the 1981 imposition unlawful and unconstitutional in 1992. Jaruzelski himself argued for decades that the crackdown had prevented a Soviet military invasion similar to those in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. In a 1995 interview with the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, he cited a letter he said he received from the Soviet politburo on the 21st of November 1981 demanding "not one step back from socialism." He called the message "ultimative." Archive documents uncovered in 2009 suggested, however, that Jaruzelski had in fact requested Soviet intervention himself as his domestic control weakened. He denied the documents were authentic.