Wojciech Jaruzelski

• 1. Introduction

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  Wojciech Jaruzelski was born on the 6th of July 1923 in Kurów, into a family of Polish gentry, the seventh of eight children. Before he turned twenty, his father would be dead in a Soviet camp, his eyes would be permanently damaged from forced labour in a Siberian wilderness, and he would be wearing the uniform of an army commanded by the very power that had destroyed his family. That pair of dark sunglasses he wore for the rest of his life was not an affectation. It was the mark of a man whose biography began as a tragedy and never quite escaped that shadow.

  Jaruzelski would go on to hold more offices than nearly any other leader in Polish history: Prime Minister, Minister of Defence, First Secretary of the party, Chairman of the Council of State, President. He would impose martial law on his own people, jail thousands without charge, and order troops to open fire on workers at a mine called Wujek. He would also sit across a table from the opposition movement he had spent years trying to crush, negotiate the agreements that ended Communist rule, and allow an election result to stand that swept his party into irrelevance.

  His story asks a question that Poland is still answering: was a man who helped destroy one system in order to protect it a patriot, a collaborator, or something that fits neither label?

• 2. Siberia and the Sunglasses

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  In June 1941, Soviet NKVD officers stripped the Jaruzelski family of their possessions and loaded them onto trains. At the railway station, Wojciech was separated from his father. He would never see him alive again.

  Jaruzelski and his mother were sent on a month-long journey to Biysk in Altai Krai. From there, he walked 180 kilometres to Turochak, where his assigned labour was clearing forest. The work in the Siberian winter caused snow blindness, leaving him with permanent damage to both his eyes and his back. The dark glasses he adopted became, in the words of those who knew him later, his trademark, a physical record of those years.

  His father died on the 4th of June 1942 from dysentery in a gulag. His mother and sister survived. In January 1942, months before learning of his father's fate, Jaruzelski made his way back toward Biysk. There, Soviet authorities selected him for enrollment into the Soviet Officer Training School. He had initially wanted to join the Polish exile army led by Władysław Anders, the force that was not under Soviet control. By 1943 that option was gone. The army he joined instead was the First Polish Army, organised under Soviet command, and it was in that army's uniform that he crossed back into Poland on the 1st of July 1945.

• 3. The Soldier's Rise

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  By the time the war ended in 1945, Jaruzelski held the rank of lieutenant. He had fought in the Soviet military takeover of Warsaw in January of that year and in the Battle of Berlin. On the 5th of July 1945, the regiment in which he served received orders to defend a 107-kilometre stretch of the Polish-Czechoslovak border. By August he was named military commandant of Głubczyce.

  After graduating from the Polish Higher Infantry School and then the General Staff Academy, Jaruzelski turned to counterinsurgent warfare. In the years immediately after the war he fought against the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and anti-communist fighters known as the cursed soldiers. Historian Sławomir Cenckiewicz has estimated that around 70 percent of Jaruzelski's military engagements in this period were against the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, with the remaining 30 percent against the National Armed Forces.

  He joined the Polish United Workers' Party in 1948, the same year he received the Knight's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta. He also became an informant for the Soviet-supervised Main Directorate of Information of the Polish Army, operating under the cover name Wolski. A BBC News profile of his career notes that his advancement "took off after the departure in 1956 of Polish-born Soviet Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky", who had served as Poland's Commander-in-chief and Minister of Defence. By 1960 Jaruzelski was Chief Political Officer of the Polish armed forces, by 1964 its chief of staff, and by 1968 its Minister of Defence, succeeding Marshal Marian Spychalski in that post.

• 4. Martial Law

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  On the 11th of February 1981, Jaruzelski was named Chairman of the Council of Ministers. On the 18th of October, Stanisław Kania was ousted as First Secretary after a listening device recorded him criticising the Soviet leadership. Jaruzelski was elected his successor, becoming the only professional soldier ever to lead a ruling European Communist party.

  A fortnight after taking power, Jaruzelski met with Solidarity head Lech Wałęsa and Catholic bishop Józef Glemp and suggested he might bring the church and the union into a coalition. The source text is clear that this was a deception. As early as September, while still prime minister, he had been meeting with aides to find a pretext for martial law. On the 13th of December 1981, citing purported recordings of Solidarity leaders planning a coup, Jaruzelski organised what the source describes as his own coup by proclaiming martial law. A Military Council of National Salvation was formed, with Jaruzelski as chairman.

  Protesters were met with water cannons, tear gas, batons, and clubs. At the Wujek coal mine, Motorized Reserves of the Citizens' Militia units received a shoot-to-kill order and opened fire on demonstrators, killing nine and wounding 21 others. The total death toll from martial law is estimated at 91. Martial law was suspended on the 31st of December 1982 and formally lifted on the 22nd of July 1983. Despite severe economic sanctions introduced by the Reagan Administration, the crackdown was largely effective in marginalising Solidarity for the rest of the decade. Between 100,000 and 300,000 people left Poland during Jaruzelski's years in power.

• 5. The Soviet Question

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  Jaruzelski's standing defence of martial law rested on a single claim: that internal suppression was necessary to prevent a Soviet invasion. In a May 1992 interview with Der Spiegel he said: "Given the strategic logic of the time, I probably would have acted the same way if I had been a Soviet general. At that time, Soviet political and strategic interests were threatened." He also claimed in 1997 that Washington had given him a green light, saying he had sent Eugeniusz Molczyk to meet with Vice-President George H. W. Bush, who agreed that martial law was the lesser of two evils. Harvard historian Mark Kramer has pointed out that no documents support this claim.

  Documents released under Boris Yeltsin's presidency tell a more layered story. Senior Soviet figures, including Mikhail Suslov, Yuri Andropov, Andrei Gromyko, and Dmitriy Ustinov, were reluctant to intervene, citing the 1970 Polish protests and the ongoing Soviet-Afghan war. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, together with East German leader Erich Honecker and Czechoslovak leader Gustáv Husák, were more willing to act. Plans had actually been drawn up for a joint operation under the codename Soyuz-80, known in Czechoslovakia as Operation Krkonoše, scheduled for December 1980. Brezhnev was persuaded to postpone by Stanisław Kania.

  By the time Jaruzelski took power, Andropov's anti-intervention faction had prevailed. Minutes from the Politburo meeting of the 29th of October 1981 record the unanimous rejection of Jaruzelski's demands for military support. Three days before the proclamation of martial law, Andropov stated in a Politburo session: "We do not intend to introduce troops into Poland. That is the proper position, and we must adhere to it until the end. I don't know how things will turn out in Poland, but even if Poland falls under the control of Solidarity, that's the way it will be."

• 6. The Round Table and After

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  From the 6th of February to the 4th of April 1989, negotiations ran across 94 sessions involving 13 working groups. The resulting agreements created a bicameral legislature, restored the post of president, and legalised Solidarity. Communists and their allies were guaranteed 65 percent of the seats in the Sejm. Solidarity won every other seat it was allowed to contest, and 99 of the 100 fully contested Senate seats went to Solidarity-backed candidates.

  Fears arose that Jaruzelski would annul the results. He allowed them to stand. Elected by parliament to the presidency as the only candidate, he then tried and failed to persuade Wałęsa to join a grand coalition with the Communists. Wałęsa instead persuaded the Communists' two allied parties, the United People's Party and the Alliance of Democrats, to break with the PZPR. Jaruzelski asked Wałęsa to name three candidates for prime minister, one of whom he would appoint. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who had helped organise the roundtable talks, was chosen as the first non-Communist prime minister of an Eastern Bloc country in four decades.

  Jaruzelski resigned as president in 1990. Wałęsa won the presidential election on the 9th of December of that year. The PZPR had already dissolved itself in January 1990. Prices had been fully freed on the 1st of August 1989, making Poland only the second Communist country to do so, after China in 1985.

• 7. Reckoning and Legacy

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  In October 1994, while attending a book-selling event in Wrocław, Jaruzelski was attacked by a male pensioner with a stone. The attacker, who had been imprisoned during the martial law period, was sentenced to two years in prison and fined 2,000,000 złoty. Jaruzelski's jaw was injured, requiring surgery.

  The Institute of National Remembrance charged him on the 31st of March 2006 with committing communist crimes, primarily the creation of a criminal military organisation aimed at carrying out illegal acts, chiefly the imprisonment of people without definite charges. A second charge involved inciting state ministers to exceed their authority. He evaded most court appearances, citing poor health. In December 2010 he suffered severe pneumonia, and in March 2011 he was diagnosed with lymphoma.

  Public opinion shifted considerably over time. CBOS polls showed Jaruzelski began his presidency with a 74 percent approval rating, which fell to 32 percent by the end of his term. A 2008 CBOS poll found 46 percent approved of his political activity and 29 percent rated him negatively. By 2018 those figures had reversed: 28 percent positive, 42 percent negative. On martial law specifically, OBOP polls from 1995 to 2016 consistently found a plurality of 41 to 54 percent of Poles saw the decision as justified, though a 2021 poll showed 37 percent now viewed it as wrong.

  Jaruzelski died on the 25th of May 2014 in a Warsaw hospital after suffering a stroke earlier that month. He had reportedly requested confession and last rites from a Roman Catholic priest. At his funeral mass on the 30th of May at the Field Cathedral of the Polish Army in Warsaw, both President Bronisław Komorowski and former President Lech Wałęsa, each of whom had been imprisoned during the 1981 crackdown, said that judgment against Jaruzelski would be left to God. He was buried with full military honours at Powązki Military Cemetery in Warsaw, near the grave of Bolesław Bierut, the first Communist leader of Poland after World War II.