Wojciech Jaruzelski
Wojciech Jaruzelski was the general in dark glasses who declared martial law on Polish television on the morning of 13 December 1981, interned ten thousand people and broke Solidarity, and who eight years later sat down with the same people at a round table, held the election that ended communism in Poland, and handed the presidency to Lech Wałęsa; whether the first act saved the country from a Soviet invasion or from nothing is the argument Poland has had about him ever since. He was born in 1923 into the gentry, was deported with his family to Siberia in 1940 after the Soviets took eastern Poland, where his father died and his eyes were damaged by the snow glare, and joined the Polish army the Soviets raised in 1943, fighting to Berlin. He rose through the communist army to be its youngest general at thirty-three, chief of staff, and from 1968 minister of defence, in which office his troops took part in the invasion of Czechoslovakia and, in December 1970, fired on the shipyard workers of Gdańsk, forty-one of whom died. When Solidarity's ten million members had paralysed the state and Moscow was massing divisions, the party made him prime minister in February 1981 and first secretary in October, and on 13 December he put the country under a military council. There were tanks in the streets, the union dissolved, the leaders interned, nine miners shot at the Wujek pit. He said for the rest of his life that the Russians would have come. The Soviet records released after 1991 suggest they had decided not to. The economy did not recover and the underground did not disappear. After the strikes of 1988 he let his interior minister open talks with Wałęsa, and the round table of February to April 1989 agreed a partly free election in June, in which Solidarity took every seat it was allowed to contest. The parliament elected him president by one vote in July, and he appointed the first non-communist prime minister since 1945 in August. He resigned in December 1990 so that Wałęsa could be elected. He was tried for the shootings of 1970 and for martial law for twenty years without a verdict, and died in May 2014, having asked for a Catholic funeral.
- Lived: 1923 CE – 2014 CE
- Nationality: Polish
- Roles: general, politician, president
