General Wojciech Jaruzelski goes on trial today over his imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981 – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7611690.stm. He imposed martial law to defeat the Solidarity workers’ opposition movement in Poland, which had become a powerful threat to the communist regime. Jaruzelski’s defence will be that he acted to prevent a Soviet crackdown which would otherwise have been inevitable to quash the Solidarity movement. Many Poles apparently believe him, and there has been no great clamour in the country to bring him before the court.
To find out a bit more about the circumstances surrounding these events, I ran some searches in IBSS using a range of terms, including ‘Jaruzelski’, ‘martial law and Poland’, and ‘Solidarity’. There are several works by the General himself, including his own justification of events Stan wojenny, dlaczego…? [The rule of martial law, why...?] published in 1992. I was especially interested to find reflections based on conversations between Jaruzelski and the leading Polish dissident Adam Michnik – Mein Leben für Polen. Erinnerungen. Mit einem Gespräch zwischen Wojciech Jaruzelski und Adam Michnik (Munich, 1993). There is also a comprehensive two volume contemporary account “Poland under Jaruzelski” (1982) from the now defunct periodical Survey (ISSN 0039-6192) which was a leading West European publication on Eastern bloc affairs. All of these would offer distinctive perspectives from the time and would make interesting reading.
However the crux of the matter is – will Jaruzelski’s defence stand up? How plausible is his claim to have acted to prevent a Soviet invasion which would, surely, have been a worse fate for Poland? The book Politics of the Lesser Evil: Leadership, Democracy and Jaruzelski’s Poland (A.Pelinka, 1999) is generally supportive of this view. However others seriously question whether the Soviet Union in this period saw intervention as an option. In ‘Moscow, Prague and Warsaw: Overcoming the Brezhnev Doctrine’, (W. Loth, 2001) the author contrasts the very different international circumstances of 1968 (when Soviet troops entered Czechoslovakia) and 1981, suggesting that ‘The Soviet Union was no longer willing to intervene as it had been in 1968, but it was Jaruzelski who feared a possible collapse of “Socialism” and who decided to impose martial law in Poland’. An article on ‘The Soviet non-invasion of Poland in 1980-1981 and the end of the Cold War’ (V. Mastny, 1999) examined in detail the then newly available archival evidence from the Warsaw Pact crisis talks over the period. The picture is certainly very complex: military intervention, it seems, was planned, but these plans were halted in December 1980. By December 1981, when martial law was introduced, invasion was no longer a realistic threat. On this evidence it might seem that Jaruzelski imposed martial law not to avert an imminent Soviet invasion, but rather when he had given up hope of assistance from his Warsaw Pact allies, and realised he had to deal with Solidarity himself. The current trial, of course, will have to assess not only the actual likelihood of invasion, but also Jaruzelski’s own understanding of the situation at the time; in the midst of a political crisis, and without the benefit of hindsight, might he have genuinely and legitimately feared an external solution?
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