Down with Big Brother (14 page)

The rest of the family experienced almost equal hardship. At the time of his father’s arrest Jaruzelski was deported to Siberia, along with his mother and sister. The trip, in an overcrowded goods train, took a month. He spent almost two years in Siberia as a virtual slave laborer, chopping down trees and hauling huge bags of flour around a warehouse. He suffered from excruciating back pains, which flared up again during periods of tension, such as in 1981. The secret police urged Jaruzelski to apply for Soviet identity papers, on the ground that eastern Poland had been incorporated into the Soviet Union. When he refused, he was thrown into prison with common criminals, who stole his belongings and beat him up. After three weeks of this treatment he accepted the NKVD offer. Shortly afterward he applied to join the Polish army that was being formed on Soviet soil under the leadership of a Communist officer, Zygmunt Berling. Joining this army, he explained later, represented a chance of “returning to Poland with a weapon in my hand.”
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Jaruzelski had little sympathy for either Russia or for communism
when—as his party biography delicately put it—he “found himself” in the Soviet Union at the age of sixteen. At school he had belonged to a particularly zealous Catholic youth organization, known as the Soldiers of Mary. By his own account, he shared the anti-Soviet convictions of the
szlachta
class. His first impression of the Red Army had been of a horde of conquering barbarians. “What struck me first was how many of them there were,” he wrote later. “I had the impression that there were thousands upon thousands of them, with their long gray overcoats and great piles of rifles. I had the sense of a force that was terrible, strange, hostile.”
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Yet, after returning to Poland from the Soviet Union, Jaruzelski became the devoted soldier of an alien ideology. In 1947, at the age of twenty-four, he experienced what he later described as a spiritual “rebirth.” He applied to join the Polish Communist Party and was swiftly accepted.
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According to Jaruzelski, this stunning conversion took place in stages. In the Siberian taiga he discovered that ordinary Russians were not the Satans he had previously imagined them to be. He began to draw a distinction between the Russian people and their oppressive political system. He came to admire their incredible feats of endurance, the way they threw themselves into battle crying, “For Stalin, for the motherland.” Communism could be cruel and terrible, but it had some redeeming features. The Communist aspiration for a fairer, more just society was not too far removed from the social values that Wanda Jaruzelski had sought to instill in her children, minus the traditional anti-Russian outlook of the
szlachta
class. The Communist Party seemed to offer a more realistic program of postwar reconstruction, and the rapid absorption of formerly German territories, than the bourgeois parties. It was not just soldiers like Jaruzelski who rallied around the party at the end of the war, but also intellectuals like Czesław Miłosz and Leszek Kolakowski.

Another explanation for Jaruzelski’s ideological rebirth might begin with the personality of a superachiever. Ever since childhood he had striven hard to earn the approval of his superiors. At the Catholic boarding school in Warsaw he was considered an outstanding pupil. He soaked up the conservative opinions of his Marian teachers, chanting songs praising Poland’s military dictator, Marshal Piłsudski, and avidly following the military campaign of Spain’s General Franco. He was an enthusiastic Boy Scout, modeling himself on the hero scouts who had helped defend Poland against the “Red invader.” Later in life he was equally zealous in seeking to impress the commanders of the Warsaw Pact and the members of the Soviet Politburo. After Solidarity came to power in 1989, he cultivated contacts with former dissidents like Adam Michnik, whom he had once thrown into prison.

In all these exploits there was an element of the odd man out, struggling for social acceptance. At school he was always the puniest child in the class. In Communist politics he was the offspring of the petty nobility who, by his own account, could never quite rid himself of an inferiority complex toward the “working class.”
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In retirement he was Poland’s last Communist leader, fighting to salvage his historical reputation.

As he climbed up the bureaucratic ladder, Jaruzelski shut his eyes to many unpleasant facts. He had the soldier’s habit of carrying out orders without asking questions. As defense minister in 1968 he had little compunction about ordering Polish troops to join the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. It never occurred to him to doubt Soviet propaganda claims about stockpiles of German weapons and a Western plan to subvert Czechoslovakia.

Sometimes his lack of curiosity bordered on the abnormal. When he was elected Communist Party leader in October 1981, in succession to Kania, he was handed a key to the safe containing the innermost secrets and scandals of the Polish regime. Despite the notoriety of this safe, he never bothered to look through its contents. “I don’t know how to explain this lack of curiosity,” he later confessed. “It’s probably very personal.”
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Jaruzelski’s five years in the Soviet Union had taught him a brutal lesson in realpolitik. The monthlong train trip to Siberia—a journey twice the width of the continental United States—had given him a sense of the vastness of Poland’s eastern neighbor. He had gained an insight into the power of the Soviet system and the might of its armed forces. Breaking with Poland’s romantic tradition, Jaruzelski prided himself on his realism. From his own experience he knew that resistance to such a huge empire was futile. It was his duty to save Poland from the horrors of yet another Russian invasion. As he remarked privately to a colleague, “Our historical mission is to prevent a Soviet intervention.”
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Whatever the explanation for Jaruzelski’s conversion to communism, the Soviets had every confidence in him. Shortly after his election as first secretary, he received a congratulatory telephone call from Brezhnev, who urged him to carry out his plan to crush the “counterrevolution.” “There is nobody else in the PZPR [the Polish Communist Party] who enjoys as much authority as you,” said the Soviet leader, reading haltingly from a prepared text.
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The Kremlin’s trust in Jaruzelski seems strange in view of his class origins and long-standing Soviet suspicions of “Bonapartism,” the meddling of the military in political affairs. The fact that Jaruzelski had endured Stalinist repression without kicking up a fuss made a favorable impression on
Soviet leaders. They also gave him credit for his wartime service, his work in building up the Polish army under Communist leadership, and his excellent Russian.
¹⁴⁵

Jaruzelski’s official biography makes clear that he played a part in the bloody settling of accounts with the anti-Communist Home Army in the years immediately after World War II. He was a protégé of the Soviet generals who supervised the Polish Defense Ministry. According to one account, he was the only Polish general to vote against the dismissal, in 1956, of the Russian-born defense minister Marshal Konstantin Rokossowsky and his recall to the Soviet Union.
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Jaruzelski was subsequently put in charge of political education in the armed forces, an extremely sensitive post reserved for someone who could get along with the Russians. When he was appointed defense minister in 1968 in succession to the nationalistically inclined Marian Spychalski, the Soviets were delighted.
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In his memoirs Jaruzelski describes himself as a “fanatical believer” in the doctrine of communism. “It went without saying that we had to defend our church and its dogmas.”
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Soviet leaders occasionally complained that Jaruzelski lacked “courage” and “decisiveness.” But they had no doubts at all about his “moral-political reliability.”
¹⁴⁹
They had studied his personal dossier thoroughly, and they knew their man.

S
TEP BY STEP
J
ARUZELSKI
had accumulated all the leading positions in the Polish People’s Republic. He was commander in chief of the armed forces, prime minister, and first secretary of the Communist Party. All that remained was for the onetime “Soldier of Mary” to declare himself military dictator. But he could not make up his mind.

After his appointment as prime minister Jaruzelski had moved into the office of Poland’s last military dictator, Marshal Piłsudski, on Ujazdowskie Avenue.
¹⁵⁰
It was here that Piłsudski had organized his program of “national purification” following the coup d’état of 1926. The ghost of his right-wing predecessor seemed to haunt Jaruzelski as he struggled to find a solution to Poland’s problems. As the crisis deepened, he frequently spent entire nights in the second-floor corner office, sleeping on a camp bed. Crushed by a sense of terrifying responsibility, he lay awake for hours. On several occasions he opened the drawer to his desk, where his service revolver lay. He gazed at the gun for minutes at a time, before closing the drawer again.
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Pressures were growing from all sides. There were rumors—yet again—of Soviet troops massing on the borders. Jaruzelski had no illusions about
what would happen to him in the event of an invasion. He remembered how Brezhnev had ordered Dubĉek’s arrest a few days after kissing him warmly on both cheeks. The image of the Czechoslovak Communist leaders being brought to Moscow under arrest had obsessed him from the outset of the crisis.
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The invasion of Czechoslovakia would be a picnic compared with the bloody catastrophe that would result if Soviet troops entered Poland.

The economy was another source of worry. Production had fallen by 12 percent in 1981, on top of the 4 percent drop in 1980 and 2 percent in 1979. The output of coal, Poland’s principal hard-currency export, had plummeted as a result of the introduction of a forty-hour week for miners. The foreign exchange reserves were practically zero. Poland was almost entirely dependent on Moscow for supplies of raw materials. A few weeks earlier the Kremlin had threatened to slash gasoline exports to Poland by two-thirds. Deliveries of natural gas, phosphorus, iron ore, and cotton would be reduced by 50 percent. Without these supplies Polish industry would grind to a halt.
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Jaruzelski knew Western countries would react harshly to a crackdown on Solidarity. But he also had reason to believe that the newly formed Reagan administration would breathe a quiet sigh of relief over an “internal solution” to the Polish crisis. He knew that Washington was exceptionally well informed about the behind-the-scenes drama in Poland. His trusted aide Colonel Kukliński had defected to the West in early November with a complete blueprint of plans for martial law. Polish leaders feared that the Reagan administration would alert Solidarity to the coming danger, but nothing happened. Jaruzelski interpreted Washington’s silence as tacit approval of his plans. He reasoned that the United States regarded martial law as a preferable alternative to a Soviet invasion, which would have devastating consequences for East-West relations.
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There is another explanation for the Reagan administration’s failure to act on Kukliński’s information: old-fashioned interagency rivalry. The handful of senior CIA officials who knew about Kukliński’s existence were determined not to share their knowledge with anyone else in the U.S. government—even after their source had escaped from Poland. They themselves treated his warnings about martial law with skepticism, trusting the instinct of Solidarity leaders who believed that Jaruzelski would not dare send the Polish army against civilians.
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W
HAT
J
ARUZELSKI LATER DESCRIBED
as “the most difficult day of my life” began, as usual, with his top military aides.
¹⁵⁶
At 9:00 a.m. he summoned
the men charged with implementing the state of war
(stan wojenny)
to his office. The task of rounding up thousands of Solidarity activists and smashing any protest action fell to the interior minister, Czesław Kiszczak, a politically astute general who had previously served as head of military intelligence. Florian Siwicki, the armed forces chief of staff, would be responsible for the military aspects of the operation, including coordination with Soviet forces. Another longtime Jaruzelski protégé, Michał Janiszewski, was responsible for drafting martial law regulations and overseeing the state bureaucracy. Together these four generals formed the inner core of the new Military Council for National Salvation.

The generals fully expected Solidarity to unleash its ultimate weapon, a general strike. Workers would occupy their factories, just as they had done in August 1980. This time, however, the authorities were well prepared. There would be no need to order Polish soldiers to fire on Polish workers, something Jaruzelski had vowed never to do. In great secrecy the regime had assembled a force of thirty thousand professionally trained riot police, known by the Polish acronym ZOMO. Dressed to look like a swarm of Darth Vadars, with Plexiglas shields, gas masks, and water cannon, the ZOMO had the job of methodically breaking one strike after another. Poland’s 320,000-strong armed forces would perform a backup role, providing security for government installations and intimidating the population with a massive show of military might. Moving thousands of tanks out of their barracks served the additional purpose of showing Soviet leaders that Jaruzelski was not in need of “fraternal assistance.”
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