Free The Year that Changed the World by Michael Meyer Page B

largely invisible, borne quietly by the people but nonetheless fissile, an explosion waiting to happen. Just as Hungary’s communists sought to shift blame for the country’s problems to someone else—Miklos Nemeth and his reformist government—so did Poland’s rulers. In extremis, they took a bold and unprecedented step. They decided to make common cause with their mortal enemy, Solidarity. The man who led them to do so, whose brainchild it was, would be none other than the Polish Antichrist, the poster boy of communist oppression, at least as seen in the West, Wojciech Witold Jaruzelski.
    What demons swirled in that poor man’s head. What a Shakespearean psychodrama consumed him. It was as if the past were repeating itself, returning to haunt him. He could choose his role: Hamlet or Lear. Whether one or the other, he almost certainly sensed, his personal destiny would not end well.
    That spring, strikes had broken out in the coal fields of southern Poland. They continued sporadically but with growing fervor through the summer. To the consternation of the government,protesting workers called for a return of Solidarity, banned since the imposition of martial law seven years before.
Solidarnosc
had always drawn its strength from the nation’s rough-and-tumble miners, steelworkers and machinists. Here, once again, they were marching and chanting a slogan from yore that sent shivers through the regime: “There is no liberty without Solidarity!” Jaruzelski clearly heard the echo. Wage freezes and government price hikes had triggered the latest unrest, but he knew it reflected the deeper and more generalized anger of economic desperation. He knew, too, that it presented him with a choice, almost identical to one he had to make so many years before—the choice that had tormented him and cast him as a traitor. As leader of the nation, head of the communist party, should he act to preserve an increasingly untenable status quo, most likely requiring force? Or should he try something new?
    In 1981, Jaruzelski’s choice had been force. He justified the decision as a lesser evil. It was either impose martial law and restore order on Russia’s border or risk a Soviet invasion and occupation. To his mind, he was a patriot who had done what he had to do to save his country. How could his countrymen, even the world, not understand? Bidding those who would judge him to put themselves in his shoes, he described the world as he saw it. Solidarity was about to call a general strike. The economy was on its knees. Civil unrest threatened. “Emotions were explosive and spiraling,” he would explain in later years. “The petrol had been spilled.”
    He did not seem a man reconciled to his decision. In 1982, when U.S. defense secretary Caspar Weinberger branded him “a Russian in Polish uniform,” Jaruzelski lashed out irrationally. He announced that Poland would impose “sanctions” on the United States. Cultural ties were terminated and American scholars sent home. Never mind that Poland, notwithstanding two years of U.S. sanctions, was economically afloat only thanks to Western loans and trade credits. Yet Weinberger had it right. More than any other East European leader, Jaruzelski owed his existence to Moscow. When the Soviets organized Polish units during World War II, he enlisted. He fought with the Russians in Berlin. He became a spy for the Kremlin within the Polish military as early as 1946, helping to suppress anticommunist insurgents in southern Poland. In 1968, after becoming defense minister,he was heavily involved in an anti-Semitic “cleansing” of the Polish army. (Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the most freethinking and reform-minded of Poland’s military were Jewish.) He led the Polish contingent that put down Prague Spring in 1968. In 1970, he helped organize the execution of striking workers during an uprising in Gdansk, Gdynia and