“12/13/1981 – I Remember”
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Poland will not forget this day: 40 years ago gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law, claiming that he was saving his country from Soviet invasion. The next 19 months were marked by arrests and deep depression, he recalled Deutsche Welle.
Tanks slid through the streets of Warsaw on that snowy December 13, 1981. Armed soldiers guarded the government residence and other strategic sites. And the militia controlled cars and pedestrians. If they were caught with urges in their pockets, they were immediately taken to the station.
On that Sunday, one could not even call on the phone: the connections were intentionally cut off. And there was only one person speaking on TV: the party and government leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who was informing about the imposed martial law. “Our country is on the brink of an abyss,” the general said in a grim voice. “Not days, but hours separate us from a real national catastrophe.” It was because of this danger that martial law was imposed, the general said, and blamed it all Solidarity opposition movement.
–General Wojciech Jaruzelski
The general on TV
In the summer of 1980, a wave of strikes along Poland’s Baltic coast eventually led to the official recognition of the Lech Wałęsa Solidarity trade union. This already national movement quickly gathered nearly 10 million members. Without hiding its anti-communist stance, it has steadily increased pressure on the government through strikes and protests. Later, publicists would call this period the Carnival of Liberties.
Weakened and torn apart by internal strife, the Polish United Workers’ Party (PWU) – that is, the ruling Communists – was passively backing down, but still unwilling to share power with the opposition. Not to mention handing it over to her. At the same time, food shortages were introduced due to the acute shortage, something Poles remember from the war years. But that didn’t help either. Photographs of empty store shelves and people happily embracing rolls of toilet paper have become a sad document of the country’s economic tragedy.
Moscow’s comrades unequivocally showed their Polish allies that they were extremely dissatisfied with this development. Warsaw Pact troops conducted two joint exercises in the late 1980s and spring of 1981, which were to shock Warsaw and purposefully remind people of the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia. “We must exert constant pressure,” Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, said at a meeting of the Soviet Politburo on April 16, 1981. To this day, historians debate whether Moscow was really ready to send troops to Poland or whether it simply wanted to intimidate the Poles. In any case, the PURP failed to control the situation and the generals’ hour struck. Jaruzelski was first elected prime minister, then took over the party’s leadership and concentrated all power in his own hands. He appointed military and key positions in government.
On the night of December 13, the Military Council for National Salvation (SJC) took power in the country. 70,000 soldiers with 1,750 tanks were mobilized, plus 30,000 militiamen – together they had to break the opposition resistance. Immediately after the imposition of martial law, 3,000 Solidarity activists were arrested and interned, along with the entire leadership, led by Lech Walesa. Strikes and all kinds of mass gatherings were banned, and the military imposed evening hours. The Solidarity movement was banned and later declared disbanded.
–Lech Walesa in the 1980s
And then Poland sank into depression
Despite the generals’ surprise strike, Solidarity still managed to mobilize people in some enterprises and raise them to resist the army and militia. The worst clashes took place on December 16, 1981, at the Vujek coal mine in Katowice, where nine miners were shot dead.
The military junta quickly managed to crush Solidarity as a mass anti-communist movement and restore power to the old system. By the end of 1982, nearly 10,000 people had been interned and 12,000 had been convicted by military tribunals. Martial law was lifted in July 1983.
Poland sank into a deep economic and social depression. Hundreds of thousands of young people turned their backs on their homeland and emigrated – mostly to Germany. The Polish country’s foreign debt swelled to an unthinkable $ 40 billion at the time. Poland was virtually bankrupt and in international isolation. Society has also been rocked by political assassinations, such as that of Catholic preacher Jerzy Popielushko, who was assassinated by Interior Ministry officials.
New hopes arose only after the great changes on the international political scene. Since 1985, the Soviet Union has been headed by Mikhail Gorbachev, whose policies of “publicity” and “perestroika” have given a new breath to the Polish opposition. In 1988, two new waves of strikes erupted in the country, showing that Solidarity could be disbanded but not defeated. This led to the 1989 Round Table, which called for the first relatively free elections in the Eastern Bloc since the Communists took power. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a Solidarity adviser who spent the last eight years as an intern, was elected prime minister. A year later, legendary workers’ leader Lech Walesa was elected president.
–Erich Honecker, Milos Jakes, Mikhail Gorbachev, Wojciech Jaruzelski, Nicolae Ceausescu and Todor Zhivkov in Warsaw in July 1988.
General Jaruzelski – traitor or hero?
Politicians and historians have argued about General Jaruzelski’s true role until his death in 2014. Some see him as a national traitor who sent soldiers and tanks against his own people, just to keep the Communist Party in power. Others glorify him as a national hero who saved his country from Soviet occupation and from a real bloodbath.
In 2011, Lech Walesa visited the seriously ill general at the hospital and shook his hand. But did he forgive him? In an interview with SG Valensa, Jaruzelski was also a patriot who tried to save his country from Soviet encroachment – albeit in his own way. And Wojciech Jaruzelski himself wrote in his book “30 Years Older” as follows: “I apologize for the severe restrictions imposed by martial law (). the least evil, but even the slightest evil always remains evil. “
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