Gen. Jaruzelski died

[Jaga]

There were times we were very upset at him, but he was a Polish patriot and maybe he prevented more chaos and Soviet intervention in 1982.

[Jaga]

Here is obituary by Robert Strybel. Strybel did not support Jaruzelski's policies:

Wojciech Jaruzelski dead at 90
By Robert Strybel, Our Warsaw Correspondent
WARSAW – The death of former Soviet-trained dictator General Wojciech Jaruzelski did not come as a surprise to anyone. The 90-year-old former communist dictator he had been ailing for years, in and out of hospitals in recent months and on the verge of death in recent weeks. Nor did his passing evoke sorrow in most Poles, many of whom felt it was good riddance to a man who had Polish blood on his hands. Others indifferently shrugged it off as an interesting but insignificant news item.
Jaruzelski died with his 51-year-old daughter Monika at his bedside in a Warsaw military hospital which had repeatedly been his home away from home for the past two years. On more than one occasion he had come down with pneumonia and suffered heart problems which doctors attributed to the toxic effects of the chemotherapy he underwent for a malignant tumor. “I feel extremely unwell and that's why I rarely leave home. I feel too weak to go anywhere or do anything,” he told a reporter in May this year. He added that he didn't think he'd ever return to health. Last year Lech Wałęsa visited the ailing general and his wife at the Jaruzelskis' Warsaw home.
The people of Poland chiefly remember Jaruzelski as the man who had plunged his country into martial law in December 1981. He went to his grave claiming he had chosen “the lesser of two evils.” By using Polish troops to crush Lech Wałęsa's 10-million-strong Solidarność, he said he had averted an alleged Soviet invasion. Except that even his Kremlin masters later admitted they had no plans to invade in 1981. In 1980 that had been a distinct possibility, but not after the Soviets got bogged down in an unwinnable war in Afghanistan.
But martial law was not his only claim to infamy. As defense minister in 1968, Jaruzelski sent Polish troops to help the Soviet army crush a peaceful democratic movement developing in neighboring Czechoslovakia. The same year he joined the government's anti-Semitic campaign and purged the Polish armed forces of Jewish officers. In 1970, Jaruzelski's troops opened fire on and killed dozens of protesting workers on the Baltic coast.
On the plus side, in 1989, eight years after his martial-law crackdown, Jaruzelski opened talks with the Solidarity opposition that led to the Soviet bloc's first non-communist-dominated government. But by the late 1980s the Polish economy was in such a state of collapse that the communists initially wanted to include a few Solidarity members in their government to spread the responsibility and take some of the heat off the red regime. Instead, two communist ministers were included in the cabinet of non-communist Prime Minister Taduesz Mazowiecki. The fully free elections of 1990 swept the communists from power altogether.
Jaruzelski came from a patriotic gentry family and attended a Catholic school run by the Marian Fathers. After world War II broke out, the Jaruzelskis fled to neighboring Lithuania where they were arrested and deported into the depths of the USSR. His father died in Siberia of cold, hunger, overwork and disease. Snow-blindness permanently damaged the future general's eyes causing him to wear what would become his trademark dark glasses. Back-breaking slave labor in the USSR impaired his spine, causing life-long back pain.
But somehow Jaruzelski did not display any resentment against that inhuman “prison of nations” which had colluded with Hitler to annex half his country, destroyed his family and robbed him of his youth. The young Polish exile seemed to have been awed, shocked and intimidated by the bleak immensity of Siberia and the inhuman brutality of Stalinist rule. After failing to join the army of General Władysław Anders, Jaruzelski enrolled in a Soviet military academy and joined a Kremlin-controlled “Polish” army in whose ranks he fought alongside the Red Army all the way to Berlin.
After the war, he began a half-century of faithful service to his Soviet masters. He helped the Red Army install a Soviet-controlled puppet government in Poland and collaborated in the destruction of the last Polish freedom-fighters struggling against their country's forced Sovietization. It has been said of Jaruzelski, that he betrayed his gentry class, abandoned his Catholic faith and betrayed his country by supporting one of Poland's two mortal enemies – Russia. He even betrayed his own mother by refusing to attend her Catholic funeral for fear that might harm his career in the red regime.
In the 1990s, after Poland had finally dumped communism, Jaruzelski was put on trial for his role in the 1970 shipyard shootings. He also faced impeachment hearings for declaring martial law. But he cleverly used every trick in the book to delay and derail the proceedings which were often adjourned due to his allegedly poor health. At one stage, he decided to change defense lawyers, which entailed a long delay for his new attorney to acquaint himself with thousands of case documents. After his health had really deteriorated, the charges were dropped on humanitarian grounds.
It isn't surprising that ex-communists have eulogized Jaruzelski as a statesman and even a hero. But Poland's leftist liberal camp centered round the daily Gazeta Wyborcza has also praised his contributions to the country's transition from dictatorship to democracy. Its editor Adam Michnik, who is known to be soft of communism and fancies himself one of the “architects” of free Poland, has repeatedly referred to Jaruzelski as “a man of honor”. Others, who hold a generally negative view of the dictator, grudgingly admit that Poland's system change was relatively smooth and peaceful compared to the blood baths that have occurred in other countries. One thing seems certain – the debate about his virtues, vices and motives is not likely to end any time soon.
*******

[pieter]

Jaga,

A very good article and biography of the man who was connected to Polands power structures for nearly half a century. (45 years) For opportunistic reasons he distantiated himself from his family and his gentry class. He ofcourse was not the only in that. Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the developper and founder of the Soviet State Security forces under their original name Cheka (1917–26)came from a Polish szlachta (nobility) family, of the Samson coat of arms. His Cheka laid the foundations of the future NKVD and KGB.

It is easy for an outsider to judge Wojciech Jaruzelski. We don't excactly know what effect the suffering and hardship he faced in Siberia, and the loss of his father, had on him. He had to survive and probably chose the movement, army and group of people he could survive with. Maybe he regretted the fact that he failed to join the army of General Władysław Anders who later became part of the Western allied forces. Fact is that he enrolled in a Soviet military academy and joined a Kremlin-controlled “Polish” army in whose ranks he fought alongside the Red Army. He helped the Red Army install a Soviet-controlled puppet government in Poland and collaborated in the destruction of the last Polish freedom-fighters struggling against their country's forced Sovietization. I can not forget that fact.

But from the other side he might have been a Polish Patriot who wanted to install a Polish kind of Socialism in the Polish Peoples Republic. Like other Polish National Communists, who wanted a Polish Socialist system in Poland and a certain kind of independence or autonomy from Moscow. I oppose (as you know) as a humanist every kind of hatred, xenophobia, discrimination, racism, Polonophobia (anti-Polonism, antipolonism), anti-semitism and also class struggle. Therefor I reject the anti-semitic campaign of 1968 in Poland, which was disguised as an anti-Zionist campaign. Yes, there were very evil, inhumane, bad and wicked Polish Jewish Stalinists in Poland during the fourties, fifties and sixties. It was good that they were removed from power in the de-stalinization process, like the non-jewish Polish stalinists too.

However like you had moderate, Polish ('Catholic') (socialist) humanist communists, and Patriotic Polish socialists within the Polish United Workers' Party, PZPR, the Communist party which governed the People's Republic of Poland from 1948 to 1989, you had moderate Jewish communists in the party and army too. Fact is that all jews suffered from the 1968 anti-semitic campaign. A lot of the remaining Polish jews (after the Holocaust) fled Poland in 1968 and moved to Israel and the USA. Polish Roman-Catholics and Polish jews played a role in the Polish dissident movents, KOR and Solidarność. Influential Solidarność leaders and members were jews, like Bronisław Geremek, Adam Michnik and Marek Edelman. The problem of 'the newest Polish history' in historical sense is that it is often so black and white. The anti-Polonism of some Israeli and American jewish authors, historians and journalists is annoying, and so is the fierce anti-semitism of a Polish minority. This anti-semitism can have christian (Roman-Catholic pillarization/polarization) roots, a biological racist ('they are a different race, ethnicity and other people') or anti-zionist and anti-communist causes. (ofcourse Polish jews had a large presence in the Zionist and Communist movements and parties, whom by the way opposed eachother) The strangest thing I have always found the fact that jews opressed, tortured and murdered fellow jews, as Stalinist hardliners (who hated religious, social-democratic and dissident jews), Kapo's (in concentration camps) and just as Communist Apparatchik's and commissars. The Israeli (Jewish) far right have a historical point in their hatred of communist leftist jews there. I am not a fan of the Israeli right, but they have a point there, and in fact these rightwing Israeli's sometimes can agree with hardcore, Roman-Catholic, Nationalistic, anti-communist, Polish anti-semites.

Maybe the 1968 Polish government's anti-Semitic campaign and purge of the Polish armed forces of Jewish officers was a late destalinization process? Polish jewish Stalinists played a large role in the Polish government, the Polish secret police and the Polish armed forces, because Stalin used them to form a loyalist Stalinist core in the Polish puppet regime. The other Stalinists were Polish non-Jewish people with a working class or poor peasent background, who had a grudge against the old pre-war Polish bourgeoisie (Midde class and high class), the Polish aristocracy and the non-communist intelligentsia of Roman-Catholic, Polish socialist, humanist professors, teachers, academics, scientists, non-communist politicians and doctors, lawjers, bankers and business men.

Jaruzelski sided with these crual, inhumane and vicious people (Polish stalinists and Polish communists in the periods 1945-1956 -Stalinist decade- and 1945-1989) These people humiliated, harassed, arrested, bullied, tortured and murdered innocent and decent Polish citizens in the fourties, fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties (But primarely during the fourties and fifties). I can not forget that fact. But like every person, he is not pure evil, nor good or a saint. He was a Polish patriot in the sense that he served the Polish interest during his time as a communist military dictator, with his 'leftwing military junta'.

Cheers,
Pieter

[pieter]

Poland's last communist leader Jaruzelski dies aged 90



In 1989 he became the first communist leader to clear the way for democracy by agreeing to semi-free elections.

General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland's last communist leader who tried but failed to crush the freedom-fighting Solidarity union, died Sunday aged 90, a hospital spokesman said.

Jaruzelski, who died in a Warsaw hospital with his daughter by his side, marked Polish history by trying to strangle the Soviet bloc's first free trade union with a brutal military crackdown on December 13, 1981.

But by 1989, he became the first communist leader to clear the way for democracy by agreeing to semi-free elections with Solidarity, led by the charismatic former shipyard electrician and Nobel Peace laureate Lech Walesa.

"He would have been a great man if he had lived in different era," Walesa once told AFP, calling Jaruzelski "a very intelligent man" who was "part of a generation from an unhappy time".

"I don't know if he believed sincerely in communism or whether he just let himself get drawn in. I won't judge him. Let God and history do that."

Jaruzelski -- whose strongman image was accentuated by dark glasses and rigid posture -- saw himself as a patriot who used martial law in December 1981 to save Poland from a potentially bloody Soviet invasion.

Critics, however, argue that the crackdown only bolstered his regime when the USSR was too bogged down in Afghanistan to step in.

Jaruzelski was born into the minor nobility on July 6, 1923 in Kurow, eastern Poland.

The Soviets deported his family after Hitler and Stalin] carved up Poland in 1939[/b at the start of World War II. His father died in Siberia.

He enjoyed a meteoric military and political rise after joining Polish forces under Moscow's command to battle the Nazis in 1943.

Having fought his way to Germany in 1945, he returned home to help crush anti-communist resistance. He became a general at 33, heading the military's political department.

In 1964, Jaruzelski joined the Polish communist party's governing Central Committee and served as defence minister for over a decade until 1983.

"I don't think he ever enjoyed life, its little pleasures. Work and politics with a capital P were always a priority," his daughter Monika said in her memoirs.




A military man

Jaruzelski took a hard line when protests erupted over price rises in 1970 in the shipyards of Gdynia and Gdansk -- Solidarity's birthplace a decade later.

The crackdown took at least 44 lives and left hundreds injured. After the regime fell, he was charged for giving shooting orders, but was never convicted.

Jaruzelski took total control by 1981, becoming premier in February and party chief in October. The martial law crackdown on the nascent Solidarity freedom movement shocked the West.

Images of tanks and soldiers in the streets and the uniformed general reading the martial law decree in back-to-back broadcasts remain etched in the minds of those who lived through the painful period.

Thousands of Solidarity activists were jailed, including Walesa. The union was outlawed but survived underground.

Poles have bitter memories of the economic crisis that ensued as basic foodstuffs were rationed.



"What was very important was that he was a military man: he was used to that rigour, to that strictness, to the idea that you give out orders which must be obeyed with no ifs or buts," Warsaw historian Andrzej Paczkowski told AFP.

"That all featured heavily in his character and I think it was only in the late 1980s that he understood it wasn't the right personality type for a head of state."

Martial law was formally lifted on July 22, 1983 and by the time reformist Mikhail Gorbachev took power two years later, the days of Moscow's satellite regimes were numbered.

In 1988, amid a new wave of strikes, the communists decided to negotiate with the still-banned Solidarity.



The Round Table talks of 1989 legalised Solidarity and paved the way for the semi-free elections that heralded communism's demise.

Lawmakers narrowly elected Jaruzelski president in July 1989, but he resigned in September 1990 after the Polish communist party voted itself out of existence, making way for free presidential elections won by Walesa.

In 2006, Jaruzelski was formally charged with setting up a criminal military organisation for martial law. He faced eight years in jail, but the drawn-out trial was shelved after his cancer diagnosis in 2011.

He withdrew from the public eye towards the end of his life as his health deteriorated and his legal woes continued, but still spoke out.

"It might seem like a paradox, but I'm very happy to see Poland in NATO, which guarantees our security, and in the European Union, which represents a huge opportunity for development," he once told AFP.



(AFP)

[pieter]

This article of Fox news about Jaruzelski is very good too.

www.foxnews.com/world/2014/05/25/poland-last-communist-leader-gen-wojciech-jaruzelski-dies-at-age-0/

[Nictoshek]

“Russian general in Polish uniform.”

--US Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger 1981