“I am asking you, the functionaries of the Citizens’ Militia and the Security Service—to guard the state against the enemy, and the working people against lawlessness and violence,” General Jaruzelski said, announcing the imposition of martial law. One can still somehow understand “guard the state against the enemy,” although everything suggested that the state—as the general understood it—was not under threat by NATO armies or Bundeswehr commandos, but rather by the opposition of many of its own citizens. But from whose “lawlessness and violence” were the militiamen supposed to be guarding the “working people”? I would hesitate to call his appeal cynical, because neither General Jaruzelski, nor the author of the draft of this speech, Wiesław Górnicki, was a cynic, although they did often engage in conceptual acrobatics. I believe that this appeal stemmed from a kind of self-indoctrination and the fact that Jaruzelski saw reality through the prism of Marxist dogmas, and thus described it with strongly ideological language. Making use of the full force of state propaganda, those in power had been trying to convince public opinion for so long that Solidarity—and especially its “extremists”—was preparing to take power in the state by means of force, to overthrow the regime, and launch a bloody settling of accounts with its defenders, that they themselves had probably started to believe in their own declarations, and required their obedient propagandists to proclaim them as well. In their language, Solidarity was simply an enemy. A miner from the Wujek mine who was interned the night of December 13, Jan Ludwiczak, or his friend Adam Skwira, arrested a few days later, were identified with the enemy, not with the “working people,” because they were Solidarity activists. It was against them that militia and secret police were supposed to be protecting the miners and shipyard workers.

The militia and secret police functionaries did not really need any prodding to act, as General Jaruzelski probably knew full well. After all, they had all been preparing themselves for a long time for precisely this kind of confrontation, which started with operations “Azalea” and “Fir.” The leadership at the Ministry of Internal Affairs was a notorious advocate of a tough stance against enemies. In 1976–77, plans had even been made to kill or kidnap one of the democratic opposition's most active members, Adam Michnik, who happened to be abroad at that time. In May 1977, Stanisław Pyjas, who had been cooperating with KOR, was killed, and one of the witnesses in that case later died under mysterious circumstances.

Some, like Jacek Kuroń, had predicted that either a huge wave of spontaneous and uncontrolled anger would erupt on a mass scale, or that a general strike would be organized, which would absorb workers’ social energy and provide it with direction. The real course of events proved these predictions wrong. Others, like Eugeniusz Szumiejko, believed that if Solidarity lost its influence in the large enterprises it would live on only as a myth or legend, and thus would not be able to initiate or influence current events. Their predictions also turned out to be off the mark. Reality took another path, one which was closer to the one anticipated by Szumiejko than the one Kuroń wrote about. In 1982, a Solidarity myth was already emerging, based on a very fresh memory of the sixteen months of the “carnival of freedom” that had preceded martial law, the sense of martyrdom immediately after December 13, and the romantic nature of the underground, which in its mythologized version was embodied by loyalty, suffering, and courage. Solidarity became implicitly linked with the series of brutally suppressed workers’ revolts in 1956, 1970, and 1976, and, above all, the tradition of national uprisings dating back to 1830, 1863, and 1944, which had all ended in defeat. All this was the source of great myth-making power. The myth was especially attractive for young people, who were eager to run into the streets and join any incipient demonstration.

Solidarity was not, however, an uprising that could end in defeat. Rather, it was a social movement that could be subdued, but would be difficult to annihilate. This was because the real Solidarity also existed alongside the emerging myth, and was associated with Wałęsa, underground heroes, the TKK, the news sheets that were proliferating, and with the Masses for the Fatherland. Although the underground activists’ appeals did not fill the streets with millions of vehement demonstrators who were ready for anything, they served as a positive example, even for most of those who preferred to stay at home. The difficulties of daily life, and particularly the fear of force and brutality, required that they remain passive. When people were sure that there would be no repercussions, that ZOMO would not charge the demonstrators, and that no tear gas or water cannons would be used, then people were suddenly revitalized.

When martial law was imposed, the position of the Catholic Church in Polish society and public life was very strong, but also fragile. It was strong because the Poles belonged to that ever-smaller group of “religious” European nations; i.e., most Poles regularly attended Mass, and the parish priest was still a local authority. The Church in Poland had deep roots in society, both because it was traditional, and also because it was a spiritual alternative to communism. Many Poles regarded that atheistic system as alien and something imposed upon them against their will. The Church's position was also strong because for over thirty years, since 1948, Primate Stefan Wyszyński, both an outstanding priest and statesman, had stood at its head. He was eminently able to formulate the nation's essential needs and expectations in the language of faith. Finally, it was also because Cardinal Karol Wojtyła was elected pope in 1978, and thus became overnight the principal authority for the vast, and probably overwhelming, majority of Poles. His election as pope also sparked a tidal wave of national pride. These were the “positive” sides of power.

The Church also enjoyed its position thanks to the fact that the atheistic communist system had been experiencing, since the mid-1970s, yet another crisis in its short history. The clearest and also most dangerous manifestation of this crisis was the emergence of Solidarity, a mass movement whose protests were constantly expanding into new areas. While it is true that the exact position of the Church cannot be assessed empirically, one can with a large degree of certainty assert that, without the role of the Church, primate, and “Polish pope” in the Vatican, Solidarity would not have taken the shape it did. Although these three conditions alone did not suffice, they were essential. It would be difficult to imagine that there could have been any other main bases of support in Poland for a social movement of that magnitude. Clearly, the link to Christianity was certainly crucial. The communists ruling Poland, despite their varying degrees of antagonism to religion and the Church, had already invoked Primate Wyszyński several times in the past during moments of crisis in hopes that he would help calm the public mood.

On March 2, 1950, the National Security Council organized a debate on the United States’ strategy in the face of the Soviet threat. One of the participants was Professor James Bryant Conant, a chemist who had been president of Harvard University since 1933. He belonged to an elite group of scientists involved with the United States’ most important military undertakings during the Second World War (including the Manhattan Project). He was also close to the world of politics: he had been the chair of the National Defense Research Committee since 1941, and was High Commissioner for Germany during the years 1953–55, and then ambassador to that country until 1957. During that debate, Professor Conant said that if it did not come to war, then “the competition between our dynamic free society and their [Soviet] static slave society should be all in our favor.” He also predicted that the Soviet Union might Balkanize itself by 1980.

The state Moloch created by Lenin and Stalin really did collapse, both formally and definitively, as a result of “Balkanization” in December 1991. It had split into national states, just like the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Professor Conant's prediction was off by just ten years. Nevertheless, the year he mentioned, 1980, was not a normal year for the Soviets, nor for the entire system of their satellite states, created by Stalin in East Central Europe during the years 1944–47. In 1980, the United States led a boycott of the Moscow Olympics in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In the end, however, this was not particularly galling, since the Kremlin could retaliate by boycotting the Los Angeles Olympics four years later. The outcome of the US presidential election was incomparably more important than America's posturing over the Olympics. The Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, won, having announced a tough stance toward the Kremlin. After some presidents’ perceived dovishness, now a hawk was in the White House. Just as important as Reagan's victory were events in Poland, the largest Soviet satellite in Europe. Since July 1, a wave of strikes had swept through the country, culminating in a general strike. This was just a couple of weeks before the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, announced the start of the Olympic Games at the opening ceremonies, and a few months before the American elections.

On December 5, the Polish Politburo granted permission for the imposition of martial law and gave Jaruzelski a free hand to select the exact date. For reasons of secrecy if nothing else, the Politburo was unable to decide the date or hour that the operation—which had been assigned the cryptonyms “G,” “W,” or “X”— would begin. According to the plans that had already been approved, the army required at least forty-eight hours after the political decision had been made to launch its operations in full force. Those same plans also stated that, optimally, the operation would begin on a Saturday night, when most workplaces were closed, making an immediate response (such as strikes and Solidarity's mobilization) practically impossible, or at least seriously hindered, until Monday. Meanwhile, since December 5 was a Saturday, the operation could not begin yet, and it would be necessary to keep its date a secret for at least a week. This would be too risky, considering the large number of people who knew about it. The preparations were still being “polished,” which was not surprising, given Jaruzelski's extreme pedantry, which he also expected of all his subordinates and colleagues. It was necessary, among other things, to conduct a propaganda campaign to publicize a specific reason (or pretext) for taking such dramatic action—putting tens of thousands of soldiers and thousands of tanks and armored vehicles on city streets. A pretext—a meeting of Solidarity's leadership on December 3—did present itself, but secret police tapes made at those meetings had to be suitably prepared and publicized in the mass media for several days at least. Because Jaruzelski made the decision to start this propaganda campaign on Sunday, December 6, it could go on uninterrupted for five or six days. Which is precisely what happened.

The regional communist party offices and administration had to be mobilized as well, as did the leadership of the military and Ministry of Internal Affairs. The satellite political parties also needed to be informed of the fact that Operation “W” was drawing near, and the chairman of the Council of State had to be told about the task awaiting him. Jaruzelski was faced with a long series of meetings, consultations, and briefings.

The strikes sparked by the declaration of martial law were still underway when other forms of protest began emerging. In Polish writing on the subject, the term opór społeczny (“civil” resistance) is usually used to describe them. One may question whether this term is appropriate, since it is semantically close to the Second World War term ruch oporu (“resistance movement”), reserved for armed operations, particularly for partisan warfare and terrorist acts. The adjective społeczny (“social,” “collective”) allows us to remove or minimize this discrepancy, but we should, however, realize that this term is very broad, encompassing an enormous number of extremely varied types of activities, including the idea of “resistance movement,” that is, acts involving physical conflict. The overwhelming majority, however, used peaceful means, close to what we often call “civil disobedience.” The term “civic resistance” does not exclude the possibility of people acting on their own; it can actually be comprised of a series of actions undertaken by specific individuals who are not acting together. Under communism, for the most part, no organized, collective forms of opposition to the system existed. Instead, there were only isolated, individual acts of protest. Each year, for example, large quantities of anti-state graffiti appeared, as well as typed or handwritten flyers, and anonymous anti-state or anti-communist letters. Red flags would be ripped down occasionally, or party slogans defaced. The communist regime's ideological and repressive character meant that all criticisms were also regarded as anti-state behavior, even if they were in private letters or conversations. The SB observed these types of deeds, and those who expressed criticism—if discovered—were sentenced or suffered reprisals, for example, by being expelled from their place of study or fired from their jobs. Thus, the very nature of the system resulted in an extremely broad concept of “civil resistance,” the limits of which were practically impossible to define.

After the declaration of martial law, individual forms of protest faded into the background, since Solidarity existed. The trade union was regarded by many, if not most, of its members as a form of opposition not only against the current ruling clique, but also against the regime as such. Nevertheless, in the first weeks after December 13, many individual acts of protest occurred in various places.

On Monday, the fourteenth of December, a group of nine people met for the first time, who, as Mieczysław Rakowski wrote in his journal, were to “constantly monitor how the situation was developing” over the coming weeks. That morning, they met in a small conference room off the prime minister's office in the historical Council of Ministers building, across the street from Warsaw's most beautiful park and the Frédéric Chopin monument. Kazimierz Barcikowski believes that, for Jaruzelski, who “clearly dominated” the others present at the meeting, “we [simply] were a select adjutant staff, which would participate in analyzing the situation and preparing decisions, which he would accept or reject.” Other than operational decisions, the group considered various matters of a more general nature, even strategic ones. In addition to Jaruzelski, this group included two deputy prime ministers (Rakowski and Janusz Obodowski, an economist and chairman of the government's Operational Anti-Crisis Center), three Central Committee secretaries (Barcikowski, responsible for the Sejm and contact with the Church; Milewski, responsible for security matters and justice; and Olszowski, responsible for propaganda), two heads from the ministries of defense and the interior (Siwicki and Kiszczak), and the head of the Office of the Council of Ministers (Janiszewski, Jaruzelski's jack of all trades, who had previously headed his Ministry of National Defense office).

In this group, five people were members or deputy members of the Politburo, and only two (Janiszewski and Obodowski) were not members of the Central Committee, and thus outside the party's formal top leadership, although they did belong to the narrow governing elite. Of those who were in charge of politically significant departments, only the foreign minister, Józef Czyrek, was absent. As a member of the Politburo and secretary of the Central Committee, Czyrek belonged to the highest decision-making circles. His absence may be explained by the fact that the group was primarily dealing with exclusively internal matters. Most of those in this group had extensive (at least twenty years’) political experience. Four of them were military men (all were in WRON), and one (Milewski) had spent his entire career in the security apparatus. All came from approximately the same generation: the oldest, Jaruzelski, was 58; the youngest, Olszowski, was 50. They were thus the optimal age for holding executive positions: experienced enough, but still in their prime.

While Poland may have indeed been the “weakest link” among communist states, this does not mean that the others were necessarily strong and intact. During the 1970s, the states founded on Marxist ideology were actually entering a deep economic crisis, which in turn prompted social and political crises. This also affected the Soviet Union itself, where the standard of living left much to be desired. Despite several decades of a nearly unblemished record of success, discontent was mounting there, too. The accomplishments of the engineers who designed the long-range missiles, nuclear weapons, and space vehicles contrasted sharply with the quality and quantity of consumer goods in Soviet homes. The Soviet Union's client states, comprised of poor Central American, African, and Asian countries, ranging from Fidel Castro's Cuba to Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Laos, and Vietnam, increased the USSR's prestige, guaranteeing it several military bases as well as votes in the United Nations. This all helped the Soviet Union to maintain its status as a superpower. The costs of this expansion, however, seriously burdened its budget. In late 1979, Moscow involved itself militarily in Afghanistan, which prompted the United States to impose harsh economic sanctions. These affected, for example, the grain imports on which the Soviet economy was very dependent. From the start, that war had high costs and was for many years a serious additional strain on the increasingly wobbly economy.

President Reagan did not limit himself, however, to his inspired anti-Soviet rhetoric, symbolized by his famous expression “the Evil Empire.” In March 1983, he announced that work would begin on “Star Wars”—i.e., the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). This was to some extent a bluff, but the Pentagon's budget did double in several years, which meant that a new phase was beginning in the arms race, one for which the Soviet economy was unprepared. In addition, the prices of crude oil had begun to fall on the world market, and this was the main source of hard currency required for Soviet industry, as well as for supplying the cities with bread. If this weren't enough, in 1982–85, Moscow experienced a “geriatric crisis”: three of the party's general secretaries died while in office (Leonid Brezhnev, Iurii Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko), as well as two other extremely important Politburo members (Mikhail Suslov and Dmitrii Ustinov).

During a Politburo meeting on December 22, 1981, General Jaruzelski said, “We have won the first battle.” His use of military language is not surprising, considering both his profession and the situation; however, he added cautiously, “We have not won the campaign (which will take several months).” More importantly, he admitted that one should not triumph prematurely, since “it will take ten years to recover from the devastation in [people’s] consciousness and lift the economy from ruins”—in other words, to win the war. It is difficult to take issue with this statement, even if some of the skirmishes of this battle had not yet been won: as the general was saying these words, miners from Ziemowit and Piast were still protesting underground, and a group of striking workers persisted at the Katowice Steelworks. Victory could, however, be proclaimed, since the enemy's main forces had been broken and its center crushed.

Nevertheless, this did not mean that the troops would return to their barracks. While it is true that most units had been withdrawn from the streets on January 7, approximately twenty-eight thousand soldiers from those assigned to “special tasks” remained in or near nine designated large cities (Bydgoszcz, Gdańsk, Katowice, Lublin, Łódź, Poznań, Szczecin, Warsaw, and Wrocław), about seven thousand were at training grounds and could reach the area of operations within thirteen to fifteen hours, and about thirty-five thousand returned to where they were permanently stationed, where they could be deployed in one and a half to two days. These units had a total of about seventy thousand soldiers. Moreover, specially designated reserves of about twenty thousand soldiers were kept “on permanent readiness for action … throughout Poland,” about nine thousand were guarding selected sites (including weapons and ammunition plants), and about two thousand were posted along communication routes. In all, over a hundred thousand soldiers were in various degrees of readiness or already deployed. The battle had been won, but the troops had not yet left the field.

The army did not limit itself to guarding, pacifying, and maintaining the psychosis of martial law. It also assumed a key position in the state administration, the economy, and the communist party: eleven military men were ministers or deputy ministers in civilian departments, thirteen were voivods or deputy voivods, and nine were secretaries of the communist party's voivodship committees.

In choosing the “lesser evil,” those in power had created an exceedingly difficult situation for themselves. Clearly, a new, independent organization would be a “foreign body” whose existence would be irreconcilable with the system's fundamental principles. Above all, it would challenge the omnipotence of the communist party, which, in Poland's case, had already been forced to accept the autonomy of the Catholic Church. The government's strategy regarding Solidarity and the other organizations that were forming under the union's protective umbrella did not leave much room to maneuver. If the system was not going to disintegrate, the union needed to be absorbed by the existing structures and subjugate itself to the “leading power,” as the communist party declared in the state constitution. Various tactics could be employed to achieve this: the movement's development could be hampered, its collapse could be brought about from within, or it could be discredited. A frontal attack could also be launched by using force, and above all by isolating (read: arresting) the most active members of the union and opposition. These measures—weaken and attack—were essentially complementary, since achieving the first aim would make it easier to employ the second. Taken together, they offered a chance to make Solidarity “fit” into the system in terms of its form and personnel. Or, they would make it possible to eliminate Solidarity entirely. Since the government abandoned the use of force in July and August, however, they could not resort to it now, after they had just signed the agreements, which the overwhelming majority of both Poles and foreign observers had applauded enthusiastically.

The communist party leadership also had internal issues it needed to address. To this end, Edward Gierek was removed as first secretary on September 5, a continuation of personnel changes that had begun two weeks earlier. Gierek's successor, Stanisław Kania, was an experienced, albeit colorless, apparatchik, who for many years had been responsible for party control over the security apparatus and policy toward the opposition. Soon, further changes were made in the party and government apparatus which were intended to show that the party was removing those responsible for the economic disaster. These changes did not result in complete unanimity within the ruling clique, however.

Operation “Azalea” had not succeeded in blocking all channels of communication, so the night of December 12–13, about 1:30 a.m., when the Council of State was still in session, the Warsaw correspondent of Agence France-Presse sent an urgent dispatch to Paris (via Vienna) about the worrying events in Warsaw. At 2:10 a.m., the press attaché at the United States Embassy, Steve Dubrow, and the embassy's political advisor, John Vaught, sent an encoded dispatch to Washington by satellite, which arrived at the Eastern European Desk at the Department of State and the National Security Council around 8:15 p.m. EST (on December 12). In it, they said that telephone communications had been cut, Solidarity activists in Warsaw had been arrested, the militia had occupied the trade union's Mazowsze Region headquarters, and convoys of military vehicles had been observed on the streets. And, most importantly for public opinion in the West and for American politicians, no Soviet military presence had been noted. In Washington, it was Saturday evening, and no authority figures were present who could have made any decisions: President Ronald Reagan was spending the weekend at Camp David, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was in a plane flying from London to Washington, and Secretary of State Alexander Haig was in Brussels, about to embark on a long trip to North Africa, the Near East, and South Asia.

In the situation room at the White House, a group of people gathered who could only analyze the situation. John Davis, director of the Eastern European and Yugoslav Affairs Office in the Department of State, organized the meeting. (Later, he was ambassador to Poland for many years.) Vice President George Bush attended, along with the White House chief of staff James Baker and admirals Nance and Poindexter. Among those present, the person who was best informed about Polish affairs was the well-known historian Richard Pipes, who had been born in Poland and was a Harvard professor specializing in Russian history. He was also an advisor to the National Security Council on matters concerning Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The news that “something” was happening in Poland was already making the rounds of the press agencies. After consultation with Haig, who had been awakened in the middle of the night at the Hyatt Hotel where he was staying, it was decided that the Department of State would issue a short communiqué.

Shortly after martial law was imposed, Stefan Olszowski said at a Politburo meeting that the party needed to be “half a step behind the army” in the current situation. Whether it was exactly half a step or not is open to debate, but in general this statement certainly corresponded to reality. While the communist party had always wielded power thanks to the support of the completely subordinate ministries of defense and the interior, they were increasingly crucial in guaranteeing the party's “leading role in the state” after the foundation of Solidarity. In fact, this “leading role” had actually been constitutionally guaranteed just recently, in 1976. Since February 1981, the higher and highest levels of power were in a sense militarized, as was the party itself, which stemmed from the need to prepare and administer martial law. Despite the increased presence of military men in party and state positions, from the perspective of an outside observer (i.e., all of society) it seemed like the army (and security apparatus) was “half a step behind the party,” until that fateful night of December 12–13.

In discussing party-army relations, however, one should recall that the vast majority of officers (practically all those of the rank of colonel or above) belonged to the communist party (as was also the case among functionaries at the Ministry of Internal Affairs). Nothing can be said for sure about whether loyalty to the party or army was more important to them, except that both institutions required discipline and complete subordination. Perhaps Olszowski's statement should thus be modified: it was not the army that went out ahead of the party, but rather the communists in uniform who simply moved half a step ahead, in front of the civilian party members.

If the communist party's role as a political decision-making institution was weakened after the imposition of martial law—at all levels, including the party organizations at enterprises, too—this happened not because those who controlled the army had appropriated power, but because of a conscious decision by party leadership to transfer some of its power. In a formal sense, this transfer happened on December 5, 1981, when the Politburo authorized General Jaruzelski to order the imposition of martial law. Earlier decisions had nevertheless already pointed in this direction—for example, the appointment of General Jaruzelski to the post of prime minister in February 1981 and his appointment as first secretary in October.

In June 1977, a group of analysts from various US government agencies produced a memorandum more than twenty pages long entitled “Prospects for Eastern Europe.” For our purposes, the following statements in the memorandum were of paramount importance: “unrest is likely to grow in Eastern Europe over the next three years… . Poland will be the most volatile, and a blow-up there, which might bring down Gierek and even conceivably compel the Soviets to restore order, cannot be ruled out.” The authors of the memorandum suggested that “if order should break down, both Warsaw and Moscow will want to see it restored by Polish forces, [and] only if these fail will the Soviets intervene.” Regardless of what one thinks of the competence of the American intelligence community at that time, one must admit that this prediction, formulated with extreme restraint, has to a large extent been vindicated—a rare event, since intelligence services err just as often as meteorologists do.

The conviction that Poland, of the eight East Central European communist states, was most likely to experience violent protests was also held among members of the region's nascent democratic opposition, and even within Poland's own ruling elite. Members of both groups were aware of a growing social discontent that stemmed from the worsening economic situation. The kinds of violent protests seen in Poland took place in other communist states either not at all or on a much smaller scale. Unrest in Poland was usually sparked by economic grievances and came to resemble political rebellions against the ruling cliques. While other countries also experienced these kinds of revolts—for example, Czechoslovakia and East Germany in 1953, and even the Soviet Union itself during the Novocherkassk riots in 1962—these were just isolated events. In Poland, meanwhile, strikes and demonstrations took place in June 1956 in Poznań, in August 1957 in Łódź, in December 1970 on the coast (the largest were in Gdańsk, Gdynia, and Szczecin), and in June 1976 in several other cities, including Radom. In two cases (in 1956 and 1970), strikes were violently broken up by means of military force, including armed units, resulting in the deaths of dozens of protesters. In Poznań alone, approximately seventy people died.