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.