The preventative arrest of thousands of Solidarity activists and the stubborn hunt for anyone who managed to escape the round-up of the night of December 12–13 were not carried out just to isolate those who were most active, or considered to be most dangerous. It was also the aim of this operation to cleanse the territory, so that new people could replace those who had been imprisoned—SB collaborators or individuals considered sufficiently conformist to accept the changed operating conditions of the union. From this technical point of view, it was actually the SB that was carrying out these activities, but the idea for them arose directly from the communist elite's perspective on reality. Thus, it would be difficult to claim that the police had come up with it on their own. Without referring to earlier examples—although these can indeed be found in communist Poland's history—I would like to point out that executive and analytical circles within the party had already begun differentiating between striking workers and the opposition during the strikes in 1980. This trend did not change after Solidarity was founded. Almost all the government's efforts to force the union into communist state structures were grounded in a belief that it was necessary (as the propaganda often said) to sever the “healthy, working-class current” from the “dirty, anti-socialist scum,” i.e., the anti-communist opposition. As time passed, that clear, dichotomous picture was destroyed because it turned out that some of those Solidarity activists who had previously shared nothing in common with the opposition were much more radical than people from KOR or the Free Trade Unions, who had been working for years to effect change, or even to overthrow the regime. Thus, the term “extremists” became more popular, both in official propaganda and during secret meetings. The term “extremists” now encompassed both the “new” radicals as well as the “old” oppositionists. The number of individuals who the government thought should be “cut off “ from the mass of many millions was thus increasing.

“The evening is peaceful, as usual on Saturdays. All the women are wearing slippers (in winter they leave their shoes in the cloakroom). Two are knitting and a third has just gone to the bathroom. Suddenly, Maria hears a hollow banging and has the impression that the noises are coming from somewhere in the building, beyond the metal doors leading to the hallway… . The strange vibrations seem to penetrate the building's metal structure. On the control panel, lights start turning on chaotically. Maria grabs the telephone receiver and connects to the technical center: ‘What's going on there?’ No one answers… . The noise grows stronger, so she decides to go and check herself. She had just taken a couple of steps when the double doors are opened with a strong shove. Four or five soldiers burst into the big room… . One shouts: ‘Chairs to the wall! Don't move!’ The second threatens Maria with a bayonet… . Maria sees him go closer to the glass, beyond which are the levers and buttons … and start to turn them all off chaotically. ‘They’ve gone mad,’ thinks Maria. ‘They’re going to blow up the whole installation.’ She looked instinctively at the big electric clock that had just stopped. The hands, now still, point to 11.20 p.m.”

This anonymous but very credible account was recorded by Gabriel Meretik. Maria worked in the telegram section of Warsaw's national and international telecommunications center. That's more or less how the Operation “Azalea” looked at 451 sites throughout the country (60 of them were in Warsaw). The rumors about equipment being wrecked or cables cut are not confirmed in the sources, but it is difficult to exclude the possibility that such events did in fact occur. In any case, just before midnight, the “civilian” telecommunications network fell silent for good. This blockade also included the telephone lines to the foreign diplomatic and consular posts. Approximately 5,000 people carried out the operation: 700 SB functionaries, over 3,000 soldiers from the MSW military units (including the Border Defense Troops), and about 1,200 soldiers from the army. Some of the sites that were occupied were then defended by the army, and some by Ministry of Internal Affairs services.

Solidarity's transition to operations underground was a smooth one, and began as early as the night of December 12–13. Some of its activists—including very prominent ones, such as Zbigniew Bujak, Zbigniew Romaszewski, and Bogdan Lis—went into hiding that night and did not take part in the protests in factories and other workplaces, which of course by their very nature were not secret. The first larger group of activists in hiding was comprised of those who had taken part in the strikes but managed to avoid arrest after they had been broken. Many of these activists “went underground” immediately. Sometimes they did so as a group, such as in Białystok, where about ten people from the Regional Board first took refuge at the presbytery of St. Roch’s. Then, dressed in cassocks, they were taken to the parish church and only from there to their individual hiding places. The regional activists from Częstochowa attempted something similar, but failed. Six took refuge at the Jasna Góra sanctuary. The militia removed them brutally and unceremoniously, chasing away the pilgrims gathered there in the process and arresting many people inside the church. As the Paulists living there emphasized, not even the Gestapo did this during the occupation. Priests helped many union activists. In the first months, there were people in hiding in every Solidarity region. In some regions, the largest or most active, several dozen people or more were in hiding. Some of the activists from the Independent Students’ Union were also in hiding, as well as people from the pre-August opposition, and activists from the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union of Individual Farmers Solidarity (NSZZ IR). Sometimes, people whom the SB were not interested in went into hiding, too—which was understandable, considering the emotional atmosphere. Not surprisingly, people were apprehensive after seeing tanks on the streets, hearing rumors that the army had attacked striking enterprises, and learning that hundreds of people had been arrested.

Just how many people were active in the underground in a strict sense is difficult to establish. During the first months of martial law, probably hundreds of activists were in hiding. This number tended to wane, since although new people may have been joining—including people who had just been released from internment, or those who only became seriously involved in underground activities later—many more people were still being caught. There were also increasingly frequent cases of people “coming to the surface” for personal or family reasons, or because they were having difficulties staying in hiding.

“The worst is already behind us,” General Jaruzelski announced in parliament on July 21, 1983, as he justified the lifting of martial law. He was actually referring to the economic situation, but his words can also be interpreted more generally. For the governing clique and its numerous supporters, the entire period after August 1980 was “bad,” and certainly “worse” than what had preceded it. In its very existence, Solidarity was undermining the status quo and posing a threat to the position of entire social groups: the party functionaries and a large portion of the state administration, members of the security apparatus and militia, and those in the professional army. They had a growing sense of being personally under threat. The rigors of martial law could not immediately alleviate all these fears. For many months, Solidarity had been trying to force the government to make concessions and negotiate. Street clashes, calls for strikes, distribution of flyers, anti-government graffiti, a selective boycott of state institutions, and conspicuous displays of religious participation accompanied these efforts. Solidarity's opponents and those who were indifferent to the union perceived the fact that the government did not yield under this pressure as a positive thing, while the lifting of martial law demonstrated that stability and order were beginning to return to Poland.

In his speech, First Secretary Jaruzelski did not clearly outline any tasks for the future. He did say, however, that a matter of “primary” importance was “to meet the material and cultural needs of society.” He believed that this could be achieved by “perfecting” the existing system through “more complete utilization of production assets” and “better management of labor resources.” These limitations stemmed from a phenomenon aptly described by sociologist Mirosława Marody: “people who support reform are against the government, and those who support the government are against reform.” To some extent, the signs of improvement over the course of 1983 did play a role; it seemed that, since the crisis had begun to abate, there was no longer any need to introduce changes. Although the country's economic situation played a fundamental role in legitimizing the system, the government's legal validity did not depend solely on how much meat was on the table.

“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).