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 While it is true that most units had been withdrawn from the streets on January 7, approximately twenty-eight thousand soldiers from those assigned to “special tasks” remained in or near nine designated large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.