Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

But it was the real Wojciech. Jaruzelski fitted the classic Marxist-Leninist profile of a “class enemy.” His family could trace its heraldic crest, a blindfolded crow, back to the thirteenth century. His paternal grandfather had been sent in chains to Siberia after taking part in the great antitsarist insurrection of 1863. Because of his defiance, the family had lost most of its property. Despite his noble status, Władysław Jaruzelski was reduced to working as an administrator on the family’s former estates. After the Red Army had occupied eastern Poland in September 1939, the Jaruzelski family fled to Lithuania, where they had relatives. A few days before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, in June 1941, Jaruzelski senior was arrested as a “socially dangerous element.” By the time he was released from a labor camp in January 1942, following a deal between Stalin and General Władysław Sikorski, the head of the Polish government-in-exile, this strong two-hundred-pound man had become an emaciated skeleton, weighing no more than a hundred pounds. He died of dysentery and malnutrition six months later. 137

The rest of the family experienced almost equal hardship. At the time of his father’s arrest Jaruzelski was deported to Siberia, along with his mother and sister. The trip, in an overcrowded goods train, took a month. He spent almost two years in Siberia as a virtual slave laborer, chopping down trees and hauling huge bags of flour around a warehouse. He suffered from excruciating back pains, which flared up again during periods of tension, such as in 1981. The secret police urged Jaruzelski to apply for Soviet identity papers, on the ground that eastern Poland had been incorporated into the Soviet Union. When he refused, he was thrown into prison with common criminals, who stole his belongings and beat him up. After three weeks of this treatment he accepted the NKVD offer. Shortly afterward he applied to join the Polish army that was being formed on Soviet soil under the leadership of a Communist officer, Zygmunt Berling. Joining this army, he explained later, represented a chance of “returning to Poland with a weapon in my hand.” 138

Jaruzelski had little sympathy for either Russia or for communism when—as his party biography delicately put it—he “found himself” in the Soviet Union at the age of sixteen. At school he had belonged to a particularly zealous Catholic youth organization, known as the Soldiers of Mary. By his own account, he shared the anti-Soviet convictions of the szlachta class. His first impression of the Red Army had been of a horde of conquering barbarians. “What struck me first was how many of them there were,” he wrote later. “I had the impression that there were thousands upon thousands of them, with their long gray overcoats and great piles of rifles. I had the sense of a force that was terrible, strange, hostile.” 139Yet, after returning to Poland from the Soviet Union, Jaruzelski became the devoted soldier of an alien ideology. In 1947, at the age of twenty-four, he experienced what he later described as a spiritual “rebirth.” He applied to join the Polish Communist Party and was swiftly accepted. 140

According to Jaruzelski, this stunning conversion took place in stages. In the Siberian taiga he discovered that ordinary Russians were not the Satans he had previously imagined them to be. He began to draw a distinction between the Russian people and their oppressive political system. He came to admire their incredible feats of endurance, the way they threw themselves into battle crying, “For Stalin, for the motherland.” Communism could be cruel and terrible, but it had some redeeming features. The Communist aspiration for a fairer, more just society was not too far removed from the social values that Wanda Jaruzelski had sought to instill in her children, minus the traditional anti-Russian outlook of the szlachta class. The Communist Party seemed to offer a more realistic program of postwar reconstruction, and the rapid absorption of formerly German territories, than the bourgeois parties. It was not just soldiers like Jaruzelski who rallied around the party at the end of the war, but also intellectuals like Czesław Miłosz and Leszek Kolakowski.

Another explanation for Jaruzelski’s ideological rebirth might begin with the personality of a superachiever. Ever since childhood he had striven hard to earn the approval of his superiors. At the Catholic boarding school in Warsaw he was considered an outstanding pupil. He soaked up the conservative opinions of his Marian teachers, chanting songs praising Poland’s military dictator, Marshal Piłsudski, and avidly following the military campaign of Spain’s General Franco. He was an enthusiastic Boy Scout, modeling himself on the hero scouts who had helped defend Poland against the “Red invader.” Later in life he was equally zealous in seeking to impress the commanders of the Warsaw Pact and the members of the Soviet Politburo. After Solidarity came to power in 1989, he cultivated contacts with former dissidents like Adam Michnik, whom he had once thrown into prison.

In all these exploits there was an element of the odd man out, struggling for social acceptance. At school he was always the puniest child in the class. In Communist politics he was the offspring of the petty nobility who, by his own account, could never quite rid himself of an inferiority complex toward the “working class.” 141In retirement he was Poland’s last Communist leader, fighting to salvage his historical reputation.

As he climbed up the bureaucratic ladder, Jaruzelski shut his eyes to many unpleasant facts. He had the soldier’s habit of carrying out orders without asking questions. As defense minister in 1968 he had little compunction about ordering Polish troops to join the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. It never occurred to him to doubt Soviet propaganda claims about stockpiles of German weapons and a Western plan to subvert Czechoslovakia.

Sometimes his lack of curiosity bordered on the abnormal. When he was elected Communist Party leader in October 1981, in succession to Kania, he was handed a key to the safe containing the innermost secrets and scandals of the Polish regime. Despite the notoriety of this safe, he never bothered to look through its contents. “I don’t know how to explain this lack of curiosity,” he later confessed. “It’s probably very personal.” 142

Jaruzelski’s five years in the Soviet Union had taught him a brutal lesson in realpolitik. The monthlong train trip to Siberia—a journey twice the width of the continental United States—had given him a sense of the vastness of Poland’s eastern neighbor. He had gained an insight into the power of the Soviet system and the might of its armed forces. Breaking with Poland’s romantic tradition, Jaruzelski prided himself on his realism. From his own experience he knew that resistance to such a huge empire was futile. It was his duty to save Poland from the horrors of yet another Russian invasion. As he remarked privately to a colleague, “Our historical mission is to prevent a Soviet intervention.” 143

Whatever the explanation for Jaruzelski’s conversion to communism, the Soviets had every confidence in him. Shortly after his election as first secretary, he received a congratulatory telephone call from Brezhnev, who urged him to carry out his plan to crush the “counterrevolution.” “There is nobody else in the PZPR [the Polish Communist Party] who enjoys as much authority as you,” said the Soviet leader, reading haltingly from a prepared text. 144

The Kremlin’s trust in Jaruzelski seems strange in view of his class origins and long-standing Soviet suspicions of “Bonapartism,” the meddling of the military in political affairs. The fact that Jaruzelski had endured Stalinist repression without kicking up a fuss made a favorable impression on Soviet leaders. They also gave him credit for his wartime service, his work in building up the Polish army under Communist leadership, and his excellent Russian. 145