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Wojciech Jaruzelski led Poland and its Communist Party from the early 1980s to the end of the Cold War. Wojciech Jaruzelski eventually saw Poland become a democracy.

Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the survivor of a Siberian labor camp, was an unlikely servant to the Soviet Union and its communist ideology.

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Poland's last communist leader, the general in tinted glasses who was best known for his 1981 martial law crackdown on the Solidarity union, died Sunday at age 90 after a long illness.

Born into a patriotic and Catholic Polish milieu, Jaruzelski and his family were deported to Siberia by the Red Army during World War II. That harsh land took his father's life and inflicted snow blindness on Jaruzelski, forcing him to wear dark glasses.

Despite his suffering at Soviet hands, Jaruzelski faithfully imposed Moscow's will on his subjugated nation until communism crumbled across the region in 1989.

Poland is still deeply divided over whether to view Jaruzelski as a traitor who did Moscow's dirty work or as a patriot who made an agonizing decision to spare the country the bloodshed of a Soviet invasion.

Jaruzelski stirs up these emotions for his defining act: His 1981 imposition of martial law, a harsh crackdown aimed at crushing the pro-democracy Solidarity movement founded months earlier by Lech Walesa.

Commenting on his death, Walesa called him a "great man of the generation of betrayal."

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Wojciech Jaruzelski remembered as last Communist leader in Poland

Wojciech Jaruzelski, the expressionless Polish general behind dark glasses who imposed martial law in 1981 to crush the independent trade union Solidarity and nearly eight years later participated in the negotiated revolution that led to the fall of communism in Poland, died May 25 at a military hospital in Warsaw. He was 90.

A hospital spokesman announced the death. The general had a stroke this month and had previously been treated for cancer.

Gen. Jaruzelski, the scion of landed gentry, was deported to the Soviet Union as a forced laborer in 1941 and returned to Poland later in World War II as a committed communist in the ranks of the Soviet-created Polish First Army.

Starting in the 1950s, he rose rapidly in the military and political establishments of the new Peoples Republic of Poland. After the Soviet-backed governments fall in 1989, Gen. Jaruzelskis past was at the center of post-communist debates about historical reckoning and justice.

Gen. Jaruzelski was accused of being Moscows stooge, and his political foes repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempted to have him punished for his role in the bloody suppression of protests against the system. He defended himself as a patriot who was forced into the impossible choice of smothering Solidarity himself or watching the Soviet army do it. He said he feared a Soviet invasion would result in carnage; his critics dismissed that as a convenient mirage.

I served the Poland that existed, Gen. Jaruzelski said in one of his many exculpatory assessments of his record.

Some saw something incorruptible in the ascetic and disciplined officer.

He was perhaps the only man in Poland who was a Communist because he believed in communism, journalist Tina Rosenberg wrote in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Haunted Land: Facing Europes Ghosts After Communism. Even Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, the generals onetime nemesis, thought Gen. Jaruzelski loved his country but was born in the wrong era.

A young nationalist aristocrat

Wojciech Witold Jaruzelski (pronounced VOI-chekh, VEE-told, yah-roo-ZEL-skee) was born July 6, 1923, and grew up on an estate in eastern Poland. Local peasants bowed to the family as they passed in their carriage on the way to Sunday Mass, he recalled.

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Wojciech Jaruzelski, Polands last communist leader, dies at 90

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