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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