Warsaw's Man on Horseback

Poland's new Premier is no stranger to conflict. He fought the Nazis in World War II, helped crush anti-Communist guerrillas in 1945-47, and was adept enough at political infighting to hang on as Defense Minister under three successive party leaders. To Poles contemplating his possible future moves, however, Wojciech Jaruzelski's most striking quality is the sense of patriotic conciliation that led him, in 1976 and 1980, to refuse to turn his armed forces against strikers.

At the height of the food price riots 4 1/2 years ago, the general told his colleagues on the Politburo: "Polish soldiers will not fire on Polish workers."

The biography of Warsaw's new man on horseback is full of curious twists.

Born into a noble landowning family in Kurow, he rose to the top ranks of a proletarian dictatorship. Forcibly deported to the Soviet Union after Stalin and Hitler partitioned his homeland in 1939, he later became one of Moscow's staunchest advocates, and according to some accounts took a Soviet wife. Alternately called a moderate and a hard-liner by Western observers, he seems to be above all a survivor. To many, that is precisely what Poland needs at this hour.

Jaruzelski began his military career in 1943 in the Soviet Union, where he joined the exiled First Polish Army as an infantry officer. He fought in its ranks in Poland and Germany until the end of the war, then took part in what his official biographer calls the "struggle against armed underground bands"--meaning the Polish anti-Communist resistance movement. After advanced infantry training and general staff college, Jaruzelski's rise was meteoric. By 1957, he commanded the 12th Motorized Division; in 1960 he was named the army's chief political commissar; in 1968 he became Poland's youngest general.

His climb through the Communist Party was no less rapid. Elevated to the Central Committee in 1964, he became an alternate member of the Politburo in 1970, a full member the next year. With party rank came political office. Appointed Deputy Minister of National Defense in 1962, he was promoted to Minister in 1968 and has held that post ever since.

Jaruzelski has won a reputation as both a fervent Polish patriot and an unshakable party loyalist. In introducing him to parliament last week, Party Boss Stanislaw Kania said: "Now as black clouds hang over Poland, he is the best man to whom the helm could be offered." Perhaps. But those clouds will sorely test his capacity for reconciling the conflicts between his nation and his ideology.

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