Poland The Man Who Did His Duty

By JOHN BORRELL WARSAW

He sits bolt upright, his hands folded neatly on the oak table in front of him. A dark suit and subdued tie reinforce the image of a stern military man, someone just as capable of offering an interrogator no more than name, rank and serial number as he is of impassively handing down a tribunal's verdict. Not even his eyes, hidden behind dark glasses, give anything away.

That's the kind of mental snapshot visitors carry away with them after meeting General Wojciech Jaruzelski. It is also the framed portrait that Poland's President, who last week announced his willingness to step down, will bequeath to the nation. Easily his country's most controversial postwar political figure, Jaruzelski, 67, will leave office even more of an enigma than when he first came to power nearly a decade ago.

Vilified then as the man who imposed martial law in 1981 and outlawed the Solidarity trade-union movement, Jaruzelski gazed calmly from the sidelines last year as the revolt against communism gathered steam. He acknowledged Solidarity's election victory in June, and then won, with just a single ballot to spare, a parliamentary vote for a six-year presidential term. "As President, Jaruzelski has done practically everything that was expected of him," says Pawel Ziolek, a spokesman of the Forum of a Democratic Right, a coalition group. "Which means he did nothing to disturb the process of dismantling the system." !

But for most of his countrymen, Jaruzelski remains stranded in a political no-man's-land strewn with the detritus of his nation's recent struggles. Was he a Moscow stooge back in 1981 or a Polish patriot making an unpopular move to prevent the bloodbath of a Soviet invasion? Was he as pivotal a political player during the 1980s as trade-union leader Lech Walesa, or was his just a walk-on part that will quickly fade in memory?

It seems likely that historians will judge him more kindly than many of his contemporaries do. He may even find his way into Poland's pantheon of 20th century heroes, joining Walesa and Jozef Pilsudski as men who marched briskly to the tattoo of their times. "Some time will have to pass before Jaruzelski can be looked at by Poles in a completely objective way," says Professor Adam Bromke of the Polish Academy of Sciences. "But time may work to his credit."

Much of the judgment will rest on what actually happened in late 1981, when spreading unrest had made Poland almost ungovernable. Brezhnev was in power in Moscow, and the doctrine he had formulated allowed the Soviet Union to intervene militarily should its interests in Eastern Europe be threatened. It may be hard to imagine today, but nine years ago, the invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 were still powerful reminders of Soviet resolve.

Jaruzelski characteristically refuses to talk about the crucial weeks before he declared martial law on Dec. 13. Asked in a recent interview with TIME whether the Soviets would have invaded had he not cracked down, Jaruzelski replied almost peevishly, "I am asked that question all the time. I don't think it would help for me to answer it now."

Yet his past in many ways personifies the abiding Polish dilemma born of geography and the hard knocks of history. Jaruzelski was 16 when Nazi Germany attacked Poland in 1939, and he recalls vividly how, on a clear September day 51 years ago, he and his family crossed into Lithuania as refugees. "I thought then that the heavens had fallen in on me," Jaruzelski recalls. "We were convinced that we would return home soon, that an English-French offensive would enable the Polish army to go on fighting against the Germans. It was not to happen."

Instead, burdened with memories of dead horses on roadsides and German planes strafing the refugees, the teenager was deported to Siberia. It was there, during three years of forced labor, he was struck by the snow blindness that later forced him to wear his famed tinted glasses. Only in 1944 could Jaruzelski return to Poland, and only then as a recruit in a Polish army put together by Stalin.

Having lived through a nightmare, he went to some lengths to spare others. Climbing quickly through the military ranks after World War II, Jaruzelski was army chief of staff when Solidarity came into being in 1980 and became the Communist Party leader the following year. His 1981 crackdown did not lead to witch hunts or secret trials, as the 1956 invasion did in Hungary. There was none of the petty vindictiveness of Czechoslovakia's Soviet-backed Communist clique. "He has always been a politician with bad cards who has tried to minimize the damage," says Professor Jerzy Holzar, a historian at the University of Warsaw.

Jaruzelski seems to view himself as someone shaped by history, a proud vision borne out by one of his last acts in office. Instead of simply stepping down, he asked parliament last week to introduce a constitutional amendment shortening his six-year term of office. This way he can leave not as the leader who resigned under pressure but as the President whose term was reduced by an act of parliament.

Walesa, his longtime opponent and the only candidate so far to declare for the presidential elections likely to be held in December, has far less modest views of himself. But whether he will ultimately be able to shape Poland's fate any more than Jaruzelski did may depend less on his skills than on geopolitics. The Soviet bear may be hibernating, but the German eagle is soaring in an ever widening economic gyre.

With reporting by Tadeusz Kucharski/Warsaw