Poland's Gen Wojciech Jaruzelski dies at 90

General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the survivor of a Siberian labor camp, was an unlikely servant to the Soviet Union and its communist ideology.
Poland's last communist leader, the general in tinted glasses who was best known for his 1981 martial law crackdown on Solidarity, today died at age 90 after a long struggle with cancer and a recent stroke.
Born into a patriotic and Catholic Polish milieu of privileged landowners, 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 the dark glasses for the rest of his life.

Despite his suffering at Soviet hands, Jaruzelski faithfully imposed Moscow's will on his subjugated nation until communism crumbled across the region in 1989.
The nation 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 agonising decision to spare the country the bloodshed of a possible Soviet invasion like the one in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Jaruzelski continues to stir up deep emotions in Poland for his defining act: The 1981 imposition of martial law, a harsh crackdown aimed at crushing the pro-democracy Solidarity movement founded months earlier by Lech Walesa.

He preferred to be remembered for reforms and negotiations which he backed eight years later that helped dismantle the regime and set Poland on track to mature into the thriving democracy it is today.

The suppression of the democracy movement resulted in the mass imprisonment of thousands of dissidents, the deaths of dozens and economic stagnation that contributed to the system's eventual undoing. It also pushed many Poles to flee the country and seek exile in the West.
"A tragic believer in Communism who made a pact with the devil in good faith" is how the Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic described Jaruzelski.

The image of Jaruzelski in his drab olive military uniform announcing martial law on state television remains iconic in modern Polish history.
Straight-backed and betraying no emotion, he read from documents as he announced martial law and the outlawing of Solidarity, the first independent labour union in the communist bloc.
"The Polish-Soviet alliance is, and will remain, the foundation of Poland's state interest," he said.