Poland's last communist leader Jaruzelski dies aged 90

General Wojciech Jaruzelski
1923-2014

General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the communist leader who imposed harsh military rule on Poland in 1981 in an attempt to crush the pro-democracy Solidarity movement but years later allowed reforms that ended up dismantling the regime, has died at age 90.

Jaruzelski, who suffered in recent years from cancer, heart problems and pneumonia died yesterday in a Warsaw hospital after suffering a stroke earlier this month, hospital spokesman Grzegorz Kade said.

Jaruzelski died just days before Poland marked 25 years since the crucial parliamentary election in which Poles voted against the country's communist rulers and in support of the Solidarity freedom movement.

The retired general remained a controversial figure in his homeland until the end of his life for his defining act: the imposition of martial law that began at dawn on December 13, 1981.

The suppression of the democracy movement resulted in the mass imprisonment of thousands of dissidents, the deaths of dozens, and brought economic stagnation that contributed to the system's eventual undoing. It also pushed many Poles to seek exile in the West.

Jaruzelski was an unlikely servant to Moscow and its communist ideology. Born into a patriotic and Catholic Polish milieu of privileged landowners, he and his family were deported to Siberia by the Red Army during the second world war. His father died there and Jaruzelski suffered snow blindness, which forced him to wear dark glasses to the end of his life.