WARSAW, (Reuters) – Poland’s last communist leader, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, wanted Soviet troops to invade his country in 1981 to help crush striking workers, according to a document published yesterday by the state archives institute.
Jaruzelski, now 86, has always insisted that he declared martial law in December 1981 precisely to avert the kind of Soviet military intervention that had crushed pro-democracy supporters in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Lech Walesa, Jaruzelski’s nemesis whose pro-democracy Solidarity trade union finally overthrew communism in 1989, said on Tuesday the general should stand trial for treason if the claims in the document were verified.
The Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) published on its website a memo it attributed to a Soviet general, citing comments by Jaruzelski days before he imposed martial law in 1981. “If (worker unrest) were to spread around the whole country, then you (the Soviet Union) would have to help us. We would not manage alone,” the memo quoted Jaruzelski as saying.
After his Soviet interlocutor said Polish troops should be able to handle the protesters unaided, Jaruzelski was quoted as saying there were no soldiers available in some large cities.
As well as supervising Poland’s communist-era files, the IPN is empowered to pursue legal action against those it considers to have committed “crimes against the Polish nation”
