7 - Reprisals and the Public Mood

Summary

“I am asking you, the functionaries of the Citizens’ Militia and the Security Service—to guard the state against the enemy, and the working people against lawlessness and violence,” General Jaruzelski said, announcing the imposition of martial law. One can still somehow understand “guard the state against the enemy,” although everything suggested that the state—as the general understood it—was not under threat by NATO armies or Bundeswehr commandos, but rather by the opposition of many of its own citizens. But from whose “lawlessness and violence” were the militiamen supposed to be guarding the “working people”? I would hesitate to call his appeal cynical, because neither General Jaruzelski, nor the author of the draft of this speech, Wiesław Górnicki, was a cynic, although they did often engage in conceptual acrobatics. I believe that this appeal stemmed from a kind of self-indoctrination and the fact that Jaruzelski saw reality through the prism of Marxist dogmas, and thus described it with strongly ideological language. Making use of the full force of state propaganda, those in power had been trying to convince public opinion for so long that Solidarity—and especially its “extremists”—was preparing to take power in the state by means of force, to overthrow the regime, and launch a bloody settling of accounts with its defenders, that they themselves had probably started to believe in their own declarations, and required their obedient propagandists to proclaim them as well. In their language, Solidarity was simply an enemy. A miner from the Wujek mine who was interned the night of December 13, Jan Ludwiczak, or his friend Adam Skwira, arrested a few days later, were identified with the enemy, not with the “working people,” because they were Solidarity activists. It was against them that militia and secret police were supposed to be protecting the miners and shipyard workers.

The militia and secret police functionaries did not really need any prodding to act, as General Jaruzelski probably knew full well. After all, they had all been preparing themselves for a long time for precisely this kind of confrontation, which started with operations “Azalea” and “Fir.” The leadership at the Ministry of Internal Affairs was a notorious advocate of a tough stance against enemies. In 1976–77, plans had even been made to kill or kidnap one of the democratic opposition's most active members, Adam Michnik, who happened to be abroad at that time. In May 1977, Stanisław Pyjas, who had been cooperating with KOR, was killed, and one of the witnesses in that case later died under mysterious circumstances.