Revolution and Counterrevolution in Poland, 1980–1989 by Andrzej Paczkowski (review)

The 1980s in Poland remain fundamental to understanding the end of the Cold War. That decade started with the rise of Solidarity as an independent trade union and social movement 10 million strong, spinning upward through 1981 on a heady wave of communitarian idealism. The movement was brutally ended in December 1981 with the imposition of a martial law regime that in practice outlasted its formal abolition in 1983. This was followed by years of political trench warfare until the power-sharing agreement of early 1989, the holding of partly free elections, and the installation of Eastern Europe’s first government led by non-Communists in over 40 years. A few months later, the other dominoes in the Soviet bloc toppled, and the Berlin Wall opened.

In 2008 one of Poland’s most distinguished contemporary historians, Andrzej Paczkowski, worked with Malcolm Byrne to present English-speaking readers with a valuable book of translated documents on the original eruption, From Solidarity to Martial Law: The Polish Crisis of 1980–1981: A Documentary History. Paczkowski now offers us a revised version of his earlier account of the formal martial law period that followed, Wojna polsko-jaruzelska: Stan wojenny 13 XII 1981–22 VII 1983, published originally in 2006 and 2007. He has expanded the original with new material to introduce and cover the whole decade, from its prelude in the 1970s to the emergence of Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s non-Communist government in August 1989, replacing the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR). Expertly translated by Christine Manetti, it is an exciting story meticulously told and important to remember as post-Solidarity Poland continues to struggle with its legacies.

Paczkowski sidesteps the ongoing controversies over whether Polish martial law was necessary or avoidable (and over who knew what and when beforehand). Instead, he concentrates on what the martial law regime actually was and how it worked, wie es eigentlich gewesen. He is careful in his scholarship, sticking closely to an immense range of both primary and secondary sources, mostly Polish. He is straightforward in his prose and sober in his judgments. His account is neither a hagiography nor a demonology and is therefore all the more convincing.

Paczkowski shows just how carefully and extensively the martial law regime was prepared, under military leadership in a Communist country, and how successful the Polish army was in limiting access to those preparations. The secrecy ensured that on the night of 12–13 December 1981, surprise was practically complete, not just for Solidarity but for most PZPR Politburo members as well. The book underscores how overwhelming were the forces deployed—one-sixth of the army, tens of thousands of reservists, and thousands of security forces—and how thorough the repression and reprisals that began that night: 2,800 supervisors and executives in the 207 largest plants gone by the next March; military commissars in every provincial structure and in 1,000-plus institutions and enterprises. More than 235,000 PZPR members were expelled by the next August, including 45 Central Committee members. The PZPR shrank by one third, losing a million members. Some 55,800 employees were fired by the end of 1982, and the number of police informers more than doubled, to 15,300, by 1983. Shock and awe indeed.

Or perhaps more shock than awe. This is very much a Polish story. Once the Soviet and Polish leaders agreed in April 1981 that repression would be an exclusively Polish show, the focus of Paczkowski’s account shrinks substantially to Poland alone, with Leonid Brezhnev’s Moscow carping sourly from the sidelines, urging more decisive action, but action by the Poles. In those years General Wojciech Jaruzelski came to head all significant institutions (as prime minister, national defense minister, and leader of the PZPR) except the Catholic Church and Solidarity, an unprecedented accumulation of power in one man in Communist Poland. He maneuvered intricately among “hardliners” and “moderates” until Mikhail Gorbachev gave him an...