THE SOLIDARITY DECADE 487when the Soviet Army occupied eastern Poland, he and his family had been cap-
tured and deported to Siberia, where his father was killed. Two years later, like
many Poles released from the camps, he set off to join the Polish Army in Russia.
But failing to reach his destination in time he joined the Soviet Army instead as
a cadet. He returned to Poland in 1944/5 under Soviet command in the ranks of
the 1st (Berling) Army. Yet he was no ordinary young military officer. As his
subsequent career indicated, he belonged to an elite corps of political officers,
who combined political functions with their everyday soldierly duties. Already
in 1956, when the bulk of Soviet 'advisers' serving in Poland were shipped back
home, Jaruzelski remained, emerging as director of the super-sensitive Political-
Military Department that in effect controlled the Polish People's Army on
Moscow's behalf. Almost certainly from this time, he was a close associate of
the Andropov Circle. In due course, he surfaced to public view as Minister of
Defence and, from February 1981, as Prime Minister.
For twenty-five years, Yuri Andropov was Moscow's principal pro-consul in
the countries of East Europe. As Soviet Ambassador in Budapest during and
after the Hungarian Rising of 1956, he devised a strategy for containing the rest-
less satellites, which, after the apparent success of 'Kadarisation' in Hungary,
was applied (with variations) throughout the Bloc. In essence, the strategy com-
bined the introduction of liberal, free-market mechanisms into the economy
with the maintenance of ultra-vigilant controls in the political field. When in the
late seventies, Andropov became head of the KGB, he could begin to think of
reforming the USSR itself. Yet much was against him. In Moscow, the Politburo
was still heavy weighted in favour of over-cautious conservatives from another
era. In the Soviet Bloc as a whole, every country seemed to follow its own way-
ward path. Romania was in the hands of the maverick Ceausescu.
Czechoslovakia had been rigidly 'normalized' according to early Brezhnevian
norms. Poland, under Gierek, was doubly misguided. It had combined political
laxity, with economic heresy, putting itself at the mercy of western loan sharks.
Worst of all, Andropov was seriously ill. He and his acolytes - which included
both Wojciech Jaruzelski and the young Mikhail Gorbachev - could only hope
that he would live long enough for an opportunity to open up.
One thing was certain. Solidarity was rapidly undermining the chances of the
Moscow Centre ever being able to introduce the sort of reforms envisaged. So
Solidarity had to be stopped - as much in the interest of the would-be Soviet
reformers as that of the Soviet hardliners. Information would later emerge of
preparations made by General Jaruzelski's Ministry of Defence in August 1980,
even before Solidarity had been recognized. The Army lent armoured personnel
carriers to the militia. Military air planes were made available to transport police-
men to Gdansk from distant parts of the country. And military presses printed
propaganda leaflets which caricatured Walesa as the leader of a South American-
style putsch and which were distributed in Gdansk to discredit the strikers.^2
Once Solidarity had been formally registered, however, it is clear that alarm
bells began to ring in Moscow with much greater insistence. By December, the