Anyone could read him at a glance. When things were going well, when it seemed for a while that the movement he led would brighten and liberate the lives of his fellow Poles, the face that grew so familiar in 1981 radiated delight: delight in his crusade, delight in his vision of the future, delight in being at the center of it all. In those moments, he held nothing back. But when things began to go wrong, when the tensions started to rise and the future he saw began to recede, the face grew heavy. The familiar walrus mustache sagged and the brown eyes turned weary. Again he held nothing back, and perhaps he could not if he tried. Lech Walesa is a man of emotion, not of logic or analysis. So was the movement, which he all but lost control of in the end, guided more by hope and passion than by rationality. That was the crusade's strength—and its weakness.
What had begun as Poland's year of liberty ended dramatically in violence, bloodshed and repression. The beleaguered government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, pushed to the wall by Walesa's challenging Solidarity union, confronted with total economic collapse, and pressured by the furious Soviets, struck back in the classic Communist fashion. Its minions came for Walesa at 3 a.m. at his apartment in Gdansk, the gray Baltic seaport whose windswept shipyards had given birth to Solidarity in August 1980. They hustled him aboard a flight to Warsaw and then held him in a government guesthouse south of the city. They cut off communications with the outside world and imposed martial law. While the people slept, olive-drab tanks and armored personnel carriers moved through the snow-filled streets to take up positions in cities and towns across the country.
At 6 a.m., Jaruzelski went on the radio "as a soldier and the chief of the Polish government," to announce that the nation was under martial law. He later repeated the grim message on national television, dressed in full military uniform with the white Polish eagle prominently displayed behind him. The "growing aggressiveness" of Solidarity's "extremists" in the midst of an acute economic crisis, said Jaruzelski, had forced him to make his repressive moves "with a broken heart, with bitterness." He assured Poles that military rule would be temporary and that the process of "renewal" launched by Solidarity would be resumed once disorder had been curbed. And nobody believed his assurances. Months of Poland's desires, months of Poland's dreams had reduced themselves to one new, pervasive, overwhelming condition: fear. Freedom and self-determination had been the goal through the inspired days of 1981. Now the goal was survival.
The crackdown had been harsh, fiercely and unexpectedly harsh. Military authorities rounded up thousands of Solidarity members, dissidents, intellectuals, artists and some 30 former government officials, including ex-Party Boss Edward Gierek. Tanks ringed factories and mines, and soldiers and police used force to clear out resisting workers, leaving at least seven dead and hundreds injured when miners in Katowice fought back with axes and crowbars. The shock was doubly traumatic because in the preceding months Poles had won more freedom than any other nation in the Soviet bloc. The country had developed a thriving