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Behind the Polish military move loomed the shadow of the Kremlin. Indeed, if the government of General Jaruzelski had not imposed the crackdown, the Soviets certainly would have. The presence in Warsaw of high-ranking Soviet officers, including Marshal Viktor Kulikov, even suggested a direct Soviet role in planning what amounted to an invasion by proxy. For more than a year, the Kremlin had made it clear that it would not indefinitely tolerate the development of a union movement that could challenge a Communist government as directly as Solidarity had—a movement that was calling, in effect, for government by consent of the governed.
Thus, as 1981 came to a close, the courageous little electrician from Gdansk stood out not only as the heart and soul of Poland's battle with a corrupt Communist regime, but as an international symbol of the struggle for freedom and dignity. Both as a newsmaker in his own right and as a representative of millions of Poles striving for a better life, Lech Walesa is TIME'S Man of the Year.
There was almost a tragic inevitability about the whole sequence of events that ended with Poland's night of the generals. The leading characters in the nation's drama seemed to be following a script for a catastrophe that both Walesa and Jaruzelski could see coming, that neither wanted—and that neither could avoid. For 16 months, Solidarity and the government had been locked in a struggle for control of the country's destiny, while the leaders of Poland's Roman Catholic Church, that age-old bastion of nationalism, appeared like a Greek chorus to intone warnings and admonitions to all.
The nation tottered on the verge of total economic collapse.
Not since the disaster of Germany's Weimar Republic in the '30s had a modern industrial state faced a peacetime economic failure of such catastrophic dimensions. As the economy faltered, the shortages of food, clothing and other basic necessities made queuing an increasingly exhausting and frustrating way of life, an ordeal made all the more cruel by the onset of an unusually harsh Polish winter. In the end, Solidarity and the government were unable to reach an accommodation as the crisis deepened.
The Polish experiment showed that a Communist government can be forced to make some reforms, but that it cannot give up a substantive measure of control without the fear of losing it all. Solidarity's hope that a totalitarian Marxist system could be made accountable to society proved to be an illusion, evidence that a Communist society cannot tolerate freedom as it is known in the West. Walesa and his movement had made a travesty of Communism's pretensions in the eyes of the world. An authentic proletarian revolution had risen, just as Marx had predicted, only to be put down by the guns of the oppressor class: the Communists themselves. However Solidarity's revolution may ultimately run its course, the movement brought the heady taste of a new life to the Poles. That memory will die hard, if at all. Nor will the world forget the lessons in courage displayed by the millions of Polish workers who were inspired by Lech Walesa.
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