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Yet his past in many ways personifies the abiding Polish dilemma born of geography and the hard knocks of history. Jaruzelski was 16 when Nazi Germany attacked Poland in 1939, and he recalls vividly how, on a clear September day 51 years ago, he and his family crossed into Lithuania as refugees. "I thought then that the heavens had fallen in on me," Jaruzelski recalls. "We were convinced that we would return home soon, that an English-French offensive would enable the Polish army to go on fighting against the Germans. It was not to happen."
Instead, burdened with memories of dead horses on roadsides and German planes strafing the refugees, the teenager was deported to Siberia. It was there, during three years of forced labor, he was struck by the snow blindness that later forced him to wear his famed tinted glasses. Only in 1944 could Jaruzelski return to Poland, and only then as a recruit in a Polish army put together by Stalin.
Having lived through a nightmare, he went to some lengths to spare others. Climbing quickly through the military ranks after World War II, Jaruzelski was army chief of staff when Solidarity came into being in 1980 and became the Communist Party leader the following year. His 1981 crackdown did not lead to witch hunts or secret trials, as the 1956 invasion did in Hungary. There was none of the petty vindictiveness of Czechoslovakia's Soviet-backed Communist clique. "He has always been a politician with bad cards who has tried to minimize the damage," says Professor Jerzy Holzar, a historian at the University of Warsaw.
Jaruzelski seems to view himself as someone shaped by history, a proud vision borne out by one of his last acts in office. Instead of simply stepping down, he asked parliament last week to introduce a constitutional amendment shortening his six-year term of office. This way he can leave not as the leader who resigned under pressure but as the President whose term was reduced by an act of parliament.
Walesa, his longtime opponent and the only candidate so far to declare for the presidential elections likely to be held in December, has far less modest views of himself. But whether he will ultimately be able to shape Poland's fate any more than Jaruzelski did may depend less on his skills than on geopolitics. The Soviet bear may be hibernating, but the German eagle is soaring in an ever widening economic gyre.