Warsaw Pact Generals in Polish Uniforms
by Vojtech Mastny
President Ronald Reagan once famously insulted Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski by describing him as a "Soviet officer in Polish uniform." He was referring to the general's responsibility for imposing martial law in Poland in 1981 - an action Jaruzelski has defended as having allegedly prevented the greater tragedy of an impending Soviet invasion of the country. While denying indignantly the suggestion that he owed a higher loyalty to Moscow than to his own people, however, neither he nor his fellow officers have ever disputed their loyalty to the Warsaw Pact - a military alliance controlled by the Soviet Union. The regarded it as being in the best interest of the communist state to which they had sworn allegiance.
The oral history interviews with nine Polish generals that are published here offer an unprecedented insight into the inner workings of the alliance by some of its highest-ranking officers as well as into the workings of those officers'' minds. For these reasons, their testimonies are bound to be of great interest not only to Polish but also to international readers. The conduct of the Polish military during the communist era has been the subject of a divisive national discussion in their country. The weight of the arguments advanced by the generals in defense of their conduct is best left to the judgment of their compatriots. For other readers, the extraordinary value of the interviews is in the light they shed on the 35-year confrontation between the Warsaw Pact and NATO.
The Warsaw Pact generals in Polish uniforms played no negligible role in that confrontation. They commanded the alliance's second largest army in the strategically crucial area between Germany and the Soviet Union. Their loyalty to the alliance was crucial for the military performance of their profoundly anti-Soviet nation that eventually proved the main catalyst of the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union's Eastern European empire. Although the performance was never called upon in a war, their legacy was bound to cast a shadow over Poland's later entry into NATO as well.
Poland figured prominently in the Warsaw Pact's prospective military operations against NATO, especially in the Baltic area. The testimony by the knowledgeable insiders helps to put the question of the capabilities and intentions of the Soviet alliance within the larger context of the Cold War, relating perceptions of the Western enemy to military plans. Most of the generals proved reluctant to talk in any detail about the operational plans, invoking their oath of secrecy to the former communist state. In the end, however, they willingly or inadvertently drew a fairly clear picture of what was in the making. This applies particularly to Gen. Tadeusz Tuczapski, whose testimony is in many ways the highlight of the collection.
The generals' reluctance to reveal Soviet secrets contrasts with the more forthcoming attitude of Polish officers who had served under foreign masters prior to the restoration of the country's independence in the aftermath of World War I. A 1989-92 survey by the Warsaw Military Institute for Sociological Research found communist era officials susceptible to "narrowly defined professionalism." US expert on the Polish military Andrew A. Michta finds that professionalism "warped" by a pride in the country's special place as Soviet ally that could not avoid having political consequences. The Polish military to became more often and more deeply involved in politics than any of their counterparts elsewhere in the Soviet bloc. [1]
Both the generals and their interviewers refer to the continued inaccessibility of the operational plans in Polish archives and the responsibility of the Polish government for their declassification. [2] Indeed, as late as this writing - September 2002 - the plans remain classified under their communist-era designation as "top secret." This conforms to the agreement concluded by the foreign ministers of the Warsaw Pact upon its dissolution in 1991, which bars disclosure of its records to third parties without common consent.Of all the former countries of the Warsaw Pact other than Russia - whether currently NATO members or candidates for NATO membership - Poland alone still officially regards the agreement as valid, thus protecting the military secrets of the defunct Soviet alliance more than a decade after its demise. [3]
A major portion of the interviews consists of those with Wojciech Jaruzelski, who as early as the 1970s was regarded in the West as an "archetypical" representative of the Warsaw Pact's nascent international officer corps. [4] Successively the chief of the army's main political directorate, minister of defense, prime minister, and general secretary of the communist party, he became Poland's head of state during the military regime established in 1981. The country's most visible and controversial political figure for the rest of the decade, he later presided against his wishes over its transition from communism to democracy, and remained head of state until Poland's first free presidential election in 1990. Supplementing the interviews is a prepared talk on the awkward question of sovereignty within the Warsaw Pact that he delivered at the National Defense Academy in Warsaw in February 2002.
The general's extreme sensitivity about his conduct during the 1980-81 Solidarity crisis and its aftermath overshadows his interest in other issues, which are discussed far more extensively by his close collaborator, Florian Siwicki. Chief of the general staff and later minister of defense, Siwicki also commanded the Polish military expeditionary force during the Soviet-orchestrated invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Like Jaruzelski, he and his family had suffered atrocious treatment at Soviet hands in his youth, yet the experience did not prevent him from becoming a dedicated communist later on. Having served in the Soviet-sponsored Polish army of Gen. Żygmunt Berling during World War II and been subsequently educated in Soviet military academies, Siwicki rose high in the Warsaw Pact hierarchy. His background and frame of mind are characteristic of many of the other generals as well.
No less instructive but more incisive than the discussion with Siwicki is that with Tadeusz Tuczapski, who served in the 1960-70s as deputy minister of defense, inspector general of territorial defense, and deputy supreme commander of the Warsaw Pact. Under his leadership, Poland became the only country of the alliance to develop its own concept of territorial defense. Tuczapski is often frank about the viability of that concept under the conditions of a nuclear war.
The structure and functioning of the Warsaw Pact are treated in considerable detail by Antoni Jasiński, deputy minister of defense and deputy commander of the Western Theater of Operations in the 1980s. He goes the farthest in clarifying the secret 1979 statute on the alliance's command in wartime, whose provisions were fiercely contested between Moscow and its junior allies for many years. Often referred to in the interviews, the text of the document in German translation has been obtained from the German Federal Archives in Freiburg.
Unique in the collection is the interview with Jan Drzewiecki, chief of the operations department in the 1950s - the years Soviet marshal Konstantin Rokossovskii served by Stalin's appointment as the Polish minister of defense. Drzewiecki distinguished himself in 1956 by preparing a memorandum contesting Poland's humiliating military subordination to Moscow and by proposing a radical reform of the Warsaw Pact that would have made it more similar to NATO. The full text of the memorandum is likewise included. Alone among the nine generals, Drzewiecki alleges the existence of offensive operational plans against Denmark as early as 1950, citing especially an exercise conducted in May of that year. [5] He also differs from his colleagues by the critical candor that informs his retrospective assessment of his service to the communist state.
The chief of the operations department in the later years, Wojciech Barański, though not so candid, still provides illuminating details about Poland's role in Soviet military plans in the 1970-80s. His testimony is complemented by that of Jerzy Skalski, a rare officer who rose to the highest ranks despite his World War II background in the anti-communist Home Army rather than the Soviet-run Berling army. Skalski was deputy chief of operations in the 1970s and later became secretary of the Committee of National Defense, chief of territorial defense, and deputy minister of defense. He describesat length the Warsaw Pact's "Polish Front" - a prominent subject because of its relevance to the question of Poland's autonomy, or the lack of it, within the Soviet scheme of things.
Wacław Szklarski, at one time deputy of the Warsaw Pact's Soviet chief of staff Gen. Anatolii I. Gribkov was, according to Skalski, the only chief of operations "with whom one could speak." [6] To his interviewers, however, Szklarski spoke about little of substance. The same is true even more to the potentially illuminating but in fact disappointing talk with Tadeusz Szaciłło, who might be expected to be well informed because of his position as chief of the Army's political directorate in the 1980s. The severe damage suffered by the recording further detracts from its value.
The Polish transcripts of the interviews are published in full. They are likely to be of primary appeal to Polish readers or anyone capable of reading the language who is interested in Polish issues. For the benefit of other readers, more concerned with the larger issues of the Cold War besides Poland's role in it, the most important portions of the interviews have been selected, arranged topically, and annotated by the PHP Coordinator, Vojtech Mastny. The selections have been translated into English by Douglas Selvage, historian at the Office of the Historian of the Department of State in Washington. They amount to approximately 10 per cent of the recorded Polish text.
For easier reading, the many passages that have been omitted in the English edition are not indicated, as would normally be the case, by dots in brackets. Instead, each of the English selections includes at its end, in italics, the name of the general who is being quoted, followed by a reference to the pages in the full Polish text that can be found elsewhere on the website. By comparing the translation with the original text, the interested reader can thus see what has been left out in the translation.
The oral history project whose results are presented here was conceived, conducted, and recorded by a group of Polish military historians led by the late Professor Jerzy Poksiński of Warsaw University, to whose memory this publication is dedicated. The group included Colonel Stefan Czmur and Professor Paweł Wieczorkiewicz, among others. The original plans for a PHP-supported workshop about the interviews, which was to be followed by their publication, were interrupted by Professor Poksiński's sudden passing away in the summer of 2000. His daughter, Ms. Blanka Poksińska, subsequently made the recordings left by her father available to scholarship. Her generosity is hereby gratefully acknowledged.
Following an evaluation of the tapes by the Coordinator during his visit to Warsaw in May 2001, the PHP provided for their transcription with the assistance of its Polish affiliate, the Institute of Political Studies, headed by Professor Andrzej Paczkowski. In facilitating this lengthy and complicated process, the PHP owes gratitude to Krzysztof Persak, currently a researcher at the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw. Since several of the tapes were of poor acoustic quality, the transcripts had to be reviewed and edited in order to decipher many unclear passages and ensure the continuity of the text. This was expertly accomplished by Paweł Piotrowski, a military historian at the Institute of National Remembrance in Wrocław. He has also supplied the documents from the Archives of the Central Organizations of the Ministry of Defense at Modlin that refer to some of the military exercises mentioned in the interviews. [7] The manuscript of the February 2002 paper by Gen. Jaruzelski appears with his permission, courtesy of Leszek Grot, of the journal Polska Zbrojna.
Notes
[1] Andrew A. Michta, The Soldier-Citizen: The Politics of the Polish Army after Communism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), pp. 16-17, 45.
[2] For the statements by Generals Jasiński and Siwicki, see "The Elusive Masterplan".
[3] In 1999, the Polish General Staff referred to the 1991 agreement in rejecting a declassification request by the Parallel History Project addressed to the then minister of national defense Janusz Onyszkiewicz: "A failure of the Polish Republic to observe the procedures necessary for the implementation of international agreements might be regarded by its foreign partners as casting doubt on its reliability, and might raise questions about its future conduct. This may have unpredictable political consequences." (Col. Henryk Porajski to PHP Coordinator, August 1999).
[4] A. Ross Johnson, Robert W. Dean, and Alexander Alexiev, East European Military Establishments: The Warsaw Pact Northern Tier ( New York: Crane Russak, 1980) , p. 55.
[5] The records of the exercise are forthcoming on the PHP website.
[6] Skalski interview, p. 9.
[7] See the six documents on those exercises under "Related Documents".
