'Translator's Note: A slight grammatical error in the original has been corrected in the translation.

2 Translator's Note: These ellipses were in the original. The three signatures on the ciphered telegram were those of Boris Aristov, Vitalii Pavlov, and Viktor Kulikov (see entry below). Pavlov, the KGB station chief in Warsaw, wrote in his memoirs that his "close contact with the Soviet ambassador, B. I. Aristov, who kept in constant touch with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, A. A. Gromyko, enabled me to have a good sense of how the MFA was assessing things. I also was aware of the close relations among Yu. V. Andropov, A. A. Gromyko, and the defense minister, D. F. Ustinov. Grasping this, the ambassador and I began to prepare joint reports under two signatures. This practice facilitated a thorough and comprehensive evaluation of all the circumstances and facts that became know to us both through embassy channels and through the KGB residency's channels. My closest contact of all was with the representative in Poland of the Main Command of the Warsaw Pact Joint Armed Forces, Army-General A. F. Shcheglov, who naturally had a good sense of how our Military High Command viewed things. He sometimes added his efforts to the joint reports that the ambassador and I sent back to the Center, especially when they dealt with military issues. During the most critical phases of the situation in Poland, the commander-in-chief of the Warsaw Pact Joint Armed Forces, Marshal V. G. Kulikov, would come here to meet urgently with the ambassador and me. I gave him thorough briefings on the most important aspects of the situation, naturally without referring to the sources of my information. The marshal and I had a very good rapport, and I retain a good impression of him to this day.... Only with the military attache, Major-General Fomenko [it should be Khomenko - M.K.] did I somehow fail to develop close relations. Perhaps this was partly due to the well-known rivalry between the GRU, which he represented, and the foreign intelligence branch of the KGB." Pavlov added that Khomenko's reports were "not sufficiently competent and did not always take account of the social and economic dimensions of the Polish crisis." See Bylem rezydentem KGB w Polsce (Warsaw: BGW, 1994), pp. 186-187.

3 Translator's Note: The General Staff building was the hub of the martial law operation. It was also the site where Jaruzelski and other top military commanders made a final decision on 9 December to proceed with martial law.

4 Translator's Note: From here to the bottom of the page, Anoshkin records sentences that appeared the next day as a paragraph in a scathing Soviet article about the situation in Poland. See "K polozheniyu v Pol'she," Pravda (Moscow), 11 December 1981, p. 5. On the 11th, Anoshkin added a brief reference to this article in the left-hand margin below. The Pravda article diverges very slightly from what Anoshkin records here, as indicated below.

5 Translator's Note: In the Pravda article, the latter part of this sentence reads: "... about the use of lines of communication passing through Polish territory to exert pressure on Poland's allies." -CMEA is the acronym for the "Council on Mutual Economic Assistance."

"Translator's Note: The Pravda article refers to just the Soviet-Polish "border" rather than the plural "borders." 'Translator's Note: Abbreviation for Viktor Georgievich Kulikov.

8 Translator's Note: Abbreviation for Dmitrii Fedorovich Ustinov.

'Translator's Note: At the CPSU Politburo meeting on 10 December 1981, the Soviet KGB chairman, Yurii Andropov, noted that he had "spoken yesterday with Milewski." Andropov expressed puzzlement that Milewski "doesn't know about 'Operation X' [the martial law operation] and about the concrete timeframe in which it would be carried out." Cited from "Zasedanie Politbyuro TSK KPSS 10 dekabrya 1981 g.: K voprosu o polozhenii v Pol'she,” 10 December 1981 (Top Secret), in Tsentr Khraneniya Sovremennoi Dokumentatsii (TsKhSD), Fond (F.) 89, Opis' (Op.) 66, Delo (D.) 6, List (L.) 7, which I translated in Issue No. 5 of the CWIHP Bulletin, pp. 134-138. Because of unavoidable ambiguities in the Russian language, it is possible that the "we" in this sentence from Anoshkin's notebook should be translated as "they," but the meaning in either case is the same.

10 Translator's Note: This entire page is in Kulikov's handwriting.

"Translator's Note: These comments are fully in line with the CPSU Politburo's decisions on the 10th. See "Zasedanie Politbyuro TsK KPSS 10 dekabrya 1981 goda," esp. Ll. 5-12.

12 Translator's Note: According to Anoshkin (in a conversation at the Jachranka conference on 11 November 1997), these lines report what Jaruzelski said after being informed of Rusakov's response.

13 Translator's Note: At the CPSU Politburo meeting on December 10, Soviet leaders instructed "Cdes. Tikhonov, Kirilenko, Dolgikh, Arkhipov, and Baibakov to continue studying the issue of economic aid to Poland, taking account of the exchange of views at the CC Politburo session." (See "Zasedanie Politbyuro TSK KPSS 10 dekabrya 1981 goda," L. 14.)

14

Translator's Note: Diagonally across the upper left-hand corner of this page is the following: "Reported to the WTO Cin-C at 14:45 (local time). Approved. I will take action."

15 Translator's Note: "Bulava" is the Russian word for "mace." 16 Translator's Note: The ellipses here were in the original. 17 Translator's Note: The ellipses here were in the original. The nickname "Shilka," derived from a famous battle, was used for the ZSU-23-4 self-propelled air defense artillery system. The Soviet Army deployed thousands of ZSU-23-4s, and the East European armies also possessed large quantities.

18 Translator's Note: These lines indicate that Soviet armored combat vehicles in Poland, when moved out to various sites, were to be disguised as Polish vehicles.

19 Translator's Note: Rembertow, on the eastern outskirts of Warsaw, was a key Soviet military base and military communications center. It is currently the site of the Polish National Defense Academy, the Polish Military Staff College, and-most important of all—the Central Military Archive.

20 Translator's Note: Two additional names, Saventsov and Grechiko, were listed here but then crossed out.

21 Translator's Note: Krzywa is an airfield in Legnica Province, some 33 kilometers outside the city of Legnica in southwestern Poland near the Czech and German borders. Legnica was the headquarters of the Soviet Union's Northern Group of Forces, and Krzywa was the main air base for those forces. With a 2,500-meter airstrip, the Krzywa airfield can accommodate any type of aicraft.

22 Translator's Note: There is no fourth point listed after the number.

23 Translator's Note: Helenow is a small village approximately 100 kilometers south of Warsaw, which was used by the Polish government. In a castle there, Kulikov frequently held meetings with Jaruzelski and other Polish leaders during the 1980-81

crisis.

24Translator's Note: Kulikov's concern about this matter can be better understood in light of remarks made at the CPSU Politburo meeting on 10 December by Nikolai Baibakov, the head of the Soviet State Planning Administration, who had been in Warsaw from 8 to 10 December: "In accordance with the [Soviet] Politburo's decision and at the request of the Polish comrades, we are providing Poland with an aid shipment of 30 thousand tons of meat. . . . The produce, in this case meat, is being delivered in dirty, unsanitary freight cars normally used to transport iron ore, making for an unpleasant sight. When the produce is being transported to the Polish stations, blatant sabotage has been taking place. Poles have been expressing outrageously obscene comments about the Soviet Union and the Soviet people, have refused to clean out the freight cars, etc. One couldn't even begin to keep track of all the insults that have been directed against us." See "Zasedanie Politbyuro TSK KPSS 10 dekabrya 1981 goda,” Ll. 4-5.

25 Translator's Note: Abbreviation for Solidarity. 26Translator's Note: These two sentences recapitulate a passage in the 11 December Pravda article (cited above), which reads: "As Polish television reports, the leaders of local 'Solidarity' organizations have begun to create 'fighting groups' at enterprises. Each shock group includes up to 250-300 people. ... Young thugs from the 'Confederation for an Independent Poland' have shown up on Polish streets sporting symbols of the Homeland Army, which in its time, as is known, took up arms in a struggle against the establishment of a people's-democratic order in Poland."

27Translator's Note: This is the way the sentence reads in the original. The word "someone" appears to be missing after the word "send."

28Translator's Note: Abbreviation for Wojciech Wladyslawowich—that is, Jaruzelski. Patronymics are used only in Russian, not in Polish. However, Soviet leaders often referred this way to their closest Polish, Czechoslovak, and Bulgarian counterparts.

29 Translator's Note: The "2nd stage" of the operation, slated to begin as early as 14 December, would have been gravely complicated if the initial crackdown had not prevented widespread turmoil and resistance.

30Translator's Note: According to Anoshkin (conversation at Jachranka, 9 November 1997), these remarks at the left were Andropov's response to Jaruzelski's request.

31Translator's Note: Anoshkin's comments here are very similar to remarks by Andropov at the CPSU Politburo session on 10 December: "The Church in recent days has also clearly expressed its position, which in essence is now completely supportive of 'Solidarity."" That view was echoed by Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, who declared that “there are no longer any neutrals." (Both cited from "Zasedanie Politbyuro TSK KPSS 10 dekabrya 1981 goda," Ll. 6, 8.) The same point was made in the 11 December Pravda article (cited above), which reads: "Church circles and organizations have noticeably stepped up their activity. The number of sermons in the churches aimed at discrediting the government's efforts to defend socialism has increased."

32 Translator's Note: Baibakov reported to the CPSU Politburo on 10 December that Jaruzelski "was deeply disturbed by the letter from the head of the Polish Catholic Church, Archbishop Glemp, who, as you know, promised to declare a holy war against the Polish authorites." (Cited from "Zasedanie Politbyuro TsK KPSS 10 dekabrya 1981 goda,” L. 4.)

Archbishop Jozef Glemp had met with Lech Walesa on 5 December 1981 and then, two days later, sent separate letters to Jaruzelski, Walesa, all the deputies in the Polish Sejm, and the National Students' Union. In the letters to Jaruzelski and Walesa, the primate called for the resumption of tripartite (governmentSolidarity-Church) talks. In the letters to Sejm deputies, he urged that Jaruzelski not be granted "extraordinary powers." In his letter to the National Students's Union, Glemp called for an end to the recent spate of university strikes. In none of the letters did he even remotely call for anything tantamount to “a holy war against the Polish authorities."

33 Translator's Note: This again refers to the 30,000 tons of meat that the Soviet Union had promised to ship to Poland. At the Politburo meeting on 10 December, Baibakov indicated that 15,000 tons of the meat had already been sent. (Suslov later cited the figure of 16,000 tons already sent, but Baibakov's figure is probably more reliable.) See ibid., Ll. 4-5, 13.

34Translator's Note: The word translated here as "adventurist action," avantyura, can also be translated as a "dangerous" or "hazardous" action, but the word "adventurist" is more appropriate for reasons that will become clear below. 35Translator's Note: The three points to the left of this vertical line are the three issues raised by Jaruzelski. Scrawled diagionally to the right of the vertical line is: "4 questions-a request."

36Translator's Note: This sentence in Anoshkin's book contained two quotation marks at the end, as indicated. 37Translator's Note: Evidently, Anoshkin means that the church was continuing to urge caution and restraint on the Solidarity leadership.

38 Translator's Note: This refers to the meeting of the Warsaw Pact's Committee of Defense Ministers on 2-4 December 1981 in Moscow. Jaruzelski was Poland's national defense minister (as well as prime minister and PUWP First Secretary), but because he was so preoccupied at home, Siwicki attended the meeting in his place.

39Translator's Note: Kulikov was aware that a "final" decision to proceed with martial law had been adopted on the night of 9 December, but his comments here suggest that he was beginning to worry that Jaruzelski might try to back away from the decision.

40 Translator's Note: Baibakov, as noted earlier, had recently been in Warsaw to consult with the Polish leadership. When Baibakov returned to Moscow on 10 December, he briefed the Soviet Politburo. See "Zasedanie Politbyuro TsK KPSS 10 dekabrya 1981 goda,” Ll. 1-4.

41Translator's Note: The extra "our" is in the original.

42 Translator's Note: Anoshkin rendered this abbreviation for "postscript" in the Latin alphabet.

43 Translator's Note: All troop deployments listed here and on

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the next page refer exclusively to Polish, not Soviet, units. The two Soviet divisions in Poland were ordered to keep a low profile throughout the martial law operation. In addition to the units mentioned by Anoshkin, three other Polish army regiments —the 2nd Mechanized Regiment of the 1st Mechanized Division in Warsaw, the 3rd Air Regiment of the 6th Airborne Division in Krakow, and the 14th Mechanized Regiment of the 12th Mechanized Division in Szczecin—took part in the operation, performing administrative tasks and providing support for the Mechanized Detachments of Civil Police (ZOMO) and other security forces that actually carried out the crackdown. Siwicki later noted that these army units constituted an elite force selected for their “outstanding level of political readiness”—that is, their willingness to use force on behalf of the Communist regime. See "Pelna gotowosc obrony socjalistycznego panstwa: Konferencja sprawozdawcza PZPR Instytucji Centralnych MON," Trybuna Ludu (Warsaw), 25 February 1983, pp. 1-2. 44 Translator's Note: Anoshkin drew a curved arrow from these lines to the names on the right.

45 Translator's Note: This sentence and the four names were crossed out with a diagonal line running downward from left to right. It is unclear why Ustinov would have claimed that these officials had already flown to Poland. It is also not known why they ended up not coming to Poland. Army-General Anatolii Gribkov, the first deputy commander-in-chief of the Warsaw Pact armed forces in 1981, has claimed that the Soviet Politburo proved unable to reach a consensus on whether to send this highranking delegation to Poland as a gesture of solidarity—see Gribkov's "Doktrina Brezhneva' i pol'skii krizis nachala 80-kh godov," Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal (Moscow), No. 9 (September 1992), p. 56—but he provides no specific evidence to support this claim or to explain why a consensus was infeasible.

46 Translator's Note: Just below this line, written diagonally from left to right, is the following:

"1) to Merezhko

2) to Borisov

3) Emelyanov-answer Clock-mine"

The word chasy in this last line might also be translated as "wristwatch." The context leaves open either possibility.

47 Translator's Note: In fact, the Military Council of National Salvation (Wojskowa Rada Ocalenia Narodowego, or WRON) consisted of 21-not 15 or 16-high-ranking military officers, chaired by Jaruzelski. The other members were Jozef Baryla, Kazimierz Garbacik, Miroslaw Hermaszewski, Tadeusz Hupalowski, Ludwik Janczyszyn, Michal Janiszewski, Jerzy Jarosz, Czeslaw Kiszczak, Tadeusz Krepski, Roman Les, Longin Lozowicki, Tadeusz Makarewicz, Eugeniusz Molczyk, Wlodzimierz Oliwa, Czeslaw Piotrowski, Henryk Rapacewicz, Florian Siwicki, Tadeusz Tuczapski, Jozef Uzycki, and Jerzy Wlosinski.

48 Translator's Note: For the full text of the speech, see "Ukonstytutowala sie Wojskowa Rada Ocalenia Narodowego: Przemowienie gen. armii W. Jaruzelskiego,” Zolnierz Wolnosci (Warsaw), 15 December 1981, pp. 1-3.

49 Translator's Note: Soviet and Polish leaders expected all along that Western countries would adopt sanctions against Poland (and perhaps against the Soviet Union) if martial law were imposed. Gromyko had noted on 10 December 1981 that "of course if the Poles deliver a blow against 'Solidarity,' the West in all likelihood will not give them [further] credits and will not offer any other kind of help. [The Poles] are aware of

this, and this obviously is something that we, too, have to bear in mind." (The actual sanctions that materialized were probably less severe than Soviet and Polish leaders had feared.) In early December 1981, Polish vessels were ordered to avoid entering foreign ports and to stay in neutral waters so that their property could not be seized. Baibakov had assured Jaruzelski on 9 December that Poland's requests for economic aid to offset the sanctions "will be given due consideration in Moscow," but at the 10 December meeting of the CPSU Politburo, Soviet leaders displayed relatively little willingness to consider large-scale economic assistance for Poland. Andropov remarked that "as far as economic assistance is concerned, it will of course be difficult for us to undertake anything of the scale and nature of what has been proposed. No doubt, something will have to give." He accused the Polish authorities of being “insolent" and of "approaching things this way merely so that if we refrain from delivering something or other, they will be able to lay all the blame on us." The Soviet Politburo decided simply to give further consideration to the "question of economic assistance to Poland." All quotations here are from “Zasedanie Politbyuro TSK KPSS 10 dekabrya 1981 goda,” Ll. 6, 8-9.

50 Translator's Note: This word was inadvertently omitted by Anoshkin, but the context and the adjectival endings make clear that "change" or "replacement” (smena or peremena or zamena or perestanovka) should be here.

51 Translator's Note: The preceding line was inserted by Anoshkin to replace the following words, which he had crossed out: "Supervision of the struggle against the counterrevolution in locales around the country . . ." Initially, he had replaced this with "An analysis of the situation in the country . . .,” but then he chose a third way of phrasing it. Anoshkin crossed out "An analysis of," but he neglected to cross out the words "situation in the country," which are squeezed above crossed-out lines.

52 Translator's Note: Anoshkin had another brief sentence here -"The authority of the leading organs has been strengthened" -which he subsequently crossed out.

By Wojciech Jaruzelski

he limitations of time, as well as an eye ailment, make it difficult for me at this time to comment

T

fully and essentially on Mr. Mark Kramer's article entitled, "Jaruzelski, the Soviet Union, and the Imposition Martial Law in Poland"— all the more since General Florian Siwicki and I are simultaneously preparing materials in relation to General Anoshkin's "working notebook." These materials will contain concrete, factually argued comments dealing also with some questions not dealt with or discussed at length in this letter.

Trusting in the professional competence of Mr. Kramer, I wish to avoid the inevitable polemics should his text be published in its present form. Polemics as such, of course, are not a bad thing, they can even be useful and desirable, but it would not be good if I had to present publicly specific criticisms questioning not only the logic, but also the veracity, of many statements, facts, and quotations cited in the above mentioned text. I believe Mr. Kramer wrote the text under the pressure of a deadline and that is why he was unable to consult other supplementary and verifiable documents. He was unable at the same time to confront and appraise in a more profound way the credibility of the sources he summoned. As a result, his outlook on a very complicated weave of facts, events, and processes at the time through the prism of only a few and selectively revealed sources is by its nature restrictive, simplified, and on a series of issues completely pointless. Unfortunately, the summary judgments in Mr. Kramer's text go quite far. If this was simply a historical debate about the distant past, I would not see it as a serious problem. In this case, however, the matter refers to a "hot" topic that is still, and lately even more so, the object of political games and confrontations.

Moving to matters of substance, I will limit myself to commenting on just some. First, let me deal with those that have to do with manifest facts as well as with elementary logic. From the sources quoted by Mr. Kramer, it is allegedly clear that during those few days of December 1981 he describes I was supposedly depressed, "unnerved," "extremely neurotic and diffident about [my] abilities," vacillating, “psychologically...gone to pieces." Consequently, not seeing any possibility of implementing martial law with my own forces, I "desperately implore[d], want[ed], ask[ed]" for foreign troops to be brought into Poland. I would like to put aside the moral and political aspects of such a statement, which, for me as a Pole, a front-line soldier, and a commander of many years are, to

put it simply, offensive. I would like to put aside the "poetic" moods from which I allegedly suffered. There is no question that deciding to implement martial law was an unusually and dramatically difficult step, and it was extremely hard on me. But there are scores, even hundreds, of people with whom I met and talked directly at the time, and nobody can say that I lacked in decisiveness or self-control. Let me describe one event to illustrate this. In the afternoon hours on December 13, that is, after the decision had already been made, I met (and proof of that can be found in newspapers) with a delegation (consisting of several score people) of the Housing Cooperative Congress, which was taking place in Warsaw at the time. I wonder what those people would have said about my behavior at the time. I am supposed to have been "crushed by the refusal" [i.e., of Suslov to guarantee Soviet intervention - trans.]. Nothing of the sort was in fact the case-I was relaxed and calm. Besides, the course of the whole operation confirms this. At this point, one question comes to mind: In whose interests was it to portray my mood in such an extremely deformed way? What about the entry in Anoshkin's "notebook" that says, "The Commander-in-Chief of Unified Armed Forces had his hands tied by Moscow"? Perhaps historians should analyze this track.

The core of the "vivisection" of the state of my soul conducted by Mr. Kramer in his article is to show my thinking to have been as follows: First, that the reaction and resistance of the opposition and of the majority of the society would be so strong that we would not be able to deal with it using our own forces; and second, that the Polish Army was not sufficiently reliable or loyal.

Neither the former nor the latter makes any sense, which was very convincingly proved by real life. In another place describing Anoshkin's "notebook," I will prove this point in a more concrete way. Before that, however, I would like to ask a question that has been stubbornly on my mind since I read Mr. Kramer's article. If Jaruzelski indeed was almost panic-stricken, full of fear, apprehension, and doubts whether we would be able to impose martial law by ourselves, why then did he not abandon the idea of imposing it in the first place? Or did he, by imposing martial law, entangle himself in a hopeless, suicidal mess that would end in unavoidable ruin?! As everyone knows, neither the former nor the latter happened.

Another piece of information cited by Mr. Kramer is