6 - Breakthrough

Summary

On Monday, the fourteenth of December, a group of nine people met for the first time, who, as Mieczysław Rakowski wrote in his journal, were to “constantly monitor how the situation was developing” over the coming weeks. That morning, they met in a small conference room off the prime minister's office in the historical Council of Ministers building, across the street from Warsaw's most beautiful park and the Frédéric Chopin monument. Kazimierz Barcikowski believes that, for Jaruzelski, who “clearly dominated” the others present at the meeting, “we [simply] were a select adjutant staff, which would participate in analyzing the situation and preparing decisions, which he would accept or reject.” Other than operational decisions, the group considered various matters of a more general nature, even strategic ones. In addition to Jaruzelski, this group included two deputy prime ministers (Rakowski and Janusz Obodowski, an economist and chairman of the government's Operational Anti-Crisis Center), three Central Committee secretaries (Barcikowski, responsible for the Sejm and contact with the Church; Milewski, responsible for security matters and justice; and Olszowski, responsible for propaganda), two heads from the ministries of defense and the interior (Siwicki and Kiszczak), and the head of the Office of the Council of Ministers (Janiszewski, Jaruzelski's jack of all trades, who had previously headed his Ministry of National Defense office).

In this group, five people were members or deputy members of the Politburo, and only two (Janiszewski and Obodowski) were not members of the Central Committee, and thus outside the party's formal top leadership, although they did belong to the narrow governing elite. Of those who were in charge of politically significant departments, only the foreign minister, Józef Czyrek, was absent. As a member of the Politburo and secretary of the Central Committee, Czyrek belonged to the highest decision-making circles. His absence may be explained by the fact that the group was primarily dealing with exclusively internal matters. Most of those in this group had extensive (at least twenty years’) political experience. Four of them were military men (all were in WRON), and one (Milewski) had spent his entire career in the security apparatus. All came from approximately the same generation: the oldest, Jaruzelski, was 58; the youngest, Olszowski, was 50. They were thus the optimal age for holding executive positions: experienced enough, but still in their prime.