General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland’s last communist leader who imposed martial law to crush the Solidarity movement only to hand over power less than a decade later, died aged 90 yesterday after a long illness, the state news agency said.

A stern, enigmatic figure in his trademark thick dark glasses, Jaruzelski’s record defies easy judgement and still divides Poles years after the fall of communism.

For many Poles, he was a Soviet stooge who, with Moscow’s backing, on December 13, 1981, announced military rule in a television broadcast after the first independent union behind the Iron Curtain, Solidarity, threatened the unpopular communist rule.

Others accepted his argument that the decision helped avert the kind of Soviet-led military intervention that had crushed similar protests in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

“The general was accompanied by his daughter Monika until the last moment” the Military Medical Institute hospital where he died said in a statement carried by Polish press agency PAP.

A stern, enigmatic figure, Jaruzelski’s record defies easy judgement

Under martial law, which lasted until 1983, dozens of demonstrators were killed and thousands more, including Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, were jailed. Decades later, on trial for declaring martial law and for human rights violations, Jaruzelski defended his decision.

“Martial law was evil but it was a far lesser evil than what would have happened without it,” Jaruzelski told a court in 2008, adding he regretted the “social costs” of the decision.

But as Polish president in 1989, Jaruzelski also convened the talks that led to the legalisation of Solidarity and the first partially free elections in the Soviet bloc that finally broke the communists’ monopoly on power. Walesa, who succeeded Jaruzelski as president in 1990, had partially reconciled with his former arch-foe and visited Jaruzelski in hospital.