(CNN) -- One was the archetypal military strongman, intent on maintaining the social order and saving his country from "catastrophe." The other was a charismatic shipyard electrician and trade union leader who was just as determined to lead his countrymen to freedom.



Wojciech Jaruzelski and Lech Walesa attend the first multi-party session of the Polish parliament in 1989.



Yet nowadays Wojciech Jaruzelski, the last leader of communist Poland, and Lech Walesa both claim, in their different ways, to have played their part in setting Poland on the path to democracy.



The rise of Solidarity, the union and social movement which Walesa founded among the dockers of Gdansk in 1980, was crucial to the ultimate collapse of communism in Poland and across the Soviet bloc.



Feted in the West, Walesa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 after spending nearly a year locked up as Jaruzelski clamped down on dissent, becoming a symbol of a rising tide of resentment behind the Iron Curtain.



By 1989, Solidarity had become an unstoppable social movement, sweeping to victory as the communist authorities relinquished their grip on power by allowing free elections. Walesa describes the union as a screw turning in the opposite direction to the communist regime, ultimately "destroying the engine."



"The system was 10 times less efficient than the western system," Walesa told CNN, recalling his decade-long struggle. "It paid less, life was worse. Each country enslaved by the Soviets was different and in Poland we had TV and people could travel so we knew life could be better... and we'd never given up."



But Jaruzelski still believes that without his decision to impose martial law in 1981, Poland's revolt against Soviet domination would have been as ruthlessly and violently quashed by Moscow as had those in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.



"For me personally it was a great tragedy, the consequences of which I've felt to this day," Jaruzelski told CNN. "Martial law was evil. But it was less evil than the real and inevitable threat we were facing. There was a threat of an explosion -- and an explosion in Poland would have meant an explosion throughout Europe."



As a key link in the Soviet Union's chain of Eastern European satellite states, Jaruzelski believes Moscow would never have allowed Poland to break away peacefully: "I feared a terrible catastrophe. If martial law had not happened, Poland might have been flooded by a sea of blood."



Walesa admits the threat of Soviet intervention in the early 1980s was real, but says Solidarity had already won the argument against communism by the time Jaruzelski imposed martial law.



"I knew we were not going to fight," he said. "Because in Poland there were over 200,000 Soviet troops, they had nuclear arms, and they shot better than us. We could conquer them only this way: You can arrest us, but when we come out we do the same, and we will never work for communism again."



Even his arrest and imprisonment only deepened Walesa's belief that Jaruzelski's government could be toppled: "My friends advised me to run away but I made a different decision. When they came to arrest me, I said, 'You have lost, I have won. You have just put the last nails into the coffin of communism.'"



These days Jaruzelski is no defender of the system which he served, describing communism as "beautiful and noble, but utopian." Yet he believes Solidarity's demands in the early 1980s amounted to an "economic time bomb" and that Poland was not ready for democracy at the time.



"The system was bad, I admit it today," he said. "But at the time, I wasn't aware of that. Everything has to ripen -- corn, fruit, man and societies. Western countries took centuries to arrive at democracy. Except for six or seven years after World War I Poland had never been democratic so it was a difficult process."



The Polish authorities also realized the urgency of economic and political reform, Jaruzelski adds, and
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