Wojciech Jaruzelski had sent Eugeniusz Molczyk to confer with Vice President George H. W. Bush and Bush had agreed with Molczyk that martial law was the lesser of two evils. Whether this meeting with the American vice president occurred is disputed. While it is erroneously cited, Harvard historian Mark Kramer has pointed out that no documents support Jaruzelski's claim. Jaruzelski was chiefly responsible for the imposition of martial law in Poland on 13 December 1981 in an attempt to crush the pro-democracy movements, which included Solidarity, the first non-Communist trade union in Warsaw Pact history. Subsequent years saw his government and its
Wojciech Jaruzelski on 9 December. On 31 January 1991, General Jaruzelski retired from the army. In October 1994, while attending a book-selling activity in Wroclaw, Jaruzelski was attacked by a male pensioner with a stone and had his jaw injured, after which he was sent to a hospital to receive surgery. The man had been arrested in prison during the martial law period. Later, the man was sentenced two years and fined 200 zloty. In an interview in 2001, Jaruzelski said that he believed Communism failed, and that he was now a social democrat. He also announced his support for then-President Aleksander