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
1981 warning strike in Poland provocation, aimed at the government of Prime Minister Wojciech Jaruzelski. The government responded by sending to Bydgoszcz a special commission, headed by General Jozef Zyto, Deputy Prosecutor-General, whose task was to clear up the situation and find out who was guilty of the beating of the Solidarity activists. However, its members were not interested in fulfilling their task and their inactivity was criticized by Solidarity. Opposition activists were personally insulted by the Bydgoszcz events, thinking that if the beatings could happen to Jan Rulewski, they could happen to any of them. A statement of the Polish United Workers' Party did