But the here-and-now prevents him from completing the makeover. All his pleasant demeanor and engaging intelligence, which emerged in earnest once the uniform came off for good, can't shake the younger politicians and prosecutors who also see Poland's history worth fighting over. With time, the public's judgment of Gen. Jaruzelski--initially forgiving, even admiring--has grown harsher. He spends his days in courtrooms and faces jail if convicted for ordering, as defense minister in December 1970, troops to fire on striking workers in Gdansk, 45 of whom were killed.

This case had languished in the courts for 15 years without resolution. Yet this spring, armed with new evidence from the archives, prosecutors went after him for "communist crimes" related to martial law, regardless that postcommunist Polish parliaments have twice investigated and absolved him of wrongdoing. Gen. Jaruzelski believes the ruling right-wing politicians want to put him on trial at year's end to mark the 25th anniversary of his imposition of martial law--the most recent of many national traumas.

Turning 83 next month, Gen. Jaruzelski doesn't relish this latest fight, though it gives him yet another chance to tell his side of the story. "I'm horrified to think I'll have to read thousands of pages of documents. For me that is torture," he says, pointing to his eyes, hidden behind the famous square dark glasses. During his internment by the Soviets in the Altai mountains of Siberia more than 60 years ago (in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact), the young Mr. Jaruzelski cracked his eyelids while working in blinding snow without protection. His stiff military demeanor clears occasionally to reveal a sad and bitter man. He and his wife are ailing. His daughter is a single mother, which pains him. And a large chunk of his country despises him. "This is my dream: to fall asleep and not wake up. I envy people who don't suffer, who are not bled dry," he says. "On the other hand maybe someone in history will notice. Maybe my [2-year-old] grandson will, after many years, understand how it happened that history threw me on these waves."

In a country emerging from five decades of totalitarianism--and three centuries, with a brief interwar window, of foreign occupation--he is both witness and accomplice to that divisive past. His mortality, in his telling, is proof of his honesty: "The reader can say, 'Jaruzelski is trying to save his own skin, it's normal.' My skin is terribly old, terribly beat up, worn out, and I have little time left. I'm an old, sick man. I don't know, tomorrow, in a month, in a year I won't be here.

"Yet I feel like a true Pole in my heart and soul. I did many bad things, I am ashamed of many things. I know of no other leader, at least in the [Soviet] bloc who, like me, and so many times in public--and for an old general that's no easy thing--said: 'I regret it, I'm sorry about it, I ask for forgiveness, I am ashamed of it.' So I don't hide. But I believe that one must judge justly and objectively, based on the realities of the time."

In his version of the last quarter-century, Gen. Jaruzelski prefers to dwell on the months leading up to communism's fall and to play down the dark days of his martial law. As Polish leader from 1981-89, he compares himself with his friend Mikhail Gorbachev, whose rise let Gen. Jaruzelski, in his view, loosen things up after ruling under a succession of geriatric hard-liners in the Kremlin. (Konstantin Chernenko, Mr. Gorbachev's predecessor, was a "living corpse," he says, even worse than Leonid Brezhnev.) In Berlin alongside Mr. Gorbachev weeks before the Wall fell, Gen. Jaruzelski recalls, the Soviet leader nodded toward East Germany's longtime Communist Party boss, Erich Honecker. "And he says to me, 'Look at that starik--that means old man in Russian--he doesn't understand a thing. You carried out such great changes, and they're bogged down.' "

Earlier in that watershed year, Gen. Jaruzelski sat down with Lech Walesa and Solidarity for "Round Table" talks--over the objections of Party conservatives--that paved the way for partially free elections in June that the opposition won in a landslide. Two months later came the formation of the first government led by a noncommunist since just after the war. In the Eastern Bloc, Gen. Jaruzelski's Poland was the most liberal country, and the first domino. The general today carries another historical, if futile, grudge: that the Wall, not the Round Table, came to be seen as the symbol of communism's collapse.

"I did everything--and it was not little--to start down that road," he says. "We handed power over on a platter." The incoming Solidarity government drew a "thick line" under the past, shunning decommunization or legal or political revenge. "If anyone had tried to solve this problem radically then, we'd have had blood in the streets," he says. The threat of bloodshed, real or imagined, was his justification for martial law, too. "But the fact that we managed it without Robespierrism, or Bolshevism, that was an impulse and a model for all the countries in the bloc. . . . That's why I call it an evolutionary revolution: revolution in substance, evolutionary in form. And I consider it a great Polish historical success." He credits Solidarity and the Catholic Church--along with himself--for it.

About half the country today finds this version of events a scandalous fiction. "They gave us nothing," says former dissident and later foreign minister Bronislaw Geremek. The people, he adds, made the revolution. Neither Solidarity nor, especially, the Communist Party expected a total rout in the June elections that gave the opposition every single seat it could contest. Gen. Jaruzelski had hoped the Round Table would let the Party hold on to power. To his critics, he imposed martial law for the same reason. When the voters rejected him in 1989, he left quietly. But the absence of any punishment for the big communists, followed quickly by their reincarnation in top business and political jobs, has kept Poland from political "closure."

Since the 1990s, the public mood has changed. An old Polish saying suggests one explanation: Enemies will reconcile but their sons never. Many of the general's persecutors are young politicians who were schoolboys during his time in power. Others played but a marginal role in the opposition. "As I look today at the most bloodthirsty, I do not see people who ever suffered terribly," he says. (He naturally favors the approach of Spain after Franco's death--just move on, put the past behind you.) There's more than that. The former communists discredited themselves at their last turn in government, and were chased from power last fall by parties that tapped into a widespread anticommunist backlash--which has also hit the old general.

Time changes views of history. Fewer Poles consider Gen. Jaruzelski a hero, in opinion polls, and many more a traitor. "Now there's a very negative view of communism and martial law," says Tomasz Wroblewski, editor of Polish Newsweek. By the standards of domestic military crackdowns, however, Poland's was light. Pinochet killed thousands, Jaruzelski a hundred or so. Almost as many soldiers--13--died in implementing military rule in 1981 as did civilians (15). When the tanks rolled, Poles mostly stayed home, bolstering Gen. Jaruzelski's claim later that the people realized that the move was justified by possible Soviet aggression. Yet Poles of a certain age, to this day, can't forgive him for stealing a whole decade. No firm proof exists, nor will likely emerge, that Brezhnev would have followed through on any threat to send in the Red Army to stop Solidarity. So this argument will run on, beyond his death.

Gen. Jaruzelski doesn't make himself out to be a hero anymore for imposing martial law. That would probably concede too much to free will, and undermine the philosophical defense of his whole life. "For my generation, chance, to a great extent, dictated where you ended up--often completely in a different place than logic would dictate." He was born to a patriotic landowning family and educated by priests; his father and grandfather fought the Russians. When the Soviets invaded Poland in 1939, two weeks after the Germans, he was deported along with two million countrymen, mostly of gentry stock, out east. The war years in Siberia, where his father is buried, taught him to love the ordinary Russian as well as to fear Russia, "a huge, powerful country with a great army." Less generously, people say it broke his spine. He joined the only Polish wartime force that agreed to Soviet command. Though he expected to become a gentleman farmer or historian, military life and communism suited him. He made his compromises. Citing a wartime letter to his mother, Gen. Jaruzelski says he wrote that "I must serve Poland as she really is, and whatever sacrifices she demands from us." In other words, make peace with a Soviet-dominated Poland. He thrived in it.

Yet Gen. Jaruzelski, the self-described unwitting actor in history's drama, says he was pressed to take the helm of the defense ministry and, in 1981, of the state. He adds that the first President Bush prodded him, along with others, to claim the presidency of Poland, which he held for a year, to assure a smooth turnover in 1989-90. "Patriotism is a subjective value, a subjective concept," he says. To the nationalist parties now dominant, this self-justification is an obvious red flag. Most people didn't embrace the Soviet-imposed regime, after all. And, while plainly eager to do his duty, he liked power.

Opportunist, cynic, or worse? Those labels don't stick well. The general, a complex and, in his later years, almost warm man, is personally modest and free of corruption. He doesn't shy from confronting detractors; he's even disarming about it. With a smile, Mr. Geremek recalls that the general sought him out to apologize for jailing him.

Can Gen. Jaruzelski distinguish fact from his own myth? "I'd rather shoot myself in the head" than impose martial law, he said, in 1993. Though he kept a pistol in his desk back in 1981, he didn't use it. "I said it once and I don't retract it," he insists. "I lived through it very painfully. It was a personal nightmare, the weeks, days before martial law. My aides said, 'Until the end of your life they'll be spitting on you for this, but you have to do it. You have to save Poland.' "

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