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Wojciech Jaruzelski, the expressionless Polish general behind dark glasses who imposed martial law in 1981 to crush the independent trade union Solidarity and nearly eight years later participated in the negotiated revolution that led to the fall of communism in Poland, died May 25 at a military hospital in Warsaw. He was 90.

A hospital spokesman announced the death. The general had a stroke this month and had previously been treated for cancer.

Gen. Jaruzelski, the scion of landed gentry, was deported to the Soviet Union as a forced laborer in 1941 and returned to Poland later in World War II as a committed communist in the ranks of the Soviet-created Polish First Army.

Starting in the 1950s, he rose rapidly in the military and political establishments of the new Peoples Republic of Poland. After the Soviet-backed governments fall in 1989, Gen. Jaruzelskis past was at the center of post-communist debates about historical reckoning and justice.

Gen. Jaruzelski was accused of being Moscows stooge, and his political foes repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempted to have him punished for his role in the bloody suppression of protests against the system. He defended himself as a patriot who was forced into the impossible choice of smothering Solidarity himself or watching the Soviet army do it. He said he feared a Soviet invasion would result in carnage; his critics dismissed that as a convenient mirage.

I served the Poland that existed, Gen. Jaruzelski said in one of his many exculpatory assessments of his record.

Some saw something incorruptible in the ascetic and disciplined officer.

He was perhaps the only man in Poland who was a Communist because he believed in communism, journalist Tina Rosenberg wrote in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Haunted Land: Facing Europes Ghosts After Communism. Even Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, the generals onetime nemesis, thought Gen. Jaruzelski loved his country but was born in the wrong era.

A young nationalist aristocrat

Wojciech Witold Jaruzelski (pronounced VOI-chekh, VEE-told, yah-roo-ZEL-skee) was born July 6, 1923, and grew up on an estate in eastern Poland. Local peasants bowed to the family as they passed in their carriage on the way to Sunday Mass, he recalled.

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Wojciech Jaruzelski, Polands last communist leader, dies at 90