Poland's last communist prime minister, rejected by voters in the 1989 election
At the Gdańsk shipyard in 1983, surrounded by Solidarity workers, when Wałęsa said 'Let's talk as Pole to Pole,' Rakowski replied: 'Let's talk as doctor to doctor.'
A reformist politician of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR) and editor-in-chief of the weekly Polityka for 24 years, he was one of Poland's most visible communist intellectuals. Becoming prime minister in October 1988, he pushed through the Round Table talks and market-oriented economic reforms (the Wilczek Law), but on 4 June 1989 he stood on the uncontested National List and still fell short of the 50% threshold, a defeat that became the symbol of the regime's collapse. After the electoral debacle he served as the PZPR's last First Secretary and presided over the party's dissolution in January 1990.
Activities and affiliations
- 1990–1990 Political and party leadership · Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR)
- 1989–1989 Political and party leadership · Poland
Career Timeline
- 1958Editor-in-chief of Polityka
- 1972–1989Member of the Sejm
- 1981–1985Deputy prime minister in Jaruzelski cabinet
- 1988–1989Prime Minister of the Polish People's Republic
- 1989Defeated on National List in 4 June election
- 1989–1990Last First Secretary of the PZPR, presides over dissolution
- 1990–2008Editor of Dzis monthly, writes memoirs
Related historical events
- 1980–1981Solidarity and Martial Law in PolandGovernment negotiatorAfter the Bydgoszcz crisis, he negotiated with Wałęsa and produced the 30 March Warsaw Accord, withdrawing the general strike in return for government promises of an inquiry and television coverage.
- 1989The Revolutions of 1989failed candidate on the National ListRunning on the National List as a reformist prime minister, he failed to secure 50 percent of the vote in the 4 June 1989 election, becoming a symbol of the regime's electoral humiliation.
Deputy premiership and martial law, 1981–1985
In February 1981 the Sejm appointed Rakowski deputy prime minister in Wojciech Jaruzelski's government. After the Bydgoszcz crisis of 19 March 1981 he took part in the negotiations that persuaded Solidarity to call off its threatened general strike; the talks ended with militiamen held to account for the Bydgoszcz intervention, official recognition of Rural Solidarity, and the strike suspended on 30 March. In the months that followed, however, he treated Solidarity less as a negotiating partner than as a hard political adversary. Around the hunger marches of July and August 1981 he began for the first time to speak of the risk of martial law as a way to calm the country, and the Western press, which had until then seen him as a liberal, began to identify him as a defender of the party's monopoly of power.
He was taken into the preparations for martial law in November 1981 and learned the date of its imposition on 12 December, spending the night of 12 to 13 December at the Office of the Council of Ministers. Once martial law was in force he was among those who argued for dissolving or suspending the PZPR, citing the Hungarian precedent of 1956, but Jaruzelski rejected the idea on the grounds that the Polish party still retained its organisational structure and some political weight. Rakowski harboured doubts yet publicly supported and defended martial law. One of his early tasks under it was to break the actors' boycott of television; he tried unsuccessfully to persuade Jaruzelski to restore the suspended Union of Polish Stage Artists. In September 1982 he left the editorship of Polityka, and in November 1985 he was formally dismissed as deputy prime minister and became a deputy speaker of the Sejm.
Martial law ran from 13 December 1981 to 22 July 1983. It installed the extraconstitutional Military Council of National Salvation (WRON), imprisoned thousands of opposition activists without trial, and saw nine miners killed in the pacification of the Wujek coal mine on 16 December 1981. The total death toll during martial law is put at 91, a figure historians still dispute.