A frail but stiff-backed General Wojciech Jaruzelski strode into a Polish courtroom as if on parade yesterday to face trial for using tanks and bayonets to crush the Solidarity revolution in the bleak midwinter of 1981.

The 85-year-old man, who was once the very symbol of communist repression, faces a possible ten-year jail sentence for “directing a criminal organisation” – a reference to the Military Council that imposed and ran the martial law crackdown of the early 1980s. It is a strange legal device – “the generals are being treated like gangsters”, said the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza– that seemed to be the only way of nailing down the general and seven other top Communist officials, all in their eighties.

For Poland it is a final reckoning with one of the most divisive and emotionally charged events of the Cold War. At its heart is a question that can be only partly answered in a courtroom: was Jaruzelski a Polish patriot or a Soviet puppet?

While onlookers at the Warsaw court struggled to recognise the other defendants – Stanislaw Kania, 81, a former Communist Party leader, and General Florian Siwicki, former head of the General Staff – there was no difficulty in recognising Jaruzelski. He wore the same sinister, dark glasses that he wore to make the television announcement at 7am on Sunday, December 13, 1981. In an almost robotic fashion the general told viewers that the Polish experiment in freedom was over. There was to be a dawn-to-dusk curfew, strikes were banned, the right to association suspended, petrol sales to private cars forbidden – and Solidarity was declared illegal. The reason: Poland “is on the brink of an abyss” – codewords for a Soviet invasion.

The General was Prime Minister at the time, and Minister of Defence. From the moment of his announcement he was also self-appointed head of the Military Council of National Salvation. I had a more modest role, Times correspondent in Warsaw, but was as shocked as many Poles.

For months the rhetoric at Solidarity meetings had been stormy, passionate, confrontational; the first free trade union of Eastern Europe had been alive for 16 months and although the Russians had growled and there were suspicious troop movements on the border, few truly believed that the Red Army was about to march in.

Solidarity reckoned that it had nine million members. It would have been far costlier than invading Afghanistan.

So when the telephones and telexes went dead on the preceding night there seemed no real reason to fear the worst. Even when I drove with a friend past the huge Soviet Embassy, with all its lights blazing on a Saturday evening, it was difficult to work out what was happening. Solidarity seemed unquenchable.

Within hours, as about 5,000 dissidents were rounded up, as the tanks rolled and soldiers lit their braziers on the snowy street corners, it became clear: General Jaruzelski had struck a deal with Moscow. He would crush Solidarity and save the Russians the bother – and the bloodshed – of an invasion.

That remains the essence of the defence case to be presented by the general in the coming months. Martial law was the “lesser evil,” he will say.

More than 40 people were killed in clashes; among them striking miners, peasant activists, students. Unfortunate, the defence team for the general will argue, but a mere pinprick compared with what could have happened.

Opinion polls indicate that today a majority of Poles accept this line. The recent Russian intervention in Georgia and threats against Warsaw for installing a US missile shield have reminded even Poles born after martial law that Moscow remains ready to use force against its neighbours.

Times Recommends

• 'New York has lost its edge'
• Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too
• More than 17,000 new underwater species found