Remembering Wojciech Jaruzelski

Wojciech who?

General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the last Communist leader of Poland, died on Sunday -- and there is some controversy over whether to bury him in Powazki Cemetery with other Polish soldiers. That's the plan, although there will be no state funeral for him.

Since we are coming up on the 25th anniversary of the fall of Communism in Central Europe later this year, here are a couple of the cartoons I drew about General Jaruzelski in the 1980's.

Back when these early cartoons were drawn, I had a usually unfortunate tendency to draw stiff, flat bodies -- which was, in Jaruzelski's case, the perfect way to draw him. Ever rigid and unyielding, he held himself as if he were posing for his own statue.

The second of these cartoons is from October of 1982, as Jaruzelski's tightened his continuing martial law over his country. Given the history of Russia's imposition of its will on Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1956 and 1968, that might have been the end of the story. But by 1989, it was the rigid, unyielding Jaruzelski who was forced to bend.