The Polish communist leader Edvard Gierek, who died on July 29th aged 88, was borne to power by a workers' insurrection in 1970, only to become the casualty of their momentous uprising 10 years later.
By Soviet-bloc standards, his turbulent decade covered a period of relatively benign misrule, characterised by the stirrings of civil society, the ascendancy of the Catholic Church, spectacular corruption and mismanagement, increasing freedoms and public boldness. The burly miner's son, whose formative years were spent in the collieries of northern France and Belgium, was unseated by the turmoil accompanying the emergence of Solidarity as the communist bloc's first free trade union in the summer of 1980.
In the wave of arrests of Solidarity activists during Gen Wojciech Jaruzelski's period of martial law the following year, Edvard Gierek, too, was arrested, kicked out of the Communist Party and forced into disgraced retirement. The last decade saw his rehabilitation; his self-justifying memoirs of 1990 became a litigious bestseller, and the generation of Poles that grew up under his regime remember him with nostalgia and affection.
A product of the southern Polish working class, he became leader of the Polish Communist Party, or Polish United Workers' Party, in December 1970, after the regime's brutal suppression of workers' protests in the Baltic ports of Gdansk and Gdynia left more than 70 people dead. The hardline regime of Wladyslaw Gomulka was discredited, its sacked leader replaced by Edvard Gierek in an attempt to boost the popularity of a regime in crisis.
But his populist efforts to shore up communist rule only hastened its demise. He opened up the country more to the West, enabling millions of Poles to travel abroad. He opened the Polish market to Italian cars, German beer and American cigarettes. He accepted vast Western credits in the hope of improving living standards.
All these attempts at making life more tolerable were meant to give a human face to socialism, but only whetted people's appetites for greater freedoms and undermined his own rule. In 1980, a wave of labour unrest, unleashed in Gdansk, culminated in the formation and recognition of Solidarity.
Meanwhile, in 1978, Archbishop Karol Wojtyla of Cracow had become Pope John Paul II, an event that augured ill for the sustainability of communism in his homeland. A year later, the new Pope returned in triumph to Poland after Edvard Gierek had resisted the Kremlin's pressure to ban the visit.
At all of these key moments he held firm against pressure to crack down from hardline colleagues, Moscow and neighbouring regimes that feared being infected by the "Polish disease". The repression came at the end of 1981, when Edvard Gierek, already purged, was jailed for a year.
If his politics - along with those of Janos Kadar in Hungary - were the least repressive in the Warsaw Pact, his economics were a shambles that left Poland pauperised and saddled with a huge foreign debt. Prodigious amounts of Western credits flowed into the country only to be squandered on ludicrous heavy industrial dinosaurs and line the pockets of the communist nomenklatura.
When Edvard Gierek came to power in 1970, Poland's foreign debt was around half-a-billion US dollars. By the mid-1970s, it stood at $7 billion. Some $20 billion in Western credits went in throughout the Edvard Gierek years and, by 1988, as Solidarity was about to lead the revolt that would bring down communism across half of Europe, the debt burden had risen to a crippling $40 billion.
Domestic corruption and incompetence were the main reasons for the economic mess, but external factors - notably the 1973 oil crisis and resulting recession in the West - also played their part. Poles were reduced to queuing for bread and sausage. Inflation soared, and workers' grievances about wages, food shortages and price rises became increasingly political.
Poland's miners and shipyard workers were now revolting against a former miner who, himself, had organised strikes and uprisings in his youth.
Edvard Gierek was born in the south Polish village of Porabka, the son of a miner who died down the pit when the boy was 10. His mother took him to northern France, where he joined the French Communist Party at the age of 18. Deported to Poland for organising strikes, he moved to Belgium in 1934. At first, he worked in the mines there, then spent the war years operating with a group of Polish guerrillas.
When Stalin imposed communism on Poland in 1948, he went home to Silesia, making a career in the mining and steel centre of Katowice, an important power base. Within three years, he had become the local party leader, and, by 1956, was in the Polish politburo, in charge of mining and heavy engineering.
Finally out of politics, he lived in the southern Polish mountain resort of Ustron. He is survived by his wife and two sons.
Edvard Gierek: born 1913; died, July 2001