Tadeusz Mazowiecki - Telegraph But the big question was how fast the reformers dared go. A non-communist-led Poland had serious implications for the whole of the Soviet bloc and the process of change was very vulnerable indeed. Four days after the elections, the Polish Military Council, the political command of the army, held an emergency session at which they considered whether to declare a state of emergency or invalidate the election under some pretext. Though Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had promised not to intervene, no one knew whether he meant it. Far removed from the image of a radical, Mazowiecki's passionless pedantry and caution made him acceptable to the communists. But he lacked Walesa's charisma and as the year went on he came under criticism from radicals in Solidarity who accused him of going soft on former communists, who were still permitted to run for office. At the same time Walesa himself was becoming increasingly frustrated at the way he was being sidelined, as he saw it, by a government he had created. "I put them where they are and they would do well to remember it,"" he told a journalist. Study the opinion polls. I'm top of every list."" "Naturally it is a problem for the government when people say such things," Mazowiecki responded mildly. Such pressure complicates matters.  During the presidential elections held at the end of 1990, Walesa stood against Mazowiecki and won, beating his former colleague into third place. Yet 15 years later, in 2005, opinion polls found that Poles regarded Mazowiecki as the most popular leader they had ever had. Tadeusz Mazowiecki was born on April 18 1927 in Plock, central Poland, into a noble family. His father was a physician, and one brother died in a Nazi concentration camp. He was educated at the Marshal Stanislaw Malachowski Lyceum and went on to read Law at Warsaw University, though he never graduated. Instead he became a journalist, becoming editor-in-chief of a Catholic weekly in southwest Poland while trying to find a way of combining Catholic activism with the realities of communist power. His initial association was with PAX, an essentially subversive group set up by the authorities to splinter the lay Catholic movements. It contained, though, a few genuine Catholic intellectuals, including Mazowiecki, who soon lost sympathy with the group and left. In 1956, with Poland opening up under Wladyslaw Gomulka, he helped to set up the Warsaw branch of the Catholic Intelligentsia Club, which, over the next few decades, became a centre for quiet but steady opposition to communist ideology and an important forum for political discussion. By 1958, with Gomulka's liberalism coming under strain, Mazowiecki took over as founding editor of Wiez, a serious independent-minded Catholic monthly. Between 1961 and l971 he was an outspoken member of the Sejm and a leader of the Znac group of lay Catholics that were given limited expression by the Communists. In 1968 he used his immunity to attack the police brutality used against protesting workers and students, after which he was barred from reelection. As he moved towards a more radical opposition, in the 1970s he became a lecturer in the Flying University, an illegal college that held seminars in private apartments, and gave his support to the Workers" Defence Committee, established to protect workers attacked by the Communist Party for their activism. By 1980 he was emerging as the moving force behind an effort to link Polish intellectuals with the militant workers in the shipyards of Gdansk, and in August of that year, during the strike that led to the birth of Solidarity, he and the medieval historian Bronislaw Geremek initiated an appeal signed by 64 intellectuals from around the country in support of the workers" demands. Both men stayed on in Gdansk and remained active as Solidarity advisers even through martial law, when Mazowiecki was interned for a year. In 1981 Walesa appointed Mazowiecki editor of the new Solidarity weekly newspaper and during the shipyard strikes of 1988 he stayed in the yards with the workers, sleeping on a blanket on a concrete floor, seemingly subsisting on little more than cigarettes and coffee. Subsequently Mazowiecki was at the centre of a renewed effort by the Catholic Church to mediate between Solidarity and the government - an initiative which was instrumental in bringing about the "round-table" negotiations of 1989. After losing the presidential election, in 1992 Mazowiecki was appointed UN special envoy to Bosnia and Hercegovina and the following year he issued a report on human rights violations in the Former Yugoslavia. In 1995, however, he resigned in disgust at the "hypocrisy" of world leaders in not fulfilling pledges to protect Bosnian Muslims following the fall of the UN-designated "safe areas" of Srebrenica and Zepa. Mazowiecki remained a member of the Sejm for three terms and in 2005 became one of the founders of the Polish Democratic Party. He received numerous awards, including the Polish Order of White Eagle (1995), the Golden Order of Bosnia (1996), and the Légion d'honneur (1997). In 2003, he was elected to the board of directors of the International Criminal Court's Trust Fund for Victims. A chain smoker and widower who raised his three young sons alone in a cramped Warsaw apartment, Mazowiecki had the gaunt, haunted look of one experienced in hardship. He began his reign as head of Poland's first post-war non-communist government with typical candour: "There are huge troubles, huge problems. It won't be easy. I am afraid of many things, but somebody has to try it. Even his departure from office was down to earth: the small car transporting him ran out of petrol. Tadeusz Mazowiecki, born April 18 1927, died October 28 2013