Stanislaw Kania, who as Poland’s Communist leader for 13 tumultuous months in the early 1980s steered a delicate course for his country, avoiding both open confrontation with Solidarity, the rising independent labor movement, and military intervention by the Soviet Union, died on Tuesday in Warsaw. He was 92.

The state-run Polish Press Agency said he died of heart failure and pneumonia at a hospital.

As first secretary of Poland’s Communist Party, Mr. Kania, a colorless career party functionary, led the government in Warsaw from September 1980 through October 1981. After surviving several attempts to oust him, he was finally deposed by party hard-liners under pressure from the Soviet leader at the time, Leonid I. Brezhnev. A Soviet invasion was averted, but within two months martial law was imposed by Mr. Kania’s successor, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski.

The struggle faced by Mr. Kania, a stocky man with close-cropped receding hair, was reflected in a speech he made to party members at the Lenin Steel Mill in the southern city of Cracow, Poland’s second-largest city, in June 1981. Speaking of militant members of Solidarity, he said: “They say that the socialist system does not yield to reform. They even do not exclude the vision of civil war in Poland. Such statements and actions cannot be treated as anything but stalking counterrevolution.”

Yet Mr. Kania (pronounced KAHN-ya) balanced that hard line against Solidarity with assurances that the government sought “constructive relations” with the union and would treat it “kindly.”