Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (29 page)

Byelorussia had once been the heart of the old Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and Old Byelorussian had long been used as the Grand Duchy’s official language. But travelling west, as soon as one crossed the Bug, one was entering the lands of the old Kingdom of Poland, of Latin Christendom, and of predominantly Polish language and settlement. During the Nazi Occupation, one was passing from the
Reichskommissariat Ostland
to the General Government. In pre-war, and post-war terms, one would be entering the fertile Polish districts of Helm, Lublin, and Zamost, which occupied the area between the Bug and the Vistula.

Lublin, historically, is a city where West meets East. Owing to the proximity of the Grand Duchy, the Royal Castle at Lublin was chosen in 1569 as the location of the declaration of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Trinity Chapel in the Castle displays a wonderful mixture of Western Gothic architecture and of Eastern Byzantine frescoes. After the Partitions, the site was used for a notorious Tsarist prison. In September 1939 the Red Army advanced and crossed the Bug to Lublin, but withdrew in accordance with the Nazi–Soviet Pact. When the Germans arrived, they cleared the Jewish Community from the Old City, and set up the concentration camp of Maidanek on the city outskirts. The surrounding region was the scene of numerous conflicts. It contained both the three dedicated Nazi death camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec and the district of Zamost, where the SS aimed to replace the entire Polish population with German settlers. Fighting in the Underground was intense. The dominant Polish Resistance movement had to hold its own not only against the German occupying forces but also against Communist rivals and Ukrainian bands from further east. Hence in July 1944, as the Soviet war machine battered its way from the Bug to the Vistula, it was driving through a population where resentments of all sorts were raw, and where politics, to put it mildly, were complex.

Rokossovsky reached Lublin on 24 July. Politics, however, were not for him. Soldiers had to stick to soldiering even when they were freshly dubbed Marshals of the Soviet Union. Two things were on his mind: as he
later recalled, he had to make a public speech in Polish for the first time in his life; and he had to give serious thought to the next phase of the campaign. He was operational commander of the central sector of the Eastern Front, moving along the direct line from Moscow to Berlin. Indeed, he was already much closer to Berlin than to Moscow. One more stunning campaign of the sort which he had just pulled off in Operation Bagration would bring him to the very heart of the Reich. The Vistula would be heavily defended, and he could expect the enemy resistance to stiffen as Berlin came into his sights. He could expect counterattacks at any point. But he held the momentum; his adversary was reeling; and it made sense to keep it going. Once his massed tanks were over the Vistula and rolling through the plains of central Poland, there was nothing much to stop them before they reached ‘the lair of the Fascist Beast’ itself. The final decisions would be taken by the
Stavka
(‘Soviet Military Command’) and by Rokossovsky’s political masters. Yet, at the very least, they would surely want his professional judgement.

The history of the Russo-Polish frontier has a fearsome reputation. Like the Schleswig-Holstein Question or the Macedonian Maze, it is often said to defy rational understanding. Yet in essence, if not in detail, it is quite simple. The Polish state, which originated in the valleys of the Varta and the Vistula, spread gradually eastwards. The Russian state, which originated in the valley of the Volga, spread westwards as well as eastwards. As a result, Poles and Russians have for centuries contested the two thousand kilometres (twelve hundred miles) that separate the Vistula and the Volga. When Poland was strong, the frontier lay far to the east. When Russia was strong, as she increasingly was, it lay far to the west. When Poland was erased from the map – as in the late nineteenth century – Russia shared a frontier with Germany. (See Appendix 6.) So-called historical claims, therefore, must all be considered with a high degree of scepticism. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, for instance, when the Polish representative proposed a return to the frontier of 1772, he was not widely considered to be acting reasonably. By the same token, the Russian ‘Whites’ who refused to budge from their claim to a return to the frontier of 1914 – which denied Poland’s right to existence – were not taken seriously. The Bolsheviks, for their part, initially denounced all international frontiers as a frippery of the past. Convinced that all of Europe’s territorial arrangements were soon to be overthrown by
revolution, they regarded all frontier lines as temporary. Stalin, in contrast, was out to secure every inch of territory he could grab.

In the chaotic years after the First World War and the Russian Revolution, Soviet Russia and the Republic of Poland faced each other across the expanses of their predecessors’ rivalries. In 1919–20, no less than three Russo-Polish frontier proposals were put forward under the auspices of the Western powers. None was accepted by the interested parties, put into force, or regarded at the time as more than an armistice or demarcation line. None made any contribution to history except to fuel the endless polemics which surround the issue. The first was the Provisional Line proposed in December 1919 by the Council of Ambassadors. The second, the Spa Line, proposed in July 1920 by the British Foreign Minister, Lord Curzon, would have left Lvuv on the Polish side. The third, the modified Spa Line, which was secretly tampered with in the British Foreign Office without Curzon’s knowledge, would have put Lvuv on the Soviet side.

On 18 March 1921, in the Treaty of Riga, Polish and Soviet representatives signed the only frontier agreement between them to possess any measure of legitimacy. The Riga Line was a deliberate compromise, roughly halfway between the Spa Line and the historic frontier of 1772. It reflected Poland’s victory in the recent war with Soviet Russia, but not the full extent of the territorial concessions that a desperate Lenin had been willing to make. It formed the internationally recognized frontier between Poland and the Soviet Union throughout the interwar period. It was ratified by both sides, accepted by the League of Nations, and confirmed by the Soviet–Polish Non-aggression Pact of 25 July 1932. From then on, any unilateral abrogation of the Riga Line would be a breach of international law.

During the currency of the Nazi–Soviet Pact, 1939–41, the Soviet Union threw international law to the winds. Expelled, like Germany, from the League of Nations, Stalin put his faith in his bilateral agreements with Hitler’s Reich. Moscow declared that since ‘Poland no longer existed’, the Riga Line had lost its validity. The Soviet Union’s western frontier, ‘the Peace Boundary’ as negotiated in 1939, was contiguous with the Greater German Reich.

After June 1941, however, when Stalin joined the Grand Alliance, new arrangements had to be made in haste. Stalin’s representatives recognized the Polish Government in London and signed the Atlantic Charter, which outlawed the principle of territorial aggrandizement. For any who were
not quite so smart at the game of diplomatic chess, the Soviets were widely thought to have confessed the error of their former ways. For whilst they could not be pressed into an explicit restoration of the Riga Line, they
did
renounce their adherence to the Nazi–Soviet agreements. Hence, throughout the critical years of conflict on the Eastern Front, Western diplomats were led to believe that Stalin had abandoned the ill-gotten gains that he had obtained by collusion with his erstwhile Nazi partners. He had done nothing of the sort.

Western leaders received their first intimation of things to come during the negotiations which followed the German attack on the USSR in 1941. Eager to avoid recognition of Stalin’s annexation of the Baltic states, they found to their surprise that, in spite of everything, Moscow was intent on reclaiming every inch of the territory lost during Barbarossa. Molotov made no bones of the fact that he had not rejected the substance of his territorial agreements with Ribbentrop. On Eden’s advice, the British wrote off the Baltic states, although the Americans, to their credit, refrained. But there were more surprises in store. When Molotov came to England in May 1942 to sign the Anglo-Soviet Treaty, he proposed a treaty with no territorial clauses whatsoever. And so it went on.

At the first meeting of the ‘Big Three’ at Teheran in November 1943 – suitably codenamed Eureka – the Western representatives were caught on the back foot once again. In the course of discussions about the future shape of Europe, Molotov coolly produced a copy of the British telegram dated 25.7.1920 describing what he now chose to call the ‘Curzon Line’. The surprise must have been palpable. The British themselves were unsure what the Curzon Line was, and were unable to explain it satisfactorily to the Americans. As yet, they did not suspect that someone in the British Foreign Office had secretly modified Lord Curzon’s proposals all those years before; nor did they seem to realize that the modified Spa Line, a.k.a. the Curzon Line, bore a striking resemblance to the Nazi–Soviet ‘Peace Boundary’. In any case, they were in no mood to protest. Having signally failed to open the long promised ‘Second Front’ against Germany, Britain and America were highly embarrassed. So Stalin found that he was risking little by taking a hard line. He also found that Churchill and Roosevelt had no stomach either for insisting on the Atlantic Charter or for defending the interests of their First Ally. In fact, he was treated to the spectacle of the Western leaders falling over themselves to please him. At one meeting, Churchill without Roosevelt took the initiative in proposing that the Curzon Line should ‘provide the basis’ for the post-war frontier.
The only condition was that Poland should be compensated by the transfer of German lands in the west. At another meeting, Roosevelt without Churchill calmly assured Stalin that frontier definition would ‘pose no problems’. After that, the Soviet dictator would have good grounds to feel aggrieved if the Western leaders were to insist on further quibbling or if they failed to bring their clients into line. He must have been particularly satisfied that they agreed to keep the whole thing secret.

Objectively speaking, one can only label Molotov’s coup as brilliant and the Anglo-American performance as lamentable. The young American diplomat who was given the unenviable task of unravelling the intricacies of the story soon came to the conclusion that the telegram presented by Molotov was not a forgery and that the frontier line suggested by Lord Curzon at the Spa Conference had been surreptitiously altered in favour of Soviet Russia by someone in the British Foreign Office. Yet, by 1943, this was ancient history. As for the Foreign Office clerk who had apparently tampered with Curzon’s proposals in 1920 and who had thereby provided the ammunition for Molotov’s coup in 1943: it was almost certainly Lewis Namier. In later years, Namier boasted that he, rather than Lord Curzon, was ‘the author of the Curzon Line’.
¹⁷

For practical purposes, therefore, Stalin was free to act as he thought fit. He had been relieved by Churchill and Roosevelt from the tiresome obligation of negotiating his western frontier with Poland, so, a few weeks after Eureka, he saw no objection to making his position public. In January 1944,
Izvestia
published an article about the Soviet Union’s future frontier on the Curzon Line. The accompanying map showed a thick black line running along the western confines of the LBU, leaving all the major centres on the Soviet side. In the central section, it ran along the River Bug, and in the south, in a totally arbitrary manner, it cut off Lvuv from all its historic Western connections. It was repeated in scores of press releases and Soviet propaganda brochures around the world. With Western connivance, Stalin had played his hand. His opponents were left with the formidable task of trying to unplay it. (See Appendix 13.) The true nature of Soviet intentions towards the western frontier can best be gauged from a confidential memorandum, which did not surface for fifty years. Written by Maisky to Molotov on 10 January 1944, it was entitled ‘On desirable bases for the future world’; and it proposed that Poland be kept to ‘a minimal size’. As stated by the Russian historian who discovered it: ‘Prejudices against Poland were not peculiar to Stalin but were characteristic of the whole Soviet elite’:

The purpose of the USSR must be the creation of an independent and viable Poland: however, we are not interested in the appearance of
too big and too strong a Poland.
[Italics in the original.] In the past, Poland was almost always Russia’s enemy, and no one can be sure that the future Poland would become a genuine friend of the USSR (at least during the lifetime of the rising generation). Many doubt it, and it is fair to say that there are serious grounds for such doubts.
¹⁸

If anyone had dared to ask Stalin or Molotov whether the Atlantic Charter could be used to justify the seizure of one ally’s territory by another, they would have been mightily affronted. (They were never put to the test.) But they would have argued that there was no question of seizing a neighbour’s territory. All they were doing was following the long-standing advice of Western diplomats and recovering the land which the Soviet Union had possessed before the start of the war in June 1941. (In the Soviet view, there was no war before 1941.) In any case, there is no evidence to suggest that they regarded Poland as an ally. In their heart of hearts, they still thought of her as ‘the Bastard’.

All armies are the servants of their political masters. But some regimes exert a greater degree of control than others. In the Second World War, the British and American Governments possessed few instruments for keeping their armed forces in line in the event of serious mutiny or disobedience. In British and American practice, it was the general staffs themselves who controlled both the military police (who were responsible for discipline), and the military intelligence (who were responsible, among other things, for testing the pulse of morale). In France, the Government was rather better equipped, thanks to the existence of a separate force of militarized gendarmerie, and, for civilian control, of the
Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité.
But no democratic states possessed safeguards comparable to those of their totalitarian counterparts. In the Third Reich, for instance, the Nazi Party maintained its own private military-police system, in the form of the SS, which was charged with supervising all the activities of the German state. In wartime, SS units fought alongside regular units of the Wehrmacht. Yet had the regulars at any time refused orders, the SS would certainly have been used against them.