Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (31 page)

No moves to revive the Polish Communist movement were undertaken until the second half of 1941, when the USSR had been invaded by the Wehrmacht and when Stalin, in dire straights, had been forced to admit after all that Poland
did
exist. Indeed, he did not hesitate in recognizing the exiled Polish Government. Hence, if Poland had been reinstated, a Polish Communist Party had to be reinvented as well. Comintern approved the formation of a steering committee, which went under the name of the Central Bureau of Polish Communists in the Soviet Union. This body in turn made preparations for the formation of a new party that for tactical reasons was to avoid the Communist label and call itself the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR). Unfortunately, since the whole of Poland was at that time occupied by the Germans, the only way to proceed was to fly in activists from Moscow. The first ‘Initiative Group’ landed in December 1941. After linking up with various clandestine pro-communist grouplets, it launched the PPR at a clandestine meeting in German-occupied Warsaw on 5 January 1942.

The initial phase in the wartime history of the PPR was extremely murky. It was attended by dire intrigues, murder most foul, and near-total isolation from the rest of the world. Its first Secretary was murdered by his successor, who was duly betrayed to the Gestapo by his comrades. The third in line, Comrade ‘Vyeslav’ (Gomulka), was a pre-war Communist, who had not been sent by Moscow, but who, having been held in a pre-war Polish jail, had chosen in 1939 to chance his luck in the Nazi rather than the Soviet Zone. The party manifesto of November 1943, ‘What are we fighting for?’, was a typical piece of Marxist-Leninist analysis and of proSoviet propaganda.

In 1943, Moscow’s network for dealing with foreign Communists was transformed. As the Red Army surged towards the complete rout of Nazi Germany, the old Bolshevik internationalism was abandoned in favour of a more narrowly Soviet and more overtly Stalinist line. Comintern was disbanded. Its functions were assumed by various organs of the Soviet party’s own organization.

The new tack had serious consequences for relations with Poland and with Polish Communists. A new organization, the Union of Polish Patriots (ZPP), came into being to coordinate Soviet–Polish relations. Its leader was the wayward daughter of a well-known pre-war Foreign Minister. ‘Patriotic’ was a new code-word meaning ‘proSoviet’, and the Patriots were ready to receive people of almost any political persuasion so long as they were willing to follow Soviet instructions. In this way, the comrades
of the PPR became just one strand among many; and the Patriotic Movement was dominated by a fine gallery of obscure opportunists unearthed by the NKVD.

Late in 1943, the PPR and the ZPP jointly sponsored the formation of the National Homeland Council (KRN), which was designed as a sort of embryo Soviet-in-waiting. The KRN claimed to be an assembly of political representatives based on the pre-war model of a Popular Front. In practice, it was unable to assemble, and enjoyed the support of no one except a handful of minuscule radical fractions. Its chairman was Comrade Boleslas B. (Bierut), a Polish-born Soviet functionary, who had been made redundant by the demise of the Comintern. Its main contribution was to lay down the principles of a domestic policy based on agrarian reform and limited industrial nationalization –
i.e.
on the plans of Poland’s Peasant and Socialist Parties – combined with a foreign policy based on ‘eternal friendship’ with the Soviet Union. After a few months of shadowy existence, its organizers realized that it could exert no real influence without an executive arm that could administer Polish districts as soon as they were occupied by the Soviet military.

The formation of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN), therefore, was prompted by Rokossovsky’s crossing of the River Bug and by the Red Army’s entry into territory which Stalin had earmarked for the future Poland. The Committee had been formed in Moscow by activists of the PPR, ZPP, and KRN. On 21 July 1944 it was flown into the town of Helm, where on the following day it issued its pre-prepared political manifesto. Its chairman, a person of great obscurity, was presented as a socialist. Of its early decrees, one was to authorize the NKVD’s control of ‘rear areas’, and the other to announce the restoration of a Polish Army under Soviet command. Since it moved its HQ on 1 August to Lublin, it became known to the outside world as the ‘Lublin Committee’.

Though the committee was a classic case of a puppet Government imported in the baggage train of a conquering army, its long-term purposes remained extremely opaque, for it did not claim to be a provisional Government and its stance was not overtly Communist. Its manifesto contained none of the policies which constituted the norms of Soviet Government, such as the collectivization of agriculture or the command economy or the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’. Of its sixteen departments or ‘ministries’, only three were in the hands of declared Communists; and nothing was said about the surrender of Poland’s eastern provinces. So if
the aim was to sow confusion, the means were highly successful: it is doubtful if anyone outside the circle of political planners in Moscow could have known what was really afoot. Even to advanced political analysts, the stream of acronyms such as PPR, KPP, KRN, or PKWN was so much mumbo-jumbo. Yet if anyone had asked whether the populace was expected to rise in support of the Soviet advance, the answer would undoubtedly have been yes. Indeed, there are some grounds to suppose that the Communists were hoping to lead the coming insurrection themselves.

Once the Red Army was in striking distance of central Poland, three scouting parties were sent across German lines to report on the state of the Polish Underground. In due course, the information provided by the three group leaders was collated in Moscow by Beria and, on 23 March 1944, forwarded to Comrade Stalin. It purported to contain details of the leading Underground groupings, their military wings, their class support, and their armed activities. The most influential group, it said, was orientated towards the USSR, and had been formed by the PPR and its military wing, the People’s Guard (GL). One of the Soviet scouts had made contact with ‘Comrade Mechislav M.’, who had outlined the GL’s structure and had put its
actif
at 5,000 men. The second group was said to be called ‘OZON or
Sanacja
’, and was described as a ‘Government party of fascist orientation’, ‘anti-Soviet in the extreme’, and ‘calling for the creation of a Greater Poland from sea to sea’. The third group was described as the ‘Endek Party’, formed from ‘petty landowners, bourgeois and officers’. It was reportedly aiming to seize power in the name of ‘the reactionary element’. The Peasant Party and its Peasant Battalions were said to be organized by ‘rich peasants’ –
i.e.
kulaks. Its lower ranks were supposed to be ignoring their leaders and fraternizing with the People’s Guard. Since the autumn of 1943, the report continued, the
Sanacja
Group had succeeded in merging itself with four others to form the Home Army or AK, ‘now called the Polish Armed Forces’. It was led by ‘army officers and policemen’. It was not involved in fighting the Germans, but was ‘preparing itself for the struggle with its enemy Nr. 1 – the USSR.’
²³

Practically every statement in this lengthy report was false. The reporters could not possibly have made so many factual mistakes if they had talked to even a modest cross-section of Underground members; and their amateur class analysis was woefully inappropriate. It is hard to believe that Stalin could fail to see that he was being fed information the sycophants wanted him to believe. Yet in Moscow there was no easy way
of checking the facts. And the message was rather encouraging. It conveyed the welcome impression that the Polish Underground was predominantly proSoviet and that, in any case, it was numerically negligible. At that stage in the war, Stalin could hardly have wished for anything better. No one in Moscow would have pondered long on the potential consequences of such poor intelligence.

As soon as Stalin had embarked on the pursuit of the retreating Wehrmacht to the Vistula and beyond, it was clear that his ability to determine the post-war settlement of Central and Eastern Europe increased with every inch of territory taken. At the same time, it was evident that no settlement would be secure without the joint approval of the Big Three, and of the post-war Peace Conference which the Western powers were still aiming to convene. To this end, Soviet policy sought to influence the public opinion of the Western powers, and particularly of Britain. For Britain was Poland’s patron: and the exiled Polish government was resident in London. Soviet pressures on Britain, therefore, were to be an important factor in the final outcome.

Soviet agents and sympathizers in Britain faced three basic tasks. First, they sought to discredit the exiled Government, and everyone who respected its authority. Second, they promoted arguments which made a Soviet takeover of the Lithuania–Byelorussia–Ukraine region look eminently reasonable. And third, to make the Poles appear responsible for the inevitable bad blood, they had to deny all of their own crimes and offences. They played their cards well.

The anti-Polish campaign had begun almost as soon as the war did. On 24 September 1939 – that is, one week after the first Soviet invasion – David Lloyd George, the former Prime Minister and war leader, put his name to a long article in the
Sunday Express
, the flagship paper of the Beaverbrook fleet, entitled ‘What is Stalin up to?’ He said that the class-ridden Government of Poland had deserted its people. He advocated a change in the eastern frontier because the people living there were not Poles but ‘of a totally other race’. He finished by denying that the Nazis and Soviets could be contemplating a new Partition of Poland. David Lloyd George could not have served Stalin’s cause better if he had asked the Soviet Press Office for guidance. His tirade did not pass uncontested. But it had set the agenda for future discussion.
²⁴
Three days later, the new Partition was announced.

The three issues raised in Lloyd George’s article recurred time and time again throughout the following years. On the Governmental issue, Poland’s detractors used a battery of uncomplimentary adjectives on the ‘class-ridden’ theme, always implying that the country was run by a rogues’ gallery of landowners, aristocrats, squires, colonels, bankers, priests, or ‘blood-suckers’ and that, in stark contrast to the Soviet regime, it was completely unrepresentative of the people. Even when the exiled Government was manifestly dominated by democratic elements – what in Soviet terms would have been thought of as ‘workers and peasants’ – Soviet apologists routinely described it as ‘fascist’. On the territorial issues, they carefully avoided the complex realities, arguing instead that Russian land, inhabited by Russians, should obviously belong to ‘Russia’. On the issue of the Nazi–Soviet Pact and its consequences, they preferred to say nothing. They were not willing to discuss either the partition of 1939 or the mass deportations or the Katyn Massacres. Anyone who attempted to raise such unmentionables was ipso facto ‘anti-Soviet’.

No less revealing was the treatment of Poland’s Ambassador, who sought to refute Lloyd George’s ill-informed remarks. He wrote a long letter to
The Times
, whose columns served in those days as a forum of national debate. But he was curtly told that
The Times
had a rule not to publish correspondence on subjects initiated by other newspapers. It was the classic British brush-off. The Ambassador then published his letter as a private brochure, which probably enjoyed a circulation of hundreds. One should remember that through much of the wartime years, the foreign editorship of
The Times
was held by E. H. Carr, a historian who had been almost as ready to appease the Nazis before the war as he was to appease Stalin during and after it.
²⁵

Fellow-travellers, in fact, formed an important part of the Soviet lobby in Britain. They consisted largely of left-leaning intellectuals, who vociferously denied having anything in common with Marxism-Leninism or with Soviet policy, but who nonetheless saw Soviet communism as an interesting and respectable branch of the political spectrum. They were people who would not have sat at the same table as a fascist but who saw nothing wrong in welcoming Communists to their homes, or in giving space to Soviet agents in their newspapers and seminars. Their archetypes were Sidney and Beatrice Webb of the Fabian Society whose fatuous and notoriously uncritical work
Soviet Communism: a new civilisation?
(1935) had gravely misled a whole generation. Yet from G. B. Shaw and H. G Wells, to Harold Laski, the influential director of the LSE, to Victor Gollancz and
J. B. Priestley, they were everywhere. And they included no small number of MPs, such as Tom Driberg or Ellen Wilkinson.
²⁶
One cannot do better than quote the opinion of the historian whose once unfashionable opinion on these matters has been amply vindicated. ‘The selective sanctimoniousness of the Stalinophile lobbies in London and Washington’, he wrote, was ‘even more repulsive than their political stupidity.’
²⁷

Even Britain’s leading historian of Russia, Sir Bernard Pares, joined the international fray, directing his heavyweight fire on a point which called the very existence of Poland’s independent republic into question. Writing in the
Manchester Guardian
, he referred to the period at the end of the First World War, when Russia had supposedly lost its western provinces ‘almost by accident’ and when, supposedly, ‘ten million Russians’ found themselves on the wrong side of the interwar frontier. Sir Bernard was no Bolshevik. He had been closely associated with the
Kadets
or ‘Constitutional Democrats’, who had played a prominent role in late Tsarist times and whose Provisional Government had been overthrown by the Bolsheviks. He would have classed himself as a ‘liberal’ and a ‘constitutionalist’, but like many liberal Britons of his generation, he was also an unashamed imperialist. He clearly thought it a great injustice that the Tsarist Empire had not survived intact and his definition of the ‘Ten Million Russians’ clearly had nothing to do with the self-identity or the self-determination of the people concerned. He evidently approved both of Stalin’s occupation of eastern Poland in September 1939, and the Soviet suppression of the Baltic States in 1940. He did not mention Warsaw or Helsinki, which he would probably have put in a separate category. Yet his line of thinking was only one step removed from suggesting that their unfortunate escape from Russian rule formed part of the same, serious aberration. His intervention was a good example of the strange phenomenon whereby all sorts of well-meaning Westerners, who had nothing in common with Stalin, nonetheless aided and abetted Stalin’s depredations. Once again, the Count was propelled into a damage-limitation exercise.