Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (88 page)

All returnees faced manifest dangers. If they presented themselves at
the ports or at official frontier crossing points, they had to run the gauntlet of security officials who were trained to look on anyone who had been abroad as contaminated. They had to undergo pedantic screening which aimed to uncover false identities and which, in the case of ex-insurgents, could trigger peremptory arrest. If, on the other hand, they attempted to enter the country illegally, usually via one of the mountain tracks leading from Czechoslovakia, they stood to be caught in the net without a question being asked. As many an old conspirator was learning, it was not so easy to fool policemen of one’s own nationality as it had been to fool the Germans. For ex-insurgents, lying low and avoiding recognition was now becoming as hard as standing up to fight.

Britain was slow to celebrate victory in the Second World War. VE-Day, which celebrated victory in Europe, took place on 8–9 May 1945. But Britain was still at war with Japan. VJ-Day took place on 15 August, on the day of the Japanese surrender. And after that there was no special appetite for more junketing. V-Day or ‘Victory Day’, with its grand parade, was postponed until 8 June 1946. All, or almost all, of Britain’s wartime allies were invited to participate.

An embarrassing problem arose, however, with regard to Poland. It appears that an official invitation was sent to the Government in Warsaw, before someone noticed that the Warsaw regime had not been Britain’s wartime ally. The embarrassment was increased by the fact that the former exiled Government of Poland, now the Government-in-Exile, had lost its formal recognition shortly after VE-Day. It had been permitted to remain in London, but it was not entitled (in British eyes) to represent Poland on official occasions and it was no longer legally responsible for the Polish Armed Forces which were still in Britain and which were in the process of demobilization.

The faux pas was not corrected until the very eve of the parade, when HMG realized that the Warsaw Government was not going to send any representatives. In consequence, a last-minute invitation was sent by Foreign Minister Bevin directly to the Chief of Staff of the Polish Army, General Kopa
ski, who was still in post in London, and other invitations were sent to the chiefs of the Polish Air Force and the Polish Navy, and to individual generals. The belated invitations were courteously declined.
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As a result, the Victory Parade in London passed off without the participation of any units, colour parties, or representives from Poland.
None of the Polish soldiers who fought at Narvik, at Tobruk, in the Battle of the Atlantic, at Monte Cassino, in Normandy, or at Arnhem were present. No one showed up to honour the Polish section of SOE, the Home Army, or the ‘Dark and the Silent’, who had been among the most faithful of allies. No doubt there were Britons who assumed that the Poles were playing true to form and causing the usual trouble. (The only Polish servicemen and servicewomen to join the parade were a sprinkling of the fliers and ground crew who attended in their capacity as members of the various RAF formations into which they had formerly been integrated.) In Warsaw, the anniversary of VE-Day was duly celebrated. So, too, was the anniversary of the supposed founding of the Lublin Committee on 22 July, which had been raised to the status of a ‘National Day’. But the regime run by Messrs Bierut, Berman, and ‘Vyeslav’ Gomulka was not going to show its face in the nest of capitalism and imperialism in London. What is more, they would see that on every 1 August in Warsaw for the foreseeable future, every anniversary of the Warsaw Rising would be meticulously passed over in grim silence.

Fortunate nations can celebrate their victories as a matter of course, without inhibitions. But the men and women who stayed loyal to the aims of Poland were not in such a happy position. They had no real victory to celebrate. As a soldier who had been serving in 1944 as a radio operator in Barnes Lodge remembers, VE-Day and V-Day were staged for those, like the British, whose only aim was to win the war against Nazi Germany. They were not for others for whom the struggle against Germany had been but a step to a more important goal. ‘The overwhelming majority of Polish soldiers in the West,’ the former radio-man was to recall, ‘were not fighting simply for the destruction of Nazi Germany, but rather, and above all, for the restoration of their country’s independence. We felt it very strongly. For us, the war had ended in catastrophe. Personally, if I had been ordered to take part in the Parade, I would have done everything in my power to avoid it. Because for me, it would have been the “Parade of Defeat”.’
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These sentiments may be contrasted with the glowing words that had been uttered five and six years before. ‘On the day of victory,’ a British minister had said in 1940, ‘Poland, as the first nation to stand up to Hitler, while others have been grovelling on their bellies, should ride in the van of the victory march.’
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I
T HAS BEEN SAID THAT
public discourse in post-war Poland was governed by two taboos. One laid down that no one was permitted to speak badly of the Soviet Union. The other laid down that no one could speak well of the Warsaw Rising. Certainly, by the time a full-blown Stalinist regime had been established in 1948, all freedom of speech had been crushed, and all favourable mention of the wartime alliance with the Western powers was anathema. The word now was that the Soviet Union had won the war against fascism single-handed; that democracy was to be identified with something called ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’; and that the ruling party could do no wrong. Anyone who dared to praise pre-war independence, or to revere those who fought during the Rising to recover it, was judged to be talking dangerous, seditious nonsense. Even in private, people talked with caution. Police informers were everywhere. Children were taught in Soviet-style schools where denouncing their friends and parents was pronounced an admirable thing to do.

Nonetheless, despite its self-proclaimed hostility to the West, Stalinism was not destined to receive the opprobrium in Western eyes that was directed against Fascism. Even at the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union became an imminent enemy, Western opinion about the Second World War stayed set in its former ways. It did not respond as much to the known facts as to the one-sided nature of Western experience. In accordance with the facile scheme which appealed no less to the puritanical Manichaeism of the Anglo-Saxons than to the Marxist dialectics of Soviet ideology, Fascism was irredeemably evil. Communism, in contrast, though it obviously had its defects, was a doughty foe of fascism and hence, at least in part, admirable. Holocaust-deniers or minimizers were to be driven from civilized society. But leading academics, who often adhered to the Communist movement throughout Stalin’s time and beyond, and who consistently denied Stalin’s mass crimes, were thought perfectly respectable. It was not until 1948 that the British Government thought fit to bar Communists from the civil service and the security organs.

Of course, Stalinism had a twenty-year career in the USSR before it ever reached Poland. Having removed the Old Bolsheviks from power in the 1920s, it began to apply Lenin’s principles in a systematic manner in the 1930s, culminating in a reign of state terror that has no equal in European history. During the war, it was permitted a few tactical modifications to assist the war effort. But it returned to its old dogmatic path as soon as victory was assured. It survived the death of the Great Leader in March 1953, by which time it was armed with nuclear weapons and had been spread from the Soviet Union to most of Eastern Europe, to China, North Korea, and Vietnam, and, a few years later, to Cuba. It did not begin to retreat until Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ in 1956, and was never completely eliminated as long as the Soviet Union lasted.

Conventional analysis dates the introduction of Stalinism into Poland from December 1948, when the Polish United Workers’ Party and the so-called ‘One Party State’ were inaugurated. Yet there is much conviction in the argument which holds that Stalinism arrived with the first Soviet unit to set foot on Polish soil in 1944. For Poland was not like neighbouring Czechoslovakia where the legitimate Government returned from abroad only to be removed by a Communist coup when the time was ripe. Poland was in Soviet and Stalinist hands from the start. The key feature lay in the fact that the Stalinists, lacking all spontaneous support, needed several years to organize their cadres and to eliminate the opposition. For this reason, three distinct periods can be identified. The period of improvisation and of so-called ‘civil war’ lasted from 1944 to 1947. The period of Stalinist consolidation covered the years 1947–54. The period of limited Stalinist retreat began in 1954 and ended in 1956.

The ‘civil war’ of 1944–47 saw the infant Communist establishment pitted against an array of political opponents who could not possibly have been defeated without the active intervention of Soviet forces. In the political sphere, the democratic opposition centred on the former Premier of the Government in London, who was leader of the country’s largest party, the Peasant Movement (PSL) and who was the only politician of substance to join the post-war regime. In the military sphere, three groups proved most active: the WiN group, which was closely linked to former AK circles; the NSZ, which had survived in the Underground intact; and the Ukrainian UPA, which operated in the mountains of the south-east.

Many of the people who participated on the democratic side strongly objected to the ‘civil war’ label. Although they often found themselves
pitted against Polish soldiers and policemen, they regarded their adversaries as Soviet puppets; and they saw the conflict as an extension of the international campaign against Poland that had begun in 1939. They saw themselves as the continuators of the independence movement. One can only sympathize with the predicament of those democratic underdogs, who had been totally cast adrift by their erstwhile Western allies and who had been driven to carry on an unequal and uncoordinated rearguard action against overwhelming odds. There may have been 40–50,000 Underground fighters in the field. Ranged against them were several hundred thousand professional soldiers, internal security troops, militarized police, and Communist reserve militia, officially designated as ‘volunteer’ regiments. Crucially, behind all these local units, stood the almost limitless reserves of the NKVD and Soviet Army. There were no pitched battles – only repeated raids and ambushes from one side and elaborate dragnet sweeps from the other. According to official figures, the Communist security forces lost 18,000 men. Losses among their Underground opponents are impossible to estimate.

The political programme of the new regime, which accompanied the ‘civil war’, was inspired by a vicious mixture of fraud and force. As some of the regime’s luminaries would eventually admit, they could not possibly have allowed a margin of free politics, because they would have lost the reins of power immediately. So they tried to maintain a facade of democratic reconstruction, whilst relying on crude coercion. The ‘free and unfettered elections’ that had been promised by the Yalta Agreement never took place. Instead, in July 1946, a spurious referendum was staged, whose results were fixed beforehand. The general election of January 1947, which was predictably won by the Government bloc, was another victory for ‘the department of party mathematics’. It was followed by the suppression or forcible merger of all the remaining opposition parties, whose membership was attacked by a sustained campaign of beatings, disappearances, unexplained killings, and judicial murders. Fifty death sentences per month were announced in the
People’s Voice
, rising to a hundred per month after the election. The game was up by the end of 1947, when the Underground ceased to resist and when the former Premier Mick was forced to flee for his life. There can only be one verdict: the political birthright of the generation which had fought and bled during the Warsaw Rising was systematically usurped.
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The so-called ‘One Party State’, which emerged in December 1948, cannot be properly described in the conventional language of Western political science. Indeed, ‘One Party State’ is a rather inadequate starting-point from which to launch an accurate account of the essentials. For the outward forms were less important than the inner motors. One may list the Marxist-derived socio-economic schemes which included central command planning, five-year plans, collectivized agriculture, and the cult of heavy industry. One can emphasize the Leninist-inspired political features including so-called ‘democratic centralism’, the duplicated organs of party and state, the absolute principle of obedience to the party, the cult of the Great Leader, the ubiquitous vigilance of the not-so-secret political police, the grotesque proliferation of concentration camps, and the routine application of state terror. And one would be right to emphasize the aspirations of the party to total social control over every aspect of welfare, employment, education, and culture. Yet these descriptive lists do not reach the heart of the matter.