by Douglas Boyd
Emerging from prison in 1956, Myra did not know Stefan, nor he her. After her second marriage failed, she returned to Britain in 1975 and was permitted to return to Poland only once, for her younger son’s wedding. She died in Britain in 1991 at the age of 69, one of the UB’s few female victims to leave any trace of her suffering in Western media.9
In addition to individuals targeted by the UB on the Soviet model, class enemies were still being created. In Autumn 1952 UB squads arrested tens of thousands of peasants who had failed to deliver their required quotas of grain. Some were deported to the USSR; others locked up in overcrowded prisons. Unlike Hungary, Poland had not built new concentration camps, but had all the abandoned German POW camps as well as some Polish ones, of which the first had been established in 1934, at Bereza Kartuska near Brest-Litovsk, to hold Ukrainian nationalists and fascists. During the German occupation, it was used to hold thousands of Communists and other leftists.10
Following the Russian system, MBP had its own man in the Polish Politburo. Jakub Berman was also the Stalinist boss of the PZPR. At the beginning of 1945, with the war still continuing against Nazi Germany, the largest department was Department One, headed by General Roman Romkowski. Despite the impeccably Polish adoptive name, he had been born Natan Grinszpan-Kikiel in Moscow. His staff was responsible for a wide spectrum of activities including counter-espionage, fighting ‘political banditry’ and running the prisons. The first Soviet ‘adviser’ to the MBP was NKVD General Ivan Serov, who had been responsible for mass deportations of minorities in the USSR both before and during the war. With tens of thousands of Soviet forces stationed in Poland until 1956, the Polish armed forces and security organisations were heavily infiltrated with KGB officers, forming a political corset to keep Polish policies on the strictest Moscow line. In keeping with this, any leaders with too Polish an attitude had to go, but Bierut did not have Gomułka and Jakub Berman shot, apparently because he regretted all the former comrades who had been executed in Stalin’s purges. They were, instead, put on ice for the time being; Gomułka was freed in 1954 and, although not reinstated at the top, allowed to acquire his own following. In many other ways the Polish Party leaders managed to steer a less extreme course than the other satellite governments through the political turbulence of 1956, for example, by representing themselves to Moscow as the best compromise and to the Polish people as the only alternative to Russian tanks in the streets. Even the periodic persecution of dissidents was comparatively low-key and the state control of agriculture was relaxed, permitting the peasants to recover their land from the collective farms in 1956.11
Everything was carried out under the strictest secrecy until the defection in December 1953 of Józef Swiatło, a lieutenant colonel in the MBP, whose job had been snooping on top party members, to provide evidence for their prosecution when required.12 Sent to Berlin to consult with Erich Mielke, he took the opportunity to leap from an S-Bahn train passing through West Berlin and offered his services to US intelligence. His defection had little to do with ideology and more to do with fear for his own life because ‘he knew too much’ after the death of Stalin and the arrest of Lavrenti Beria in Moscow. As a close collaborator of Bierut, first secretary of PZPR since the arrest of Gomułka, and of General Serov, Swiatło had personally participated in the arrests preceding the Trial of Sixteen, the harassment of Cardinal Wyszynski and the arrests and torture of many AK members.
After a lengthy debriefing under conditions of strict secrecy – he lived under a witness protection programme in the United States until his death in 1994 – Swiatło recorded for Radio Free Europe a whole series of talks exposing the routine torture of prisoners under interrogation by UB officers, politically motivated executions and the internecine struggles for power inside the leadership of PZPR. He had also participated in the falsification of the January 1947 election results and personally arrested Gomułka, using forged documents to incriminate him. Among many other revelations was the news that, in addition to the thousands of former partisan fighters summarily killed or executed after fake trials, no fewer than 50,000 had been deported to the Gulag, and were still there.
In all the socialist countries, the fat cats lived well – like the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm, of which they were the models. Swiatło recounted how Bierut’s entire household staff, including cooks, a butler, drivers and cleaners, were all provided free of charge by the UB. Stanisław Radkiewicz, head of UB 1944–54, had an apartment in Warsaw and a villa in the country that did not cost him a złoty from his salary. Even at Swiatło’s lower level perks included a good apartment with domestic staff, cars and drivers, and free clothing, footwear and bedlinen.13
As they became known in Poland, from the transmissions of US-subsidised propaganda stations, Swiatło’s revelations were a severe embarrassment for the government, which gave the security services a facelift. MBP was replaced by Komitet do Spraw Bezpieczenstwa Publicznego (KdSBP), or Committee for Public Security, and Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnetrznych (MSW), or Ministry of Internal Affairs. Staff were reallocated to these new agencies and their numbers reduced, a few being arrested and charged with abuse of power. But what’s in a name? KdSBP took over intelligence and counter-espionage, government security and the secret police. MSW was responsible for state and local administration, the Milicja Obywatelska and fire services, the prison system and the paramilitary border guards.
In 1956 KdSBP was in turn merged into the MSW, placing internal security and counter-intelligence under the same roof as Polish intelligence on the model of Beria’s recently established KGB. In addition to all the pen-pushers and telephone interceptors, it controlled 41,000 soldiers of the Internal Security Corps, 57,500 members of the citizen militia, 32,000 border troops, 10,000 prison officers and 125,000 members of the Volunteer Reserve Citizen Militia. In 1956 Słuzba Bezpieczenstwa Ministerstwa Spraw Wewnetrznych (Security Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs), abbreviated to ‘SB’ for pretty obvious reasons, was set up with many of the same personnel and officers of the Security Service, who were known colloquially among themselves as ‘SB-eki’, much as KGB officers were informally called ‘Chekisty’, from the CHE-KA initials of the first Bolshevik secret police.14 Never to their faces, the SB officers were also called ‘ubek’, ‘bezpieka’ or ‘esbek’, which became terms of abuse in the mouths of their fellow citizens.
That year brought a number of changes to Polish politics. In June 100,000 workers in Poznan demonstrated under the slogan Give us bread and freedom in protest at shortages of food and consumer goods – and the poor housing conditions and bad economic policies that produced inflation unmatched by wage increases. With Soviet pseudo-logic, the government declared that the demonstrators were provocateurs, counter-revolutionaries and agents of Western imperialism. In typical Stalinist style, Rokossovsky, as commander-in-chief of all Polish armed forces and deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, ordered 10,000 armed security police with 360 tanks to put down the riots. In the process, they killed at least seventy-four demonstrators15 and injured an unknown number. The courage of the workers resisting this onslaught triggered a belated realisation in the PZPR leadership that the riots were the tip of an iceberg of social unrest. At the risk of mixing metaphors, it was decided to defuse the situation by redesignating the Poznan rioters as ‘honest workers with legitimate grievances’. Wages were increased by an amazing 50 per cent and other changes were promised.
Within the Party, a Poland-for-the-Poles movement grew in strength, arguing that far too many Russians still held positions of great power. With pro-Soviet Bierut dead, his successor, Edward Ochab, rehabilitated Gomułka, whose only ‘fault’ had been his conviction that Polish communism should be Polish first and communist second. Despite looking like a walking skeleton after his years in prison both before and after the war, Gomułka insisted that Rokossovsky be expelled from the Polish Politburo and a programme of reforms be put in place, to avoid a general uprising. Rokossovsky flew to Moscow and tried in va
in to convince Nikita Khrushchev to send in the Red Army ‘to restore order in Poland’. On 19 October, the leadership of PZPR formally named Gomułka First Secretary of the Party – this with the backing of the defence forces and the Internal Security Corps.
These first overt signs that Poland was regaining control over its own destiny alarmed Moscow so much that intimidatingly large-scale manoeuvres were launched near the Soviet–Polish border. This was the iron fist in the velvet glove of a top-level delegation to Warsaw headed by Khrushchev. With extraordinary courage, Gomułka told them that Polish troops would resist if the ‘manoeuvres’ encroached on Polish territory, but sweetened the pill by portraying his reforms as internal Polish matters, which did not mean that the country was about to abrogate its treaty relationship with the USSR, abandon socialism or withdraw its armed forces from the Warsaw Pact alliance.16 As the Soviet delegation flew back to Moscow the following day, more or less satisfied, Gomułka’s popularity grew – not only in his own country. When neighbouring Hungary learned of these happenings from US propaganda station Radio Free Europe towards the end of October 1956, student unrest in the country turned into a full-blown anti-Soviet revolution, with secret policemen hacked to death in the streets of Budapest.
On 12 December far-reaching increases in food and other prices were announced; this triggered protests that started in the Lenin shipyard at Gdansk and spread along the Baltic coast. UB officers were attacked and local party offices torched, which provoked Soviet-style repression in response, with troops shooting rioters dead. Gomułka, blamed for the crackdown, was sacked again and replaced by Edward Gierek. In January he and Defence Minister Wojciech Jaruzelski actually sat down with the strikers in Szcecin and Gdansk, arguing for a whole day to persuade them to end their strikes.
The UB reduced the number of its officers in the central HQ by 30 per cent and in the regional and local offices by 40 or 50 per cent, but continued to be responsible for political repression, most notably targeting the Solidarnosc movement, whose co-founder Lech Wałesa was under constant surveillance until 1989. But lower numbers did not mean quiescence: as late as March of 1981 Solidarnosc supporters were attacked and beaten in the major city of Bydogoszcz, precipitating a strike by Solidarnosc’s 9.5 million members and many communist sympathisers, representing three-quarters of the working population. Concessions were promised but not put into effect, causing more strikes until on 12 December 1981 a cabal of generals declared a state of emergency, suspending all civil liberties, arresting Gierek and other party VIPs and approximately 10,000 other people, including all visible Solidarnosc leaders. Sit-ins by workers were ended by sending tanks to smash their way into factories and shipyards and an estimated 100 workers were killed in confrontations with the security forces.
The situation was a stand-off, with Jaruzelski’s strong-arm tactics somehow managing to short-circuit direct intervention by Moscow. In November 1982 Wałesa and his cohorts were released, but it took the visit of a Polish pope to this still premoninantly Catholic country to effect the final lifting of martial law and an amnesty for the majority of jailed dissidents. Just when things might have settled down, in October 1984 came the murder of 37-year-old Jerzy Popiełuszko, the priest who was an outspoken advocate of Solidarnosc. They first faked a car accident to kill him on 13 October, which failed. Six days later they kidnapped him in flagrant KGB style, beat and tortured him and dumped his body in a reservoir near Włocławek. So great was the fury at Popiełuszko’s brutal murder that more than a quarter-million people attended his funeral on 3 November. News of the political murder caused uproar throughout Poland, and the three killers were tried and jailed, together with the UB colonel who had given the orders.
Many people believed that these men had received their orders from the government itself and Poland continued its rocky path through strikes, concessions, inflation and more concessions. After power-sharing with Solidarnosc, the Polish Party voted itself out of existence on 28 January 1990.
Notes
1. Extract from http://www.doomedsoldiers.com
2. Deposition of Miroslav Barczynski, historian at Museum of Southern Podlaskie, see above
3. P. Kenney, Rebuilding Poland, London, Cornell Paperbacks 2012, p. 39–40
4. Kenney, Rebuilding Poland, p. 55
5. G. Dallas, Poisoned Peace, London, John Murray 2005, p. 563–4
6. P. Sudoplatov, J.L. Schechter and L.P Schechter, Special Tasks, the memoirs of an unwanted witness, London, Little Brown 1994
7. Sudoplatov, Special Tasks, p. 223. He refers to him as ‘Moravitz’
8. Kenney, Rebuilding Poland, pp. 54–5
9. M. Scisłowka, article in Toronto Star, 10 January 2008
10. B. Wasserstein, On the Eve, the Jews of Europe before the Second World War, London, Profile Books 2013
11. Brogan, Eastern Europe, p. 53
12. Born Izaak Fleischfarb, he took the name of his wife, Justyna Swiatło, to conceal his Jewish origins
13. Applebaum, Iron Curtain, p. 414
14. Chrezvychainaya Kommissia, meaning ‘the Extraordinary Commission’
15. Some sources say fifty-seven deaths
16. Which had been signed the previous year
14
THE HORIZONTAL SPY
The Poles have a long history of espionage, which is not surprising if one takes a glance at the map of Central and Eastern Europe, where the brothers Methodius and Kyril have a lot to answer for. When sent to proselytise the Slavic tribes in the ninth century, these two Byzantine monks disagreed over the alphabet to give their previously illiterate converts. Kyril gave to the eastern Slavs a Greek-based alphabet, modified by the addition of symbols borrowed from other languages for sounds that did not exist in Greek. Methodius chose the Latin alphabet for the western Slavs, with the addition of various accents for sounds that did not exist in Latin. As a result, the Poles, Czechs and Slovaks enjoyed the Renaissance, while the eastern Slavs with their Cyrillic alphabet did not.
Lying on the boundary between the two linguistic groups, the Polish nation has constantly confronted an aggressive, continually expanding people on their eastern border, with little in the way of natural barriers to deter invasion.1 As a result, the eastern borderlands have been historically in a state of flux, with the tsars and their Soviet successors constantly nibbling away at Polish territory, except for moments when they took large bites. The other neighbours have also done some nibbling and the Poles at times have also grabbed extra land. It would take a whole book to follow the changes, but the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia2 does a fair job of reducing the flux into two sentences:
In 1492, the territory of Poland-Lithuania covered 1,115,000 km (431,000 sq mi), making it the largest territory in Europe; by 1793 it had fallen to 215,000 km (83,000 sq mi), the same size as Great Britain, and in 1795 it disappeared completely. The first 20th century incarnation of Poland, the Second Polish Republic, occupied 389,720 km (150,470 sq mi) while since 1945, a more westerly Poland covered 312,677 km (120,725 sq mi).
Living where they do, many Poles have developed gallows humour into an art form. They can make jokes about anything, even the million tragedies in every territorial ‘adjustment’ decided by statesmen at international conferences. There is even one about this flux: having been informed that the border had been moved to the east after the First World War, a Polish-speaking farmer in the disputed territory that was now legally part of Poland, said, ‘Dzieki Bogu. Nie wiecej rosyjski zimy!’ Thank God. No more Russian winters!
Threatened by land-hungry neighbours to the west, south and east, the rulers of historical Poland under its various titles needed good intelligence about the intentions of those neighbours. While low-grade spying was a blue-collar affair, so that no one wept when a spy with a telescope was caught and shot in the field, high-level spying – like stealing the enemy’s order of battle – was an upper-class occupation in those class-conscious times.
Fitting perfectly the image of the ‘gentlema
n spy’ was Jerzy Franciszek Kulczucki, born into a Polish–Lithuanian noble family in 1640 near Sambor, now in Western Ukraine. Fluent in German, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Turkish and Ukrainian, he joined the Zaporozhian Cossacks in search of adventure – and found it. Captured by Turks, he was sold to some Serbian merchants, in whose service he worked as translator in the Belgrade office of an Austrian trading company. In 1678, about to be arrested by the Turkish overlords of the Balkans, he slipped away to Vienna, where he had managed to stash away considerable savings that enabled him to start up his own trading company. Five years later, Vienna was under siege by the 100,000-strong forces of Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha. Inside the city were a mere 10,000 Austrian defenders. After the Turks had captured part of the walls, Kulczucki and a trusted servant rode casually through the siege lines dressed in Ottoman style and chatting in Turkish with anyone who tried to stop them.
Reaching the camp of Duke Charles of Lorraine, commander of the Habsburg forces, he imparted the latest information about the siege. Returning to Vienna with the news that relief was on the way, Kulczucki persuaded the garrison not to surrender. With insufficient men to make a frontal attack on Mustafa Pasha’s army, the Duke of Lorraine harrassed its lines of communication and managed to get supplies into the city until a Polish Christian army under King Jan III Sobieski arrived and drove the Turks off. Kulczucki was the hero of the hour, generously rewarded by the rich merchants of Vienna. The legend has it that Jan III Sobieski himself also gave the city’s saviour several sacks of green coffee beans found in the deserted Turkish camp after the decisive battle of Kahlenberg, a few miles north of the city. From his dealings with Turks, Kulczucki knew what to do with the beans and opened Vienna’s first coffee house, near the cathedral. With the flamboyant owner supervising the roasting of the beans and serving the clients dressed in his Turkish costume, this became a roaring success. He died eleven years later and was afterwards memorialised like a patron saint of Viennese coffee houses, with a street baptised with the German spelling of his name – Kolschitsky – and his statue on the corner of Kolschitskygasse and Favoritenstrasse showing him in costume serving coffee in the Turkish manner.
