Russia at war
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of thousands of people were returning to Leningrad. The reconstruction that had already begun in the liberated areas in 1944 was being speeded up.
Along with this, there were also millions of personal tragedies— of women who had now lost all hope of seeing their husbands or sons return from captivity, and ex-war-prisoners who had survived the war, but were now being put through the NKVD mill, and of whom
so many were to spend years in camps. There were purges in which not only real, but also alleged collaborators were to suffer. These purges were probably heaviest of all in the Baltic Republics and in the western Ukraine. But officially, very little was known about all this at the time, and the full story of the 1944-5 purge still remains to be written—if the real facts ever come to light.
(c) International Pleasantness and Unpleasantness
A somewhat uneasy international atmosphere marked those three months of peace "twixt Germany and Japan". It cannot be said that a uniform process of Gleichschaltung was yet being applied by the Russians to the whole of eastern Europe. Czechoslovakia was to
remain for some time a sort of show-window of East-West coexistence, with the powerful Communist Party under Gottwald apparently co-operating loyally with the "bourgeois"
parties. President Benes, though not really trusted by the Russians, was, nevertheless, treated with a great show of respect.
[It was at this time that the Czechoslovak premier, Fierlinger, came to Moscow to sign the agreement whereby Ruthenia (the eastern tip of pre-war Czechoslovakia) was
"returned" to the Soviet Ukraine.]
More curious were the friendly gestures made by the Russians to King Michael of
Rumania, despite all the unpleasantness of the previous February. Now, in the summer of 1945, it was prominently reported that Marshal Tolbukhin had solemnly conferred on the young King the Order of Victory, the highest Russian military decoration, for the
courageous stand he had taken in August 1944 when he broke with Germany. On another
occasion it was almost equally prominently reported that some of the most famous
Russian singers and musical performers had given a special concert in Bucharest in
honour of King Michael and the Dowager Queen Helen and that, after the concert, the
artistes, as well as many eminent Soviet scientists who were there, were presented to
"Their Majesties".
Among other friendly gestures during that summer was the conferring by Marshal
Zhukov of the Order of Victory on Eisenhower and Montgomery; the compliment was
returned when Montgomery conferred the G.C.B. on Zhukov, the K.C.B. on
Rokossovsky, the O.B.E. on Sokolovsky and Malinin, and so on.
On the other hand, there was a good deal of unpleasantness of one kind or another. The Soviet press showed much indignation over Field-Marshal Alexander's "insolent and insulting" behaviour to the Yugoslavs at Trieste.
[Tito had tried to annex Trieste and Istria, which met with sharp opposition from
Churchill and Truman. Although Alexander was at first friendly to the Yugoslavs, he
later sharply opposed them on Churchill's instructions, and on one occasion even
compared Tito to Hitler and Mussolini, much to Stalin's indignation. (See Churchill, op.
cit., vol. IV, pp. 480-8). Later, in 1948, at the time of the Stalin-Tito quarrel, the Russians made a complete about-turn and accused the Yugoslavs of having behaved provocatively and irresponsibly and of nearly having dragged the Soviet Union into an unwanted war with the Western Allies by trying to grab Trieste.]
There had also been, as already said, some angry recrimination on the part of the
Russians about Churchill's "suspect patronage" of the "Flensburg Government". There were, further, some angry protests over the temporary arrest, in northern Italy, of Nenni and Togliatti, and a good deal of recrimination about British policy in Greece. Much was made, of course, of the leading part played by the communists in both the Italian and the French Resistance, but, for all that, the Russian attitude to the French, Italian and other Western Communist parties remained somewhat vague. Downright revolutionary
activities on their part were not encouraged; instead, both while the war lasted and for two years after, they were urged to "co-operate" with the bourgeois parties—and in France, with de Gaulle in particular—and to make their influence felt both in parliament and in the administration.
[The most striking example of communist "appeasement" vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie was the formal approval that Thorez—just back from Russia—gave on January 21, 1945 to de Gaulle's dissolution of the gardes patriotiques, the para-military formations of the predominantly communist part of the Resistance. This approval was given in the name of
"national unity", and with the defeat of Germany as No. 1 objective. Thorez's move, obviously taken with
Stalin's approval, if not simply on his instructions, annoyed a great part of the communist rank-and-file, and also some leaders like Marty and Tillon (the latter had been highly prominent in the Resistance inside France), both of whom were later to be charged by the communist leadership with irresponsible revolutionary romanticism and blanquisme.
Similarly, Thorez declared that the Liberation Committees that had emanated from the Resistance must not try to "substitute themselves" for the Governments. (See the author's France 1940-1955, p. 244.)]
Only time would show how influential they could become.
(d) Poland again— Hopkins—Trial of the Polish Underground
Poland—always Poland!—continued to be the most acute problem between Russia and
the Western Allies in the early summer of 1945. Even before entering Poland proper, that is, in Western Belorussia and Lithuania, the Red Army had met with some armed
resistance and sabotage from the "London" Polish underground, the Armija Krajowa, and things had gone from bad to worse once the Russians were inside Poland. It was claimed on the Russian side that several hundred Russian soldiers and officers had been
assassinated by Poles; the Armija Krajowa was also held guilty of many terrorist acts against representatives of the Lublin Government and of sabotaging the recruitment of Poles into the Polish Army fighting side-by-side with the Red Army. The Russians were also impressed by the hostility of a large part of the Polish population, and by the intensive anti-Soviet propaganda conducted in Poland, both by the "London"
underground and by the Church.
In January 1945, on instructions from London, the Armija Krajowa officially dissolved itself, but was replaced by a secret organisation, called NIE (short for Niepodleglosc, i.e.
Independence), still with General Okulicki at its head. After the collapse of the Warsaw Rising, Okulicki had been appointed to replace General Bör-Komarowski as head of the Armija Krajowa. The new Underground, which had "inherited" the military and radio equipment of the Armija Krajowa, continued its activities after the Russians had overrun the whole of Poland. So in March the Soviet Government decided to decapitate this "anti-Russian resistance movement".
General Okulicki and fifteen others were invited—in two lots—to meet a number of
Russian officers, ostensibly with a view to discussing the Yalta decisions on Poland and a modus vivendi. The meetings were a trap, Okulicki and the others, among them three members of the "Polish Underground Government" (Jan Jankowski, Adam Ben and Stanislaw Jasiukowicz), and Puzak, socialist president of the "underground parliament", were arrested and taken to Moscow. On April 28 Churchill anxiously inquired, in a letter to Stalin, about the "fifteen Poles" who were rumoured to have been "deported". On May 4, Stalin replied that he had no intention of being silent about the sixteen—not fifteen—
Poles. All, or some of them, depending on the outcome of the investigations, would be put on trial.
[They are] charged with subversive activities behind the lines of the Red Army. This subversion has taken a toll of over a hundred Red Army soldiers and
officers; they are also charged with keeping illegal radio transmitters behind our lines... The Red Army is forced to protect its units and rear-lines against saboteurs.
He described Okulicki as a person of "particular odiousness".
[ Churchill-Stalin Correspondence, p. 348]
The arrest of these Poles—and the whole Polish question—were right in the centre of the Stalin-Hopkins discussions between May 26 and June 6. These six meetings took place
during the "last mission" that Hopkins—a very sick man who was to die only a few months later—was to perform at the request of the new President, Harry Truman. At the very first meeting with Stalin, Hopkins recalled how, on his way back from Yalta,
Roosevelt had frequently spoken of "the respect and admiration he had for Marshal Stalin"; but the fact remained that "in the last six weeks deterioration of [American]
public opinion had been so serious as to affect adversely the relations between the two countries."
In a country like ours [Hopkins said] public opinion is affected by specific incidents, and the deterioration ... has been centred on our inability to carry into effect the Yalta Agreement on Poland.
Time and again he returned to this question, saying that, in the public view in the United States, "Poland had become a symbol of our ability to work out problems with the Soviet Union." He urged Stalin to speed up the formation of the "new" Polish Government and also, purely and simply, to release the leaders of the Polish Underground now under
arrest.
Stalin would not yield on this point; not only had this Underground committed grave
crimes against the Red Army, but these people represented that cordon sanitaire policy so dear to Churchill's heart; the British conservatives did not want the new Poland to be friendly to the Soviet Union. In reply to Hopkin's long plea in favour of allowing Poland all the necessary democratic freedoms, as America understood them, Stalin said that (a) in time of war these political freedoms could not be enjoyed to the full extent and (b) nor could they be granted without reservations to Fascist parties trying to overthrow the government. It was obvious that, in Stalin's mind, the word "Fascist" applied to the Armija Krajowa and all other Polish elements hostile to Russia.
However, a virtual agreement was reached about including Mikolajczyk and a few others in the Polish Government, and, after his fourth meeting with Stalin, Hopkins was able to report to Truman:
It looks as though Stalin is prepared to return to and implement the Crimea
decision and permit a representative group to come to Moscow to consult with the
[Molotov-Harriman-Clark Kerr] commission.
In the course of the six Hopkins-Stalin meetings several other important questions were, of course, discussed.
[ Sherwood, op. cit., vol. II, pp. 872-906.]
Hopkins urged Stalin to appoint without delay the Russian member of the Control
Council in Germany, since Eisenhower had already been appointed its American
member; Stalin said he would appoint Zhukov in the next few days. Stalin persisted in expressing the belief that Hitler was not dead and said he thought that Goebbels and Bormann had also escaped.
Stalin, without objecting to the termination of Lend-Lease, said it had been done in an
"unfortunate and brutal" way. "He added that the Russians had intended to make a suitable expression of gratitude to the United States for the Lend-Lease assistance during the war, but the way in which the programme had been halted made this impossible
now." Hopkins, while deploring certain "technical misunderstandings" which had created this situation, added that the termination of Lend-Lease was not intended as a "pressure weapon" against Russia, as Stalin had suggested. He said "he wished to add that we had never believed that our Lend-Lease help had been the chief factor in the Soviet defeat of Hitler... This had been done by the heroism and blood of the Russian Army."
Another important question discussed by Hopkins and Stalin related to Russia's entry into the war against Japan. Stalin declared that the Soviet Army would be properly deployed in its Manchurian positions by August 8. This part of the Hopkins-Stalin talks will be dealt with later.
The Moscow trial of the Polish Underground opened in the Pillared Hall in Moscow (the very hall where the great Purge Trials of the '30's had taken place) on June 18, and lasted for three days. The presiding judge was the notorious General Ulrich, also of the Purge Trials.
General Okulicki, the principal defendant, a dapper Polish officer, defended himself ably and with courage, pleading guilty to most of the charges (formation of an underground after the dissolution of the Armija Krajowa, ignoring the Red Army's orders to surrender arms and radio equipment, secret wireless communications with London, anti-Soviet
propaganda amongst the population, etc.) but declined responsibility for the killing of Russian officers and soldiers. Since he had taken command of the A.K., he had been in the part of Poland still under German occupation, and he had had no control over eastern Poland or Lithuania, where the Russians were murdered; when the Russians penetrated
into western Poland, nothing like that happened.
When he was asked by the Second Public Prosecutor, General Rudenko, why he had not
surrendered the A.K.'s armaments, radio transmitters, etc., to the Red Army, the following exchange took place:
Okulicki: I intended to keep them for the future.
Rudenko: For what purpose?
Okulicki: To fight for Poland should she be threatened.
Rudenko: Fight against whom?
Okulicki: Against anyone threatening Poland.
Rudenko: What country did you have in mind?
Okulicki: The Soviet Union.
Rudenko: So what you had in mind was a war against the Soviet Union, with this qualification: "if the Soviet Union threatens the independence of Poland". In such an eventuality what allies, what bloc were you thinking of?
Okulicki: A bloc against the Soviets.
Rudenko: That meant Poland, and who else? What other states?
Okulicki: All other states.
Rudenko: Will you enumerate the states mentioned in your letter to Colonel
"Slawbor"? [one of his subordinates].
Okulicki: I mentioned England.
Rudenko: And whom else?
Okulicki: The Germans.
Rudenko: So you were thinking of a bloc with the Germans, with Germany, the enemy of all freedom-loving countries, notorious for its cruelty and barbarity...
Okulicki: I meant a bloc, not with the Germans, but with Europe.
(Laughter.)
[Sudebnyi otchet po delu... polskogo podpoliya (Report of the Trial of the Polish Underground) (Moscow, 1945), pp. 141-2.]
On the last day of the trial, in his "last words" before the verdict, Okulicki admitted that he had been mistaken in distrusting the Soviet Union and in trusting the Polish
Government in London; this had not accepted the Yalta Agreement on Poland, and that
was a mistake, which he had recognised at once. Nevertheless, he had maintained the
Polish Underground, complete with arms stores and radio equipment, because he had
continued to distrust Russia. He remembered that Tsarist Russia had oppressed Poland for 123 years, and he had not been convinced that Poland's independence would be
respected by the victorious Russians; he did not know at the time what changes had taken place in Russia. He had fought the Germans, but said that there was nothing in his
directives to the AK to show that he had ordered acts of terrorism against the Russians, and if these took place without his knowledge (and they did take place) it was deeply regrettable. As for his ideas about an alliance with "Europe", including England and Germany, these related to the future and were purely "hypothetical".
That was as far as he would go. But the official Russians were fairly satisfied; in their eyes the trial had shown up the London Government and, indirectly, Churchill, w
ith his cordon sanitaire.
As Stalin had already foretold to Hopkins, the sentences were relatively lenient. The Public Prosecutor, no doubt acting on instructions from above, did not demand the death sentence, not even for Okulicki. The latter was given ten years, the three members of the
"underground government" between five and eight years, the others much shorter sentences, and three were acquitted.
Even so, there was something distasteful about the whole thing, not only to Western
observers, but also to many Russians who remembered the Purge Trials in the late '30's.
Just before the trial there had also been a particularly nauseating article by Zaslavsky in Pravda calling all the accused murderers, bandits, etc., in the worst style of 1937. To many it also seemed a confession of weakness to have these men tried by a Russian, and not a Polish, court. Would there have been too much sympathy for them in Poland? After all, many of them had fought for years against the Germans, and the main charge that they were directly responsible for the deaths of many Russian officers and soldiers had not been proved.
Although, on the face of it, the trial looked fair enough, many Russians wondered, as they looked at this same court room and the same sinister Judge Ulrich, whether some
pressures had not been brought to bear on the defendants.
Soon afterwards in Poland I found that even pro-Soviet Government Poles were a little embarrassed about the whole thing, and many Poles wondered, of course, what would
actually happen to Okulicki and the three other principal prisoners.. .
[The evidence here is conflicting. According to the US Ambassador in Warsaw, Arthur
Bliss Lane (/ Saw Freedom Betrayed, London, 1947), Okulicki and the others still in Russian prisons were amnestied in 1946, though a few (not Okulicki) were later
prosecuted by the Polish authorities. Poles, both in Warsaw and in England, have assured me that Okulicki died in Russian captivity in 1947.]
As a result of Harry Hopkins's prodding, the Molotov-Harriman-Clark Kerr Committee at last managed to bring about the formation of a Polish "Government of National Unity".