Russia at war

by Alexander C Werth

  Only a small number of "London Poles", though none of them members of Arciszewski's Polish Government there, entered this government. The most prominent among them was

  Mikolajczyk, who had resigned from the London Government some months before, and

  had, albeit reluctantly, accepted the Yalta Agreement on Poland. Despite the great

  hostility shown him by the "Lublin Poles", Churchill had insisted that he join the new Polish Government. The final negotiations which ended in the formation of this

  government took place in Moscow between June 17 and 24, thus coinciding, by a grim—

  and perhaps intentional—irony, with the trial of Okulicki and the other Underground

  leaders. Both before and after the trial Mikolajczyk had pleaded with the Russians that the Underground leaders be released; he argued with Molotov that such an act of

  magnanimity on the Russians' part would have a wonderful psychological effect in

  Poland; but it was of no avail. Bierut, whom Mikolajczyk begged to support his plea, refused to do so, saying it would merely annoy Stalin. "Besides, we don't need these people in Poland just now."

  [Mikolajczyk. Le viol de la Pologne, p. 158.]

  The Polish Government that was finally formed, and in whose honour Stalin gave a

  sumptuous banquet at the Kremlin before its members left for Warsaw, was a somewhat

  lop-sided affair, in which the key positions were held by pro-Soviet Poles; but it was the best the Western Powers could achieve in the circumstances, and they hastened to

  recognise the new Polish Government. In his speech at the Kremlin that night, Stalin spoke of the harm Poland and Russia had done each other in the past, and admitted that Russia's guilt had been greater than Poland's; he even suggested that a new generation of Poles would have to grow up before all the bitterness disappeared. Germany, he said, would continue to be a threat to both Poland and Russia, and their alliance was essential, but it was not enough in itself, and both countries, therefore, needed the alliance of the United States, Britain and France.

  [ Ibid., p. 157.]

  (e) Close-Up: Civil War Undertones in Poland

  This was for foreign consumption. Stalin and all other Russians knew that an acute

  struggle was going on in Poland between "East" and "West". When I spent ten days in Poland soon after the formation of the new government, I found there something not

  unlike a civil war atmosphere. The arrival in Poland of an unusually large group of

  Western correspondents gave rise to some sharp anti-Russian demonstrations for their benefit. One of them was particularly grim: at Cracow, to show us that the "underground"

  was active, two unfortunate Russian soldiers were shot outside the hotel where we were staying. Any meetings we had with the "intelligentsia"—whether with writers in Cracow, or with members of the Radio Committee at Katowice—were invariably marked by

  violent denunciations of the Russians and of their "stooges"— "NKVD" Bierut, Osobka-Morawski, or Gomulka.

  Faute de mieux, Mikolajczyk became a symbol of Polish patriotism of the right kind: soon after his arrival in Poland, many thousands staged a tremendous demonstration in his honour at Cracow, which had become like the capital of the old-time and pro-Western Poland, and the stronghold of the Peasant Party, the PSL, and also of all that was most clerical and "reactionary" in the country. The city, with its famous baroque churches, and Pilsudski's tomb—an "anti-Russian" shrine which thousands visited every day —had suffered less damage than most Polish cities. But although the Russians had saved

  Cracow from destruction, the hostility to them was greater here than anywhere else. The Russian soldiers in Cracow, for their part, were particularly nervous, boorish and defiant, and among those who had come from Germany with all its lawlessness, discipline was far from good, and the Poles wallowed in stories of Russian robbery and rape.

  The atmosphere in Warsaw was distinctly better. The city was, of course, a tragic sight.

  Practically all governmental and other activity was centred in Praga, on the other side of the river, and the Vistula could be crossed only by a temporary wooden bridge. In

  Warsaw proper, among the few "live" places were the Hotel Polonia and a few blocks of houses behind it; here the Germans had lived till the end, while the rest of Warsaw was burning. Around, for miles, was the desert of burned-out houses and mountains of rubble.

  There were cigarette vendors outside the Polonia selling mostly UNRRA cigarettes, and the "fourteen flower stalls" of Warsaw were considered a pathetic small beginning of the restoration of life. A few pre-fabricated houses and a few buses and tramcars had been presented to Warsaw by the Soviet Union, and there was much talk that Russia was going to "rebuild half of Warsaw"; but, whether true or not, all this was still in the future.

  Meantime, most of the workers of Warsaw were busy clearing rubble and patching up

  houses that could still be made more or less habitable. What was striking in Warsaw, though, was the faith that the city would be rebuilt; the "Lublin" Poles had announced that this would be done, and this was psychologically, a great point in their favour. This reconstruction of Warsaw and the Oder-Neisse Line were the two points on which all

  Poles were agreed.

  One day when I was in Warsaw, about 20,000 workers, and some peasant delegations,

  held a great demonstration in the Krakowskie Przedmescie—all of it in ruins, and from the balcony of the burned-out Opera-house overlooking the street, the members of the government, complete with Mikolajczyk, were there to greet them. There was a great deal of cheering from the demonstrators—but it was not necessarily meant for Mikolajczyk

  only. Many of these workers, carrying red banners, were PPR and PPS, Communists and

  Socialists.

  [The pro-Russian Poles, as I noticed particularly at Katowice, the centre of the Silesian black country, were doing their utmost to build up, among the miners, a large trade-union organisation with a strong communist slant, which was expected to be one of the main pillars of the new régime.]

  "Amazing, amazing," Mikolajczyk was saying, "such vitality among our people, living, as they do, among the ruins, and hungry, very, very hungry..." A girl, in national costume, representing the PSL, the Peasant Party, presented him with a bunch of flowers.

  Mikolajczyk then recalled the "wonderful reception he had been given at Cracow—an ovation, a real ovation." (At this point somebody whispered that it wasn't really a pro-Mikolajczyk ovation, but an anti-Bierut ovation).

  In 1945, Poland's "Western Territories" were still a desert. Nearly all the Germans had gone, and the villages were mostly empty. Polish and Russian troops were being used to bring in the harvest. Here and there new settlers were coming in in driblets, some from the Lwow areas, some from tiny "uneconomical" farms in central Poland. Some came without cattle, and although they had been given good German farmhouses—in which

  they had already installed then-holy pictures—they were living on potatoes and little else.

  Some, between the Oder and the Western Neisse, were saying: "Here we have been given more land than what we had at home, but we have nothing to work it with—we've no

  horses—and this isn't our country, anyway." Two years later, both the general picture in these parts and the people's mentality had changed completely. By 1947 they looked

  upon it very much as their country. Gomulka, the minister then in charge of the Western Territories, had played a leading part in this process.

  A few Germans were still living here in 1945. I remember the local miller's son, a sturdy youngster with turned-up nose and freckles. He looked bewildered. "I don't know where they will send us. We have nowhere to go. I have lived here all my life." On a road we met a procession of several hundred Germans, men, women, children, carrying bundles, and the old folks sitting in horse-carts. Polish soldiers, who were escorting them,

  bellowed at them when they started telling us some tal
e of woe. The Germans had had no pity for the Poles; now the Poles had none for the Germans.

  Danzig—now Gdansk—was hideous in its destruction. The fighting here had been very

  heavy, and there were dozens of Russian mass-graves along the coastal road between

  Gdynia and Danzig. Outside Danzig we saw an experimental factory for making soap out of human corpses, which had been run by a German professor called Spanner. It was a

  nightmarish sight, with its vats full of human heads and torsoes pickled in some Hquid, and its pails full of a flakey substance—human soap. A slow-witted Germanised young

  Pole, who had worked here as a laboratory assistant, and who now looked very scared, said that the factory had not gone much beyond the experimental stage, though what soap had actually been made was good. It had smelt bad, until some chemical had been added which made it smell of almonds. His mother had liked it. He said that, Professor Spanner had told him that after the war, the Germans would set up a soap factory in each

  concentration camp, so that the whole thing could be run on a sound industrial basis.

  Now that the Jews had been wiped out, they could start on millions of Slavs.

  Back in Warsaw. I talked to a Russian colonel who said: "There are a lot of AK and NSZ

  [Polish Fascist] terrorists everywhere, especially in places like Cracow. The PPR [the Polish Communists] are having a very tough time; hundreds of their officials have been bumped off. One has to be very brave to be a Polish communist. In Czechoslovakia there is great enthusiasm for the Red Army, but not here in Poland. The Poles are difficult people; the only good thing is that they hate the Germans even more than they hate us; it may make things easier between us in the long run, especially with the Oder-Neisse

  frontier, on which they are all very keen. Also, the Red Army is pulling out of Poland, except on the communication lines to Germany, and that may make them feel better and stop all their silly talk about the 'Russian occupation'."

  Meanwhile, however, a little civil war was going on in Poland below the surface—and

  not so very far below. It did not stop until 1947, and not without the help of the Army and a powerful police force, both built up with Russian advice and assistance. Mikolajczyk fled in 1948, Cyrankiewicz replaced Osöbka-Morawski, but, after several years of

  "Stalinist" terror (though less violent in Poland than elsewhere) a different kind of Poland emerged, with Gomulka at its head—that very Gomulka whom Mikolajczyk regarded in

  1945 as a criminal maniac. It was, however, wrong to assume that in 1945 there were no genuine socialists or communists in Poland, except those "sold" to the Russians, or that all Poles loved the West; just as there were very many Czechs, so there were also numerous Poles who remembered only too well that their country's alliance with the West had done them no good in 1939.

  Not only among the working-class leaders, but also among a part of the intelligentsia there were many who were saying: "With our economy as devastated as it is, and with the Western Territories to settle and organise, only a centrally-controlled socialist economy can cope effectively with all these problems." But this was the "rational" approach and, emotionally, a large number of Poles, starting with the Church, were more or less hostile to Russia.

  There were popular rhymes in 1945 on the early return of Lwow to Poland, in which

  Lwowa (the genitive of Lwow) rhymed with bomba atomowa.

  Chapter V POTSDAM

  At the Potsdam Conference which met on July 17, the Soviet delegation was headed by

  Stalin and Molotov, the American delegation by the new President, Harry Truman, and

  the new Secretary of State, James Byrnes, and the British delegation, first by Churchill and Eden and from July 28, i.e. after the Labour victory in the General Election, by Attlee and Bevin, the new Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary.

  At the end of the Conference, Pravda wrote in its editorial of August 3: "It points to a further strengthening of the co-operation between the Big Three, whose armed alliance brought about victory over the common enemy", and, during the days that followed, it angrily denounced as malicious slander any suggestion, for instance in the Swedish press, that "the seeds of the division of Germany and of Europe into two had been sown at Potsdam."

  Yet, unfortunately, that is precisely what happened there, despite the long official communiqué which kept up the semblance of unity among the Big Three. But even this

  document showed that no agreement had been reached on several questions, and that

  many decisions had been postponed.

  This twenty-page document was divided into the following fifteen sections: 1) Preamble; 2) Establishment of a Council of Foreign Ministers; 3) Germany; 4) German Reparations; 5) German Navy and Merchant Fleet; 6) Königsberg; 7) War Criminals; 8) Austria; 9)

  Poland; 10) Peace Treaties and Admissions to UNO; 11) Territories under Trusteeship; 12) Revision of the Procedure of the Allied Control Commissions in Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary; 13) Transfer of German Populations; 14) Military Problems discussed by

  the Heads of the General Staffs at the Conference; 15) List of Delegates.

  It will be seen from this list alone how large a range of subjects was discussed during the thirteen plenary meetings of the Conference, besides the various committee and sub-committee meetings; and even this list is far from exhaustive: it makes no specific

  mention of Japan, which held a very important place in both the political and military talks at Potsdam, or of such secondary subjects as Trieste and Yugoslavia, or Franco Spain. All three agreed that Spain was not to be admitted to UNO, but neither Britain nor the United States were prepared to break off diplomatic relations with her, as the

  Russians had urged them to do. Nor was there any mention of Turkey in the

  communiqué; the Russian demand for bases there was rejected.

  One of the most important achievements of Potsdam was the setting up of the Council of Foreign Ministers, whose most urgent task was to draft the peace treaties with Italy, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Finland. The Council was also to deal, in due course, with a German peace treaty.

  The long section on Germany was chiefly concerned with the numerous demilitarisation, denazification and démocratisation measures that would be applied to her. There was no mention of any partition of Germany, but the communiqué stated that, for the present, no central German government would be formed. There would, however, be certain central

  German administrative departments, acting under the guidance of the Allied Control

  Council.

  The disposal of the German Navy and Merchant Fleet was referred to a committee of

  experts. Britain and the United States agreed, in principle, to the transfer to the Soviet Union of Königsberg and the adjoining territory. Agreement was also reached on the

  procedure which ultimately led to the constitution of the Nuremberg Tribunal for the trial of the major German war criminals and of other courts dealing with similar cases. The question of recognising the Renner Government set up by the Russians in Austria was

  postponed until the entry of British and American troops into Vienna. The Russian

  proposal that the Soviet Union be made a trustee of one of the former Italian colonies met with no favourable response from Britain and America, and the matter was referred to the Council of Foreign Ministers, who were to draft the Italian peace treaty. It was agreed that the transfer of Germans still in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary would

  henceforth be carried out in an "orderly and humane" manner.

  The official Russian line still was that all had gone well at Potsdam. In reality, the whole atmosphere at Potsdam was radically different from that at Teheran and Yalta. There was much angry recrimination on a wide range of subjects. Thus, the British and Americans treated the policy the Russians were pursuing, particularly in Bulgaria and Rumania, as a violation of the Yalta Declaration on Liberated Europe; the Russians counter-attacke
d by making similar charges about the British in Greece. Truman made great difficulties about recognising the Bulgarian, Hungarian and Rumanian Governments. There was also some

  recrimination about British and American property—notably oil equipment—in Rumania

  which had been confiscated by the Germans and had since been taken over by the

  Russians. The Russians also charged that the Western Powers had set up an "Italian Fascist régime" in Trieste.

  But all this, although indicative, was not yet fundamental. The two major differences were focused on Germany and Poland. It is true that all the demilitarisation,

  denazification, etc., measures were, on the face of it, strictly in accord with previous decisions; on the face of it, too, Germany was placed under the joint control of the Four Powers. The unity of Germany as a political and economic entity was implicitly

  recognised, and the Russians later claimed great credit for having firmly opposed, as early as March 1945, any Western proposals for the partition of Germany into a western part centred on the Ruhr and Rhineland, a southern part, including Austria, and with Vienna as its capital; and an eastern part, with Berlin as its capital. But while such a partition was not brought about, Potsdam undoubtedly laid the foundations for a different kind of partition. All Russian attempts to secure a foothold in the Ruhr were firmly rejected; but what made the "zonal" division of Germany even more obvious was the agreement that was finally reached on reparations—ostensibly in return for the Western Powers' acceptance of the fait accompli of the Oder-Neisse Line as the western boundary of the German territories "under Polish Administration", pending the final German peace settlement. These territories were not to be regarded as part of the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany.

  If, as Stettinius complained, Britain and the United States were not in a strong position at Yalta, Truman and Byrnes thought they were in a very strong position indeed at Potsdam.

  The American atom test bomb had just been successfully exploded and Truman, in the

  words of Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, was "immensely pleased" and "tremendously pepped by it". The President said "it gave him an entirely new feeling of confidence" in talking to the Russians.