9
The Warsaw Uprising
pursued Soviet interests. His position was strong because the Soviet military already occupied the regions in which he wished to maintain a Soviet presence and his demand to remain in Poland, promising free elections in this nation ravaged by war, was not denied. He had the cooperation of the American delegation seeking his alliance in the war against Japan, and the reluctant acquiescence of the British. To many Polish, the agreement signed at the Yalta conference was seen as a betrayal of Poland, which had suffered greatly in the hands of the Russians during the war [Refer Box Item: The Warsaw Uprising].
At a later conference known as the Potsdam Conference, regions of Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany and the Balkans were left in Soviet control. Stalin promised that the Russian military presence would be removed from these territories, allowing for free elections and self-government without external interference. It was soon apparent that the fears of the Western Allies were not unfounded. In Stalin’s own words, “This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system on it. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise.”
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9
Poland suffered great losses during World War II. The Polish capital of Warsaw became one of the most devastated cities of Europe after the Warsaw Uprising, a valiant attempt by the Polish resistance to liberate Warsaw from Nazi Germany. The rebellion began on August 1st, 1944, after almost 5 years of Nazi occupation of Poland. It was planned to coincide with the arrival of the Soviet Red Army, advancing from the East, in order to get their assistance. However, the Soviets stopped at the city limits, ignoring Polish radio signals, and did not come to their aid.
Winston Churchill pleaded with Stalin to help Britain's Polish allies, but to no avail. Supplies were sent by Britain and the U.S. Air Force but the Soviet Union refused to allow bombers to land on Soviet airfields after dropping supplies to the Poles. The Polish resistance fought for 63 days with little external help, enabling the Germans to regroup and wipe them out. It is estimated that about 16,000 of the Polish resistance died and 6000 were badly wounded. The Soviet inaction has been described as “one of the major infamies” of the war.
The Warsaw Uprising was supported by the Polish government-in-exile formed in London by members of the Polish government who had fled at the start of the war. The London Poles were strongly anti-Soviet and anti-communist. They distrusted and disliked Stalin because he had divided the country in a pact with Germany in 1939. In 1943, when news leaked about a mass execution ordered by Stalin of thousands of Poles (known as the Katyn massacre), relations between Stalin and the Polish government-in-exile were severed. Stalin knew that if the London Poles came into power after the war, they would be hostile to the U.S.S.R. Instead, he supported a group of pro-soviet, communist Poles, who met with the Soviets in the town of Lubin, to form the future government of Poland. They came to be known as the Lubin Poles.
In 1945 the USSR announced that Poland had been liberated and the “provisional government” sanctioned in Yalta was made up of Lubin Poles. The Allied Powers did not want a direct conflict with Stalin although Churchill stated that the U.K. “could never be content with any solution that did not leave Poland a free and independent state”. Stalin pledged to permit free elections in Poland, but did not keep his word, and Poland endured communist
rule for close to half a century.
German troops destroy Warsaw during the Uprising, 1944