Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

by Anne Applebaum

  Despite these moderate intentions, violence quickly accelerated, not always intentionally. Often, orders to move slowly could not be fulfilled because Soviet soldiers and officials were intellectually and psychologically unprepared for the consequences of such a policy. To a Soviet officer, educated in Bolshevik schools and trained in the Red Army or the NKVD, an active participant in any political group other than the communist party was a suspicious figure by definition, and probably a saboteur or spy. Politburo members in Moscow could speak in theory about the creation of “socialist democracies,” but Soviet administrators on the ground were often unable to tolerate anything other than a totalitarian state. They reacted with instinctive horror when newly liberated citizens began to exercise the freedom of speech, press, and association that the new regimes’ rhetoric appeared to promise.

  The violence also accelerated because the expectations both of the new Soviet military administrators and of the local communists were so quickly dashed. In the wake of what the Red Army regarded as its triumphant march through Europe, local communists expected the working class to join the revolution. When that failed to happen, they would often explode in fury at their countrymen’s “incomprehensible spirit of resistance and complete ignorance,” as one Warsaw party functionary put it.8 Their frustration, coupled with the profound clash of Soviet and Eastern European cultures, fed directly into the political violence too.

  In some countries there was no initial “liberal” moment of occupation. In Poland, the Soviet Union treated the Polish Home Army and especially its partisan divisions in the eastern half of the country with intense hostility long before the end of the war. The first Soviet invasion and occupation of eastern Poland in 1939 had been accompanied by mass arrests and deportations of Polish merchants, politicians, civil servants, and priests. The violence culminated in the infamous mass murder of at least 21,000 Polish officers in the forests of western Russia, a tragedy known as the Katyn massacre, after the village where the first mass grave was discovered. Among the Katyn victims were many reserve officers who had worked in civilian life as doctors, lawyers, and university lecturers—once again, the Polish patriotic and intellectual elite. The Polish Home Army, exiles, and underground leadership knew this story well: the discovery of one of the mass graves at Katyn by the Nazis in 1941 had led to a total break in diplomatic relations between the Polish exile government and the USSR.

  At the time of the second Soviet invasion in 1944, the Home Army was nevertheless not primarily an anticommunist organization. By definition it was anti-Nazi and antifascist, having been formed in 1942 as the armed wing of the mainstream Polish resistance movement, the Polish Underground State. Antifascism was almost the only political sentiment that united its soldiers, in fact, among whom were members of socialist, social democratic, nationalist, and peasant parties. At its height, the Home Army had some 300,000 armed partisans, which made it the second-largest resistance movement in Europe after the Yugoslav partisans, at least until the French resistance expanded in the wake of D-Day. The Home Army was legally subordinate to the Polish constitutional government in exile in London, which gave it both legitimacy and continuity with prewar Poland, something none of the smaller resistance movements in the country could claim.9

  The Home Army itself operated on the premise that its leaders would play a large role in the formation of the postwar provisional government, just like Charles de Gaulle’s followers in France. Its soldiers saw themselves, correctly, as Allies, along with Britain, France, and the USSR. Faced with the imminent arrival of the Red Army, the Home Army was therefore determined to mobilize against the retreating Germans and engage in tactical cooperation with the Red Army. Home Army units had been under direct orders not to fight against Soviet troops since October 1943, when the Home Army commander had requested that the London government in exile make a “historically transparent” decision on the matter.10 Home Army partisan leaders were instructed to make themselves known to Red Army troops, and to assist Soviet soldiers as much as possible in fighting the Germans.11 They were also to concentrate their efforts on liberating cities, the better to wield some political advantage later on.12

  Some of the initial encounters went off smoothly. In March 1944, officers from a forward Scouting unit of the Red Army met with their counterparts in the Twenty-seventh Volhynia Home Army Infantry Division and agreed to cooperate in the liberation of Kovel, part of prewar Poland, today in western Ukraine. The Poles agreed to subordinate themselves to Soviet operational command during the battle, and the Soviets agreed to lend them ammunition and to acknowledge their political independence. Over three weeks, Polish and Soviet soldiers fought side by side, taking several villages and suffering many losses.13

  If Soviet political goals had been different, that could have been a model for future cooperation. But it ended badly. In July, the Polish divisional commander reiterated his desire to continue to work with the Red Army, but declared that he would not cooperate with the new, communist-led, Polish national liberation committee in Lublin. Cooperation ended. The division was immediately surrounded by Soviet troops and disarmed. Some of its members were sent to labor camps, others were arrested.14 Cooperation, betrayal, disarmament, arrest: most of the subsequent encounters between the Red Army and the Home Army followed exactly the same pattern.15

  As the Red Army’s second invasion of Poland got under way in the spring and summer of 1944, its interactions with the Home Army were of intense interest to the Soviet leadership. Lavrentii Beria, the brutal and duplicitous boss of the NKVD, filed detailed daily reports on the situation in Poland to Stalin, using language that could well have been designed to alarm the Soviet leader. On June 29, 1944, for example, Beria gave Stalin a list of “Polish bands” (the word “band” implying something vaguely criminal) that were then preparing for action in “western Belarus” (formerly eastern Poland, the territory occupied by the USSR since 1939). These bands, he wrote, are “organized according to the same principles as prewar Poland” (prewar Poland having been capitalist, “aristocratic,” and hostile to the USSR). He noted darkly that they maintain a “direct connection to the military circles of the Polish government in England” and in a later note pointed out that they sometimes even met with envoys from London (which meant that they must be tools of Western influence). He reckoned there were between 10,000 and 20,000 armed men in the area, and he was deeply suspicious of all of them.16

  Beria also noted that the “bands” appeared to be preparing a major offensive against the Germans, which was true. At the end of June, Home Army soldiers in former Polish territories were indeed preparing for “Operation Tempest,” a series of uprisings aimed at liberating Polish cities from Nazi occupation in advance of the Red Army’s arrival. The most famous of these was the Warsaw Uprising, but smaller uprisings were also planned for Vilnius and L’viv (or Wilno and Lwów, as the Poles still called them). Beria was also correct in surmising that the leaders of the Home Army kept in touch with London. Although their communication with the outside world was primitive and irregular, the partisan units in these eastern forests did consider themselves to be part of a regular army, operating under the command of the Polish government in exile in London. They also assumed that with the end of the war the Polish territories occupied by the USSR in 1939 would revert to Polish sovereignty, and that the country’s prewar borders would be restored.

  Eventually Beria’s communiqués went further. Not only did he imply darkly that the Home Army was a force of aristocratic capitalism but he also implied that its leaders were collaborating with the Germans. Borrowing a term from espionage, he wrote to Stalin that the Warsaw and Vilnius Home Army “centers” all “work in service of the Germans, arm themselves at [German] cost, and conduct agitation against the Bolsheviks, the [communist] partisans, and the kolkhozes, murdering communists who are left on the territory of western Belarus.”17 Beria was profoundly suspicious of the motives of the local commander in eastern Poland, General Alexander Krzyz
anowski—better known then and since by his pseudonym, Wilk (“wolf”). General Wilk, Beria wrote in July, was a shady figure who had arrived in the region “illegally” from Warsaw during the period of German occupation. Worse, one of Wilk’s underlings had already identified himself to the Red Army, and had asked the Soviet commanders for their cooperation in the liberation of Vilnius. Beria considered this request outrageous—“the Poles think they have a right to take Vilnius!”—and complained that “this Polish army disorients the population”: the people of this region, he explained, ought to be under the impression that they owed their liberation to the Soviet Union, not to Poland.18

  Some elements of Beria’s rant against General Wilk ring true. Many Polish partisan groups in the regions around Vilnius, as well as in western Belarus and western Ukraine, were distinctly suspicious of communists, and with good reason. These were the territories that had already been occupied and terrorized by the USSR between 1939 and 1941, the territories from which half a million Poles had been deported into Soviet exile and concentration camps. The survivors were resentful, they knew about the Katyn massacre and they certainly did think they had the right to take back Vilnius, which had been a Polish city for many centuries and was at that time dominated by a Polish ethnic majority. They saw no shame in using the weapons stores that departing Germans had left behind either, if that would help them liberate their country in advance of the Red Army’s arrival.

  Yet to describe the Home Army battalions as working “in the service of Germans” was ludicrous. There was nothing remotely fascist about General Wilk, who had been fighting the Germans since 1939. Neither he nor anyone else in a senior position gave orders to resist the Red Army, then or later. Beria’s dislike of men like Wilk was ideological, and perhaps egotistical as well. He hated the idea that some upstart noncommunist Poles might challenge Soviet officers.

  This attitude was reflected all the way down the chain of command. In a report to headquarters in July, a Soviet commander of the First Belorussian Front reported meeting a Polish “partisan”—like Beria, he put this description in quotations—who had, to the Soviet commander’s astonishment, acted like his equal. He noted that the Pole had claimed to be a “captain-commander of a division” and had requested arms and assistance. A few days later, another report from the field described an encounter with another group of Polish partisans who had come upon some downed American pilots. The Poles refused to turn these pilots over to the Red Army when commanded to do so. “These aren’t partisans,” complained the colonel in the field, “they are Polish divisions loyal to the Polish government in London!”19 Actually, they were both. But the colonel’s mental horizon could not stretch to include a partisan who was not a Soviet partisan.

  By the middle of the summer, all pretense of cooperation had been abandoned, and the USSR began to treat the Home Army overtly as a hostile force. Beria informed Stalin in mid-July 1944 that he had sent 12,000 NKVD troops to “take the necessary Chekist measures”—that is, to use secret police methods—to root out the remaining Home Army partisans from the forest and to “pacify” the population that had been feeding and housing them.20 As noted, he also sent General Ivan Serov to command them. Serov had already supervised the deportation of “dangerous elements” from eastern Poland and the Baltic States in 1939–41, and had organized the brutal deportation of the entire Tatar population from Crimea in 1944. The “pacification” of small nations was his speciality.21

  Serov acted quickly. On July 17, Red Army commanders, acting on his orders, invited General Wilk to a meeting. Wilk arrived and was promptly disarmed and arrested. Over the next two days, large numbers of his men were also summoned, disarmed, and arrested. By July 20, the Red Army had arrested and disarmed, 6,000 Home Army partisans, among them 650 officers.22 Enticed by the promise of better weapons and support, almost all of them were caught by surprise. On July 14, for example, Henryk Sawala, a young partisan fighter, was told that his unit would be joining a new Polish-Soviet division. His commander explained that they would receive six weeks of training. After that, they would continue to advance alongside the Red Army, with the support of Soviet artillery and tanks. Pleased by this prospect, Sawala presented himself on July 18 to the Soviet officers whom he believed would be leading this new division. He was immediately placed under arrest.

  “We were met by a group of 50 [NKVD] soldiers and disarmed,” he recalled later. Some of his fellow partisans resisted arrest, preferring to “die with honor.” But seeing that they were vastly outnumbered, most decided to avoid an unnecessary massacre and put down their weapons immediately. All of them, including Sawala, were then marched, under armed guard and without food, to a temporary camp some forty kilometers from Vilnius. While the battle raged on in the west, these trained partisans—men who would have happily fought the retreating Germans—were forced to sit for days in cramped conditions, doing nothing: “We slept beside one another like canned sardines,” he remembered, “eating nothing but bread and herring.”23

  Finally they were called to a meeting and offered a deal. A soldier in a Polish army uniform—Sawala remembered that he was “hard to understand, because he used more Russian words than Polish”—exhorted them to join the Polish division of the Red Army and to reject the “traitorous” London government. Jerzy Putrament, a Polish communist writer, then got up and repeated the same message. The response was not positive. The partisans threw mud in Putrament’s face and demanded the return of their commander. The agitator who spoke bad Polish then dropped his polite demeanor and snarled that they’d all end up “breaking rocks” somewhere if they didn’t join the Red Army right away. Now furious, most of them refused. They were duly deported farther east, to POW work camps. Some were sent farther still into the Gulag system. Sawala himself landed in a camp in Kaluga, southwest of Moscow.24 The attack on the Home Army was supplemented with violence directed at anyone who might be sympathetic to the Home Army’s plight, including family members. In total, the NKVD arrested some 35,000 to 45,000 people in the former eastern territories of Poland between 1944 and 1947.25

  As they moved into territory that even the USSR recognized as Polish, Soviet commanders did not become any less wary of the Home Army or any less suspicious of its leaders. On the contrary, as they moved deeper into Poland, the Russians became crueler, more decisive, and more efficient. By the time they reached Poznań in western Poland, they needed only a week to arrest dozens of Home Army members, incarcerate them, and subject them to brutal interrogation and torture. Following that, the NKVD conducted group executions of thousands of people in the forests outside the city.26 At the same time, the Home Army stopped treating the advancing Red Army as a potential ally, and Home Army partisans stopped identifying themselves to the new invaders. Some dropped their arms and melted into the civilian population. Others stayed in the forest and hunkered down to see what would happen next.

  Tales of what had happened in eastern Poland quickly reached Warsaw. Although the Home Army’s leaders in the Polish capital had only sporadic contact with London, and although they knew little about the progress of the rest of the war, they did know that the Red Army was arresting and disarming their comrades. In an atmosphere of confusion and panic, on August 1 they launched the brave but disastrous Warsaw Uprising in an attempt to overthrow the Nazis and liberate Warsaw before the Red Army entered the central part of the city. The Germans fought back, brutally. British and American planes, mainly flown by Polish and South African airmen, bravely dropped food and ammunition for the rebels, though not enough to make a difference. The Red Army, by then just across the river, stationed itself in the eastern suburbs and did nothing. Stalin refused permission for Allied planes carrying aid for the rebels to land on Soviet territory.27

  Though Stalin would later affect to know nothing of the uprising, the Red Army’s spies watched the fighting in Warsaw very carefully, and they kept close track of the public mood. In early October, as the rebellion drew to a tragic and terrible e
nd, a Red Army colonel described the situation in one of many detailed reports to Moscow. Though hundreds of thousands of people had died and the city had, in practice, ceased to exist—after the uprising ended, the Germans systematically dynamited buildings that were still standing and forced all survivors into labor camps—his primary concern was the relationship between the remnants of the Home Army and the much smaller People’s Guard, the Gwardia Ludowa, the armed wing of the communist party. The former, he complained, was not sharing weapons with the latter. Worse, Home Army leaders were spreading negative propaganda about the USSR:

  In bulletins, they emphasize the insignificant assistance that the rebels had received from Soviet air drops, and at the same time praise the Anglo-American effort. Thus is it clear that this organization is preparing action against the Red Army … Rumours are also spreading to the effect that the Polish Army [the Polish troops under Soviet command] are Soviet spies who have nothing in common with Polish national interests.28

  After the uprising was over—after Warsaw was burned to the ground, the leaders of the Polish Underground State were dead or in German prison camps, and some 200,000 people had been killed—the tone of the field officers’ reports to headquarters and of Beria’s reports to Stalin grew harsher. On November 1, Beria filed a report to Stalin describing the “anti-Soviet activity of the White-Polish-Nationalist Bandit Revolutionary organizations,” by which he meant the Home Army leadership.29 Later that month, Soviet field commanders recommended an “increase of repressive measures” against all armed Home Army members. Red Army troops were pulled from the front, more NKVD troops were procured, and at last the forces of the new Polish secret police were sent to do battle, literally, with the Polish resistance.30 Thanks in particular to the NKVD reinforcement, 3,692 Home Army members were under arrest by the third week of November 1944. By December 1, the number was 5,069.31