Well before the full scope of Romania’s disaster became apparent, Marshal Ion Antonescu began looking for a way out, even as he assured Hitler on August 5 that he would stay the course. Instead, King Michael and assorted political groups ousted him from power on August 23. Moscow was not entirely pleased with that action because it preempted the Red Army’s “liberation.” They entered Bucharest only at the end of the month. One Jewish writer noted that their victory parade was met with bewilderment, alternating between “great waves of enthusiasm” and a “certain reserve.” Some watchers did not appreciate the Jews who applauded, so anti-Semitism and anti-Communism persisted even after Antonescu’s fall.76
As in most of the liberated countries, when the Romanian government collapsed and the German occupation forces were driven out, the result was a political vacuum. Regardless of popular attitudes and the little support for Communism, the Soviet Union promptly set about creating a new regime; it tried to conceal that it was in fact dominated by the Communist Party.
Meanwhile, Hungary was still in the war and determined to hold back the Reds. Dictator Admiral Miklós Horthy had been delighted to participate in the invasion of the Soviet Union. Just like Antonescu, he wanted to be part of Hitler’s crusade against what they all called “Jewish Bolshevism.”77 But with Romania and Bulgaria already knocked out, Horthy had a change of heart, and in early October he sent a delegation to Moscow. There they agreed that Hungary would change sides and declare war on Germany. The deal was made on October 11, and Horthy broadcast the astounding news four days later. In response, Hitler sent Otto Skorzeny and his crew, who kidnapped Horthy’s son. The Hungarian leader was then blackmailed into following Hitler’s orders.
On October 18, Horthy accepted asylum in Germany after having resigned in favor of Ferenc Szálasi, leader of the fascist Iron Cross. The new leader did not want to defend Budapest as such, for as a trained general staff officer, he knew it would mean the obliteration of the city. Nevertheless, Hitler demanded that Budapest be held at all costs and on November 23 directed that no house be abandoned without a fight. Soon the siege began. It was one of the worst in the war.78 Red Army soldiers were thrown into battle with reckless disregard for casualties; Stalin wanted to advance to the west as far and as fast as possible, and to ensure Soviet control over Budapest and Hungary.
There, as in all the other enemy countries that his armies overran, he soon set out to transform them. In order to disguise his intentions, he had each of them adopt a “national front” model, with various political parties in a coalition government. For his Western Allies, the priority was beating Hitler. That was Stalin’s priority as well, but his political goals were always integral to his calculations.
CHAPTER 5
Taking Eastern Europe
Stalin always had time to think about the future of Communism. Even in the midst of the crisis in August 1941, while sitting in a Moscow air-raid shelter, he pondered the future of Poland. He told Comintern boss Georgi Dimitrov that “it would be better to create a workers’ party” of some kind there, not a Communist one, because it “frightens off not only outsiders, but some who sympathize with us as well.”1 It is interesting to note how far ahead Stalin was thinking, all the more with the Germans at the gates. He and Dimitrov knew that during the Great Terror of 1937–38, the NKVD had killed off most of the exiled Polish comrades. Now, in 1941, they began fashioning a new Polish Workers’ Party (PPR).
The messages sent out from Dimitrov’s desk to PPR activists in Poland a year later gave them their talking points. They should underline that they stood for driving out the Nazi invaders, winning national freedom, and establishing “people’s democratic power.”2 They must drop any mention of Communism and avoid creating the impression that they were “heading toward the Sovietization of Poland, which in current conditions could only play into the hands of various provocateurs and enemies of the Polish people.”3
UPRISING IN WARSAW
During 1943, Stalin became the most powerful military and political figure in the world, and by the next year his country’s armed forces could have defeated Germany by themselves; at least that was what he told his generals. Even though his Cold War political agenda was becoming more obvious, Roosevelt and Churchill repressed their worries. They wanted victory first. But in August–September 1944, they could easily have been more insistent when Stalin steadfastly rejected their appeals to support the democratically oriented resistance movement in Poland.
On July 18, 1944, the Polish Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow instructed its activists in the homeland to set up a national front and said that these would soon be created also “in France, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Yugoslavia, etc.” The principle that Communists were to adopt, in Poland and elsewhere, came right out of Stalin’s handbook. Moderation was the byword. The Poles were told that their new approach would require “compromises which will split our opponents without fundamentally altering our aim.” The point was “satisfying the major demands of the masses and creating a situation favorable to our long-term plans.”4 The Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) was established on July 22 in newly liberated Chełm, in the province of Lublin. It was a cover for the Communist Party, and henceforth Stalin treated it as Poland’s legitimate government.5
The main Polish opposition to the Communists was the officially recognized Polish government-in-exile. It had been in London since 1939 and had many loyal followers who fought in their homeland against the Nazis. They were non-Communist in orientation but prepared to cooperate with the Red Army when it crossed into Poland in joint operations against the Nazis. Additionally, the Soviet Union mobilized large numbers of Poles to fight, both alongside the Red Army and as partisans.6
The Red Army’s offensive reached the Vistula at the end of July 1944 and some of Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky’s troops got to the western bank of the river below Warsaw. A number of the mighty T-34 tanks actually broke through into one of its eastern suburbs on July 31. But then everything came to a halt.7
On August 1, against Stalin’s wishes, the London-based Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) began the Warsaw Uprising. It was led by General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, but the motives behind the effort are still disputed. The Polish government-in-exile hoped to mobilize its troops to prevent the worst when its country was changing hands from the Nazis to the Soviets. Many, like Prime Minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk in London, wanted to reclaim Poland’s prewar borders and its independence. As far back as 1943, these “London Poles” told the British and Americans that there would be an uprising at some point in the future, but opinions among them remained divided, also about the Soviet Union. None of them, however, had any intention of fighting the Red Army.8
Had an uprising succeeded, politicians devoted to national independence might have come to power. Not surprisingly, Stalin refused to offer any aid, in spite of being implored by Roosevelt and Churchill; he preferred to have the Germans snuff out the resistance.9 Since 1941, Moscow had been sending in members of the Polish Comintern to organize its own partisan movement.10 As the Kremlin saw matters, had the Warsaw Uprising succeeded and a “bourgeois Poland” been established, it would necessarily be an “agent of imperialism.”11