The Allies and the Polish government-in-exile asked Moscow what had happened to the missing Poles, but the Soviet vice-commissar for foreign affairs scoffed at rumors of any skullduggery. Then on April 21 the Soviet Union went ahead with its plans and signed a friendship pact with the Communist-dominated Provisional Government of Poland that tied the two countries together for twenty years. This fait accompli was presented to the world on the eve of the United Nations founding meeting in San Francisco.
At the big UN event in San Francisco on May 3, in response to yet another query from his allies, Commissar Molotov casually informed Secretary of State Stettinius and Foreign Secretary Eden that indeed the Polish leaders had been arrested and would be put on trial in Moscow. This shocking admission demonstrated what Soviet-led reconciliation meant.
Inside the State Department there was consternation, all the more so as the experts were convinced that the Soviet government was violating the Yalta agreements in Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. What would happen in Germany was still up in the air, and the prognosis not good.45
In Moscow, Stalin directed proceedings against the captured Polish leaders. He was informed of their interrogations and worked on the indictments, just as he had for the big show trials in the 1930s. He wanted the accused put through a similar staged event in Moscow’s House of Trade Unions. The defendants were charged with involvement in underground activities in the western regions of Ukraine and Byelorussia, as well as Lithuania and Poland. They were said to have organized an “illegal army” and, following orders from the émigré government in London, carried out subversive and “terrorist acts” against Soviet occupation forces.46
At this very moment, when the Polish leaders were being interrogated down the street, presidential envoy Harry Hopkins was confiding his concerns to Stalin about the recent deterioration in Soviet-American relations. What was happening in Poland to non-Communist political parties, he said, was indicative of how other nations in the Soviet occupation area were being treated. “American public opinion” was reacting negatively, and the president felt some changes were needed “to find a common basis to go forward.”47
Instead of answering, Stalin had “several disturbing questions” of his own in regard to the United States. He emphasized that American attitudes to his country “had perceptibly cooled once it became obvious that Germany was defeated,” and it seemed almost “as though the Americans were saying that the Russians were no longer needed.” What stuck in his craw was that Lend-Lease had been ended without notice. Nor did he appreciate U.S. meddling in Polish affairs or putting France on the postwar commission that was to determine war reparations and allocate them. That “looked like an attempt to humiliate the Russians,” he said, and he accused Hopkins of hiding behind American public opinion to divert attention from the real source of the objections, namely the Truman administration.48
Over the next several days, the weary and unwell Hopkins tried to set the record straight and break through a number of roadblocks, above all on the Polish question. Stalin would not concede a thing, and in his usual style, he said that if there were infringements on freedom of speech in Poland, then they were needed “for security reasons.” If not all political parties could compete in elections there, surely, he said, that was the case as well in the United States and Britain, where the fascists were barred from participating. If the Soviet Union acted on its own instead of in concert with its allies, it was compelled to do so by circumstances.
Stalin was the master negotiator, tireless, shrewd, and with deep knowledge that he could use as needed. When he met with less prominent persons, such as Hopkins, he completely dominated them with his grasp of the issues, down to the minute details. Anyone reading his exchanges will realize immediately that it was the height of folly for Presidents Roosevelt and Truman to have dreamed of negotiating alone with him.
Hopkins ran up against Stalin’s techniques at an evening session on May 30. Finally the beleaguered envoy confessed that “rightly or wrongly there was a strong feeling among the American people that the Soviet Union wished to dominate Poland.” President Truman, Hopkins said, was prepared to accept that the “Lublin Poles” (that is, the Communists) would have the majority in any new provisional Polish government, but he wanted additional persons to be represented in the discussions. Appallingly, Hopkins admitted that the United States “had no interest in seeing anyone connected with the present Polish government in London involved in the new Provisional Government of Poland.” Personally, he did not “believe that the British had any such ideas” either. That statement not only spelled the doom of the London Poles; it sealed the political fate of the millions they represented. In retrospect, this capitulation to the Soviet Union shows the weakness of the American stance.49
Little wonder that Stalin promptly agreed to have a few non-Communist Poles on the Tripartite Commission, which since February had been sitting in Moscow, working on the shape of a new Polish government and trying to broaden its democratic basis. Hopkins reported excitedly to Washington that in accepting these (insignificant) changes, Stalin was once again carrying out the Yalta agreements.50
Truman was positively delighted or at least relieved that he had something to show for standing up to the Soviets and calling on them to live up to their agreements. He confided in his diary on June 7, after Hopkins had returned, that the Russians had “always been our friends and I can’t see why they shouldn’t always be.”51
Stalin won American support by agreeing to allow three representatives from the “London Poles” into the discussions, including the head of the Polish government-in-exile, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, who traveled to Moscow. There on June 17, the first day the Polish representatives spoke among themselves, Mikołajczyk made himself instantly unpopular by claiming that a Communist leader like Bolesław Bierut would never be accepted as president by democratic forces in their country. It did not matter what he said. A disappointed Mikołajczyk and the rest of the new government flew back to Warsaw on June 27—appropriately enough, he wrote later—on Russian transport planes. The Provisional Government of National Unity was proclaimed the next day, and though formally a coalition of parties, it was controlled by the Communists.52
On July 5 the United States officially recognized the new Poland, and at Truman’s request, the British followed suit. Nevertheless, Stalin let the show trial of the sixteen Polish opposition leaders take its course that month. Hopkins had tried to dissuade him from that but managed only to get a feeble gesture from Stalin that the accused would be treated “leniently.” Mikołajczyk again pleaded for their release before he left for Warsaw, but Molotov replied only that any “objective judge” would find the proceedings “fair.” The judges sitting before General Okulicki gave him ten years in prison and Jankowski eight; neither survived their stay in custody. The others received lighter sentences.53
The entire episode represented another victory for the Communists. Stalin was already distributing spoils to the victors, promising Marshal Rokossovsky that he would soon be made Poland’s minister of defense. This was the very leader of the Red Army who in 1944—as far as Polish non-Communists were concerned—had stood idly by on the opposite bank of the Vistula River while the Nazis finished off the Warsaw Uprising. Finally, in 1949 Rokossovsky was not only given the portfolio he coveted but was also made Poland’s deputy prime minister.54