The British had gone to war in alliance with Poland, and had even guaranteed her territory. However, Stalin wanted to annex a good part of the Polish east — lands that were mainly Ukrainian or Byelorussian, which he could attach to the Soviet republics of those names, for the sake of what he himself called a Bolshevik version of Pan-Slavism. Since the Red Army occupied the area in 1944, and went on to occupy the entire country in 1945, there was not much that the British could achieve on the ground. Churchill tried. The deal which the British had in mind was a sacrifice of the eastern lands in exchange for western lands taken from Germany, and that deal was implicitly agreed at the Teheran conference late in 1943. The British wanted the Polish government in London exile to accept this, with a further guarantee that the country, no doubt neutral, would have its independence respected by Stalin. But there was too much bad blood. Stalin, occupying the Soviet part of the country in the early part of the war, had behaved atrociously, murdering 15,000 Polish officers at Katyń and elsewhere, and deporting hundreds of thousands of people. Almost no Pole was prepared to cede the historic cities of the east, and even when Churchill was in Moscow in October 1944 to negotiate over the issue, one of the Polish delegates, a professor, chose to lecture him for a long time on the historic rights of Poland in that region. It is just thinkable that, in exchange for an agreed cession of the eastern territories, Poland might indeed have been neutral and independent.
An equivalent such deal was successfully done over Finland. The Russians had attacked her in the winter of 1939-40, with a view to seizing lands north of Leningrad; after several months, in which blundering Soviet soldiers were outmanoeuvred by white-clad Finnish soldiers sliding on skis from ambushes, the Finns had had to surrender; they lost the lands, but, when Hitler attacked the USSR, joined up with him to take them back. If they had then cut the supply line to Leningrad, that city would have collapsed, and would have faced the utter extinction that Hitler had promised it. However, the Finns’ leader, Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, knew his Russia — he had been a cavalry general under the Tsar — and told his intimates that if the Finns acted ‘they will never forgive us’. The Finns stopped, dragged their feet, maintained a link to Moscow through Stockholm, got out of the war in September 1944, and fought the Germans in their far north. In the resulting peace, Finland lost land, had to pay reparations (mainly in timber), conceded a Russian base and proclaimed neutrality. But there was no Soviet occupation, and parliamentary democracy was maintained at the cost, now and again, of grubby concessions (would-be Soviet defectors were, for instance, handed back).
The London Poles did not give way and it may not anyway have made a difference. Poland was much larger than Finland, in a much more strategic position — on the way to Germany — and in any case strongly anti-Soviet or even just anti-Russian (at Potsdam, Stalin openly said that a free election would mean an anti-Soviet government). Sad battles went on in the eastern territories as the Red Army settled in, and local Lithuanians or Ukrainians tried to establish themselves in the historic Polish cities: very young Polish hotheads were killed in defence of Vilna, for instance, and are remembered with cheap iron crosses in the old cemetery; and there was a battle in Balzac’s old haunt, Wierzchównia, in which the entire village was wiped out by Ukrainian partisans. Five million Poles were expelled from these regions as the Red Army cleared them out. They were settled in turn mainly in the formerly German lands that had been assigned to Poland as compensation, from which 3 million Germans had themselves been expelled. Shattered Warsaw was reoccupied by 1.5 million people. Inflation was rife, and in 1945 and 1946 the average monthly wage in Poland bought ten pounds of meat or sugar; bottles were currency; there were epidemics of venereal disease. Late in 1945 an amnesty brought 30,000 demoralized men from hiding. The non-Communists were in no position to resist with any force. On the other hand, Poland had ‘a mass of manoeuvre’ in the sense that the population was greater and the territory quite large; besides, the Western embassies had treaty rights, and the Communists had public opinion in the USA to consider. Also, there was Catholicism, and that required some management. Still, at Yalta the Western powers had given way, in exchange for a guarantee that the Soviet Union would help against Japan. There were supposed to be free elections but everyone knew what these would entail. When Roosevelt told Stalin that the American Lithuanians might object if their country were taken into the USSR, Stalin said, ‘You want a referendum? It can be arranged.’ With a near 100 per cent ‘yes’ vote, this duly happened. The British and the Americans (though not the Vatican or the Irish) recognized the Communist-based Polish government, provided that some (unimportant) ministries went to non-Communists. It was now up to Stalin’s Polish collaborators to manage the takeover.
The people who did the stage-managing were acute and energetic enough, and Marxism was a useful training. They were widely hated, and eventually lost, but many lived on to a great age, and an enterprising journalist got them, in retirement, in small, overheated, book-lined flats, to talk. The head of the Secret Service, responsible for espionage and lengthy prison sentences, was Jakub Berman — forty-four in 1945, son of a Warsaw commercial traveller with five children, and he went on to higher education. Most of the family were wiped out by the Nazis at Treblinka, though one brother managed, as secretary of the Jewish resistance organization, to escape, eventually to Israel. Berman himself had the advantage of talking Russian, because he had attended the main Warsaw Russian school, and he reached the Soviet zone early on. Then he went through the grim and dedicated political school, and attracted the attention of a Comintern chief, Dmitry Manuilsky, and lived in a chauffeur’s room on the fifth floor of the Hotel Lux (there was a telephone in the corridor, which no-one, for fear that it might be the NKVD police, dared to answer; it was part of the sinister surrealism of the place that when he did eventually answer an insistent ringing, someone asked him about a Polish Communist writing on Africa). Berman then cultivated the obviously up-and-coming Soviet officials Nikita Khrushchev, in the western Ukraine, and Boris Ponomarev, in Byelorussia, who was to be head of the International Department of the Central Committee, the successor to the Comintern. As the Red Army moved forward, Berman was one of the very few Poles whom Stalin trusted, and in Warsaw he took over the Security Service, the UB, with its networks everywhere, and he was a main architect of the new regime, arranging for the persecution and silencing of opponents. In case such men might let him down, Stalin would be a constant presence, even telephoning at midnight to catch them off their guard. But there were figures ostensibly less sinister than Berman. The press chief, Stefan Staszewski, had had a terrible history. Born in 1906, son of a Jewish small tradesman, he became a law student, joined the Communist Party, went to the Comintern school in Moscow for three years, and then served as youth secretary in south-east Poland, where the Party tried for an alliance with Ukrainian nationalists. He was arrested, fled to the USSR in 1934, and was sentenced there to eight years in a camp, in the terrible frozen Kolyma. A brother was murdered in the USSR; his mother was murdered at Treblinka. A man such as Staszewski only really had the Party as a mental and emotional focus, and in 1948 he was its press chief. Or there was Roman Werfel, socially above Staszewski, in that his father was a prosperous lawyer in the chief city of the south-east, Lwów, when it was one of the great places of the Austrian empire. There was a portrait of the Emperor on the wall and the family spoke German at home. Roman — like so many other boys of this class — despised religion, ate ham sandwiches at school, and was beaten up by other Jewish pupils. Then it was Vienna and Communism, followed by Berlin and a return to Poland, where he organized strikes on the noble Sapieha family estate at Rawa Ruska, where the peasants were generally Ukrainian. In 1939 he escaped to the Soviet zone, and joined up with the Moscow Communists as head of the ideological section. As such, he came to run much of the educational and cultural side of Polish Communism, but he was very erudite, and he did use his influence to help people who, in, say, Prague, would have been cleaning boilers. There were others who followed the Stalinist line and who were as much its captives as its advocates, and their loss of office later on probably came as a relief. Of the people the journalist spoke to, the only unrepentant figure was Julia Minc, widow of the one-time economic chief. Her past was part prison (for membership of Communist Youth, in 1922), part France, part Samarkand, where her husband, during the war, taught economics. Her interview with the journalist was pure agitprop, delivered with contempt, and when the journalist demurred, she told the dog to bite her.