Stalin: A Biography

In fact the Polish anti-German resistance had secretly been preparing an uprising in Warsaw, and plans were at an advanced stage. Nationalists, far from wanting to welcome the Red Army, hoped to overturn Nazism in Warsaw without Soviet interference. The purpose was to prevent Poland falling prey to the USSR after liberation from Germany. The military organisation was led by the Home Army, and the Warsaw Uprising began on 1 August. It was a brave but doomed endeavour. The Germans brought in the Wehrmacht and steadily the rebels were picked off and defeated. The fighting was over by 2 October.

The Red Army’s lengthy period of recuperation and re-equipment caused much adverse comment both at the time and in subsequent years. The Home Army, while planning to defeat the Germans in Warsaw by Polish efforts, pleaded desperately for Soviet support and received almost nothing. Not that the question of earlier military intervention failed to be raised in Moscow; indeed there had been no angrier discussion in Stavka since before the battle of Kursk. Unfortunately almost nothing is known about who said what until the Warsaw Uprising was over. Zhukov, the military professional, was still arguing the need for a prolonged pause in early October. Molotov took the opposite side, demanding an immediate offensive. Beria made mischief among the disputants, delighting in pitting one member of Stavka against another. Stalin predictably leaned towards Molotov: action was his preference. But Zhukov persisted. Eventually Stalin gave way, albeit with his customary lack of grace.³ Zhukov had won the debate at the expense of piling up problems for his relations with Stalin at the war’s end. The Red Army drew itself up on the eastern bank of the Vistula and stayed put for the rest of the year.

What Stalin said to Zhukov was probably not the full extent of his thinking. The weary condition of the Red Army was only one of the factors to be weighed in the balance. Stalin was already looking for ways to secure political dominance over Poland during and after the war. His experience in the Soviet–Polish War of 1920 had convinced him that Poles were untrustworthy because their patriotism outweighed their class consciousness. ‘Once a Pole, always a Pole’ might have been his motto in dealing with them and their elites. He was determined that whatever Polish state emerged from the débris of the war would stay under the hegemony of the USSR. This meant that the émigré government based in London was to be treated as illegitimate and that any armed organisation formed by the Poles in Poland would be treated likewise. Stalin felt no incentive to handle Poles sympathetically. He had ordered the murder of thousands of captured Polish officers in April 1940 in Katyn forest in Russia. He no more wanted the survival of Poland’s political and military elite than he aimed to preserve the elites in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — and he was long practised in the art of solving public problems by means of the physical liquidation of those who embodied them.

Stalin also had objective strategic reasons for refusing to start an early offensive across the Vistula. Hitler and his commanders in August had treated the Red Army as the most urgent enemy and left the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising to their security units while the Wehrmacht massed by the river to repulse any attempt at a crossing by Rokossovski. The German authorities were confident they could easily suppress Polish insurgents. What was militarily inexcusable in Stalin’s behaviour, however, was his rejection of all Polish pleas for assistance once the Warsaw Uprising had begun on 1 August 1944. Churchill detected the dirty work and rebuked the Kremlin.⁴ British aircraft based in Italy were dispatched to drop supplies to the Poles. But Stalin was immovable and the Red Army did not budge.