The Polish Factor

Just as the Ukrainian nationalists assessed the state of the world from their own perspective, so did the Polish Government-in-Exile and the Polish Home Army. These Ukrainian and Polish frames of reference remained irreconcilable.

After the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941, the governments of the United Kingdom and the USSR established an anti-German mili­tary alliance on 12 July. Poland, Great Britain’s closest ally, followed suit. On 30 July 1941 General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the prime minister of the Polish Government-in-Exile, and Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to Great Britain, reopened full diplomatic relations between Poland and the USSR. In this treaty, the USSR annulled all of its 1939 agreements with Nazi Germany, but it did not explicitly recognize the pre-war Polish­Soviet borders, which the 1921 Treaty of Riga hammered out.¹⁵⁰ Two weeks later, the two governments signed a military alliance treaty, creating a forty-thousand-man Polish army on Soviet soil.

Due primarily to the USSR’s refusal to recognize the precise coordinates of Poland’s eastern borders after the war, the Polish Government-in-Exile and the USSR became wary allies against Nazi Germany. Both the Soviets as well as the British promised to help the Polish Government-in-Exile’s ex­tensive anti-German underground network in Poland, but it “received as little practical support” from the Soviets as it did from the Western Allies.¹⁵¹

Shortly after the Polish army surrendered in September 1939, Sikorski established the Union for Armed Struggle (ZWZ) as occupied Poland’s military resistance movement, one of the largest in Nazi-subjugated Europe. In February 1942, in response to Nazi terror, he reorganized the ZWZ into the Home Army (Armia Krajewa, or AK), which united vari­ous independent detachments operating in the German- and Soviet occu­pied zones and attracted approximately 400,000 men and women.

Led by Pilsudski’s acolytes, the AK cautiously accepted the authority of the more broadly based (but fragile) London exile government, composed of representatives of the pre-war political parties opposed to Pilsudski’s policies. The London government developed Poland’s overall strategy and negotiated with its allies; the AK fought in the streets and fields 1,450 ki­lometres (900 miles) away. The Polish Government-in-Exile did not di­rectly control all of the Home Army’s day-to-day operations. Despite the political and logistical strains between them, both groups proclaimed the necessity to restore Poland to its pre-September 1939 borders. But in the course of the war, the AK - which courageously fought in the disputed territories - watched helplessly as the British and Soviet governments forced the Polish Government-in-Exile to abandon this strategic goal.

Even before Sikorski’s death in an airline crash in Gibraltar on 4 July 1943, the uneasy relationship between his government and the USSR col­lapsed. On 13 April the German mass media announced that their troops had discovered mass graves of Polish officers near the Katyn Forest in former Eastern Poland and claimed that the Soviets had executed them prior to the outbreak of the German-Soviet War on 22 June 1941. The Soviets vociferously denied this accusation, insisting that the Germans committed the crime months after their invasion. The Polish Government­in-Exile, which had always suspected Soviet complicity in the disappear­ance of twenty-two thousand Polish officers the Red Army captured in September-October 1939, asked the International Red Cross to investi­gate. Angered that the Poles had publicly questioned the integrity of the Soviet Union’s anti-fascist credentials, Stalin broke off relations with the Government-in-Exile and openly cultivated Polish pro-Soviet groups within the USSR in order to form Poland’s first post-war government.¹⁵²

In response to the uncertainties concerning Poland’s eastern frontiers, the Polish government-in exile and the leadership of the Home Army launched operations to gain as much ground as possible before the Soviet advance into the kresy.

After the Soviet army crossed the Bug (Buh) River on 22 July 1944 and entered the territory Moscow would designate as the post-war Polish state, the Soviet government created the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) in Lublin. Partially in response to this political shockwave, on 1 August the AK launched the Warsaw Uprising, which sought to seize the capital from the Germans, just before the arrival of Soviet troops. Shortly after the Germans brutally crushed the largest urban insurrection of the Second World War in early October, Winston Churchill forced Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, Sikorski’s successor as prime minister, to accept the creation of the Soviet-sponsored Lublin government and Poland’s new truncated bor­ders. The Soviet Union recognized the Lublin government as Poland’s pro­visional government on 31 December 1944. At Potsdam, the first Allied summit after the war in Europe ended, the British and US governments ac­knowledged the PKWN’s successor, the Provisional Government of National Unity (TRJN), on 30 June 1945 as Poland’s legitimate post-war government. Ostensibly a coalition government, which included Mikolajczyk and other representatives of the London-based Polish Government-in-Exile, the TRJN soon emerged as a communist-led government.¹⁵³

Willing to sacrifice tens of millions of soldiers and civilians and taking ad­vantage of all the opportunities that came his way, Stalin in the course of the war beat back the Germans, reacquired the pre-22 June 1941 Soviet border­lands in the West, occupied Poland, marginalized the Polish Government-in- Exile, neutered the Home Army, and installed a new pro-Soviet government in a smaller Poland.

In an age of nationalism, most viewed states with large territories as powerful nations. Much like the Poles, Ukrainian nationalists sought to gain possession of the maximum amount of the land they claimed and to fend off the Soviets.¹⁵⁴ Much like the Poles, they failed.