Roger Moorhouse - The Devils' Alliance - Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939-1941

Poland’s future was also in grave doubt. Now wholly occupied by the Germans, with its government in exile in Britain, it endured a shadowy existence that, were it not for the collective memory of 123 years of foreign occupation prior to 1918, might have been considered terminal. Of course, the outbreak of war between the two powers that had invaded and divided the country in 1939 was to be welcomed, as it held at least the possibility that Poland’s suffering might be brought to an end. But Poland’s predicament was more complex than that. Unlike the British, the Poles had considered themselves to be at war with both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union prior to June 1941, and few relished the prospect of now finding an accommodation with the latter. Moreover, Poland itself was not at one remove from the fighting. The Soviet and German occupations had already unleashed unprecedented brutality on their helpless populations, and Polish politicians and military leaders in exile in Britain were acutely aware that the new phase of the conflict had recently raged over the former Polish eastern territories—lands that, for many of them, were very familiar indeed. Far from edging toward its end, therefore, Poland’s calvary seemed to have entered a new, darker chapter.

So, when the Soviet ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky, sat down in Whitehall to meet the Polish premier, General Władysław Sikorski, the tension was palpable. The plump, avuncular Maisky and the stern, vain Sikorski were in some sense polar opposites. In his later memoir, Maisky was much amused to relate the story of how Sikorski had arrived preceded by an entourage of adjutants who swept through the building “pushing aside those whom they met” and shouting, “The General is coming! The General is coming!” Upon entering the room, Maisky wrote, Sikorski—in full dress uniform—had glanced toward him, and “a slight grimace of surprise, almost of indignation, passed over his face.” He told himself that the general’s reaction was due to the “light-heartedness” of his summer suit, but Sikorski’s look of contempt was almost certainly not sartorial in origin.

That chilly disdain set the tone for the negotiations that followed. Sikorski had believed that, given the Soviet Union’s new predicament, Poland was entitled to expect Stalin to cancel the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Indeed, he had been aggrieved that Churchill had not demanded some sort of quid pro quo along these lines, before pledging British assistance to Moscow two weeks earlier. In the circumstances, Sikorski saw that it fell to him not only to try to undo the profound harm that nearly two years of Soviet occupation, persecution, and deportation had wrought on his people but also to secure some guarantee of Poland’s future existence. These principles, then, formed the essence of his opening demands to Maisky: the Soviet Union was to formally renounce the Nazi-Soviet Pact and to free all Polish military and civilian prisoners still held in Soviet jails and gulags. In return, normal diplomatic relations would be restored between the two, and he would authorize the formation of a Polish army from the 300,000 soldiers still thought to be in Soviet hands.

Inevitably, the talks were fraught. For one thing, Sikorski was not above bluntly airing a few grievances. “You hate the Germans as much as we,” he said to Maisky during their first meeting. “You ought never to have made agreement with them in 1939.” In reply, Maisky could only laugh nervously and counter, “All that is past history.” In addition, the negotiations were certainly not helped by the logistics required of holding their discussions in London; Maisky needed to refer back to Stalin in Moscow regularly, which could require a few days for messages to pass both ways. Sikorski, too, was obliged to report back to his cabinet, which could be an uncomfortable experience. Consequently, the two would hold only two meetings in London in July, thereafter using Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden as an intermediary, and so were still little closer to agreement when Sir Stafford Cripps and Molotov signed the Anglo-Soviet Agreement—pledging mutual assistance in the war against Hitler—on July 12 in Moscow.

The primary sticking point in London was Poland’s frontiers. The two sides naturally had rival conceptions of what Poland’s—at that point rather theoretical—geographical extent should be. Sikorski suggested that, given the demise of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Polish eastern border should revert to that of August 1939. Moscow meanwhile instructed Maisky to view Poland within what he called her “ethnographical” limits, which very broadly approximated to the border agreed on by Molotov and Ribbentrop. Although both parties would eventually negotiate a compromise position—effectively postponing any decision on frontiers to an unspecified later date—the issue would overshadow further talks, becoming a touchstone of Poland’s understandably limited trust in its new Soviet partner.

The second obstacle was the issue of the many Poles—civilian and military—still detained in the Soviet Union. Sikorski demanded the release of all Polish prisoners of war and deportees under Soviet control as an essential condition of any agreement. But this put Maisky in a difficult position because to free such prisoners would not only imply that their arrest and deportation had been illegal but also cast the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in a very dubious light. He therefore countered that he saw no reason why a Pole convicted of a crime by the Soviets should now have his conviction quashed. Sikorski tersely retorted that the Soviets regarded Poles as criminals simply for being Polish citizens and added that not demanding their release would be tantamount to accepting Moscow’s right to judge them. Realizing the seriousness of the impasse, Eden, who chaired the meeting, sought to postpone any decision until the broader diplomatic framework had been agreed—as had been done with the issue of frontiers—but neither side was willing to give.

At this point, the talks were close to collapse. Sikorski faced a revolt from within his own cabinet on July 25, when three ministers resigned in protest of their premier’s handling of the negotiations. The British, meanwhile, were eager for agreement and desperately tried to reassure both sides while seeking to delay the discussion of all contentious issues until some future undefined date. The British government, as Churchill would later recall, was on the horns of a dilemma. Having gone to war in defense of Poland, he wrote, “we had a strong obligation to support the interests of our first ally [and]could not admit the legality of the Russian occupation of Polish territory in 1939.” However, in the maelstrom of summer 1941, “we could not force our new and sorely threatened ally [the USSR] to abandon, even on paper, regions on her frontiers which she had regarded for generations as vital to her security. There was no way out.” In consequence, he lamented, “we had the invidious responsibility of recommending that General Sikorski rely on Soviet good faith in the future settlement of Russian-Polish relations.” As Churchill well knew, the problem for the Poles was that the phrase “Soviet good faith” was not one that they recognized.

The breakthrough came on July 27. In his memoir, Maisky predictably praised the “insistence and flexibility of the Soviet government” in bringing the “long arguments and acute polemics” to a successful conclusion. Eden credited Sikorski’s statesmanship while acknowledging Britain’s role as one of “patient diplomacy tinged with anxiety for what the future must hold for the Poles.” Cripps, meanwhile, congratulated himself for his extended negotiations with Stalin in Moscow and, crucially, for “persuading him to grant an immediate amnesty to every Polish citizen detained in this country.” The idea of an amnesty was controversial—and has even been considered an error—but it neatly sidestepped the divisive issue of the legality of the Soviet occupation, allowing the Soviets to release the prisoners while saving face. It certainly broke the deadlock, but it has rankled with many Poles ever since; how could those countless thousands of Poles be “amnestied,” they would ask, when they had committed no crime?