The Provisional Government of National Unity

On 28 June 1945 in Warsaw, Bolesław Bierut, President of the State National Council (KRN), appointed the Provisional Government of National Unity (TRJN). The prime minister remained the socialist Edward Osóbka-Morawski, who had headed the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland. The first deputy prime minister was Władysław Gomułka, general secretary of the Polish Workers’ Party (PPR); the second deputy prime minister and minister of agriculture and land reform was Stanisław Mikołajczyk, a former prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile. The government was sworn in the same day.

The new cabinet was meant to carry out the decision of the Yalta Conference that the government operating in Poland should be “reorganised on a broader democratic basis” by including politicians from both Poland and the emigration, and should then hold “free and unfettered elections”. In practice the new government was simply the old Provisional Government enlarged: the key ministries stayed in the hands of the communists and their allies, while Mikołajczyk’s people received only a few of the twenty-one portfolios. For Britain and the United States, however, its formation was reason enough to recognise it a week later and to withdraw recognition from the Polish government in London, to which they had been bound since September 1939.

Two governments for one Poland

From the summer of 1944 there were two Polish centres of power. The government in London, led from November 1944 by the socialist Tomasz Arciszewski, was recognised by the Western powers; it commanded the Polish Armed Forces in the West and the structures of the Polish Underground State at home. On the other side stood the centre created under Moscow’s patronage: the State National Council headed by Bierut, and the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN), set up in July 1944 and transformed on 31 December 1944 into the Provisional Government. The USSR recognised it in the first days of January 1945, and after the Red Army and the Polish 1st Army entered Warsaw it moved to the ruined capital.

Mikołajczyk, prime minister of the government-in-exile from July 1943, tried to reach an understanding with Stalin without agreeing to the loss of the eastern lands. During the Moscow Conference in October 1944 he was told by Molotov that the border on the Curzon Line had in effect already been agreed at Tehran. Unable to persuade his cabinet to compromise, he resigned on 24 November 1944. From then on he was a politician without office, but with the backing of much of the peasant movement at home and the confidence of Churchill, who saw him as the only Polish politician capable of coming to terms with Moscow.

At Yalta in February 1945 the Big Three agreed that the Provisional Government would be enlarged, and that consultations with Polish politicians would be conducted in Moscow by a commission made up of Molotov and the American and British ambassadors, Averell Harriman and Archibald Clark Kerr. Arciszewski’s government rejected the Yalta decisions as taken without Poland’s participation or knowledge. Mikołajczyk chose a different path: in April 1945, under pressure from Churchill, he declared publicly that he accepted the conference’s decisions, including those on the eastern border. This opened the way to talks for him, but severed his ties with the government in London.

The commission’s deadlock and the Hopkins mission

The Moscow commission met for the first time at the end of February and stalled almost at once. Molotov treated the Provisional Government as the core of the future cabinet and insisted that the Warsaw politicians decide whom to invite for consultations; Harriman and Clark Kerr wanted talks on an equal footing with people from outside that circle, above all Mikołajczyk. The dispute was further inflamed by the arrest near Warsaw of sixteen leaders of the Polish Underground State, who had been invited to talks in March by “General Ivanov” – in fact General Ivan Serov. At the beginning of May Molotov admitted in San Francisco that they were in Soviet hands, whereupon the British and Americans suspended the talks on the Polish government. The Polish question became one of the main sources of tension between Moscow and the new US President, Harry Truman, who had spoken sharply about it with Molotov in Washington in April.

The deadlock was broken by the visit to Moscow of Harry Hopkins, Truman’s envoy and a close associate of the late Roosevelt, who held six conversations with Stalin between 26 May and 6 June 1945. Hopkins did not obtain the release of the arrested underground leaders, but he agreed a list of Poles to be invited for consultations and secured consent to Mikołajczyk’s participation. In return the United States accepted that the new government would be built on the basis of the existing Provisional Government. The solution resembled the earlier Tito–Šubašić agreement in Yugoslavia, where the pro-Western forces received roughly a quarter of the seats in a communist-dominated government.

The Moscow talks, 17–21 June

The consultations began in Moscow on 17 June 1945, the day before the Trial of the Sixteen opened. Around the table sat representatives of the Provisional Government and the State National Council – among them Bierut, Osóbka-Morawski and Gomułka; from London came Mikołajczyk, the socialist Jan Stańczyk and the peasant-party politician Julian Żakowski; from Poland itself came politicians who did not belong to the Lublin camp: the peasant leader Władysław Kiernik (PL), the socialist Zygmunt Żuławski, and Professors Stanisław Kutrzeba, Adam Krzyżanowski and Henryk Kołodziejski. Wincenty Witos, the best-known leader of the peasant movement, was invited but did not go to Moscow.

Mikołajczyk pressed for more than the great powers had agreed: more portfolios, his own people in the ministries responsible for the police and the army, early elections and the release of those arrested. The Warsaw side, backed by the presence of the Red Army and the NKVD in the country, had no intention of giving way. According to participants’ accounts, Gomułka said at the time that the communists would never give up power once they had won it. Mikołajczyk accepted the terms in the conviction that the only chance lay in returning home and fighting for free elections, in which the peasant movement, the strongest political force in the Polish countryside, could hope to win.

Agreement was reached on 21 June – the same day that the verdicts in the Trial of the Sixteen were announced in the Hall of Columns of the House of the Unions in Moscow. General Leopold Okulicki, the last commander of the Home Army, was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, and Jan Stanisław Jankowski, deputy prime minister of the government-in-exile and its Government Delegate for Poland, to eight. For many Poles the coincidence of dates was symbolic: in one part of Moscow the leaders of the underground loyal to London were being tried, while in another a government was being formed to replace the one in London.

The composition of the government

Of the 21 members of the new government, according to tallies based on the PWN Encyclopedia, seven belonged to the PPR, six to the Polish Socialist Party (PL) (PPS) that cooperated with the communists, three to the pro-communist People’s Party (PL) (SL), two to the Democratic Party, and three – Mikołajczyk, Kiernik (public administration) and Czesław Wycech (education) – to Mikołajczyk’s peasant party; another of their supporters, Mieczysław Thugutt, was nominally minister of posts and telegraphs, but the ministry was actually run by Tadeusz Kapeliński of the People’s Party. Of the London group, Jan Stańczyk received the portfolio of labour and social welfare.

The real balance of power, however, was determined by who controlled the security and economic ministries. The Ministry of Public Security went to Stanisław Radkiewicz of the PPR, national defence to Marshal Michał Rola-Żymierski, industry to Hilary Minc, and foreign affairs to Wincenty Rzymowski of the Democratic Party. The ministries of information and propaganda, justice and the treasury went to the PPS socialists. Mikołajczyk’s peasant politicians had no influence over the security apparatus, the army or propaganda, and their ministers were subordinate to the prime minister and a Council of Ministers dominated by the communist bloc. Under the Moscow arrangements Witos and Stanisław Grabski, returning from London, became vice-presidents of the State National Council, and Mikołajczyk’s people received places in the Council, the administration and the diplomatic service – always as a minority.

Recognition by the powers and London’s protest

Mikołajczyk returned to Poland at the end of June and was greeted by crowds, a sign of the support he could expect in free elections. International recognition came quickly. On 29 June the new government was recognised by France and Sweden, and on 5 July 1945 by the United States and Britain, which at the same time withdrew recognition from the Polish government in London. Two days before the government was formed, on 26 June, the Charter of the United Nations had been signed in San Francisco with a space left blank for Poland; it was the Provisional Government of National Unity that signed on Poland’s behalf, in October 1945, which allowed Poland to take its place among the founding members of the UN.

The government in London rejected the Moscow agreement. As early as 15 June, before the talks began, it declared that the creation of a lawful and independent government of national unity was impossible as long as Poland remained occupied by the Red Army and the Soviet political police and cut off from its Western allies. After recognition was withdrawn, Arciszewski and his ministers protested against the recognition of a government imposed on Poland from outside, and the ambassador in London, Edward Raczyński, likened its legal foundations to those of the governments the Germans had set up in conquered countries. The government-in-exile carried on, unrecognised by the great powers, until 1990. For tens of thousands of soldiers of the Polish Armed Forces in the West, including General Władysław Anders’s II Corps, this meant a choice between returning to a country ruled by communists and remaining in exile.

At home, the underground authorities concluded that further struggle was pointless. On 1 July the Council of National Unity announced its own dissolution and issued the “Testament of Fighting Poland”, and on 6 August Colonel Jan Rzepecki dissolved the Armed Forces Delegation for Poland, the successor to the Home Army. Part of the underground, however, continued armed resistance.

From the Government of National Unity to rigged elections

The new government’s first task was the struggle over the borders. In July 1945 its delegation, which included Bierut, Osóbka-Morawski, Gomułka and Mikołajczyk, presented Poland’s claim to a border on the Oder and the Lusatian Neisse at the Potsdam Conference. The powers placed the lands east of that line under Polish administration pending a peace conference, and Bierut undertook to the British to hold free elections. On 16 August the government signed an agreement with the USSR recognising the Curzon Line, with minor changes in Poland’s favour, as Poland’s eastern border.

In August 1945 Mikołajczyk’s peasant politicians formed the Polish People’s Party (PSL), which quickly became the largest party in the country and the main centre of legal opposition. The communist security apparatus responded with surveillance, arrests and the murder of PSL activists. The elections that Stalin had promised at Yalta “within a month” were postponed. First, on 30 June 1946, came a referendum in which the PSL urged a “no” vote on the question of abolishing the Senate. According to the official results, 68 per cent of voters favoured abolition; the PPR’s own confidential calculations, revealed years later, put the figure at 26.9 per cent.

The elections to the Legislative Sejm were held only on 19 January 1947 and were rigged by the security apparatus with the help of NKVD advisers. According to the official results, the bloc built around the PPR won about 80 per cent of the vote and the PSL about 10 per cent. The United States and Britain protested that the elections had not met the commitments made at Yalta and Potsdam, but could do nothing more. On 6 February 1947 the Provisional Government of National Unity gave way to the government of Józef Cyrankiewicz. In October 1947 Mikołajczyk, under threat of arrest, fled the country with the help of the American embassy.

Place in the history of the war

A few weeks after the Berlin Declaration, by which the powers assumed supreme authority in defeated Germany, the formation of the Provisional Government of National Unity closed the Polish chapter of the Big Three’s wartime diplomacy. Britain, which had gone to war in 1939 in defence of Poland, and the United States recognised a government in which real power belonged to the communists, in return for Mikołajczyk’s presence in it and the promise of free elections. For the West it was a compromise that preserved the appearance of carrying out the Yalta agreements at a time when the war with Japan was still going on and Washington was courting Soviet participation in it. For the government in London and for many Poles it was the final defeat of the policy pursued since 1939: a state that had fought from the first day of the war emerged from it with a government formed under Moscow’s supervision. Historians disagree over whether Mikołajczyk, by joining the government, gave the communists legitimacy or seized the only chance available to fight for a free Poland; what is certain is that the promise of “free and unfettered elections” was not kept.