The Sikorski–Stalin declaration

Late on the evening of 4 December 1941, after a state dinner in the Grand Kremlin Palace, the Prime Minister of the Polish government-in-exile and Commander-in-Chief, General Władysław Sikorski, and the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, Joseph Stalin, signed a joint document: the “Declaration of the Government of the Republic of Poland and the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”, known in Moscow as the declaration of friendship and mutual assistance. Two years earlier the Red Army had marched into the eastern lands of the Polish Republic; now the two states announced a joint war against Germany until victory and cooperation after the war. The declaration concluded the first and only visit by the head of the Polish government-in-exile to the Soviet Union. In the course of it Sikorski heard from Stalin that thousands of missing Polish officers had “fled to Manchuria”, won consent for the expansion of the Polish army and its transfer to the south, and courteously set aside a proposal to discuss the borders.

From the July agreement to the December visit

Polish-Soviet relations, broken off by Moscow after the aggression of 17 September 1939, revived only after Germany attacked the USSR. Talks in London, conducted under pressure from the British, who had just concluded an agreement on joint action with Moscow, ended on 30 July 1941 with the signing by Sikorski and the Soviet ambassador Ivan Maisky of the Polish-Soviet agreement. In it the Soviet Union recognised that its treaties with Germany of 1939 concerning territorial changes in Poland had “lost their validity”. Diplomatic relations were restored, and a Polish army was to be formed on Soviet territory, subordinate to the Polish government and, operationally, to the Soviet High Command. The agreement did not settle the question of the border. Because of this three ministers resigned from the government, and President Władysław Raczkiewicz voiced reservations.

The military details were settled by an agreement signed in Moscow on 14 August by the head of the Polish military mission, Brigadier General Zygmunt Bohusz-Szyszko, and a representative of the Soviet General Staff. Two days earlier, on 12 August, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR had proclaimed a so-called amnesty for Polish citizens imprisoned, interned and deported in 1939–1941. The very word angered the Poles, since it implied that the victims of the mass deportations and arrests had committed some crime. According to NKVD figures passed to Stalin, the decree covered more than 380,000 people, including some 26,000 prisoners of war.

The army’s commander was Major General Władysław Anders, released on 4 August from the Lubyanka prison (Russian sources give 6 August). The Polish Armed Forces in the USSR were formed from September on the Volga and the Samara: the headquarters at Buzuluk, Brigadier General Mieczysław Boruta-Spiechowicz’s 5th Wilno Infantry Division at Tatishchevo near Saratov, and Brigadier General Michał Tokarzewski-Karaszewicz’s 6th Lwów Infantry Division and the reserve centre at Totskoye. The chief of staff was Colonel Leopold Okulicki. The agreed strength of the army was a mere 30,000 men, yet tens of thousands of emaciated prisoners and deportees, often with their families, streamed to the recruiting points. Only the 5th Division received Soviet weapons, and even those were incomplete. In the autumn the soldiers of the 6th Division lived in tents, and according to Sikorski the units had become “labour detachments” rather than anything else, building dugouts and digging potatoes out of collective-farm fields for their own needs.

At the beginning of September the Polish ambassador, Professor Stanisław Kot, a historian from the Jagiellonian University and one of Sikorski’s closest associates, arrived in Moscow. From 20 October the embassy, like the whole diplomatic corps, worked in Kuibyshev (Samara), to which part of the Soviet government had been evacuated as the Germans approached Moscow. Kot pressed for the release of prisoners still being held, for care for the thousands of people who, on release from the labour camps, had been left without money or a roof over their heads, and for the expansion of the army. The most disturbing issue was that of the officers. Of the roughly 15,000 prisoners from the camps at Kozelsk (PL), Starobilsk and Ostashkov, with whom contact had been lost in the spring of 1940, almost none reported to the army. Cavalry Captain Józef Czapski, himself a survivor of Starobilsk, collected their names on Anders’s orders and searched for them in NKVD offices. The Soviet authorities replied evasively or not at all. They did not admit that in the spring of 1940 the NKVD had shot these men on the orders of the Politburo. Shortly before the talks at the Kremlin, on 1 December, the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs announced in a note that the “amnesty” applied only to persons of Polish nationality. Moscow regarded Ukrainians, Belarusians and Jews who had been citizens of pre-war Poland as its own citizens.

Sikorski’s journey

Sikorski left London at the end of October 1941. He was accompanied by the Chief of Staff of the Commander-in-Chief, Brigadier General Tadeusz Klimecki, his political adviser Józef Retinger, and a British liaison officer, the Member of Parliament Victor Cazalet. Travelling via Gibraltar and Malta, he reached Cairo on 6 November and then visited besieged Tobruk, where the Independent Carpathian Rifle Brigade was fighting. On 24 November he flew out of Cairo and, via Lydda, Baghdad, Tehran, Baku and Astrakhan, arrived in Kuibyshev on 30 November. There he held talks with Ambassador Kot and met Anders. On 2 December he flew to Moscow, where he was greeted at the airfield by the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov.

Moscow was then a front-line city. The German offensive was reaching Khimki on the city’s northern approaches, and the Battle of Moscow still seemed undecided, although the offensive of Army Group Centre was losing strength in the frost. The Soviet side nonetheless received the Polish Prime Minister with the highest honours. According to documents of the Soviet diplomatic protocol described by the Russian historian Vladimir Nevezhin, preparations for the visit had been under way since mid-November, and Molotov personally saw to it that the Polish visitor was treated as a guest of the government.

The talks at the Kremlin on 3 December

On 3 December Sikorski held talks with Stalin at the Kremlin in Molotov’s presence. On the Polish side were Kot and Anders, who interpreted. The conversation was long and at times tense. Its course is known from a Polish note, later published in collections of documents, and from a Soviet record.

Sikorski began with the situation of Polish citizens. He demanded the release of all those still in prisons and labour camps and handed Stalin a list of the missing officers. According to Polish accounts it contained some 4,000 names, though Anders pointed out that the list was incomplete. Stalin replied that the amnesty had covered everyone and that these men must have been released. According to the Polish note, when Sikorski insisted that none of them was in the country or in the army, Stalin declared: “That’s impossible. They have escaped.” Asked by Anders where they could have escaped to, he answered: “Well, to Manchuria.” Stalin knew that the officers had been dead for eighteen months. Sikorski and Anders did not know this, but the answer did not reassure them. The matter returned with full force in April 1943.

The second part of the conversation concerned the army. Sikorski described its poor condition: the lack of weapons, food and warm quarters, the frosts on the Volga, the hundreds of thousands of compatriots scattered across Siberia and Kazakhstan. He proposed that the whole army and its reinforcements be moved to Iran, occupied in August by the British and the Red Army, where the British and Americans could arm and feed it. Stalin reacted sharply. He took the view that an army that left the USSR would never return, because the British would use it elsewhere, and that such a departure would mean the end of the Polish-Soviet agreement. According to Polish accounts, he said bitterly that the Russians would manage on their own and would recover Poland by themselves. To save the talks, Sikorski withdrew the plan. A compromise was agreed: the army would remain in the USSR but would move from the Saratov and Buzuluk area south to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, to a warmer climate and closer to the Iranian border. Polish citizens released from the labour camps and from exile were also to be directed there.

Stalin agreed that the army should grow from 30,000 to about 96,000 men. According to the report that Sikorski presented to the Council of Ministers in January 1942, this was to comprise five infantry divisions and a training division (some authors write of seven divisions). About 25,000 soldiers, together with airmen and sailors, could be evacuated to Britain and Egypt to reinforce the Polish units there. Once fully organised and trained, the army was to fight as a single whole under Anders’s command rather than be broken up. Sikorski regarded this as one of the most important results of his journey, since Moscow had been pressing for the incompletely armed 5th Division to be sent to the front at once. The Soviet government also promised a loan to aid the Polish civilian population. The figure of 96,000 men was confirmed on 25 December by a resolution of the Soviet State Defence Committee, which designated the new stations: the headquarters at Yangiyul near Tashkent, the divisions in the republics of Central Asia.

The question of the borders, which Sikorski did not want to raise, also came up. According to his report, Stalin proposed talks on the frontier and spoke of Soviet goodwill, of Soviet help in the dispute with the Ukrainians over Lwów (Lviv), and of “Poland’s mission in the West”, meaning its enlargement at Germany’s expense. Sikorski replied that the only frontier he recognised was the one with which Poland had entered the war, fixed in the Treaty of Riga. As he wrote, “I parried these proposals for the time being, politely but firmly.” Stalin agreed and announced that he would return to the subject when the Polish army was fighting on the Eastern Front. Sikorski also flatly rejected the claim that the population of the eastern provinces had become Soviet citizens in 1939.

The declaration and the dinner

The text of the declaration was agreed on 4 December. It was short and general. The two governments declared that German Hitlerite imperialism was the worst enemy of mankind and that there could be no compromise with it. Together with Great Britain and the other allies, and with the support of the United States, they would wage war until complete victory and the destruction of the German invaders. In implementing the agreement of 30 July, the governments promised each other full military assistance. Polish troops in the USSR were to fight the Germans shoulder to shoulder with Soviet troops (the Russian text spoke of war “against the German brigands”). After the war, relations between the two states were to be based on good-neighbourly coexistence, friendship and the honest fulfilment of obligations. After victory and the punishment of the German criminals, the allies were to secure a lasting and just peace through a new international order based on a union of democratic states and on respect for international law backed by the collective armed force of the allies. Sikorski later stressed with satisfaction that the document spoke of mutual respect for sovereignty and for each other’s political system. He read this as recognition of the Poles’ right to arrange their state as they wished. On the borders the declaration was silent.

In the evening Stalin gave a dinner in honour of the Polish delegation in St Catherine’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace. On the Soviet side the guests included Molotov, who as master of the table proposed toast after toast, the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs Lavrentiy Beria, Anastas Mikoyan, Lazar Kaganovich, Georgy Malenkov, the Chief of the General Staff Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov and his deputy, General Aleksandr Vasilevsky. On the Polish side were Sikorski, Kot, Anders, Bohusz-Szyszko, Okulicki, the writer and embassy press attaché Ksawery Pruszyński, and Anders’s aide-de-camp, Captain Jerzy Klimkowski. According to the accounts of Kot and Pruszyński, Stalin spoke of the history of Polish-Russian relations: the Poles had once occupied Moscow, the Russians had taken Warsaw several times, and it was time to put an end to all that and fight the Germans together to a victorious finish. Sikorski took this speech as proof that Moscow saw a strong, anti-German Poland as its shield in the west. Before midnight the two leaders signed the declaration. Finally the guests were invited to the Kremlin cinema to watch a newsreel of Sikorski’s stay in Kuibyshev and his welcome in Moscow. Pruszyński remembered the roar of artillery, which he took for the signal of a Soviet attack. The counter-offensive at Moscow began the next day, 5 December.

On 5 December the declaration was published by Pravda. According to Sikorski, the Soviet authorities translated it into dozens of languages, broadcast it on the radio and scattered millions of copies, including in German, behind the lines of the German army. On 4 December the first issue of the embassy’s weekly Polska, intended for Poles in the USSR, also appeared.

Visiting the army

On 5 December Sikorski returned to Kuibyshev, where he spent several days in talks with the embassy and with Molotov’s deputy, Andrei Vyshinsky. In the second week of December he inspected the army: the headquarters at Buzuluk, the units at Totskoye and the 5th Division at Tatishchevo. He saw soldiers in tent camps and dugouts, in the frost, some still in rags, but also the first deliveries of British uniforms. He said that the soldiers’ morale was excellent and their eagerness to fight the Germans “extraordinary”. He took a march past and addressed the soldiers and the refugees. Thousands of civilians gathered around the army, among them many orphaned children, whom Anders ordered to be taken in. On 15 December Sikorski flew from Saratov via Astrakhan and Baku to Tehran, where he arrived on 16 December. From there he wrote to Winston Churchill asking for weapons for the army in the USSR. He returned to London on 6 January 1942.

By the time he left, the war had changed fundamentally. The Red Army had gone over to the counter-offensive at Moscow, and on 7 December (8 December, Asian time) Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. The Soviet Union had gained the certainty that it would survive the winter, and with it fewer reasons to make concessions to the Poles.

Place in the war

The December agreements soon began to crumble. After the successes at Moscow, the Kremlin’s position hardened. As early as December, in talks with the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, Stalin demanded recognition of the USSR’s borders of June 1941, and in January 1942 Sikorski received signals that Moscow wanted to keep Lwów and to base Poland’s frontier on the Curzon Line. Food rations for the army being moved to Central Asia were cut, and in February Moscow again demanded that the 5th Division be sent to the front. Anders, increasingly distrustful, obtained Stalin’s consent for a first evacuation in March 1942. Between 24 March and the beginning of April some 33,000 soldiers and 11,000 civilians left via Krasnovodsk and the Caspian Sea for Pahlavi in Iran. In the second evacuation, in August 1942, some 44,000 soldiers and more than 25,000 civilians left. In all, about 115,000 Polish citizens left the Soviet Union, although they did not include the hundreds of thousands of deportees who had not managed to reach the army in time. The army did not fight on the Eastern Front; in 1944 it fought at Monte Cassino as the 2nd Polish Corps.

On 13 April 1943 the Germans announced the discovery in the Katyn Forest of the graves of Polish officers – the same officers who, according to Stalin, had “fled to Manchuria”. When the Polish government asked the International Red Cross to investigate, Moscow broke off diplomatic relations with it on 25 April 1943. A little over two months later, on 4 July 1943, Sikorski was killed in an air crash at Gibraltar, together with Klimecki and Cazalet, who had accompanied him on his journey to the USSR. In 1944 Stalin relied on the Polish Committee of National Liberation, which was subordinate to him.

Historians judge the declaration in different ways. Critics, beginning with Sikorski’s opponents in exile and Anders himself, see it as an expression of illusions. The Kremlin’s promises cost Stalin little, the question of the borders was postponed at a moment when Poland’s position was at its strongest, and the words about friendship and respect for sovereignty meant nothing eighteen months later. Others, such as Eugeniusz Duraczyński, point out that the policy of understanding with Moscow was the only way to save hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens held in the USSR, and that it made possible the army that led more than a hundred thousand people out of Russia. Sikorski himself called this policy “thoroughly realistic”. The declaration of 4 December 1941 remained the high point of the Polish-Soviet rapprochement during the war.