The Trial of the Sixteen

On 18 June 1945 the show trial of sixteen leaders of the Polish Underground State opened in Moscow before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. In the dock sat the last commander of the Home Army, General Leopold Okulicki; the Deputy Prime Minister and Government Delegate for Poland, Jan Stanisław Jankowski, and his deputies; the chairman of the underground parliament – the Council of National Unity – Kazimierz Pużak; and representatives of the four main political parties of the underground. All of them had been lured at the end of March to supposed talks with the Soviet command and arrested. They were tried by a foreign court for activities carried out on the territory of their own state, on behalf of a government still recognised by most of the world. The trial lasted three days; the verdicts were announced on 21 June – the same day on which, in the same city and in the presence of Joseph Stalin, talks on the formation of a new Polish government were concluded.

After Yalta: the underground and the new authorities

In January 1945 the Red Army’s offensive swept across Polish territory as far as the Oder. Behind the front the Provisional Government, formed by the communists and recognised only by the USSR, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, was moving from Lublin to Warsaw. The underground already knew the price of “liberation” in the east: after Operation Ostra Brama in Wilno (Vilnius) and the Lwów uprising in the summer of 1944, the NKVD had disarmed Home Army units, arrested their commanders and either drafted the soldiers into the army or deported them deep into the USSR. General Okulicki, successor to General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski, appointed before the surrender of the Warsaw Uprising, dissolved the Home Army on 19 January 1945, releasing its soldiers from their oath. He kept, however, a deeply clandestine cadre organisation, “NIE” (“No”), prepared for the eventuality of lasting Soviet domination.

At the Yalta Conference (4–11 February 1945) the Western powers accepted the eastern frontier on the Curzon Line and agreed that a new Polish government would be created by “reorganising” the Provisional Government “on a broader democratic basis”, with the participation of politicians from Poland and from exile. The decisions were silent about the government in London. The Prime Minister of the government-in-exile, Tomasz Arciszewski, rejected them on 13 February as not binding on Poland. At home the Council of National Unity, although it described the terms on 21 February as “new, exceedingly heavy and wronging sacrifices”, decided to accept the Yalta decisions: joining the future “government of national unity” seemed the only chance of not handing it over entirely to the communists.

“General Ivanov invites you”

Contact was initiated by the Soviet side, through intermediaries linked to the left-wing underground, which had been infiltrated by the NKVD. At the beginning of March, in Pruszków, a Colonel Pimenov handed Okulicki and Jankowski letters inviting them to talks with “General Ivanov”, supposedly a representative of the staff of Marshal Georgy Zhukov. Pimenov pledged his word of honour for the safety of the Polish delegation. In reality “Ivanov” was General Ivan Serov, Deputy People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs and the NKVD plenipotentiary with the 1st Belorussian Front, and the whole undertaking was an operation of the NKVD and military counter-intelligence. The Council of National Unity at first advised Okulicki against the meeting; the British and American governments, however, encouraged the talks, and the government in London, informed of the plans, instructed that they be used above all to ease repression and deportations. The delegation, enlarged at Pimenov’s suggestion to include representatives of the political parties, was, as its members believed, to discuss the terms for operating legally in Poland and a journey to consultations on the government.

On 27 March Okulicki, Jankowski, Pużak and the interpreter Józef Stemler-Dąbski arrived at a villa on Pęcicka Street in Pruszków, in fact the local NKVD headquarters. They never came back. The next day the rest of those invited presented themselves: Antoni Pajdak (PL) of the PPS-WRN (the underground Polish Socialist Party), Stanisław Jasiukowicz, Kazimierz Kobylański, Zbigniew Stypułkowski and Aleksander Zwierzyński of the National Party, Józef Chaciński and Franciszek Urbański of the Labour Party, Adam Bień (PL), Kazimierz Bagiński and Stanisław Mierzwa of the Peasant Party, and Eugeniusz Czarnowski and Stanisław Michałowski of the Democratic Union. They too were detained and flown from Okęcie to Moscow, to the Lubyanka prison. Thus was formed the group that came to be called “the Sixteen”.

Moscow’s silence and Molotov’s admission

News of the leaders’ disappearance was sent to London by Stefan Korboński, who took over the duties of Government Delegate. The Polish ambassadors in London and Washington, Edward Raczyński and Jan Ciechanowski, asked for intervention; the British and American ambassadors in Moscow enquired about the fate of the Poles, but for several weeks were told that no arrests had taken place. Only on 3 May in San Francisco, where the founding conference of the United Nations was under way, did People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov admit to Edward Stettinius and Anthony Eden that sixteen Poles were in Soviet hands and would be tried for “diversionary activity in the rear of the Red Army”. Two days later the information was made public. In May a representative of the Provisional Government spoke of men wanted for assassinations and sabotage – at home the communist authorities adopted the Soviet version wholesale.

The affair weighed on relations between the Allies just as the war in Europe was ending. The talks held in Moscow since February by a commission made up of Molotov and the American and British ambassadors, Averell Harriman and Archibald Clark Kerr, on the composition of a new Polish government had already been deadlocked; now they came to a complete standstill. At the end of May President Harry Truman’s special envoy, Harry Hopkins, raised the matter of the arrested men in Moscow. Stalin refused to release them, but agreed to invite politicians from outside the communist camp, including the former prime minister Stanisław Mikołajczyk, to Moscow for consultations on the government. The date of the trial coincided with these consultations. On 16 June the President of Poland in exile, Władysław Raczkiewicz, telegraphed Truman and Prime Minister Winston Churchill that the trial of the political leaders of one of the United Nations by a court of another must be regarded as a hostile act towards the Polish nation. There was no reply that might have changed anything.

The indictment

For almost three months the prisoners were interrogated in the Lubyanka, often at night, as they were prepared for their roles in the trial. Okulicki went on hunger strike in May. What mattered most to the interrogators was confessions: Stalin, historians believe, counted on the West being satisfied with the defendants’ admissions and not enquiring whether the charges were true.

The indictment charged them with organising underground Home Army armed units in the rear of the Red Army, creating the “NIE” organisation, terrorist, sabotage and espionage activity, operating illegal radio transmitters, and finally preparing an “armed action in a bloc with Germany” against the USSR. Okulicki, Jankowski, Jasiukowicz and Bień were accused of directing the underground in Poland, Lithuania and “the western oblasts of Belarus and Ukraine” – that is, in the lands of the Second Polish Republic annexed by the USSR – and the remaining twelve of taking part in the underground and failing to carry out the Soviet command’s orders to hand over weapons, radio transmitters and printing presses. The prosecution stated that between 28 July 1944 and 30 May 1945 Home Army units had killed 591 and seriously wounded 219 Red Army soldiers and officers; these figures were never linked to the actions of any of the defendants.

The very structure of the indictment assumed that the lawful Polish underground authorities – the Government Delegation, the Home Council of Ministers, the Council of National Unity and the Home Army – were “illegal” in Poland and that a foreign state had the right to try them. The formal basis was Article 7 of the agreement of 26 July 1944 between the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN) and the Soviet government on the front-line zone. The charge of collaboration with Germany was false: for six years the defendants had directed the struggle against the German occupier, and many of them had personally suffered at its hands. The only “evidence” was a letter from Okulicki to the commander of the Western Area of “NIE”, Lieutenant Colonel Jan Szczurek-Cergowski, in which the general considered the possible post-war balance of forces, including a conflict between the West and the USSR.

Three days in court

The defendants were seated on a dais in two rows, facing guards with fixed bayonets. Journalists and officials of the American and British embassies were in the courtroom. The presiding judge was General Vasili Ulrikh, the same man who in 1936–1938 had conducted the great Moscow trials and sentenced former Bolshevik leaders to death. The prosecutor was the Chief Military Prosecutor, General Nikolai Afanasyev; also taking part in the trial was Roman Rudenko, a few months later the chief Soviet prosecutor before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Fifteen men were tried – the case of Pajdak, who had admitted nothing under interrogation, was officially separated on account of his illness.

The defendants met their court-appointed defence counsel only in the courtroom; some of the lawyers pleaded guilty on behalf of their clients and asked for “Soviet magnanimity”. Three defendants conducted their own defence. The prosecution witnesses were Home Army and “NIE” officers imprisoned earlier and broken by long interrogation, who repeated prepared testimony about sabotage and intelligence work. When Okulicki asked for witnesses of his own choosing to be called, the court announced that some of them “had not been found on the territory of the USSR” – although they were prisoners in Soviet camps.

Most of the defendants admitted some of the charges: maintaining radio communications, intelligence work, hiding weapons. Okulicki, in a long speech, took responsibility for “NIE”, for the order to hide weapons and for the radio transmitters, but firmly rejected the charge of collaboration: “You cannot prove that we did not fight the Germans […]. The charge of collaboration with the Germans is […] a charge against the Polish nation for having taken part in the underground struggle.” Jankowski accepted political responsibility for the work of the Government Delegation. Ulrikh asked him outright whether he could have supposed that the USSR would not regard the creation of a Polish administration on “your territory” as a hostile act – a question that captured the meaning of the whole trial. Of those tried, only Zbigniew Stypułkowski admitted nothing, either under interrogation or in court, and demanded acquittal. Afanasyev, in his closing speech, quoting Stalin copiously, presented the whole of Poland’s pre-war policy as treason and the Home Army as “bands” little different from the Germans.

The sentences

On 21 June 1945 the court announced the sentences: Leopold Okulicki – 10 years’ imprisonment; Jan Stanisław Jankowski – 8 years; Adam Bień and Stanisław Jasiukowicz – 5 years each; Kazimierz Pużak – eighteen months; Kazimierz Bagiński – one year; Aleksander Zwierzyński – 8 months; Eugeniusz Czarnowski – 6 months; Józef Chaciński, Stanisław Mierzwa, Zbigniew Stypułkowski and Franciszek Urbański – 4 months each. Three were acquitted: Kazimierz Kobylański, Stanisław Michałowski and Józef Stemler-Dąbski. Antoni Pajdak was sentenced in separate, secret proceedings in November 1945 to 5 years’ imprisonment and exile; he returned to Poland only in 1955.

By Soviet standards the sentences were light, and for some of the defendants symbolic. Historians see calculation in this: leniency was meant to make it easier for the West to accept the trial and not to disrupt the talks on the Polish government, while the defendants’ admissions themselves were to serve as proof of the “criminal” nature of the underground.

A trial in the shadow of the government talks

The trial ran in parallel with the talks held in Moscow from 17 June between representatives of the Provisional Government – Bolesław Bierut, Edward Osóbka-Morawski and Władysław Gomułka – and invited politicians from exile and from Poland, among them Mikołajczyk. As the sentences on the underground leaders were being announced, the composition of the Provisional Government of National Unity, in which the communists and their allies kept a decisive majority, was being agreed in the same city. For Poles the coincidence of dates was a clear signal: there was a place in the new order for those who accepted Moscow’s terms, while those who had represented the underground state ended up in the dock. According to an account of a conversation with Gomułka written down years later, he intervened with Stalin on behalf of the arrested men, pointing to the violation of Polish sovereignty; Stalin is said to have replied that it was too late for corrections.

On 19 June the Polish government in London declared that authorities recognised by the nation and forming an integral part of the lawful government of the Republic had been brought by deceit before the court of a foreign state. On 1 July the Council of National Unity, in an appeal to the Polish people, wrote that “the best sons of Poland”, who for five years had led the struggle against Hitlerism, had stood trial in Moscow. The reaction of the Western powers, by contrast, was restrained – just as Stalin had foreseen. Ambassador Clark Kerr judged the trial favourably, stressing that no one had been sentenced to death and that the defendants had been able to speak. The Times of London wrote on 22 June that the verdict should surprise no one who had followed the anti-Soviet activities of the Polish government. The American magazine Time observed that in an American court the case would have collapsed, since no witness had linked the defendants to specific acts of violence, and that the proof of guilt had become their acceptance of political responsibility. Among the few voices of protest was George Orwell, who wrote in Tribune that the Poles had been accused of trying to preserve the independence of their own country and of remaining loyal to a government recognised by the whole world except the USSR.

The fate of the condemned

Some of those given short sentences were released in the autumn of 1945; some chose exile, others returned to Poland and to politics – Stanisław Mierzwa was imprisoned again in the Polish People’s Republic for his work in the Polish People’s Party (PSL), and Kazimierz Pużak, arrested by the Security Office (UB) in 1947 and sentenced to 10 years, died in Rawicz prison in 1950. Adam Bień was released from a Moscow prison in 1949. The three highest-ranking men never returned. Stanisław Jasiukowicz died on 22 October 1946 in Moscow’s Butyrka prison. Leopold Okulicki died there on 24 December 1946; the Soviet authorities gave the cause as a heart attack, but many historians believe he was murdered. Jan Stanisław Jankowski died on 13 March 1953 in the prison at Vladimir, a few weeks before the end of his sentence – also in circumstances that Polish researchers regard as suspicious.

In the Polish People’s Republic the trial was passed over in silence or presented in the spirit of the Soviet indictment. Only the changes of 1989 made it possible to return to the case: at the request of the Polish prosecution service, the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the USSR, by a decision of 19 April 1990, discontinued the criminal case against General Okulicki for lack of the elements of a crime, which amounted to his rehabilitation.

The trial’s place in the history of the war

The Trial of the Sixteen was one of the last acts of the war over the shape of post-war Poland and at the same time one of the first acts of the post-war order in Central Europe. The state that had been the first to resist Germany and had maintained underground civil and military structures throughout the occupation saw its leaders in the dock in an ally’s capital at the very moment of victory for the coalition to which it belonged. Norman Davies called it a model show trial, intended to demonstrate that Soviet “justice” could impose an obvious injustice with impunity and that the Western powers could do nothing about it.

And so it proved. A few days after the sentences were announced the Provisional Government of National Unity was formed, and at the beginning of July the United States and Britain recognised it, withdrawing recognition from the government in London. The trial shattered the leadership of the Polish Underground State and hastened its self-dissolution: at its last meeting on 1 July 1945 the Council of National Unity adopted the “Testament of Fighting Poland” and ceased its activities, while “NIE” had already been dissolved in May. For many Poles the Moscow trial became a symbol of the fact that the end of the war in Europe had not brought their country freedom – and a foretaste of the repression that in the following years fell on the soldiers of the underground in Poland itself.