USSR breaks relations with the Polish government

At midnight between 25 and 26 April 1943 the Polish ambassador to the Soviet Union, Tadeusz Romer, was summoned to the Kremlin. The People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, read him a note in which the Soviet government accused the cabinet of Gen. Władysław Sikorski of collusion with Hitler over the graves of Polish officers near Smolensk and declared that it had decided to sever relations with it. Romer refused to accept the document. At about two in the morning, already on 26 April, a courier of the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs delivered the note to his hotel. This is why the literature usually speaks of the night of 25-26 April, while the note is dated 25 April.

The pretext was a request that the Polish government had addressed to the International Committee of the Red Cross after the Germans announced the Katyn massacre. Much suggests, however, that the causes ran deeper. Relations with the government in London, which would not agree to surrender Poland’s eastern lands, had been deteriorating for months, and the Katyn affair allowed Moscow to break with it at the moment most convenient for itself and most difficult for the Poles.

Deteriorating relations

Diplomatic relations between the Polish government and the USSR had been restored by the Sikorski–Mayski agreement of 30 July 1941, concluded a few weeks after Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union. In it Moscow recognised that its 1939 treaties with Germany concerning territorial changes in Poland had lost their force, and agreed to the formation of a Polish army on its territory. In December 1941 Sikorski and Joseph Stalin signed in the Kremlin a joint declaration of friendship and mutual assistance. The two sides, however, did not settle the question of the frontier, and in the following months cooperation increasingly fell apart.

In 1942 the army of Gen. Władysław Anders was evacuated to Iran in two stages, in spring and summer. According to the introduction to the volume of “Polskie Dokumenty Dyplomatyczne” for 1942, published by the Polish Institute of International Affairs, from March the Soviet authorities restricted the activities of the embassy’s delegations, which looked after hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens released from the Gulag and from exile. In July the delegations were liquidated, most of the delegates were arrested and the warehouses with relief supplies were sealed. On 16 January 1943 the Soviet government notified the embassy that it regarded as Soviet citizens all persons who in the autumn of 1939 had been in the lands incorporated into the USSR. This struck at hundreds of thousands of Poles who were still in the Soviet Union, and in practice negated the provision of the 1941 agreement on the invalidity of the treaties with Germany.

In the spring of 1943, after the victory at Stalingrad, Stalin felt confident. From 1 March in Moscow, Polish communists gathered around Wanda Wasilewska were organising the Union of Polish Patriots and publishing the weekly “Wolna Polska” (PL).

Katyn as a pretext

On 13 April 1943 Berlin radio announced the discovery in the Katyn forest of the graves of Polish officers. On 15 April Moscow responded with a communiqué of the Sovinformbureau that attributed the crime to the Germans. The same day the Polish government instructed its representative in Switzerland to ask the Red Cross in Geneva to investigate the matter on the spot, and on 17 April it announced this in a communiqué of the Polish Telegraphic Agency. Almost simultaneously the German Red Cross made the same request. This coincidence, accidental on the Polish side, became Moscow’s main argument: on 19 April “Pravda” published an article entitled “Hitler’s Polish Collaborators”.

The Committee in Geneva replied that, in accordance with its principles of September 1939, it could send experts only with the consent of all the parties concerned. The Soviet Union gave no such consent and the initiative in practice collapsed. Moscow, however, did not intend to stop there. As the author of an article on the IPN portal notes, the Soviet Union, which knew what had really happened at Katyn, could not allow an impartial investigation, and accusing the Poles of collaboration with the Germans suited it well.

On 21 April Stalin sent Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt confidential, almost identical telegrams. In them he wrote that Sikorski’s government had taken up a “campaign of slander” begun by the German fascists, that it had not approached the Soviet government for explanations, and that the simultaneous action of the German and Polish press left no doubt as to “contact and collusion” between Hitler and the Polish government. He announced that the USSR would interrupt relations with that government. The telegrams reached their addressees with a delay. Ambassador Ivan Maisky passed the text to Churchill only a few days later, and Ambassador Maxim Litvinov handed it on 24 April to Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles, since the President was then on an inspection tour of the west of the country.

Attempts at rescue

The British tried to prevent a rupture. On 24 April the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, told Sikorski that Stalin would break off relations if the Polish prime minister did not personally and publicly reject the German accusations and withdraw the request addressed to Geneva. Sikorski, as he later reported to the American ambassador to the Polish government, refused, but was ready to quieten the Polish press and not press for a Red Cross investigation in exchange for Moscow’s consent to further groups of Poles leaving the USSR.

Churchill replied to Stalin on 25 April. He assured him that Britain would be firmly opposed to any Red Cross “investigation” in territory controlled by the Germans and that Eden would press Sikorski to dissociate himself from it. He defended the Polish prime minister, however: Sikorski was neither pro-German nor in collusion with the Germans; on the contrary, he risked being overthrown by those Poles who thought he defended his compatriots too weakly against the Soviets. “If he went, we should get someone worse,” he wrote. He asked that the announcement of an “interruption” of relations be treated as a final warning, not a rupture, and that it on no account be made public until other solutions had been tried.

Roosevelt replied on 26 April, when the note was already in Romer’s hands. He wrote that he understood Stalin’s problem, but hoped that his step could be presented as a suspension of talks with the government in exile and not a complete break in diplomatic relations. In his view Sikorski had in no way cooperated with “Hitler’s gang” but had made a mistake in turning to the Red Cross. He reminded Stalin that several million Poles lived in the United States, many of whom served in the army and navy. The telegram reached Molotov only on 27 April.

Molotov’s note

The note that Molotov read to Romer largely repeated the content of the telegrams of 21 April. It accused the Polish government of having taken up and inflated a “slanderous campaign” by the German fascists over the officers “murdered by the Germans themselves” near Smolensk, called the inquiry being prepared by the Germans a “farce”, and claimed that Sikorski’s government wanted in this way to extort territorial concessions at the expense of Soviet Ukraine, Byelorussia and Lithuania. It followed that the Polish government had entered the path of collusion with Hitler’s government, had in practice broken its allied relations with the USSR and had taken up a hostile attitude towards it. The Soviet government had therefore decided to interrupt relations with it.

According to Romer’s account, which the ambassador passed the next day to his American colleague William Standley, he refused to accept the note because of its insulting language and false claims. He asked Molotov for permission to return to Kuibyshev, where the embassy was located, to prepare the departure of the staff. On 26 April he refused in writing to accept the note delivered to him during the night. After studying it he noticed that Moscow used the word “interrupt”, not “break”, and concluded that the door to talks remained ajar. Churchill stressed the same distinction. Moscow itself, however, left no illusions.

In the afternoon of 26 April the British ambassador, Archibald Clark Kerr, and the American, Standley, asked Molotov at least to postpone publication of the note until Roosevelt had answered Stalin. “This is madness,” Clark Kerr is said to have remarked on leaving the office. Molotov replied that a government with self-respect could not postpone its decision even by a few days. At about the same time Deputy People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Solomon Lozovsky read the note to the heads of the diplomatic missions in Kuibyshev, and in the evening it was given to the press.

The Polish government and the rupture

The Polish government discussed the situation at a meeting on 27 April, and on 28 April it issued a statement which Sikorski called “firm, dignified and courteous”. It recalled the history of Polish-Soviet relations since 1941, rejected the accusation of cooperation with the Germans and assured that it wanted good relations with the USSR but had to defend the interests of Poland and its citizens. Through the British, Moscow demanded that Sikorski personally and publicly withdraw the request to the Red Cross. The prime minister refused, but proposed an intermediate solution, which Eden accepted: on 30 April the BBC broadcast a communiqué of the Polish Telegraphic Agency, according to which the government regarded its request as no longer relevant in view of the reply from Geneva. The communist “Daily Worker” in London called this communiqué an “impudent gesture”.

Sikorski was not sure what was guiding the Kremlin. He took into account that Stalin wanted to force the existing or a reconstructed Polish government to pay a high price for the resumption of relations. In favour of the second possibility, that Moscow had long been seeking a pretext for a break, was the fact that it was already promoting Polish communists, preparing a Polish army subordinate to itself and publishing “Wolna Polska”.

At the beginning of May the staff of the Polish embassy left Kuibyshev. According to American telegrams they departed on 6 May by train for Ashgabat, on the way out of the USSR; dzieje.pl gives 5 May. The embassy’s archives and property were temporarily taken under British protection. Both London and Washington, however, declined to formally represent Polish interests in the USSR, because they wished to keep their position as intermediaries between Moscow and the Polish government. In mid-May the British informed Sikorski that the care of Polish interests would be taken over by the Australian legation in Kuibyshev, headed by William Slater. The Australian government agreed to this on condition of Moscow’s acceptance. Sikorski was grateful for this, but disappointed that a British representative had not taken on the task.

What came of it

The Western Allies hoped that the interruption in relations would prove temporary. On 4 May Stalin replied to questions from the “New York Times” correspondent Ralph Parker that the USSR “undoubtedly” wanted a strong and independent Poland after the defeat of Germany, and that relations with it should be based on good neighbourliness or, if the Poles so wished, on an alliance against Germany. These words, published on 6 May, were received in London with cautious relief. At the same time, however, Moscow was building its own Poland. In May 1943 at Sielce on the Oka (PL) the formation began of the 1st Tadeusz Kościuszko Infantry Division under Zygmunt Berling, and on 9 June the Union of Polish Patriots was formally constituted.

Relations with the Polish government in London were never restored. Sikorski died in July 1943 near Gibraltar. His successor Stanisław Mikołajczyk sought an understanding through the British, but Stalin made it conditional on the acceptance of a frontier along the Curzon Line and on disowning the “slanders” over Katyn. At the Tehran conference in the autumn of 1943 the Western Allies informally agreed to the Soviet terms on the frontier without asking the opinion of the Polish government. In January 1944 TASS declared that the USSR could not conduct official talks with a government with which it had broken relations “through its own fault”. In July 1944 the Polish Committee of National Liberation, subordinate to Stalin, was created in Moscow, and from then on the Soviet Union arranged Polish affairs with it.

Molotov’s April note closed the road that Sikorski had tried to follow since July 1941: an understanding with the USSR in the name of the common war against Germany while preserving Polish sovereignty and borders. The truth about Katyn, which Moscow presented as a German provocation, became a pretext for removing the legitimate government of the Republic from decisions on Poland’s future. The Western allies accepted this fait accompli in the name of the unity of the coalition.