Daughters of the KGB (23 page)

But Poland had no friends and no international voices to be raised in its defence. In the London Victory Parade on 8 June 1946, not a single Free Polish serviceman was to be seen, lest it upset Stalin, although those who had fought in the RAF were invited. The shameful ruling tarnished the day. The Poles of the RAF honourably refused the invitation as a gesture of solidarity with their thousands of compatriots who had fought in British uniforms with a shoulder flash reading POLAND. Now no longer prime minister, Churchill tried to atone for his discarding of General Anders by telling Parliament how deeply he regretted the prohibition on the Poles’ participation, lamenting the situation in Poland, where the Lublin government dared not have free elections in the presence of international observers.

In January 1947 an allegedly free general election was held after non-Communist candidates and activists of PSL had been subjected to harassment, beatings and a few straightforward murders, to ensure they got the message. In some places, their lists of candidates were declared void. Polling day, 19 January, saw PZPR activists marching long columns of workers to the polling stations to vote for the party. The results were so blatantly falsified that many prominent PSL figures fled the country.
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Many of General Anders’ men who decided to return home after this last betrayal by Britain were arrested on setting foot in their homeland. Some were eventually released with a black mark against them for life that guaranteed they would have only menial jobs in Bierut’s Communist state. Others were murdered after interrogation at Warsaw’s Mokotów prison, and their bodies dumped naked in refuse pits or other unmarked graves.

Official records show that approximately 300,000 Poles were arrested in the immediate post-war years – and this in a country that counted fewer than 24 million inhabitants in the 1946 census. Of those arrested, at least 5,000 were female. They included pregnant women and mothers of infant children. Mostly accused of spying for the West or plotting to overthrow the provisional government, they were more vulnerable to physical torture than male prisoners, and were also subjected to threats against their unborn or living children. After the women had been sentenced, their children were sometimes released into the care of relatives but were more often sent to state orphanages as part of the punishment; many were never traced after the mothers’ release.

Among the cases documented is that of Władisław Sliwinski, who met his wife, Myra, in Britain while he was serving as a fighter pilot in the RAF and she was in the WAAF. Ignorant of the real conditions there – as were most people in the West – they moved together to Poland in 1947. On 4 June 1948 they and their 6-month-old son, Stefan, were arrested in Warsaw as British spies. Since Myra had British citizenship, Władisław offered to divorce her so that she could return to her homeland but, despite being physically maltreated herself, she refused this in the belief that her presence in Poland might in some way protect him. To prove that it did not, he was executed on 15 June 1951, after which Myra was compelled to give up her 18-month-old son, sent to live with his paternal great-grandmother. When the old lady died, an elderly neighbour gave the child a home.

Emerging from prison in 1956, Myra did not know Stefan, nor he her. After her second marriage failed, she returned to Britain in 1975 and was permitted to return to Poland only once, for her younger son’s wedding. She died in Britain in 1991 at the age of 69, one of the UB’s few female victims to leave any trace of her suffering in Western media.
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In addition to individuals targeted by the UB on the Soviet model, class enemies were still being created. In Autumn 1952 UB squads arrested tens of thousands of peasants who had failed to deliver their required quotas of grain. Some were deported to the USSR; others locked up in overcrowded prisons. Unlike Hungary, Poland had not built new concentration camps, but had all the abandoned German POW camps as well as some Polish ones, of which the first had been established in 1934, at Bereza Kartuska near Brest-Litovsk, to hold Ukrainian nationalists and fascists. During the German occupation, it was used to hold thousands of Communists and other leftists.
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Following the Russian system, MBP had its own man in the Polish Politburo. Jakub Berman was also the Stalinist boss of the PZPR. At the beginning of 1945, with the war still continuing against Nazi Germany, the largest department was Department One, headed by General Roman Romkowski. Despite the impeccably Polish adoptive name, he had been born Natan Grinszpan-Kikiel in Moscow. His staff was responsible for a wide spectrum of activities including counter-espionage, fighting ‘political banditry’ and running the prisons. The first Soviet ‘adviser’ to the MBP was NKVD General Ivan Serov, who had been responsible for mass deportations of minorities in the USSR both before and during the war. With tens of thousands of Soviet forces stationed in Poland until 1956, the Polish armed forces and security organisations were heavily infiltrated with KGB officers, forming a political corset to keep Polish policies on the strictest Moscow line. In keeping with this, any leaders with too Polish an attitude had to go, but Bierut did not have Gomułka and Jakub Berman shot, apparently because he regretted all the former comrades who had been executed in Stalin’s purges. They were, instead, put on ice for the time being; Gomułka was freed in 1954 and, although not reinstated at the top, allowed to acquire his own following. In many other ways the Polish Party leaders managed to steer a less extreme course than the other satellite governments through the political turbulence of 1956, for example, by representing themselves to Moscow as the best compromise and to the Polish people as the only alternative to Russian tanks in the streets. Even the periodic persecution of dissidents was comparatively low-key and the state control of agriculture was relaxed, permitting the peasants to recover their land from the collective farms in 1956.
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Everything was carried out under the strictest secrecy until the defection in December 1953 of Józef Swiatło, a lieutenant colonel in the MBP, whose job had been snooping on top party members, to provide evidence for their prosecution when required.
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Sent to Berlin to consult with Erich Mielke, he took the opportunity to leap from an S-Bahn train passing through West Berlin and offered his services to US intelligence. His defection had little to do with ideology and more to do with fear for his own life because ‘he knew too much’ after the death of Stalin and the arrest of Lavrenti Beria in Moscow. As a close collaborator of Bierut, first secretary of PZPR since the arrest of Gomułka, and of General Serov, Swiatło had personally participated in the arrests preceding the Trial of Sixteen, the harassment of Cardinal Wyszynski and the arrests and torture of many AK members.

After a lengthy debriefing under conditions of strict secrecy – he lived under a witness protection programme in the United States until his death in 1994 – Swiatło recorded for Radio Free Europe a whole series of talks exposing the routine torture of prisoners under interrogation by UB officers, politically motivated executions and the internecine struggles for power inside the leadership of PZPR. He had also participated in the falsification of the January 1947 election results and personally arrested Gomułka, using forged documents to incriminate him. Among many other revelations was the news that, in addition to the thousands of former partisan fighters summarily killed or executed after fake trials, no fewer than 50,000 had been deported to the Gulag, and were still there.

In all the socialist countries, the fat cats lived well – like the pigs in Orwell’s
Animal Farm
, of which they were the models. Swiatło recounted how Bierut’s entire household staff, including cooks, a butler, drivers and cleaners, were all provided free of charge by the UB. Stanisław Radkiewicz, head of UB 1944–54, had an apartment in Warsaw and a villa in the country that did not cost him a złoty from his salary. Even at Swiatło’s lower level perks included a good apartment with domestic staff, cars and drivers, and free clothing, footwear and bedlinen.
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As they became known in Poland, from the transmissions of US-subsidised propaganda stations, Swiatło’s revelations were a severe embarrassment for the government, which gave the security services a facelift. MBP was replaced by Komitet do Spraw Bezpieczenstwa Publicznego (KdSBP), or Committee for Public Security, and Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnetrznych (MSW), or Ministry of Internal Affairs. Staff were reallocated to these new agencies and their numbers reduced, a few being arrested and charged with abuse of power. But what’s in a name? KdSBP took over intelligence and counter-espionage, government security and the secret police. MSW was responsible for state and local administration, the Milicja Obywatelska and fire services, the prison system and the paramilitary border guards.

In 1956 KdSBP was in turn merged into the MSW, placing internal security and counter-intelligence under the same roof as Polish intelligence on the model of Beria’s recently established KGB. In addition to all the pen-pushers and telephone interceptors, it controlled 41,000 soldiers of the Internal Security Corps, 57,500 members of the citizen militia, 32,000 border troops, 10,000 prison officers and 125,000 members of the Volunteer Reserve Citizen Militia. In 1956 Słuzba Bezpieczenstwa Ministerstwa Spraw Wewnetrznych (Security Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs), abbreviated to ‘SB’ for pretty obvious reasons, was set up with many of the same personnel and officers of the Security Service, who were known colloquially among themselves as ‘SB-eki’, much as KGB officers were informally called ‘Chekisty’, from the CHE-KA initials of the first Bolshevik secret police.
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Never to their faces, the SB officers were also called ‘
ubek
’, ‘
bezpieka
’ or ‘
esbek
’, which became terms of abuse in the mouths of their fellow citizens.

That year brought a number of changes to Polish politics. In June 100,000 workers in Poznan demonstrated under the slogan
Give us bread and freedom
in protest at shortages of food and consumer goods – and the poor housing conditions and bad economic policies that produced inflation unmatched by wage increases. With Soviet pseudo-logic, the government declared that the demonstrators were provocateurs, counter-revolutionaries and agents of Western imperialism. In typical Stalinist style, Rokossovsky, as commander-in-chief of all Polish armed forces and deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, ordered 10,000 armed security police with 360 tanks to put down the riots. In the process, they killed at least seventy-four demonstrators
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and injured an unknown number. The courage of the workers resisting this onslaught triggered a belated realisation in the PZPR leadership that the riots were the tip of an iceberg of social unrest. At the risk of mixing metaphors, it was decided to defuse the situation by redesignating the Poznan rioters as ‘honest workers with legitimate grievances’. Wages were increased by an amazing 50 per cent and other changes were promised.

Within the Party, a Poland-for-the-Poles movement grew in strength, arguing that far too many Russians still held positions of great power. With pro-Soviet Bierut dead, his successor, Edward Ochab, rehabilitated Gomułka, whose only ‘fault’ had been his conviction that Polish communism should be Polish first and communist second. Despite looking like a walking skeleton after his years in prison both before and after the war, Gomułka insisted that Rokossovsky be expelled from the Polish Politburo and a programme of reforms be put in place, to avoid a general uprising. Rokossovsky flew to Moscow and tried in vain to convince Nikita Khrushchev to send in the Red Army ‘to restore order in Poland’. On 19 October, the leadership of PZPR formally named Gomułka First Secretary of the Party – this with the backing of the defence forces and the Internal Security Corps.

These first overt signs that Poland was regaining control over its own destiny alarmed Moscow so much that intimidatingly large-scale manoeuvres were launched near the Soviet–Polish border. This was the iron fist in the velvet glove of a top-level delegation to Warsaw headed by Khrushchev. With extraordinary courage, Gomułka told them that Polish troops would resist if the ‘manoeuvres’ encroached on Polish territory, but sweetened the pill by portraying his reforms as internal Polish matters, which did not mean that the country was about to abrogate its treaty relationship with the USSR, abandon socialism or withdraw its armed forces from the Warsaw Pact alliance.
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As the Soviet delegation flew back to Moscow the following day, more or less satisfied, Gomułka’s popularity grew – not only in his own country. When neighbouring Hungary learned of these happenings from US propaganda station Radio Free Europe towards the end of October 1956, student unrest in the country turned into a full-blown anti-Soviet revolution, with secret policemen hacked to death in the streets of Budapest.

On 12 December far-reaching increases in food and other prices were announced; this triggered protests that started in the Lenin shipyard at Gdansk and spread along the Baltic coast. UB officers were attacked and local party offices torched, which provoked Soviet-style repression in response, with troops shooting rioters dead. Gomułka, blamed for the crackdown, was sacked again and replaced by Edward Gierek. In January he and Defence Minister Wojciech Jaruzelski actually sat down with the strikers in Szcecin and Gdansk, arguing for a whole day to persuade them to end their strikes.

The UB reduced the number of its officers in the central HQ by 30 per cent and in the regional and local offices by 40 or 50 per cent, but continued to be responsible for political repression, most notably targeting the Solidarnosc movement, whose co-founder Lech Wałesa was under constant surveillance until 1989. But lower numbers did not mean quiescence: as late as March of 1981 Solidarnosc supporters were attacked and beaten in the major city of Bydogoszcz, precipitating a strike by Solidarnosc’s 9.5 million members and many communist sympathisers, representing three-quarters of the working population. Concessions were promised but not put into effect, causing more strikes until on 12 December 1981 a cabal of generals declared a state of emergency, suspending all civil liberties, arresting Gierek and other party VIPs and approximately 10,000 other people, including all visible Solidarnosc leaders. Sit-ins by workers were ended by sending tanks to smash their way into factories and shipyards and an estimated 100 workers were killed in confrontations with the security forces.