World War II Behind Closed Doors (6 page)

Nevertheless, further down the Soviet chain of command there was more belief that this was a sincere agreement. Just days after the border treaty had been signed, Tuleniev, one of the Soviet military commanders in occupied Poland, gave the captured Polish general Władysław Anders ‘a long lecture’ in which he declared that: ‘The treaty of friendship with Germany would secure the mastery of the world to the Russians and Germans. Together the
two peoples would defeat France, and Britain, the greatest enemy of the Soviet Union, who would be finished for ever’. According to Anders, Tuleniev then went on to say that ‘They did not expect the entry of the United States into the war, as they would use the influence of their Communist organisation to prevent it’.
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But across the Atlantic, although there was no immediate prospect of the United States intervening militarily in the conflict, there was no question which side President Franklin Roosevelt supported. In the middle of August he had told Konstantin Oumansky, the Soviet ambassador to Washington, that in order to safeguard its future the Soviet Union should reach an agreement with Britain and France rather than with Nazi Germany. Furthermore, the ambassador was informed that he should ‘tell Stalin that if his Government joined up with Hitler, it was as certain as night followed day that as soon as Hitler had conquered France, he would turn on Russia and that it would be the Soviets’ turn next'.
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Roosevelt's considerable political gifts told him that Hitler was not to be trusted. But by the end of September 1939 the Soviet leadership must have thought the American President had been indulging in provocation with his dire prediction. For all seemed to be going well – perhaps even better than expected. Not least because the Soviets now basked in the certain knowledge that one of their greatest fears – that Britain or France would declare war on them in the wake of the Red Army's invasion of eastern Poland, and drag the Soviet Union into the conflict – had not been realized.

THE ALLIES FIGHT BACK – BUT ONLY WITH WORDS

On 20 September the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, spoke to the House of Commons about the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland: ‘For the unhappy victim of this cynical attack, the result has been a tragedy of the grimmest character. The world which has watched the vain struggle of the Polish nation against
overwhelming odds with profound pity and sympathy admires their valour, which even now refuses to admit defeat…. There is no sacrifice from which we will shrink, there is no operation we will not undertake provided our responsible advisers, our Allies, and we ourselves are convinced that it will make an appropriate contribution to victory. But what we will not do is to rush into adventures that offer little prospect of success and are calculated to impair our resources and to postpone ultimate victory’.
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So fine words – but no action.

British diplomats were even less enthusiastic about the prospect of conflict with the Soviet Union (or ‘adventures that offer little prospect of success’ as Chamberlain had just put it) than the politicians. ‘I do not myself see what advantage war with the Soviet Union would be to us’, wrote the British ambassador to Moscow, Sir William Seeds, on 18 September in a secret telegram to the Foreign Office, ‘though it would please me personally to declare it on M. Molotov’.
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Seeds then went on, in the same telegram, to make a prediction that was to turn out to be woefully wrong: ‘… the Soviet invasion of Poland is not without advantages to us in the long run, for it will entail the keeping of a large army on a war footing outside Russia consuming food and petrol and wearing out material and transport, thus reducing German hopes of military or food supplies’.
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But after the signing of the German-Soviet border treaty late that month, Sir William was to make a prophecy of much greater accuracy – one, indeed, that is remarkable given that Britain had been at war for less than a month. ‘It must be borne in mind’, he wrote in a telegram of 30 September, ‘that if war continues any considerable time, the Soviet part of Poland will, at its close, have been purged of any non-Soviet population or classes whatever, and that it may well be consequently impossible, in practice, to separate it from the rest of Russia’. Seeds then went on to ask his superiors in London whether it might not be possible to intimate to the Kremlin that ‘our war aims are not incompatible with reasonable settlement [in Poland] on ethnographic and cultural lines’.
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On the face of it, this was an incredible suggestion. The Soviet Union had just invaded, and was in the process of subjugating, the eastern part of a nation that the British had openly pledged to protect, yet here was a senior British official privately suggesting that this aggression should be immediately rewarded. But back in London another senior diplomat, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, endorsed Seeds's views in a report of 1 October: ‘The intervention of Russia has of course made the reconstitution of Poland much more difficult, if not wholly impossible. We should therefore be wise not to proclaim that we stand for the old boundaries of Poland. Such an attitude would render inevitable a conflict with Russia, which we do not wish to precipitate. There is much force in Sir W. Seeds's argument….’
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Kirkpatrick appended a ‘sketch map of Poland’ to his report and pointed out significantly that the new Soviet-imposed border of Poland mostly followed the ‘Curzon Line’, the demarcation line that had been proposed by Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary in 1919, and that had then been rejected by the Poles and Bolsheviks.

Meantime, some of the British population were bemused that their country had not been obliged to declare war on the Soviet Union. If the British treaty to protect Poland from aggression had resulted in war with the Germans, why hadn't it also resulted in war with the Soviet Union?

It was on this point that the British government found itself in a somewhat delicate position because the Nazi-Soviet pact was not the only treaty that had a secret protocol – the 1939 Anglo-Polish treaty had one as well. Whilst the section of that treaty that had been made public spoke of Britain's obligation to defend Poland from ‘aggression’ in general terms, there was another, private section that specifically limited that obligation to aggression from Germany. In order to explain the British inaction in the face of Soviet aggression, the Earl of Perth, a senior figure in the British Ministry of Information, wrote on 5 October to the Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, urging ‘that the time has now come to make known the existence of the secret protocol between Poland and ourselves’.
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Significantly, he also added that this action would have the additional benefit that ‘knowledge of this protocol might have a considerable effect on the Russian government, who it seems to me are somewhat anxious that part of our war aims may be the return of the Polish State with the boundaries which it had previous to the outbreak of war’.

Cadogan, Eton- and Oxford-educated and often cool in his judgements to the point of freezing, did not reply to Perth's letter until 3 November, but when he did he revealed that, whilst the Polish government in exile had agreed that the secret protocol could be made public, ‘we decided that it would be inadvisable to make any statement admitting the existence of a secret protocol, as this would only provoke curiosity about the existence of similar secret protocols attached to other treaties…’.
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By the time of Cadogan's letter, the British government's line on this potentially embarrassing subject had become clear. Although the secret protocol was not to be admitted openly, a statement was made in the House of Commons revealing that the Poles had ‘understood’ that ‘the agreement should only cover the case of aggression by Germany’.
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So from the beginning, Soviet aggression was treated differently from German aggression. And it is not hard to see why. On a purely practical level it was scarcely to the advantage of Britain to declare war on a second totalitarian power. The British government had already shown that they could not defend Poland against one aggressor – let alone two. Poland was simply too far away for the British to protect. But more than that, these secret diplomatic exchanges demonstrate how from the earliest days of the war there was a reluctance in some quarters ever to guarantee to the Poles that Britain's aim was to recover all their territory. And this was not just another example of straightforward pragmatism, but also a demonstration of the fact that some mandarins in the Foreign Office considered the eastern boundary of Poland somewhat ‘fluid’. We can also see in these diplomatic and governmental discussions a gap beginning to open between the grandiloquent words of the British government in public – ‘a cynical attack…a tragedy of the grimmest character’ – and the very different tone in
private – ‘the Soviet invasion of Poland is not without advantages to us in the long run’.

At one level, of course, this isn't a surprise. It comes as no shock to learn that politicians and diplomats are capable of dissembling. However, it is significant here because the Second World War took on the mantle of an entirely ‘moral’ war, almost a modern-day crusade against evil, and, as we shall see, later statements by the leaders of the Western Allies made this moral stance explicit. But from the first, behind the scenes there was a clear balance to be struck between ‘morality’ and traditional, old-fashioned national self-interest.

REPRESSION

Secure in the knowledge that the Western Allies would do nothing in practical terms to prevent them benefiting from their aggression, the Soviet authorities moved quickly to consolidate their control over the population of eastern Poland. And a crucial part of the process of repression was a sham pretence of democracy, with the first ‘elections’ held as early as 22 October.

Only candidates approved of by the Soviets could stand for election – and in some cases that meant there was no choice at all. ‘Yes’, comfirms Nikolai Dyukarev,
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who was a member of the Soviet NKVD in occupied Poland, ‘[if] there was only one candidate, [then] we would elect him, all of us. So it's not like it is now’.

The Soviet authorities often deliberately selected potential candidates from ill-educated, often illiterate, peasants. ‘We tried to elect poor people because we trusted them more’, admits Dyukarev. ‘They would support the Soviet Union, whilst rich people had their own interests. After all, [a poor person] was somebody who had worked all their life, and they could be good people’. At one election meeting a Mr Kowalewski was brave enough to speak out and let the Soviets know that their ruse was obvious to all: ‘You are on purpose selecting idiots for candidates’, he said, ‘so that they will merely appear as names on a list’.
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His
subsequent fate is not recorded, but – given the ruthlessness with which the Soviets pushed through political change – he is likely to have been arrested by the NKVD.

Another crucial part of enforcing change was the systematic destruction of the old educational system. Those teachers who managed to keep their jobs in the new system were required to instruct their pupils in a variety of previously alien ideas – speaking out against the Catholic Church and in favour of Stalin and Communism. And behind this reversal of the previous belief system was the ever-present feeling of threat.

‘When the Red Army arrived’, says Zenon Vrublevsky, then a schoolboy, ‘they hung a portrait of Stalin in the classroom. We were used to the old regime and we did not know this one was different. So, you see, we did what we had always done and Stalin acquired a new kind of moustache! This very elderly teacher spotted it and ran to the school principal. The principal came running in. There was noise and commotion and he took down the portrait. And we were laughing. But later on we understood. The teacher said to us: “How can you not understand this, you idiots! Can't you understand that nothing would happen to you, but they would put us teachers and the principal in prison [for this]!” We were so shocked. Who would have imagined that just a little [extra] moustache could get our teachers put in jail?’

But the Soviet authorities didn't just rely on fear to transform the Polish educational system – they also used incentives. The Polish General Anders learnt of one technique that the Soviets used to make the children understand that their world had changed: ‘A Bolshevik commission… visited a school for small children, most of whom were hungry owing to the shortage of food. “You are used to saying prayers,” said the Russians. “Now pray to your God to give you some bread”. The children were then made to pray. A long pause – “You see, you get nothing. Now ask the great Stalin for the same thing”. Almost immediately tea, sandwiches and sweets were brought into the classroom. “Now you see who is the better and more powerful”’.
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And hand in hand that autumn with this attempt to ‘re-educate’
the population of eastern Poland went close cooperation with the Germans in the form of the practical work of the German-Soviet border committee. This group had been set up after the 27 September meeting between Ribbentrop and the Soviets, and charged with the task of formalizing the precise route of the boundary between the two states. At the end of October all the various sub-committees were gathered in German-occupied Warsaw to receive instructions. ‘This [meeting] was hosted by the German embassy’, wrote Andor Hencke,
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‘which, as leader of the German delegation, I had to represent. This was the first opportunity since the change of policy to return the hospitality the Russians had extended to us. On the Reich Foreign Minister's express orders, special emphasis was placed on making the two-day stay of the Soviet officials (and officers belonging to the central border committee and the sub-committees in the German sphere of control) as pleasant as was possible in the Polish capital’.