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By Root 933 0

In the early stages of the Rising, Moscow seemed merely sceptical and indifferent about its outcome. In late August, however, Stalin went much further, making a considered decision to allow the Germans to eliminate the Army Krajowa in Warsaw. He shifted troops from the Vistula Front to the Baltic and the Balkans, even while the Army Krajowa was in the midst of its agony a few miles westward. To confuse matters further, he allowed Soviet forces to make some trifling gestures of support for the beleaguered Poles, to appease the Western allies. But, while Rokossovsky busied himself establishing bridgeheads on the western bank of the Vistula to secure start lines for further advances, the Red Army made no substantial moves to enter the Polish capital. “The Soviet government do not wish to associate themselves directly or indirectly with the adventure in Warsaw,” the Soviet deputy commissar for foreign affairs, Andrei Vyshinsky, told Averell Harriman, U.S. ambassador in Moscow, on 18 August.

The story is rendered still uglier by the behaviour of some of those in the West. The socialist intelligentsia was still much enamoured of the Soviet Union. British media comment on the Rising was slight and massively ill informed. Some writers remained for weeks extravagantly sympathetic to Soviet passivity. The left-wing New Statesman dismissed the Polish resisters as “Macchiavellian dilettanti.” The Times observed indulgently: “It is not difficult to understand Russian unwillingness to supply arms to people who are opposed to friendly relations with Russia.” George Orwell, almost alone among his kind, denounced Russian behaviour towards Poland passionately and publicly, in a noble flight of prose in Tribune: “the ‘Lublin regime’ is not a victory for socialism . . . It is the reduction of Poland to a vassal state . . . Woe to those in a vassal state who want to maintain their independent views and policies . . . If they happen to lead a heroic rising that embarrasses the protégés of the great ‘Protecting’ powers, they will be stigmatised as ‘criminals’ . . . Please do not ask us to show enthusiasm for such policies.” Orwell castigated his compatriots who refused to consider whether a given Russian action was or was not defensible. Instead, they simply said to each other: “ ‘This is Russian policy; how can we make it appear right? . . . The Russians are powerful in Eastern Europe, we are not; therefore we must not oppose them.’ This involves the principle, of its nature alien to Socialism, that you must not protest against an evil which you cannot prevent.”

Far more serious than the behaviour of British communist fellow-travellers, however, was the refusal of President Roosevelt to exert wholehearted pressure on Moscow. The secretary of state, Edward Stettinius, argued that the U.S. should seek to send aid to Warsaw, if remotely feasible. Roosevelt appalled Churchill, however, by the cold-bloodedness of a note drafted by his Chief of Staff, Admiral Leahy, on 5 September: “I am informed by my officers of Military Intelligence that the fighting Poles have departed from Warsaw, and that the Germans are now in full control . . . The problem of relief for the Poles in Warsaw has therefore, unfortunately, been solved by delay and German action.” In reality, of course, while the Poles had been driven out of Warsaw’s Old Town, they were still fighting fiercely in the centre of the capital. But Warsaw was scarcely discussed at the Anglo-American Octagon conference in Quebec in mid-September. The Russians continued to treat the Poles’ lunge for freedom with cold contempt. Rokossovsky likened the Rising to “the clown in the circus who pops up at the wrong moment and only gets wrapped up in the carpet.” The marshal later asserted that, if the Poles had delayed their revolt until his forces had gained the Praga suburb of Warsaw east of the Vistula in September, the liberation of the city might have been achieved. This seems implausible.

Churchill described Soviet behaviour at this period as “strange and sinister.” The prime minister recognized Stalin