Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (28 page)

Fortunately, for the sake of an easy conscience, the propaganda department of the Union of Polish Patriots pursued a comforting line in historical explanations. Pre-war Poland, it would say, had been a land of oppression run by priests and nobles. Yet the old Poland was dead. So, too, was the outdated hatred and suspicion of Russia. With the help of the Soviet Union, a new Poland would arise, full of peace and justice. What is more the Polish people had a fine tradition of fighting against oppression. Time and again, they had linked up with their Russian brothers in the long struggle against the wars. In 1793–94, in 1830, in 1863 and in 1905, their capital had risen up repeatedly. Insurrection was a Polish speciality. When the battle for the Vistula was joined, everyone knew what to expect.

There remained the key question of the ‘Patriotism’ on which the Union of Polish Patriots was harping at every turn. What sort of patriotism was it that required Poles not only to fight the Germans but to obey and to emulate the Soviet Union in every slavish detail? The problem was not improved by one of its early slogans: ‘
POLAND: THE SEVENTEENTH REPUBLIC OF THE USSR
.’

One cannot repeat often enough that anyone who thinks that it was the frontier of Russia, not the Soviet Union, which the Germans crossed in June 1941 will already have lost the plot. Yet the modern history of the lands that lie between Moscow and Warsaw becomes much simpler when one realizes that
all
the interested parties without exception had their own interpretations of history, their own claims, their own propaganda and their own nomenclature. Much turns on the legacy of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a historic entity which occupied the enormous space between the ancient Kingdom of Poland to the west and the ancient Principality of Moscow to the east. At its greatest extent in the late sixteenth century, the
Grand Duchy included the cities of Vilno, Minsk, and Kiev, which, after many tribulations, became the capitals respectively of Lithuania, Byelorussia (Belarus), and Ukraine. (Some modern commentators refer to this region by the useful acronym of LBU (or ULB), which coincides nicely both with important ethnic divisions and with the contemporary, post-Soviet states.) (See Appendix 1.) For most of its existence, the territory of the Grand Duchy was contested by the rival rulers of Poland and Muscovy. From 1385 to 1572 it was ruled alongside Poland by the same Yagiellonian dynasty; and from 1572–1793 it formed an integral part of the dual Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Yet, from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, the tides of power were flowing in the favour of Moscow. Bit by bit, bite by bite, the Muscovites ate into the body of the Commonwealth. They swallowed Kiev in 1662, Minsk in 1773, Vilno in 1793, and Warsaw at the second or third attempt in 1815. What is more, having declared themselves Tsars of ‘all the Russias’, they changed the existing names. Old Muscovy had invented the name of Rossiya or ‘Russia’ for itself long since. ‘White Ruthenia’ was changed into ‘White Russia’. And the other part of Ruthenia, the former southern borderland of the Commonwealth, Ukraina, was made into ‘Little Russia’. In the last decades of the Tsarist Empire, historic names such as ‘Poland’ or ‘Lithuania’ or ‘Ruthenia’ were disappearing from official usage.

At the end of the First World War, when the Tsarist Empire fell apart, all manner of national republics claimed their independence, from Finland in the north-west to Georgia in the south-east. Most of them, like Byelorussia and Ukraine, were soon suppressed by the Bolsheviks who triumphed in the so-called Russian Civil War and were intent on recreating a new sort of empire in the form of the Soviet Union. But the Republic of Poland was one of those which resisted reincorporation. After three years of war against Germany as well as Soviet Russia, it achieved a continuous system of internationally recognized borders. Its eastern frontier, formally established by the Treaty of Riga of 1921, remained intact throughout the interwar period and was not violated until the Soviet invasion of 17 September 1939. Though superseded in practice by the Nazi–Soviet agreements, and by the unilateral arrangements of the German Occupation regime of 1941–44, it remained in international law as the sole legitimate dividing line between the Soviet Union and Poland.

The ethnic mix of the population of Lithuania, Byelorussia, and Ukraine was no less complex than its history. The major language groups
were Poles (more than 5 million), Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Lithuanians, Yiddish-speaking Jews, and, as a remnant from Tsarist days, a small number of Russians, whom the others invariably dubbed Moskale (‘Muscovites’). These groups were traditionally associated with particular religions: the Poles and Lithuanians with Roman Catholicism, the Ruthenians (the Ukrainians and Byelorussians) with the Uniate (Greek Catholic) Church, the Jews with various forms of Judaism, and the Russians with Russian Orthodoxy.

This relatively straightforward picture was distorted by two acts of arbitrary policy deriving from Tsarist days. First, the Tsarist authorities absolutely refused to acknowledge the distinction between Russians and Ruthenians, or to accept that the two Ruthenian peoples belonged to separate nationalities. They held that all the East Slavs formed a single Great Russian nation and that the Byelorussian and Ukrainian languages were mere dialects of Russian. (This can be compared to the contention that the Dutch and the Deutsch belong to a single nationality whose members speak slightly different variants of the same German language.) Second, the Patriarch of Moscow categorically refused to countenance either the Greek Catholic Church or the old form of Ruthenian Orthodoxy, which had traditionally paid allegiance not to Moscow but to the Patriarch of Constantinople. As a result, wherever the Tsar’s writ ran, all East Slavs were officially designated as ‘Russians’ and all these Russians were ascribed as Russian Orthodox. It was a grave injustice which underlay the widespread misattribution of the region as an integral part of Russia.

In reality, the outstanding characteristic of the population of these borderlands was its diversity. It was multi-ethnic, multilingual, multicultural, and multiconfessional. The same can be said of the two great cities of the region, Vilno and Lvuv, although in their case, the Polish element commanded a clear majority. Vilno, for example, served as the main cultural centre not only for Poles, but also for Lithuanians, Byelorussians, and Yiddishers of the surrounding region. Yet Lvuv was more intensely Polish than any other centre. In its whole history prior to 1939, it had never found itself in the Grand Duchy, in the Tsarist Empire, or in the USSR. Historically, it had been the eastern bastion of the Kingdom of Poland. Its motto,
SEMPER FIDELIS
, declared its loyalty to the Polish cause. Even under Austrian rule, as the capital of Galicia, it retained far-reaching autonomy; and Galician Poles wielded a formidable influence in Vienna. In 1918–19, it had repeatedly defended its attachment to Poland with sword
in hand. It was the last place in the Borders that the Poles would willingly abandon.

In the interwar period, both the Soviet and the Polish Governments revised the existing ethnic classifications. In the Soviet Union, Lithuanian, Byelorussian, and Ukrainian were recognized for the first time as the official national languages of their Soviet republics. In the Republic of Poland, all three were legally protected minority languages, qualifying alongside Polish as languages of instruction for schooling in the eastern provinces. Yiddish, though frowned on in various circles (including the Zionists’), continued to be the most frequent mother tongue both of Soviet and of Polish Jews. The Greek Catholic (Uniate) religion, though severely repressed on Soviet territory, was officially reinstated on the Polish side of the frontier.

During the German occupation, which in 1939–41 reached as far as the Bug and spread far to the east in 1941–44, ethnic groupings were reordered in line with the Nazis’ pseudo-racial categories. The Slavs were declared to be a racial group, not just a linguistic one. They were rated as
untermenschen
, subhuman, and the differences between them were either ignored or exploited in a crude form of ‘divide and rule’. They were higher in Nazi estimation than the Jews, but markedly inferior to the German master race and to the Balts, who were judged ripe for Germanization.

In the course of the war, all the nationalities of the Borders suffered grievously. The ‘collateral damage’ of the German–Soviet Front, which passed through twice (in 1941 and 1944), was colossal. Byelorussians and Ukrainians were vastly reduced by military and political actions. The Jews were decimated by the Nazis. The Poles were cut down by Soviet deportations, by Nazi repressions, and by a campaign of ethnic cleansing undertaken by Ukrainian nationalists. As became apparent after the war, some of the worst atrocities of the Jewish Holocaust were perpetrated by German occupying forces in these same districts. It was not Soviet practice to draw attention to any particular group.

Rokossovsky’s war memoirs give no hint of these matters. But he and his men must have been keenly aware of the changing ethnic and historical complexion of the lands through which they were advancing.

Stalingrad and Kursk were both in Russia, in what in those days was called the Russian Federation of Soviet Socialist Republics (RSFSR). Stalingrad, the former Tsaritsyn renamed ‘the City of Stalin’, lay on the right
bank of the Volga and marked the most easterly point which the Wehrmacht reached in that central sector. Kursk, 650km (400 miles) from Stalingrad, lay south of Moscow, close to the point where Russia, Byelorussia, and Ukraine meet. It was still in historic Muscovite territory, inhabited by Russians and surrounded by Russian villages where Russian peasants spoke nothing but Russian.

The RSFSR, of course, included Siberia and stretched all the way to the Pacific. It constituted 85 per cent of the territory of the Soviet Union. Even so, Russians represented only 55 per cent of the total Soviet population, though they were considerably more numerous in the army, and especially in the officer corps. As a result, they sustained a disproportionate share of military losses. At the same time, since the German occupation barely touched the fringes of Russia, their civilian losses were considerably less, both in relative and in absolute terms, than those of the Byelorussians and Ukrainians.

Ukraine, whose northern reaches were traversed by Rokossovsky’s advance, was the Soviet Union’s second most populous republic. It was larger than France, and with nearly 50 million inhabitants had a similar sized population to Britain or Italy. Before 1939, it had been split into two unequal parts – the smaller Western Ukraine, centred on Lvuv (L’viv), which had spent centuries in Polish or Austrian hands, and the larger swathe of Central and Eastern Ukraine, which before 1917 had been in the Tsarist Empire and from 1923 in the Soviet Union.

In the later stages of the First World War, Ukraine was benevolently treated by the occupying forces of the Kaiser’s Germany, which helped to set up the short-lived independent republic. In the Second World War, it was barbarously treated by the Nazis, who rejected pleas for the restoration of the Ukrainian Republic, setting up instead the military protectorate of
Reichskommissariat Ukraine
. The estimated 3 million Ukrainians who perished at German hands in 1941–44 matched the 3 million Ukrainians who had perished ten years earlier on Stalin’s orders during the artificial Terror-Famine.
¹⁵
The Ukrainians must be regarded as the nationality which suffered the largest total of civilian war dead during the war.

During the Soviet advance of 1944, Western Ukraine was in the throes of a particularly vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing. Following the murder of the region’s numerous Jewish community by the Nazis, the fascistic Ukrainian Insurrectionary Army (UPA) had seized the opportunity to create a purely ‘Ukrainian Ukraine’ by murdering the Poles in their midst.
¹⁶
The Soviet solution was to round up all Ukrainian nationalists,
whether or not they had been involved in the slaughter, then encourage the remaining Poles to leave.

Byelorussia had also been split into two distinct parts. Western Byelorussia had been in Poland. Eastern Byelorussia, otherwise the Byelorussian SSR centred on Minsk, had been a founder member of the Soviet Union. Both parts, in 1944, were suffering from extreme distress – and not only from the effects of Nazi occupation. During the war, the vast marshes and forests of Byelorussia made ideal country for partisans who were not deterred by the German threat to execute a hundred people for every German killed by ‘bandits’. Soviet, Byelorussian, Polish, and even Jewish Underground groups fought and competed in the backwoods. By 1945, one quarter of the country’s population had perished. Proportionately, it was the highest death toll in Europe.

Pre-war Soviet Byelorussia had suffered disaster after disaster. In the 1920s it was allowed to introduce the native language for the first time, only to find that in the 1930s the new Byelorussian intelligentsia was virtually wiped out in Stalin’s purges. Sixty per cent of the professors at the Byelorussian Academy of Sciences in Minsk were liquidated. They were largely replaced by Russians. As in Ukraine, huge numbers of peasants were eliminated by forced collectivization. The entire leadership of the Polish Communist Party (KPP), which had taken refuge in Minsk, was shot. In the Kuropaty Forest, huge pits contained the bodies of several hundred thousand victims of the ‘Great Terror’ of 1938–39, when Stalin’s security police were killing by quota. Then came the Nazis. The citizenry of Minsk, which had a particularly large Jewish community, was all but wiped out. Physical destruction followed human destruction.

Western Byelorussia, which included the towns of Novogrodek, Grodno, Brest, and Pinsk, also included the vast expanse of Polesie, better known in English as the Pripet Marshes. This was the ultimate sanctuary of primitive Slavonic folklore and of prolific birdlife. The stupendous Forest of Bialovyezha, where bison and wolves still roamed, had attracted the Tsars to their favourite hunting and shooting lodge. Under Polish rule after 1921, Byelorussian language and culture had been permitted. A strong peasant cooperative system had been formed. A Byelorussian political movement which was banned in the USSR had also functioned. Its leader had died in a Soviet prison. The towns as opposed to the countryside were overwhelmingly Polish and Jewish. Novogrodek was the birthplace of Poland’s national poet, Adam M., and of Menahem Begin, a future Premier of Israel. Some towns, like Pinsk, had absolute Jewish majorities. They
were notorious in the eyes of the rest of the population for having staged elaborate ceremonies of welcome for the Red Army in September 1939. But then September 1939 had seen the last days of peace. The Soviet Occupation of 1939–41 brought mass arrests, deportations, and confiscations. Operation Barbarossa brought in the Nazi regime, and endless murders and reprisals. Rokossovsky’s approach brought another round of bitter fighting on the grand scale.