Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw (89 page)

The key to Stalinism, as to many other forms of totalitarian regimes, lies in the ethos of a secular religion which taught its adherents both to believe its precepts and to condemn all non-believers. For Stalinism was a special form of sectarian cult, which possessed its infallible leader, its dogmas, its rituals, its superstitions, and its Great Satan. On the political scale, it stood as far from pluralistic, tolerant, utilitarian democracy as one can get. Its hell was the outside world, where its norms could not be enforced. Either through fear or through faith, its followers simply could not envisage compromise.

One of the best introductions to Stalinism, therefore, was written by a political left-winger, who had initially been drawn towards Marxism but who, having seen the Soviet system from the inside, wrote the most devastating critique ever penned. A writer and poet, who had disagreed with the Warsaw Rising and had fled as soon as it started, briefly served the post-war regime before fleeing for good to the USA. He likened Stalinism in Poland to the ‘Art of Ketman’ as performed under the oriental despotism of the Shah in feudal Persia:

Ketman was the art of double-think, of dissimulating and of deceit – the profession of an army of toadies and lick-spittles who pandered to the whims of ‘Him’ with limitless flattery and cynicism, simply to promote their careers or to save their skins. According to the Comte de Gobineau, who first described the Persian Court to the world at large, ‘there were no true Moslems in Persia.’ According to the author, ‘there were very few true Communists in Poland.
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The closed, mystical nature of the world of communism was confirmed by a member of the inner circle, a Varsovian, who stayed loyal to the movement throughout the Stalinist period despite serving seven years in the Gulag and losing a brother in the pre-war purges. His perseverance may be explained by the fact that he also lost his parents in Treblinka:

For the Party . . . is a word that replaces all known concepts and expressions; it is an absolute, an abstraction. It is always right; it is our honour, our happiness, our life’s goal. And if you ask any Communist about its infallibility, . . . he will say: the Party didn’t commit mistakes; people committed mistakes. The leadership, abusing our trust, committed mistakes . . .
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The inner circle of the post-war political elite, who took all major decisions and who passed on instructions from Moscow, did not exceed perhaps half a dozen individuals. In the early years they were headed by the General Secretary of the PPR, Comrade ‘Vyeslav’ G., and by Bierut, the Chairman of the KRN, who posed for the time being as a ‘non-party man’. The former was the only one who, though a loyal Communist, held a modicum of independent views and who did not owe his position directly to Moscow. After his removal in 1948, the circle was reduced to a ‘Troika’ of three – Bierut, now both General Secretary of the United Workers’ Party and President of State, Jacob Berman, the Security Chief, and Hilary Minc, the economic supremo. These men, ‘Muscovites’ to a fault, held all the reins of power. They controlled all other party functionaries through the rules of party obedience. They controlled all non-party ministers and officials through the party-run nomenklatura system which oversaw all appointments, high and low. So long as they maintained Stalin’s confidence, they were untouchable. Unlike the mass of their subjects they lived in style – with access to luxurious, party-owned villas, to well-stocked shops reserved for the party, to limousines, to servants, and to the supreme symbol of power – the
vyerskhuvka
telephone, a dedicated, direct line to the Kremlin.

In November 1949, the ‘Troika’ was joined by none other than Marshal Rokossovsky, the Soviet commander who had halted his armies within view of the Warsaw Rising five years earlier. The Marshal, who was a Soviet citizen, was now appointed Poland’s Minister of Defence in a move to re-subordinate the Polish military establishment to its Soviet superiors. His appointment, accompanied by an army of Soviet advisers, was
occasioned by the creation of NATO and by Stalin’s fears about Poland’s reliability in the looming international conflict.

Two or three times a year, Bierut and Berman would travel together to Moscow for a personal meeting with Stalin. They usually met him either late at night or in the early morning. Stalin used these meetings to test and to humiliate his henchmen. Once, Berman had to dance with Molotov whilst Stalin wound the gramophone. He learned that Molotov’s wife was being held in the Gulag – ‘just in case’. On another occasion, Stalin pressed Bierut to say whom he liked better, Berman or Minc. ‘It was like a child being asked whether he loved Daddy or Mummy.’ Bierut passed the test, replying that he liked both of them equally.

On one such occasion Bierut received a rude shock about the realities of his position. Years after the purge of the KPP in 1938, he was still trying to discover the fate of numerous pre-war comrades, who had disappeared without trace. And he had dared to ask Stalin about it face to face. Stalin went through the same routine that he had laid on for Gen. Sikorski in 1941 when asked about the whereabouts of the thousands of missing Polish officers subsequently unearthed at Katyn. He called in Beria and spoke sharply to him. ‘Where are they?’ he would enquire; ‘I told you to look for them. Why haven’t you found them?’ Beria did not see the funny side. Leaving the room in Bierut’s company, he warned him off in no uncertain terms. ‘Why are you fucking around with Iosif Vissarionovich?’ he began. ‘You fuck off and leave him alone. That’s my advice to you, or you’ll regret it!’ An open warning from a monster who by that time had already killed millions was not to be ignored.
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‘Poland’s Stalin’, who was viewed at home as an all-powerful dictator, was a mere mouse to be played with in the presence of the real Stalin. Yet such is life among gangsters. The big fry beat the lesser fry; and the lesser fry beat the small fry. Many of the inner circle had done time in the Gulag or in Soviet prisons. One member of Bierut’s Politburo had been so badly tortured in the USSR that, unusually, he couldn’t even mention it. Another had reputedly broken his own arm to avoid signing a confession that would have ended his life. Eventually, when many of the grisly facts were made public, all denied having any knowledge of them.

When Stalin died on 5 March 1953, millions wept. One may think that they wept because the ‘Great Leader’ had been loved and admired. But that would be an unjustified generalization. Certainly, he was widely admired in the Soviet Union as the victorious war leader, who had made Russia great again. He was loved by those who had taken his cult at face
value. But for tens of millions, especially in the satellite states, he had never been remotely loved or admired. They saw him simply as a bloody tyrant. But they wept as well – from shock, from relief, from disbelief, from the realization that everyone else was weeping. Having been told that Stalin was immortal, or having lost hope for an end to the nightmare, commissar and schoolchild, veteran or victim, they all felt the wave of shock and emptiness.

Yet Stalinism did not die with the death of Stalin. The system which he had created over thirty years did not possess any mechanisms for change or reform. In Moscow, a collective leadership emerged, which for its own safety killed Beria, but which was otherwise committed to keeping the system intact. In Warsaw, Bierut was unchallenged and unchallengeable. The United Workers’ Party continued to rule supreme. The security apparatus continued to function as before.

The ‘Thaw’, as it was called, began imperceptibly. It was first noticed in Poland when compulsory collectivization was quietly abandoned in 1954. It was gathering pace in 1955, when public criticism of the regime was first aired by party members. In this regard, the publication of a
Poem for Adults
by Adam W. contained some really shocking lines.

By the time that the hated Ministry of Security was removed in the same year (if only to be replaced by something rather similar) the prospect for more fundamental reform was in the air.

The denouement came in March 1956 with Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’. At a meeting of the Soviet Party Congress, one of Stalin’s most notorious henchmen announced that Stalin had been a criminal, guilty of crimes against the party. (Khrushchev said nothing about Stalin’s crimes against ordinary people.) Bierut had travelled to Moscow to attend the Congress. He returned in a coffin, having suffered a heart attack in uncertain circumstances. Things would not be the same again. It was nearly eleven years after the end of the war, nearly twelve years since the start of the Rising.

Life restarted in post-war Warsaw in a setting that resembled Hiroshima. The evacuation of the inhabitants had been almost total. The physical destruction, which in the principal, left-bank districts of the city was almost complete, exceeded the devastation of Dresden. Yet the determination to restore the city as the country’s capital was virtually unanimous. For a couple of years, many Government institutions had to be located elsewhere, notably in Lodz, simply for lack of accommodation. But the intention was clear from the start:
Varsovia revivenda est.

Many post-war observers commented on the shocking, ghostly nature of the ruins. Yet the most terrible of the ghosts which stalked the shattered streets and walked the broken walls was ‘the Rising’ itself. It was the cause of the city’s disaster. Yet in the climate of the new, post-war order, it was all but unmentionable.

The rebuilding of Warsaw after 1945 was a grand act of national defiance which stated in bricks and mortar that the late
Führer’s
will would not prevail. In practical terms, it didn’t make sense. Since Poland had lost over half of its territory, Warsaw now stood on the extreme eastern periphery. Urban planners would have preferred to prepare a purpose-built capital on the lines of Canberra or Braília somewhere nearer the centre. But the political and emotional arguments were overwhelming. Warsaw could not be left to die. The size of the task was horrendous. Some 80km
²
(thirty square miles) had to be cleared of rubble and corpses before construction could even begin. Eight or ten years would be needed before even small districts, especially the Old City, could be fully restored. Fifty years would pass before the Royal Castle rose again to its former glory. The irony was: the people who ordered the rebuilding were the very ones who had benefited most from the destruction. They took great care to conceal what had actually happened. Everything was blamed on ‘the fascists’.

For obvious reasons, qualified city planners were in great demand in post-war Warsaw; and it was almost inevitable that ex-insurgents would figure among them. One such specialist was Capt. ‘Agaton’, a ‘dark and silent’, who had been parachuted in by SOE in March 1942 and who subsequently fought in the Rising in the AK’s ‘Fist’ Battalion. After the Capitulation, he served as Gen. Boor’s adjutant. But on arrival in England, he made straight for Liverpool University and a course in urban planning. On graduation, he returned to Poland without delay; and, despite his political connections, he was allowed to work in the Warsaw Planning Office undisturbed. He was one of the very few ex-insurgents who
participated both in the battle for the capital in 1944 and in the subsequent campaign of reconstruction.

The priorities in Warsaw’s reconstruction said much about the new ruling elite. The restoration of the Old City, which was undertaken in loving detail at a time of great austerity, was shrewdly designed to establish the patriotic credentials of the post-war order. And the provision of high-quality, stone-built, and spacious living quarters for official families was a standard feature of Soviet-style capitals from Moscow to Bucharest or East Berlin. But it contrasted sharply with the cramped and shoddy accommodation provided with much greater delay for the working class in low-grade multistoreyed concrete blocks. The massive Joseph Stalin Palace of Culture and Arts, which rose in the vicinity of the Central Station and on the site of some of the heaviest fighting in 1944, was designed to dominate the skyline. Nominally a gift from the USSR, it was more than paid for from the grotesquely unfair trade terms which the Soviet Government had imposed. Polish coal, for example, was sold to the USSR at 5 per cent of its international market value. The Palace of Culture was a blatant piece of architectural oppression. It was a secular replacement for the Tsar’s gift of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral which had dominated the city’s skyline before 1914 and which the Varsovians had dared to demolish.

So, despite appearances, this was not really an attempt to restore the old Warsaw. It was a new capital, run by new people with completely new priorities and with no intention of letting the old spirit revive. Thanks to the strict control of residence permits, preference was given to dependants of the regime; and political undesirables, like the surviving families of ex-insurgents, could easily be prevented from returning and from reclaiming the ruins of their old homes. The social policy of the Communist regime was systematically exclusive.

Post-war policy on historical monuments followed similar political priorities. Some of the pre-war landmarks were duly replaced. The Sigismund Column was raised again above the Cracow Faubourg. The Chopin Statue reappeared in 1946 in the Lazhenki Park, having been rescued from a German scrapyard. It still bore the magnificent quotation from Poland’s national bard:

Fire may consume the colourful relics of the past
And thieves may plunder the prizes of the sword.
But the melody will survive intact.
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There was a grandiose Soviet War Memorial to the fallen of 1945, replete with oversize figures and T34 tanks, which dominated the modern freeway leading to the airport. In Praga, there was a memorial to Polish–Soviet brotherhood-in-arms, which, thanks to memories of the Rising, came to be known as ‘the Four Sleepers’. Yet many other items were strangely absent. There was no Polish War Memorial to the fallen of 1939. When the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was restored, most of the original inscriptions were removed. There was no reference to the Battle of Warsaw 1920, though battle honours from the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War were inserted. A fine monument to the Heroes of the Ghetto was unveiled in Muranov in 1947. But no public monument whatsoever was allowed to the memory of the Warsaw Rising.