Poland, spring forty-fifth. Case of Sixteen
The trial of sixteen in Moscow, June 1945. General Leopold Okulitsky argues with the prosecution. The defendants refused protection because everyone was fluent in Russian and had a law degree
The insidious arrest by the Soviet counterintelligence of sixteen leaders of the Polish underground in March 1945, followed by their trial in Moscow, for obvious reasons, did not receive much attention of historians and journalists of the Polish People’s Republic. It would seem that a change in the political system was to remove the curtain of silence over this history. But the hype caused by glasnost and perestroika quickly passed, and the veil of silence again fell over the fate of sixteen persons involved in the Moscow process. And there are good reasons for this.
Sixteen prominent politicians, with experience of underground struggle, fell into a primitive police provocation - entered into negotiations with unknown colonel Konstantin Pimenov, head of the SMERSH NKVD task force in Radom, and accepted invitations from him to meet with a general at dinner with his last name ( Ivanov) per kilometer staged with a pseudonym. Even ordinary readers of espionage novels know that such invitations, as a rule, are only a preliminary step to arrest. However, no one demanded the presence on the Soviet side of high-ranking and well-known figures not related to the special services. The Poles also neglected to notify their Anglo-American allies. Amazing naivety for experienced underground workers.
More interesting. General Ivan Serov (aka Ivanov), authorized by the NKVD on the 1st Belorussian Front and head of the rear guard of the 1st Belorussian Front, later the head of the GRU and the first chairman of the KGB, did not hide the true objectives of the provocation: to seize the leaders of the underground domestic delegation of the Polish government in London and ensure the work of the Polish Provisional Government of National Unity, negotiations on the creation of which were about to begin in accordance with the agreement of the leaders of the Big Three in Yalta. From the telegram sent by Serov to the head of the Soviet special services Lavrenty Beria, he dedicated the members of the provisional government of Poland, President Boleslav Bierut and Prime Minister Edward Osubka-Moravsky, who did not object to the Serov plan, but only asked to postpone holding his life until an agreement is reached with Moscow on the organization of negotiations with the London delegate on the subject of its representatives joining the government of national unity or attracting their cooperation. According to Serov’s alleged diaries, in response to his telegram, he received a strict order not to get involved in boyhood and to take measures to capture the Polish underground. At the end of 2019, the authenticity of Serov’s diaries was disputed, but it is known for certain that Serov did keep diaries. Periodically, fragments fell into scientific circulation, allegedly taken from his diaries, which alleged that Serov had informed Berut and Osubka-Moravsky that the leaders of the underground had disappeared and there was a suspicion that someone had warned them of the impending arrest. It is only known for sure that in April 1945, Vladislav Gomulka, the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers' Party, who arrived in Moscow to sign a friendship treaty between Poland and the USSR, argued with Joseph Stalin about this and demanded to punish Serov on the grounds that he acted on the territory under Polish jurisdiction without the consent of the Polish side. Serov was eventually transferred to the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany, and this incident was over.
Those of the leaders of the underground who remained in an illegal situation (like Stefan Korbonsky or Jozef Nechko) or surrendered to the Polish authorities (like Stanislav Banychik) remained at large, and some even joined the political life of socialist Poland.
The leaders of the Polish resistance movement, oriented towards the emigration government in London, were dominated (with few exceptions) by the desire to wishful thinking. They were also characterized by boundless vanity and ambition. But their ideas about domestic and international situation diametrically diverged from reality. Among them, the prevailing opinion was that the Red Army could not defeat the retreating without Polish help. Wehrmachtthat the Soviet authorities without an agreement with the London delegate will not be able to effectively control the rear of the fronts advancing on Berlin, that in direct negotiations with Stalin they will be able to bargain for themselves better conditions than the British and Americans did in Yalta, especially since they were ready to agree with some its decrees as the Polish-Soviet border along the Curzon line. It seemed to them that in the current situation they would be able to ignore the Western allies and even the emigration government. And the people’s army and power, which comes into its own in the liberated territories, were not taken into account at all, being sure that they would be easily dispersed.
This attitude towards reality fatally reflected in their relations with the Western powers. The governments of Great Britain and the United States of America, after unsuccessful attempts to persuade the emigrant government in favor of adopting Yalta resolutions (the Curzon line, personnel compromises, and concessions in favor of the socialist model of development) ultimately decided to do without the London government. But they were not going to refuse the political capital of this government in Poland and abroad in the hope of using it in the future in their own interests. In Yalta, the British and Americans agreed to the wording:
A new position was created in Poland as a result of its complete liberation by the Red Army. This requires the creation of a variable Polish government that would have a broader base than was possible before, until the recent liberation of western Poland. The current interim government in Poland must therefore be reorganized on a broader democratic basis with the inclusion of democratic figures from Poland itself and Poles from abroad. This new government should then be called the Polish Provisional Government of National Unity.
Shortly before the start of the conference, British Foreign Minister Sir Anthony Eden asked the Polish emigration government to provide him with a list of leading figures in the London underground in Poland with the aim of securing personal security for them at the meeting of the Big Three in the liberated territories of Poland. However, he did not receive such a list, since the emigration government ordered its politicians and the military to remain underground. And when he changed his position and acquainted the British side with the composition of the delegate, it was already too late to do anything.
Only after the Yalta Conference did former Prime Minister Stanislav Mikołajczyk, who was no longer a member of the London government and became the main Western candidate for negotiations on the future Polish government, pass on to the British and Americans several names of Polish politicians selected for these negotiations.
At the end of February, the ambassadors of both Western powers in Moscow were instructed to demand from the Warsaw government to stop litigation and other repressive measures against political opponents, with the exception of war criminals and perpetrators of crimes against the Red Army.
Over the next months, the Western Allies repeatedly appealed to Stalin in favor of the arrested group of sixteen, emphasizing that we are talking about the leaders of political parties - civilians. However, the last chief commandant of the Craiova Army, General Leopold Okulitsky, was not a civilian, which was clearly voiced on May 3 in a conversation between the Soviet People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Vyacheslav Molotov and Eden and US Secretary of State Eduard Stettinius.
It is widely believed that the gentleness of British and American petitions in the interests of the arrested Poles stemmed from their compliance with Stalin. One can hardly find a more absurd argument than this. British and American politicians were personalities in a format that hardly made them tremble before the personality cult of an ideological adversary. Their policies stemmed from the logic of war. They themselves did not tolerate any clandestine organizations in the rear of their troops, especially military ones, and severely disarmed such organizations in Italy, Greece, France and Belgium, Burma and the Philippines. For the same reason, they did not intend to prevent their ally from doing the same in the rear of the Eastern Front. The leadership of the Polish emigration and the underground knew this and did not notify the British about the creation of a successor to the Craiova Army, an organization No, nor about other initiatives in the rear of the Red Army.
In December 1944, reporting to London on the creation of a new military-political underground organization, gene. Okulitsky, in particular, radiated:
Lviv, Vilna, Lublin should already be untwisted, since people from there were sent first. For security reasons, we keep in strictest confidence the details of the organization and the directive and correspondence on this topic is undesirable.
It seems to us that we should not burden ourselves with responsibility in the international market by working against the Soviets.
It seems to us that we should not burden ourselves with responsibility in the international market by working against the Soviets.
The strictest secret that Okulitsky insisted on was actually a fiction. The British were well aware of everything, as the whole exchange of information between London and the occupied territories passed through their hands. If necessary, they were quite capable of manipulating the content of messages and the sessions of their transmission.
Okulitsky went to "negotiations" with Ivanov-Serov, despite a direct ban on the chief of staff of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Army, General Stanislav Kopansky. Okulitsky referred to the unconditional demand of the delegate. But was this the only reason? On the tenth day of the arrest, in a letter addressed to Beria, the general offered sincere negotiations on the activities of the Home Army, subject to security guarantees to the persons who would be named during these negotiations.
Further, on April 5, Okulitsky personally wrote upright 50-page confessions in typewriting. In them he outlined in detail everything he knew about the Home Army, its structures, weapons, and command. He defended the correctness of the decision to raise an uprising in Warsaw, but admitted that the main argument against this decision was the lack of interaction with the Red Army command. He also openly posed the issue of maintaining the residual organization and headquarters after the dissolution of the Home Army. He did not see any signs of hostility towards the USSR in this, but expressed the assumption that the London government could have its own vision of the tasks of these structures. Okulitsky quite frivolously called the names, surnames and call signs of a number of colleagues who remained underground, among others, the gene. Augustus Fielddorf. He also strongly condemned the emigration government. Crimean Conferencethe general wrote turning to the solution of the Polish question bypassing this government, finished off the Polish government in London in the eyes of the Polish public. The importance of this government in Poland is already extremely small. The Peasant Party has the greatest power in Poland, more than 50% of the country. Okulitsky placed the Polish Labor Party in second place, evaluating its influence by 20%.
General Okulitsky expressed full support for the Yalta decisions as the starting point for further initiatives to resolve the Polish question:
In my opinion, the future interim Polish government should pursue a policy of the interim Lublin government, friendly to the USSR. (...) The Soviet government has the right to demand that the new government of Poland be created from democratic elements, which should guarantee that good-neighborly relations between Poland and the USSR will be preserved in the future and that Poland will not be used by external forces against the USSR. The Soviet government must provide freedom for the development and life of Poland as an independent and fully sovereign state. I am sincerely convinced that when these general principles are respected, the cooperation of the Polish people with the peoples of the USSR will develop harmoniously and without any friction in the future. (...)
Literally the same thing I would write, remaining at large.
Literally the same thing I would write, remaining at large.
Of course, it is likely that Okulitsky did not write sincerely, but led his own game with the NKVD, which he did not play. At the trial, the general changed tactics and began skillfully polemicizing with the prosecution. However, the Process of Sixteen, carefully staged and timed to coincide with the Moscow Conference, which addressed the creation of the Polish Provisional Government of National Unity, did not arouse much interest in the foreign press and revealed the political loneliness of the accused. The political parties of the London camp in Poland were already preparing for legitimate activities in the new reality, and the fate of compatriots convicted in Moscow did not bother them. Sigismund Zhulavsky, a socialist who was very wary of the Communists, described the course of the Moscow Conference in a letter to a friend:
“All the professionals and almost all the leaders of the former organization yearn for this or that cooperation. Abstinence cannot be sustained in the long run, and complaints about relationships are indeed sometimes unbearable, but waiting for “mercy from God” or war cannot give us anything. ”
The politicians of the London camp, mainly agrarians and socialists, participants in the conference in Moscow, were not interested in the fate of the comrades who were convicted just in the same city, literally three blocks away. Mikolajczyk was considering the possibility of some spectacular protest, but British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill talked him out of this. After the trial, Churchill, in conversation with Molotov, asked for the clemency of the convicts. Molotov replied: "Let’s think it over." US Ambassador to the USSR Averell Harriman and US Presidential Envoy Harry Hopkins petitioned Stalin for amnesty, while carefully avoiding the mention of General Okulitsky. Stalin reassured them with the promise that sentences would be lenient and that an amnesty would follow immediately. Hopkins notified the US Department of State that there was no need to worry more about this.
British Ambassador Sir Archibald Clark Kerr informed his government of the trial in a very objective note, in which he was relieved to note that Britain was beyond suspicion, and expressed satisfaction that due to the leniency of sentences, case sixteen did not affect the agreement to create a new Polish government .
Of the sixteen leaders of the Polish underground arrested by the NKVD in March 1945, fifteen appeared before a court in Moscow in June 1945. Fourteen of them pleaded guilty on all counts. Leopold Okulitsky partially admitted his guilt, but firmly denied his involvement in crimes against the Red Army. The sixteenth accused, Anthony Paidak, the only one who completely refused to admit his guilt, was undergoing treatment at that time and appeared in court in November. Thirteen people were sentenced to prison terms:
- Leopold Okulitsky - 10 years old (died in prison in 1946).
- Stanislav Yankovsky - 8 years old (died in prison in 1953).
- Stanislav Yashchukovich - 5 years old (died in prison in 1946).
- Anthony Paidak - 5 years old.
- Adam Ben - 5 years old (released in 1949).
- Kazimir Puzhak - 1,5 years (released in November 1945; repressed in Poland).
- Casimir Baginsky - 1 year (released in November 1945; emigrated to the United States).
- Alexander Zvezhynsky - 8 months (released in November 1945).
- Eugeniusz Czarnowski - 6 months (released in the fall of 1945; joined the political life of Poland).
- Stanislav Mezhva - 4 months (released; repressed in Poland).
- Zbigniew Stypulkovsky - 4 months (released; emigrated to the UK).
- Franciszek Urbanski - 4 months (released).
- Jozef Haczynski - 4 months (released).
Three (Kazimir Kobylyansky, Stanislav Mikhalovsky and Jozef Stemler) were acquitted; were subsequently repressed in Poland.
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