Churchill and Poland

In a splenetic outburst on his blog, Szwagier says that “the old bastard” Winston Churchill – “a deeply unpleasant human specimen” – handed over tens of millions of people in Eastern Europe to Stalin at the 1943 Teheran Conference “without much of a thought for the millions he was condemning to misery and Stalinist terror”. Churchill, according to Szwagier, was a thoroughly bad hat with “lousy decision-making and authoritarian tendencies”.

Well, Szwagier, I grew up during World War Two and I know – better than you, I think – that whatever his shortcomings, Churchill almost single-handedly inspired the British people to keep on fighting after the Dunkirk evacuation without even contemplating defeat or surrender at a time when the odds were almost impossibly stacked against us. Anyone who actually heard his wartime broadcasts when he delivered them – as I did – will never doubt that without Winston Churchill we would have lost heart and given up the fight. The country at that time was riddled with pessimism and defeatism after the long dreary twilight of Chamberlainite appeasement and the phoney war. Only Churchill sounded the clarion call to struggle and ultimate victory, and the proof of this is that although the people threw out his tainted party at the 1945 general election, Churchill’s personal popularity was simultaneously at its height.

Churchill was a complex man, with many political warts and blemishes during his long career. I by no means defend his total record. He was impulsive and sometimes autocratic – which as a war leader he had to be – but he was a profound believer in parliamentary democracy and personal freedom and consistently sought to secure those blessings [as he saw them] for as many people as possible.

Unfortunately, the wartime realpolitik, and the geographical realities, meant that he was in the end powerless to prevent the postwar division of Europe by what he dubbed the Iron Curtain. It’s quite clear that he strove very hard to secure a free, Western-style democratic government for Poland, and that he was continually rebuffed by the Russians and not backed up sufficiently strongly by the Americans.

There were two aspects to the ‘Polish problem’. The first was frontiers. Poland’s Eastern frontier had been settled by military conquest against Russia and her other Eastern neighbours in the immediate post-WW1 years, and was grudgingly ratified by the Russians in the Treaty of Riga. The Western frontier was settled by the victorious allies at Versailles. The Soviet Union never willingly accepted the Eastern frontier, and sought throughout the war to ensure that Russia’s former provinces incorporated in the new Poland would be regained. Churchill recognised the case made by Stalin on security grounds, and advocated a Westward shift of both Poland’s frontiers to the Curzon Line in the East and the Oder-Neisse Line in the West. The first was uncontroversial, except with the Polish government-in-exile in London. The second was disputed among the Big Three, the Russians wanting a Polish border further West into former German territory than Churchill deemed prudent or just. This dispute was not resolved until the 1945 Potsdam Conference.

Shifting frontiers, of course, affected many millions of Poles, Germans, and Russians either beneficially or adversely. There is something distasteful in the tone of the discussions about this at the Conferences; but it is the way of so-called ‘statesmen’ to overlook the impact of their decisions upon the lives of ordinary citizens – as we are seeing now only too clearly in the Middle East.

The more contentious, and significant, dispute was over the form of the postwar Polish government. The British were committed to the Polish government in exile in London, who were anathema to the Russians because of their anti-Russian and anti-Communist stance. Abortive negotiations between the two came to nothing, and Russia proceeded to install its own puppet government, the ‘Lublin Committee’, in the regions of Poland it occupied. Churchill repeatedly stressed to Stalin that the British had a debt of honour to Poland, for whom we had entered the war in the first place; and that the Allies should ensure a multi-party parliamentary democracy in Poland. Stalin demurely assured the British and Americans that he had no ulterior designs on Poland, and that all he wanted was security for Russia against a repeat of the German invasion.

At least during the earlier conferences, when the emphasis was on creating good personal relations between the Big Three leaders in the hope that this would sway the Russians into allowing at least a degree of political freedom in Eastern Europe if not in Russia itself, the British and Americans were willing to give Stalin the benefit of the doubt. At that time, Russia was still extremely popular in Britain, and to a lesser extent in America, because of the heroic feats of the Red Army and ‘Uncle Joe’ was viewed by some as an almost benign figure. But by the time of Yalta and Potsdam it was becoming clear that Russia had no intention of allowing freedom to its satellites, including Poland. Yet Churchill persevered, telling Stalin in April 1945 that “the British people can never feel this war will have ended rightly unless Poland has a fair deal in the full sense of sovereignty, independence and freedom on the basis of friendship with Russia. It was this that I thought we had agreed at Yalta.”

The Russians, however, now felt strong enough to provoke a crisis by arresting sixteen Polish government negotiators on charges of causing the deaths of Red Army officers. This Churchill described to his deputy Eden as ‘perfidy’. He kept up the effort at Potsdam, though by that time the Russians had tightened their iron grip on Poland and had banned their Western allies from entering the country. The representatives of the Russian-sponsored Lublin government continued their attempts to pull wool over Churchill’s eyes with specious assurances that the new Poland would be ‘far from Communist’, living on friendly terms with the Soviet Union and wanting to profit from Russian experiences, ‘but not wanting to copy the Soviet system’. This was all specious hogwash, but it was too late for Churchill to resist what was an already accomplished fact; and he was in any case about to be dismissed from office by the British electorate.

The rest is history – the Fulton speech, the clanking down of the Iron Curtain across Europe, and the descent into Cold War. With Churchill out of office, his mantle as chief anti-Stalinist spokesman was ably assumed by Ernest Bevin.

In my view, if not Szwagier’s, this is a tale of honourable defeat – not one of callous betrayal.