In 1944–1946, Stalin ensured the destruction of the military-political
base of the Polish Home Army (AK) when he allowed the German
armed forces to defeat the Warsaw uprising in the fall of 1944. When
the Red Army entered Poland in 1944, Stalin ordered the NKVD and
Smersh to disarm the AK, a partisanmovement representing the last
Polish government. AK leaders were arrested, shipped to Moscow, and
tried for imaginary war crimes. Rank-and-file AK soldiers were im-
pressed into the Moscow-oriented Polish army. Thousands of men and
women who had fought the Nazis as partisans were arrested and im-
prisoned in Siberia or Central Asia in the gulag.
Moscow took control of Polish politics in 1946–1956 using prox-
ies in the Ministry of State Security to arrest and try enemies. Soviet
MGBofficers were inserted into the Polish security bureaucracy.
Special targets of the Polish communists and their Soviet patrons
were AK veterans and the Roman Catholic Church. In the late 1940s,
the Polish Communist Party tried but ultimately failed to set up an al-
ternative Polish church. In 1956 worker violence in Poznan and
growing street demonstrations in other cities brought the Soviet lead-
ership to Warsaw in October to confront their puppets. In a series of
meetings, the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev’s regime agreed to
reduce direct Soviet control of Poland in exchange for Poland’s con-
tinued membership in the Warsaw Pact. Soviet security and military
advisors were withdrawn and sent home.
Beginning in the late 1970s, communist power in Poland was chal-
lenged by a new political alliance of workers, clerics, and intellectu-
als. Solidarity, the most important of the movements, won wide-
spread support across the country. The KGB developed sources
within both Solidarity and the Polish government, and the Soviet
leadership was well informed on developments inside Poland. The
KGB helped the Politburo of Leonid Brezhnevto pressure the Pol-
ish government to crack down on Solidarity in December 1981. The
Soviet service spread rumors that Moscow was preparing to inter-
vene, and it convinced its agents of influence that the only way to
prevent a Soviet–Polish war was for the Polish communists to break
Solidarity. The KGB was unable, however, to keep Soviet plans for
Poland secret; the Central Intelligence Agency had important sources
within the Polish military, including Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski.200 •POLISH CRISES06-313 G-P.qxd 7/27/06 7:56 AM Page 200