to develop between the communist-led Moscow
Czechs and the London Western-oriented Czechs
and accepted Soviet conditions and loss of terri-
tory. But the Poles in London had not made their
peace with Moscow. On the contrary, relations
between the Polish government in exile and
Moscow were little short of outright hostility, and
had been aggravated by the establishment in
Lublin of a communist-dominated provisional
government.
Beyond Russia’s frontiers the smaller nations
in an arc from the Baltic to the Balkans had
recently acted, in Stalin’s view, as the springboard
of aggression from the West against the Soviet
Union. He insisted to Roosevelt and Churchill
that they must not be allowed again to serve as
hostile bridges to the heart of Russia. Soviet secu-
rity, he emphasised, would depend on guarantees
that they would be ‘friendly’ to the Soviet Union
and would act in cooperation with it. What,
however, did ‘friendly’ mean? To Stalin it meant
that they could not remain capitalist, with anti-
Russian governments based on the kind of society
that had existed before the war; only societies
transformed by a social revolution would be
‘friendly’ in the long term. The Western leaders
rejected this link between the social and economic
composition of the Soviet Union’s neighbours
and its own security. They in turn insisted on free
elections, meaning that the people of the nations
in question should be allowed to choose the kind
of government and society they desired.
The prospect of reconciling these opposite
views was slight. From Stalin’s point of view the
West had no business to dictate the social and
political reconstruction of Poland, Czechoslovakia,
Romania, Bulgaria or Hungary, any more than he
himself wished to dictate the shape which the soci-
eties and politics of France, Italy, Belgium and the
Netherlands should take. In these countries,
Moscow had instructed the communist parties to
work constructively in coalitions dominated by
non-communists. He expected a quid pro quo.
The West saw the issue in simple terms of democ-
racy and self-determination.
For the Polish government in London the rela-
tionship with the Soviet Union was one of under-
standable enmity. The Russians had invaded
Poland in September 1939 and now were annex-
ing a large part of eastern Poland. The mass
graves of 4,421 Polish officers, shot in the back
of the head by the Russians, had been discovered
in 1943 in the forests of Katyn by German occu-
pying forces and exploited by Joseph Goebbels
for Nazi propaganda purposes. This unforget-
table atrocity tormented Polish–Soviet relations.
During the Second World War, Poland had been
the conquered nation which, with Russia, had
endured the most. Should it also become the
nation that would now be made to suffer the con-
sequences of victory? Britain and the US agreed
at Yalta to accept the Curzon Line, with some
deviations, as Poland’s eastern frontier, thus
giving a third of its pre-war territory to the Soviet
Union. This, the London Polish government felt,
was a betrayal. Churchill and Roosevelt had been
driven to the reluctant conclusion that they had
no realistic alternative. The Red Army occupied
Poland and could not be forced to withdraw
unless the Anglo-American armies were prepared
to fight. Stalin for his part was well aware of the
bitterness of the Polish government in London,
which constituted an obvious danger to the
Polish settlement he had in mind. The Poles were
traditionally anti-Russian. They would not be
allowed to assert their freedom at Russia’s
expense.
The major tussle was over the western bound-
ary of Poland. Stalin had promised the communist
Lublin government that the frontier would be
marked by the western Neisse. It was agreed that
Poland would receive Pomerania and the larger
half of East Prussia. Churchill and Roosevelt held
out for the eastern Neisse, which would not have
assigned the whole of Silesia to Poland in addi-
tion. This question was left open to be settled
later. These territories were only to be ‘adminis-
tered’ by Poland until the conclusion of a final
peace treaty with Germany.
Despite these calculations Stalin signed the
Declaration on Liberated Europe at Yalta. Ac-
cording to its provisions the Allies would act as
trustees, reaffirming the principle of the Atlantic
Charter – the right of all peoples to choose the
form of government under which they would live- and ensuring the restoration of sovereign rights