‘In the seamless transition from the Second World War to the Cold War, the Warsaw Rising occupies a unique place. The fate that befell the Polish capital was one of the worst human catastrophes of the most catastrophic period in modern history… The historical significance of the Rising, though, goes far beyond the suffering of the Varsovians. For Warsaw was the crucible in the heat of which the wartime alliance began to come apart. For the first time it became clear for all who cared to see that Poland, for whose sake Britain had gone to war with Germany, would be left to the mercy of Stalin once Hitler had been defeated.’

~ D. Johnson

This week in 1944, the Yalta Conference took place. It was the second major meeting between Churchill, Roosevelt & Stalin to discuss Europe’s post-war reorganization, & the one in which Poland was infamously ‘sold out’ to the latter by the former two. Overnight, hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers fighting in Allied armies across Europe were guaranteed never to be able to return to their homes. 40% of the Second Republic’s territory was annexed by the USSR, to be partly compensated with German land; while the entire country was brought under Stalin’s control with false promises that it would be democratic. In 2005 George W. Bush called Yalta ‘one of the greatest wrongs of history’… He was right.

‘Yalta proved that by 1945 the Polish issue had become nothing more than a bargaining chip on the map of post-war Europe. With the war coming to a close, the shape of things to come was the question on the mind of the Big Three. Each leader had his own agenda; FDR had the UN, & Churchill had his Anglo-American front against the USSR. Only Stalin was concerned with the Polish question, i.e. assuring his control over the broken nation. Remarkably, after all that had happened – after Katyń & the stranding of the Warsaw Uprising – the West still believed that Stalin would keep his word regarding free elections in the Soviet sphere. Whether it was born out of ignorance, naivety, or indifference, Yalta effectively doomed Eastern Europe to a further 5 decades of occupation with the hammer & sickle replacing the swastika.’

~ Wesley Kent

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