Why did the Soviet Union Withhold Support for the Warsaw Uprising?
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On August 16, 1944, Stalin dismissed the Warsaw Uprising in a dispatch addressed to Churchill: “Now, after probing more deeper into the Warsaw affair, I have come to the conclusion that the Warsaw action is a reckless and fearful gamble.” Even under diplomatic pressure from his military allies, Stalin’s strategic concerns and military considerations led him to decide not to aid the Home Army, the Polish resistance force. Eventually, the Soviet inaction led to the defeat of the Home Army, anti-Soviet humanitarian indignation in Britain and the United States, and further tensions between the Allies. This paper will use the diplomatic correspondence between the Soviet Union, Great Britain, the United States, and the Polish government-in-exile, right before, during, and after the Uprising, to illustrate the growing rift between the Soviet Union and its Western allies. It will use the primary documents to argue that Stalin’s political calculation, including the prospect of postwar dominance in Eastern Europe and his intention to frustrate the anti-Soviet designs he attributed to the Western powers, led him to decide to withhold support. The outcome of the Warsaw Uprising also set the stage for the Cold War dynamics following World War II.
Prior to the Warsaw Uprising, Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Polish government-in-exile in London shaped the balance of power in Poland. In September 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union invaded and divided Poland between the Vistula River. However, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa in 1941 shifted the Nazi-Soviet relationship from cooperation to antagonism. The two forces engaged in large-scale warfare across the Eastern Front, and the Soviet Union joined the Allied Powers, becoming a military ally with the Polish government-in-exile and Britain to fight against Nazi Germany. In principle, therefore, the Soviet Union owed its support to the anti-Nazi Warsaw Uprising.
However, the western powers and the Soviet Union had different anti-Nazi motivations and leadership interests in Poland. The British government supported the aim of the Polish government-in-exile to regain its, intending to establish a pro-Britain government in postwar Poland. The Soviet Union, however, strongly promoted the “Lublin Committee,” the Polish Communist Party based in Soviet-controlled Poland. Such a divergence in ideologies and motivations made Stalin hesitate to implement his obligations, withholding aid for the Warsaw Uprising launched by the Polish government-in-exile.
Historians have different interpretations about Stalin’s inaction. Geoffrey Roberts, in his book Stalin’s War, claims that Stalin made that decision based on “pragmatic strategy shifts.” He points out that before the Uprising, Stalin was actively pursuing the cooperation between Polish government-in-exile and the Lublin Poles. However, the London Poles [the Polish government-in-exile]’s lukewarm attitudes towards cooperation and intransigence over the Soviet-Polish border shifted Stalin’s attitude towards hostility against the resistance forces. Considering that the Red Army had already suffered heavy losses near Warsaw in dealing with the German Army, Stalin decided not to continue to provide support for the uprising. On the other hand, historian Alexandra Richie viewed Stalin’s decision as a betrayal of Allied unity. She argued that Stalin and the Soviet Union always prioritized political dominance in Eastern Europe instead of the collaboration with the Polish government-in-exile and his Western Allies. In his book Rising ‘44, Norman Davies argued that Stalin fully understood the potential impact of his inaction according to the meeting records and diplomatic correspondence with his Western Allies. He intentionally allowed the Home Army to be defeated, foreseeing the anti-Soviet and anti-communist stance of the Polish government-in-exile. The espionage reports and media analysis from Britain and the United States also confirmed the resistance’s ideological opposition to Soviet influence.
Behind Stalin’s response to Warsaw, his main strategic interest had always been establishing pro-Soviet governments and expanding Soviet influence into Eastern Europe. In September 1941, Stalin told Harriman, Roosevelt’s ambassador in Soviet Union, “We know that the people won’t fight for world revolution, and they won’t fight for Soviet power, but perhaps they will fight for Russia.” In this conversation, Stalin manipulated the ideological language to express his vision of “Slavic unity” in eastern Europe. He used the concept of a united “Russia” and his searches of Slavic states alliances to shape Soviet patriotism, building the spiritual foundation for the Red Army’s tenacious fighting on the Eastern Front. Poland, as a Slavic state connecting the Soviet Union to Europe, was the most important region where Stalin needed to expand Soviet influence. Therefore, besides fighting with the German army and advancing the Nazi-Soviet border westward, Stalin also wanted to promote a pro-Soviet regime in Poland in postwar Europe.
This could be seen in Stalin’s strong support for the Lublin Committee, the provisional government in Soviet-controlled Poland that was set up in July 1944. At the very beginning of the Warsaw Uprising, Mikolajczyk came to Moscow to present Stalin with a request for Soviet support for weapons and ammunition for the Home Army. Instead of directly rejecting him, Stalin laid down the ambiguous condition that the assistance was possible: “You have to reach an understanding with the Lublin Committee. We support them. We cannot have dealings with two regimes.” In this correspondence, Stalin is demonstrating his support for the Lublin Committee as the representative of the Soviet Union in the Polish political situation. This was also a disguised request for the Polish government-in-exile to attach importance to the pro-Soviet government’s political power in exchange for assistance.
This conversation demonstrates Stalin’s determination to promote the Lublin Committee as the only legitimate authority in postwar Poland, and he used his control of military support to force the Polish government-in-exile to recognize leadership in alliance with the Soviet Union. In the article “Warsaw Fought Alone,” two Polish scholars commented on the conversation, that it “ended in a fiasco,” because both Stalin and Mikolajczyk were well aware that the Lublin Committee’s position on the Uprising would overlap with Soviet ideology. Also, as a delegation, the Lublin Poles could simply refuse any Polish government request for assistance without diplomatic pressure from Britain and the United States. Underneath the excuse of emphasizing the pro-Soviet government’s authority in Poland, Stalin was refusing to aid the Uprising.
The shift in Stalin’s reaction to the Warsaw Uprising occurred after Stalin replied to Mikolajczyk. As the Warsaw Uprising progressed and the Home Army’s position weakened, it appears that Stalin shifted from delegating responsibility to the Lublin committee, to more directly citing the Red Army’s limited military capacity as a justification for withholding aid. After Stalin replied to Mikolajczyk telling him to ask the Lublin committee, he continued to receive petitions from Mikolajczyk as well as pressure from Churchill and Roosevelt. Furthermore, before and in the lead-up to the Uprising, Moscow discovered that Western Allied forces and the Polish government-in-exile secretly participated in ultimately anti-Soviet actions. This knowledge increased Stalin’s suspicion over his allied partners for cutting off the Soviet influence in Poland.
Stalin became aware of anti-Soviet tendencies of Britain and the United States from the Soviet sophisticated espionage intelligence system. Closely related to the Warsaw incident was the fact that the United States and Britain were providing special training and support for anti-Soviet soldiers from Slavic states. In his memoir The Man Behind the Rosenbergs, Alexander Feklisov, the Soviet intelligence agent who resided in the United States, wrote that starting from 1942, soldiers from Slavic states like Belarus and Lithuania were receiving secret training in the special training centers in North America. The majority of the “student body” had emigrated to the United States years earlier and expressed clear anti-Soviet, pro-Polish and nationalist sentiments. What made Moscow alarmed was that the soldiers would then be “dropped back into their native countries” by parachute to organize resistance groups and gather intelligence that would be transmitted back to London by radio. From the point of national security, British and American support for anti-Soviet forces worried the Soviet government. It had to wonder whether the Uprising, launched by the Polish government-in-exile, which had close ties with the British government, had anti-Soviet aims under the guise of anti-Nazism. As a result, Stalin began to use different reasons for not going to support the Home Army.
The major argument that Stalin and the Soviet government made was about the military situation of the Red Army. They pointed out that the Home Army refused to coordinate with the Soviet Union and the shrinking strength of the Red Army. On August 10, 1944, an infuriated Churchill sent a dispatch to Stalin: “Wouldn’t it be possible for you to give them further assistance?” Three days later, Stalin responded to him with his consistent cold tone: “There have been made no attempts beforehand to inform and coordinate with the Soviet military leadership any sort of event in Warsaw.” Stalin and the Soviet military officials criticized the Home Army’s actions and attitude from a military perspective, which was a pragmatic concern and a reasonable argument for withholding support. Indeed, from a Soviet military point of view, the timing of the rebellion was inappropriate, because the Red Army had been defeated in a tank battle close to Warsaw, and there were plans for military operations in the Balkans going underway by the time the Warsaw Uprising began. Coupled with the fact that the Home Army did not eagerly seek cooperation with the Soviet Union, Stalin failed to see the benefits to Soviet strategy in supporting the uprising. Therefore, he resolutely chose to use the plausible excuse of military capability to temporarily stave off the pressure from Churchill.
In the later stages of the Warsaw Uprising, negotiations between Britain and the Soviet Union reached an impasse. Churchill tried to reach Roosevelt and put further diplomatic pressure on Stalin and even tried to register Ukraine without Soviet permission. On August 20, 1944, Churchill and Roosevelt sent a joint dispatch to Stalin: “We are thinking of world opinion if the anti-Nazis in Warsaw are in effect abandoned…We hope that you will drop immediate supplies and munitions to the patriot Poles in Warsaw or will agree that our planes should do it very quickly.” The Western Allied Powers were still trying to use their appeasing attitude towards Nazi Germany five years ago to persuade Stalin to provide more support for the war effort. However, it is obvious that Stalin was not a political leader who would consider “public opinion,” and defense of Soviet strategic interests and his opposition to the Warsaw Uprising gradually hardened. He unequivocally replied to his military allies: “There can [be] no doubt that the Red Army is not sparing its efforts to break [through] the Germans around Warsaw and to free Warsaw for the Poles.” Stalin referred to the effort of the Red Army to fight the Germans on the outskirts of Warsaw while actually refusing to support the insurgent army with more weapons and airlifts. This was a re-manifestation of Stalin’s firm position on the dominance of Eastern Europe, and also a sign of the further split inside the Allies. In the end, Stalin realized his vision--The lack of Soviet support left the Warsaw Uprising vulnerable, leading to its collapse after 63 days of intense fighting. As a result, the Polish government-in-exile and its Home Army suffered devastating casualties, deepening the Soviet Union’s influence over postwar Poland.
The decision that Stalin made not to aid Warsaw was based on pragmatic political strategic concerns, combining his vision of expanding Soviet influence in postwar Poland. However, the lack of assistance from Moscow became the basis for the Polish government-in-exile and the Western Allied Powers to charge the Soviets with guilt for the fall of the Uprising. On September 4, 1944, the British War Cabinet addressed Stalin: “Our nation cannot understand why no assistance in the form of materiel has been sent to the Poles in Warsaw.” The cabinet in the address referred to the public opinion again, condemning Stalin for harming “the spirit of Allied cooperation” and handing off an anti-Nazi rebellion to be defeated. Within the Polish government-in-exile, the Council of National Unity also asserted in its last appeal in Warsaw that: “They treated us worse than the allies of Hitler: Italy, Romania, Finland.” In fact, both Polish government-in-exile politicians and Home Army officers knew quite clearly that there was little hope of Stalin providing direct support for the Home Army, because of poor Polish-Soviet diplomatic relations. Nevertheless, it is clear from the emotional and heavy-handed statements of the British War Cabinet and the Council of National Unity that the Western allied forces were surprised by Stalin’s neglect of alliance relations and his disregard for diplomatic pressure, which further reveals the political characteristic of Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The characteristic of Stalinism that is revealed from his engagement with the Warsaw Uprising is a disregard of individual sacrifice, prioritizing the strategic planning for the Soviet Union. In the book Warsaw 1944, Alexandra Richie claimed that Stalin was only doing a “cold planning” when he approached the Soviet political and military strategies of the Uprising. His callous analysis of the situation can be seen in the way he describes the Home Army in his correspondence to Mikolajczyk, Churchill, and Roosevelt. At the beginning of the Uprising, he responded to Churchill, claiming that the information from Warsaw was “greatly exaggerated” and “unreliable.” By the middle of the uprising, when the battle was deteriorating and Mikolajczyk begged for his support, he still brutally asserted that the Warsaw action was a “reckless and fearful gamble.” This shows that Stalin understood the Nazi violence and the seriousness of the situation, that the uprising would end with the destruction of the city and the death of thousands of Polish citizens. However, Moscow did not hurry with assistance, as the fall of the uprising was necessary for Moscow to achieve its ideal postwar Polish dominance, regardless of human cost.
Moreover, the Warsaw controversy became a negative turning point in the Soviet-Western relations, which was also a prelude to the Cold War world pattern. By the mid-to-late stages of World War II, as the Axis powers waned in strength, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States all shifted their war aims significantly. For Stalin and the Soviet Union, what began as a desperate struggle for national survival during Operation Barbarossa in 1941 evolved into a broader pursuit of expanding Soviet influence across Europe. The Red Army’s efforts, once centered on defeating Nazi Germany, increasingly aligned with securing political and territorial dominance, reducing the anti-Nazi agenda to a secondary priority. Therefore, with the Lublin Committee established as the pro-Soviet government, postwar Poland became a tightly controlled satellite state until the end of the Cold War. On the other hand, the Western allies’ failed attempt to influence the political direction of Poland highlighted their inability to counter Soviet expansion effectively, ultimately solidifying the division of Europe into spheres of influence. This failure set the stage for the Cold War, as the ideological and geopolitical rivalry between the Western allies and the Soviet Union turned into a counter-confrontation.
The issues discussed in this paper are inherently complicated. Many historians and western politicians condemned Stalin for his lack of humanitarian consideration and compassion for Polish citizens, while the Soviets accused the anti-communist Home Army of recklessness and adventurism. In fact, just like Geoffrey Roberts’s evaluation of the tragedy of Warsaw, “the Warsaw uprising was a disaster for all concerned except the Germans.” In essence, the Warsaw Uprising was a patriotic movement that fought against Nazi tyranny and for national sovereignty. It was only at a time of global war when international relations and geopolitical rivalries over Warsaw neglected the dying citizens and wore down the principles of humanity. Despite the strategic warfare within the correspondence, the Warsaw Uprising remains a powerful symbol of Polish resilience and their desire for autonomy. The memory of lonely struggle in the Uprising is deeply rooted in the collective memory of Polish people, becoming the moral and psychological support of the nation.
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