Mikołajczyk wanted to negotiate directly, but Stalin became increasingly evasive; the Tehran Conference of November 1943 had convinced him that he need fear nothing from Churchill or Roosevelt. There was no good reason for him to tie his hands on an issue on which he now perceived he would have both entirely free. Time was on his side, not on that of the Poles. In January 1944 the Red Army crossed the 1939 Polish-Russian frontier in pursuit of the retreating Wehrmacht. Soon Stalin would have his divisions in Poland, while those of the Polish government were in Britain and Italy. He even had the 80,000 men of the First Polish Army commanded by General Zygmunt Berling, an ex-legionary who had been imprisoned in 1939 and persuaded to remain in Russia. Ironically, the Polish government’s one remaining asset in Poland, the AK, turned out to be a political liability. Its long-awaited show of force was reduced to a peripheral episode of pointless heroism which profited only Stalin.
The AK command had been preparing a rising in support of Allied operations. After the British and American advance through Italy into Austria, the Polish Second Army Corps of General Anders was to race ahead into Poland from the south, while a special independent parachute brigade waited in England to be dropped in to support the rising. But the Soviet armies advanced faster than those of the Allies. In the event, Poland would be liberated by the Red Army, while Anders battled from Monte Cassino to Ancona and Bologna, and the parachute brigade was destined to meet its effective end in the battle for Arnhem.
The underground authorities in Poland therefore had to face the fact that they would be liberated by allies who did not recognise them. As they prepared to conduct military operations against the Germans, they realised that they would simultaneously have to make a political stand against the Soviets. The AK’s amended plan, code named ‘Tempest’, was to conduct operations in the German rear in support of the advancing Soviet troops. AK units were to make contact with Red Army commanders and combine further operations. It was an attempt to bridge on the battlefield the chasm which had opened at the political level.
In April 1944 the AK’s 6,000-strong 27th Division helped the Red Army capture Lwów. In July the 5,000-strong local AK units similarly assisted in the battle for Wilno. In both cases, the Red Army and AK units cooperated, but two days after the celebratory bear-hugs and handshakes, the AK officers were arrested or shot, and their men pressed into Berling’s army. Discouraging as this was, the AK command clung to the hope that the Soviets might behave differently once they crossed the Curzon Line into territory which they formally recognised as Polish. These hopes were dashed when, after the joint liberation of Lublin at the end of July, the AK units taking part met with a similar fate.
In June Stalin had told Churchill that he would only consider negotiating with the Polish government if certain changes were made within it. Roosevelt suggested that he discuss these directly with Mikołajczyk. Under strong Allied pressure, Stalin agreed. Mikołajczyk flew to Moscow on 26 July, but by this time his position was weakened further. Stalin had collected a number of his client Poles into a ‘Union of Polish Patriots’, and on 20 July a group of these, under the leadership of an erstwhile member of the PPS, Edward Osóbka-Morawski, constituted themselves as the Polish Liberation Committee. A week later they issued a manifesto composed earlier in Moscow, and began acting as a provisional government in liberated areas, taking their seat at Lublin on 1 August.
The AK command had little room for manoeuvre. The Red Army crossed the Bug on 20 July, and on the following day news broke of the bomb plot against Hitler. On 23 July the German administration began to evacuate its offices in Warsaw, while columns of German settlers, stray soldiers and camp followers clogged roads leading west. On 27 July Soviet units crossed the Vistula to the south, and the sound of Russian guns could be heard in Warsaw. On 29 July Moscow Radio broadcast a message from Molotov to the inhabitants of Warsaw, calling on them to rise against the Germans. ‘There is not a moment to lose,’ it urged. The AK command were only too aware of this, and they were caught on the horns of an impossible dilemma.
An uprising in Warsaw was a terrifying prospect. The AK would probably be wiped out and the civilian population was bound to suffer. If they did not rise, the Soviets would brand them as Nazi sympathisers. They also knew that it would be hard to restrain their men, who had waited five years for the moment they could openly fight the Germans. Units of the communist-controlled People’s Army were preparing to go into action, and this would provoke a general free-for-all which nobody would be able to control.