Władysław Sikorski: Encyclopedia II - Władysław Sikorski - Aftermath

Władysław Sikorski - Aftermath

Immediately after the crash, a Polish officer who had witnessed the event from the airstrip began sobbing quietly and repeating: "This is the end of Poland. This is the end of Poland." Without a doubt, as Sikorski had been the most prestigious leader of the Polish exiles, his death was a severe setback for the Polish cause, and doubtless convenient for Stalin. In some ways it was also convenient for the western Allies, who were finding the Polish question a stumbling-block to preserving good relations with Stalin. After the Soviets had broken off diplomatic relations with Sikorski's government in April 1943, in May and June Stalin had recalled several Soviet ambassadors for "consultations": Maxim Litvinov from Washington, Gusiev from Montreal, Ivan Maisky from London. In June, Stalin had also initiated secret negotiations with Germany (via the Bulgarian embassy in Moscow), which had led the western Allies to speculate about the possibility of the Soviets making a separate peace with Germany. While Churchill had been publicly supportive of Sikorski's government, reminding Stalin of his alliance with Nazi Germany in 1939 and their joint attack on Poland, in secret consultations with Roosevelt he admitted that some concessions would have to be made by Poland to appease the powerful Soviets. The Polish-Soviet crisis was beginning to threaten cooperation between the western Allies and the Soviet Union at a time when the Poles' importance to the western Allies, essential in the first years of the war, was beginning to fade with the entry into the conflict of the military and industrial giants, the Soviet Union and the United States.

General Sikorski's death marked a turning point in Polish influence. No Pole after him would have much sway with Allied politicians. The Allies had no intention of allowing his successor, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, to threaten the alliance with the Soviets. Poland, for whose freedom much of the world had ostensibly gone to war, was represented at neither the Teheran, Yalta or Potsdam conferences. Only four months after Sikorski's death, in November 1943, at Teheran, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed with Stalin that the whole of Poland east of the "Curzon Line" would be sacrificed to the Russians, even if it were contrary to the Atlantic Charter. In the summer of 1944, as the Polish Government in London had warned all along, the Soviet Government sponsored a Committee of National Liberation in Poland, which the Red Army was now "liberating." The Committee was recognized by the Soviet Government as the only legitimate authority in Poland, while Mikołajczyk’s Government in London, which had fought consistently at the Allied side on many fronts, and had organized a formidable underground Home Army (Armia Krajowa) in Poland as early as 1939, was termed by the Soviets an "illegal and self-styled authority." At the Potsdam conference in 1945, Churchill and Stalin settled the details of a new Polish Provisional Government in which the London Polish government-in-exile would have only minor influence, further diminished by the Red Army's support for the Polish communists. In the People's Republic of Poland, Sikorski's historic role, like that of all the adherents of the London government, would be minimized and distorted by propaganda, and those loyal to the government-in-exile would be liable to imprisonment and even execution. The Polish government-in-exile would continue in existence until the end of communist rule in Poland in 1990, when Lech Wałęsa became the first post-communist President of Poland, re-establishing the continuity of the Republic and in effect retrospectively recognizing the legitimacy of the wartime government-in-exile.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Aftermath", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki