Provisional Government of National Unity

Based on Wikipedia: Provisional Government of National Unity

The Puppet Government That Sealed Poland's Fate

In June 1945, with World War Two barely over, Poland's future was decided not by Poles but by a backroom deal that handed an entire nation to Soviet control. The instrument of this betrayal had an optimistic name: the Provisional Government of National Unity. But there was nothing unified about it, and precious little that was provisional. It was, in plain terms, a puppet government—one that would cement Poland's place behind the Iron Curtain for the next four decades.

What makes this story so compelling is not just the geopolitics. It's the human drama of a nation caught between empires, of resistance fighters sentenced to death in Moscow show trials, and of Western allies who traded away Polish freedom in exchange for Soviet promises that everyone knew would be broken.

How Poland Lost Its Government Twice

To understand the Provisional Government of National Unity, you need to know that Poland essentially had two governments claiming legitimacy at the same time. This wasn't a civil war situation—it was a direct consequence of the chaos of World War Two.

When Nazi Germany conquered Poland in September 1939, the Polish government didn't surrender. Instead, its leaders fled first to Paris, then to London after France fell in 1940. This government-in-exile was the legal continuation of the pre-war Polish state. Britain and the United States recognized it as the legitimate government of Poland. More importantly, it commanded the loyalty of the Home Army, known in Polish as the Armia Krajowa—the largest resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Europe.

But the Soviets had different plans.

In 1943, Polish communists working with Moscow created a rival organization called the State National Council, using its Polish acronym KRN. This wasn't just a resistance group—it was positioning itself as an alternative government. When the Soviet Red Army began pushing the Germans out of Poland in 1944, the KRN established something called the Polish Committee of National Liberation in the city of Lublin. Western observers called it the "Lublin Committee" or simply the "Lublin Poles."

The government-in-exile in London was furious but powerless. Their situation became truly desperate after the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, when the Home Army rose against the German occupiers in Poland's capital. The Soviets, whose forces had reached the outskirts of Warsaw, simply stopped their advance and watched. For sixty-three days, the Germans methodically destroyed the uprising and much of the city itself. The Home Army was shattered. With it went much of the exile government's ability to influence events on the ground.

The Yalta Bargain

In February 1945, the leaders of the three major Allied powers—Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin—met at Yalta in Crimea to decide the shape of the post-war world. Poland was high on the agenda.

By this point, Soviet forces had overrun nearly all of Poland. Stalin held all the cards. The Lublin Committee had already been upgraded to something grander-sounding: the Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland. But the Western Allies still recognized the London government-in-exile.

Stalin made a promise at Yalta: free elections in Poland. Roosevelt and Churchill accepted this promise, even though they must have suspected it was worthless. In exchange for words on paper, they tacitly accepted Soviet control of Poland.

Why did they do this? Partly exhaustion—the war in Europe was almost over, but the war against Japan was still raging. Partly the desperate hope that cooperation with Stalin might continue into peacetime. And partly because there was simply nothing they could do about it short of starting another war, this time against their own ally.

The Polish government-in-exile still tried to hold out. But without American and British support, they were shouting into the void.

A Deal with the Devil

One man decided to make the best of a bad situation. His name was Stanisław Mikołajczyk, and he had served as Prime Minister of the government-in-exile from 1943 to 1944. Mikołajczyk was a pragmatist. He believed that the only way to salvage anything for Poland was to work within the Soviet-imposed system and try to build a political base that might eventually challenge communist dominance.

He broke with his fellow exiles and began negotiating with the communists.

In June 1945, talks were held in Moscow. The participants were the Polish Workers' Party (that's what the Polish communists called themselves), Soviet officials, and Mikołajczyk with his newly created Polish People's Party. The Polish People's Party, known by its initials PSL, was a centrist organization rooted in the pre-war agrarian movement. It represented farmers and rural interests—a significant constituency in a country that was still largely agricultural.

The result was the Provisional Government of National Unity, announced on June 28, 1945. The name suggested a broad coalition. The reality was something different.

The Mathematics of Power

Look at how the cabinet positions were distributed. The Polish Workers' Party—the communists—got seven ministers. The Socialist Party, which was increasingly under communist influence, got six. That's thirteen out of twenty-one positions for parties aligned with Moscow.

Mikołajczyk's Polish People's Party got just three ministers. The old People's Party, a separate agrarian group, got three more. The Democratic Party received two.

On paper, this looked like a coalition. In practice, the communists and their allies held an unshakeable majority. Every important decision would go their way. Mikołajczyk had traded his legitimacy as a member of the exile government for a seat at a table where the game was rigged.

The Western Stamp of Approval

The whole point of creating this "national unity" government was to give Western powers an excuse to recognize it. And it worked perfectly.

On July 5, 1945, the United States recognized the Provisional Government of National Unity. Britain and France quickly followed. The next day, both the United States and Britain formally withdrew their recognition of the Polish government-in-exile.

This was devastating. The exile government continued to exist—it would actually persist until 1990, a remarkable testament to Polish stubbornness—but it was now a government of ghosts, commanding no territory and recognized by no major power. The Vatican, notably, refused to recognize the new Warsaw government, but the Vatican controlled no armies.

The message to Poles was clear: your Western friends have abandoned you. The only game in town is the one Moscow is running.

The Price of Resistance

While diplomats exchanged recognitions, something darker was happening to those who had actually fought for Polish freedom.

General Leopold Okulicki had been the final Commander of the Home Army. He had led the underground resistance against the Nazis at enormous personal risk. When the war ended, he and fifteen other Polish leaders were arrested by the Soviets and taken to Moscow.

On June 21, 1945—the same week the Provisional Government of National Unity was being announced—Okulicki was sentenced to ten years in prison. His crime? Alleged sabotage against the Soviet Army. The charge was absurd; the Home Army had fought alongside Soviet forces against the Germans. But the Soviets wanted to eliminate anyone who might serve as a rallying point for genuine Polish independence.

This proceeding became known as the Trial of the Sixteen. The defendants were tortured. Their confessions were coerced. The whole thing was a show trial in the grand Stalinist tradition.

Okulicki never served his ten years. On December 24, 1946—Christmas Eve—he died in Moscow's notorious Butyrka prison. He was fifty-eight years old. The official cause of death was never credibly established. Polish patriots drew their own conclusions.

Carving Up the Map

The Provisional Government of National Unity didn't just accept Soviet political dominance. It presided over a radical reshaping of Poland's borders.

In July 1945, a delegation from the new government attended the Potsdam Conference, where the victorious Allies were deciding the fate of defeated Germany. The Poles were present not as equals but as supplicants.

In August, Poland signed a border agreement with the Soviet Union. This formalized what Stalin had already taken: Poland's eastern provinces, which the Soviets had first occupied in 1939 under their pact with Hitler and then "liberated" in 1944. The new border roughly followed the Curzon Line, a boundary proposed by the British back in 1919 as an ethnographic frontier between Polish and Eastern Slavic populations.

Cities that had been Polish for centuries—Lwów, Wilno—were now Soviet. Millions of Poles who lived in these regions would be expelled westward.

In exchange, Poland received German territories east of the Oder-Neisse line. This was significant territory, including the industrial region of Silesia. But it came with a catch: Poland would now depend on Soviet military power to hold these gains against any future German revisionism. Poland's new western border tied it to Moscow as surely as any treaty.

On July 10, the government announced the expulsion of all Germans from Poland. This would become one of the largest forced population transfers in history, with millions of ethnic Germans driven from their homes.

The Fiction of Free Elections

Remember those free elections Stalin promised at Yalta? The communists had no intention of holding them until they were certain of the outcome.

In the meantime, they systematically destroyed any genuine opposition. Political opponents were bribed when that worked, threatened when it didn't, outlawed when they persisted, and sometimes simply murdered. The security services—trained and advised by their Soviet counterparts—ran an extensive network of informers and enforcers.

Władysław Gomułka, a leading Polish communist who would later have his own complicated relationship with Moscow, was refreshingly honest about the party's goals. The communists, he said, intended to be the "hegemon of the nation." Nothing would stop them.

Before risking actual elections, the government tested its control mechanisms with a referendum in June 1946. The questions were rigged to make "yes" answers seem patriotic, hence the popular name "the Three Times Yes referendum." Even with all the advantages of controlling the state apparatus, the communists still felt the need to falsify the results. They announced 68 percent support for their positions. Independent observers and subsequent historical research suggest the real numbers were very different.

Building the Socialist State

While crushing political opposition, the Provisional Government of National Unity also set about transforming Poland's economy along Soviet lines.

In 1946, the government issued a nationalization decree. Any enterprise employing more than fifty people became state property. By the end of that year, the government controlled ninety percent of Poland's industry. Private businesses, private property, private initiative—all were swept away in the name of building socialism.

The government also announced a Three-Year Plan for 1947 to 1949, the first of many central planning schemes that would characterize communist Poland. The state would decide what was produced, in what quantities, and where it went. Market forces were bourgeois relics to be eliminated.

A Different Perspective on Polish-Russian Relations

Amidst all this political maneuvering, there were some who genuinely believed that friendship between Poland and Russia was both possible and desirable. One official named Zurawski articulated a view that might have seemed reasonable at the time, however naive it appears in retrospect.

He acknowledged the centuries of bloodshed between Poles and Russians. Poland and Russia had been at war many times, and only Germany had benefited from their mutual exhaustion. Poles had occupied Moscow twice during the Time of Troubles in the early 1600s. Russians had abandoned Poles—most recently by standing idle during the Warsaw Uprising.

But perhaps, the argument went, the new Soviet Russia was different from Tsarist Russia. Perhaps new people with new policies could overcome centuries of mutual suspicion and hatred.

It was a vain hope. Soviet Russia would prove just as repressive toward Polish independence as the Tsars had been. But some Poles, exhausted by war and desperate for stability, convinced themselves otherwise.

The End of the Provisional Government

In January 1947, Poland finally held legislative elections. By this point, the communists had perfected their control. Opposition candidates were harassed, arrested, or disqualified. Voters were intimidated. Ballot counts were manipulated.

The official results showed an overwhelming victory for the communist-led Democratic Bloc. Mikołajczyk's Polish People's Party was crushed, at least on paper. In reality, many historians believe the PSL would have won a genuinely free vote. But the votes weren't free, and the counting wasn't honest.

The newly elected parliament replaced the State National Council that had served as a quasi-legislature. A new government was formed under Józef Cyrankiewicz, a Socialist who had made his peace with communist dominance. On January 19, 1947, the Provisional Government of National Unity was formally dissolved, its functions transferred to the new regime.

Mikołajczyk fled Poland later that year, smuggled out with the help of American and British intelligence. He had gambled that working within the system might preserve some space for genuine political competition. He had lost.

The Long Shadow

The Provisional Government of National Unity lasted only nineteen months, from June 1945 to January 1947. But its significance far outlasted its brief existence.

It established the template for Soviet control of Eastern Europe: a nominally coalition government that was actually dominated by communists, international recognition that legitimized the fait accompli of Soviet occupation, and the systematic elimination of any genuine opposition.

Poland would remain under communist rule until 1989—forty-four years of what Poles called "People's Poland" or, more sardonically, the "People's Republic." The government-in-exile continued its spectral existence in London, a constant reminder of the nation that might have been. When communism finally collapsed, the last President-in-exile flew to Warsaw and ceremonially handed over his insignia of office to the newly elected Lech Wałęsa. It was a gesture of continuity, an assertion that the legitimate Polish state had never ceased to exist, even when it was powerless and unrecognized.

The Provisional Government of National Unity is largely forgotten today, overshadowed by the longer drama of communist Poland and its eventual liberation. But it deserves to be remembered. It was the moment when the fate of thirty million people was sealed by a combination of Soviet force, Western exhaustion, and the naive hope that dictators might keep their promises.

It's a story worth keeping in mind whenever great powers meet to discuss the fate of smaller nations.