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From Labor Action, Vol. 13 No. 46, 14 November 1949, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
A Russian general, Marshal K.K. Rokossovsky, has been imposed on Poland as that satellite country’s minister of defense and head of the army.
At the same time Poland received orders to change its constitution to permit Rokossovsky, as commander in chief, to become a member of the Polish State Council. This amendment is necessary not because Rokossovsky is a Russian but because constitutionally the military head is not a member of the council in peacetime.
The thin veneer of Polish national independence is therefore publicly stripped off to a greater degree than heretofore. President Bierut has covered this up slightly by referring to “the fact that Marshal Rokossovsky is a Pole [that is, was born a Pole] and is very popular with the Polish nation.” The cynicism of this reference is to be seen in one other fact about Rokossovsky.
This Russian general is the co-hangman (with Hitler) of the uprising of the Warsaw people against the Nazi occupation in 1944. Rokossovsky is the man who was at the head of the Russian forces which stopped the pursuit of the retreating German army on the eastern bank of the Vistula River In the Warsaw suburb of Praga.
In anticipation of the Russian advance, the Warsaw population rose in a heroic struggle against the Germans, led by the Home Army (the resistance forces). Rokossovsky deliberately encamped across the river while the Germans proceeded systematically to crush the uprising. While he waited for the Nazi slaughter to be accomplished, the Germans killed or wounded nearly a quarter million of Warsaw’s people and, after surrender of the Home Army, burned and dynamited the city to almost complete extinction. Then the Russians moved in, after the Nazis had had plenty of time to do the dirty work of crushing the movement of the people.
Only speculation is possible about the reasons for this open step of domination of Poland by Moscow. Whether the motivation is the danger of Titoism, or whether it is preparation for withdrawal of Russian troops from Eastern Germany to Western Poland, the question arises why a Polish military man could not be the front man even under 100 per cent Russian control. Is there not a single Polish general who can be completely relied upon my the Moscow masters?
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