Recognition

In Lublin last fortnight the Polish Committee of National Liberation announced that henceforth it was the Provisional Government of Poland. Five days later the Kremlin officially recognized it.

Instantly from London and Washington came cries of dissent. Said London: Russia's action in no way affected the policy of His Majesty's Government toward the Polish Government in Exile. Washington reaffirmed its recognition of the London Poles.

Russia's puppetizing of Poland also drew protests from the U.S. and British press and liberals--but nothing like the hubbub they made when Prime Minister Winston Churchill attempted to preserve order in Greece. Liberal opinion was less concerned with the fate of the Poles than with the effect of Stalin's move on the Grand Alliance, the war and a future world security organization.

Grim Correctness. In this, whatever their motives, they were probably somewhat more realistic than the Allied governments. Stalin's intentions had been perfectly clear for months. He had high-pressured the London Poles, in the person of ex-Premier Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, to join his Lublin Committee--on Lublin's terms. He had informed his Teheran colleagues of his decision to establish a friendly regime in Poland. When they asked him to wait a little while, he had graciously acceded. But he had never changed his plans.

Nor was there any group that could make him do so. The power of the London Poles' fighting forces was destroyed by the Germans during the uprising in Warsaw (which is now on the verge of famine--). The Polish Army fighting in Italy was loyal to the Government in Exile, but Italy is far from Poland. Last fortnight, while the Poles abroad planned to raise a memorial to 8,000 Polish soldiers who had died at Cassino, Lublin's new Army, some 250,000 strong, were equipped with U.S. trucks which had been lend-leased to Russia. Said the Lublin Government's President Boleslaw Berut to TIME Correspondent John Hersey: Lublin's Army is "already larger than the French Army. It is growing all the time. .

"Enemy of the People." The once-powerful Polish landlords might have done something. But Lublin's land policy has already split up many of their estates among the peasants. The landlords have gone into local administrative posts (when they played ball with Lublin), or gone to jail (when they did not). In London the Government in Exile was powerless. Premier Tomasz Arciszewski could merely growl: "We refuse to become a new Soviet Republic even under the name of 'independent Poland.'" Ex-Premier Mikolajczyk was already being denounced by Lublin as a "traitor to the Polish peasants"--a new version of the "enemy of the people," the formula that Russia uses to indict Nazis and collaborators. Perhaps Britain believed that Mikolajczyk could still participate in the Lublin Government, thus effecting a compromise between the Polish factions. But Lublin's President Berut and Premier Edward Osubka-Morawski were publicly committed to keeping Mikolajczyk out of their Government.

The Atlantic Charter. Russia's recognition of Poland had left the London Poles with little more than the Atlantic Charter--or such bits and pieces as they could still find. It left the" next meeting of the Big Three with little more to discuss in the way of a Polish question than an accomplished fact. Perhaps discussion would be scarcely necessary. In London there was hope that Russia's recognition of Lublin would be followed shortly by a Red Army smash toward Germany. If that succeeded, the fate of Poland would seem almost academic beside the defeat of Germany.

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