Behind the Curtain

Britain's Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin told a tense House of Commons last week that terror had become an instrument of national policy in the new Poland. Many members of Vice Premier Stanislaw Mikolajczyk's Polish Peasant Party who opposed the Communist-dominated Warsaw Government had been murdered. "Circumstances in many cases appear to point to the complicity of the Polish Security Police. ... I regard it as imperative that the Polish Provisional Government should put an immediate stop to these crimes in order that free and unfettered elections may be held as soon as possible, in accordance with the Crimea decision. ... I am looking forward to the end of these police states. . . ."

This stinging accusation drew a sputtering answer and a significant admission from Warsaw officials in London. Said their spokesman, Foreign Affairs Under Secretary Zygmunt Modzelewski:

> Terror in Poland was the work of agents sent in by General Wladyslaw Anders, commander of the British-financed Polish Army in Exile. British taxpayers were footing the bill for the murders. Polish Communists (900) and Socialists (250) had been killed, as well as Peasant Party members. (A Briton commented that it was curious solace for the Peasant Party to know that everybody was being murdered.)

> Elections would soon be held in Poland. But they would be democratic "in the sense that the Poles understand democracy, and not in the Western sense." This was perhaps the first time that a fundamental difference between the Russian and Western meanings of "democracy" had been proclaimed in an official statement. It served notice that the Yalta agreement on "free and unfettered elections" was also Yaltese doubletalk.

Pending the elections, a bitter, bloody political struggle would rage on inside Poland. Bevin and Modzelewski had lifted only a corner of the curtain of obscurity.

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