Office of the Historian

The Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union (Stalin) to President Roosevelt 66

[Paraphrase]
[Moscow,] 9 August 1944.

I should like to inform you of my meeting with Mikolajczyk, Romer and Grabski. Judging from my conversation with Mikolajczyk, I am convinced that he has unsatisfactory information about Polish conditions. I was, however, left with the impression that Mikolajczyk is not opposed to finding ways to unite the Poles.

I suggested to Mikolajczyk, since I did not think it possible to press any decision on the Poles, that he and his colleagues meet together and discuss their problems with representatives of the Polish Committee of National Liberation, and above all the question of the earliest union of all democratic forces of Poland on liberated Polish land. These meetings have taken place, and I have been informed by both sides about them. The National Committee delegation proposed as the basis of the Polish Government’s activity the Constitution of 1921,67 and on this basis offered four portfolios to Mikolajczyk’s group, among them the post of Premier for Mikolajczyk. However, Mikolajczyk did not give his agreement to this. Although it is to be regretted that these meetings have not achieved the desired results, they [Page 1308] have had a positive significance by permitting both Mikolajczyk and Morawski and Bierut, who had just come from Warsaw, to exchange their points of view, and especially in the development that both Mikolajczyk and the Polish National Committee expressed a desire to work together and to find the practical possibilities to achieve that end. In relations between the Polish Committee and Mikolajczyk this might be considered the first stage, and we shall hope that in the future the business will go better.

The Polish Committee of National Liberation in Lublin, I am advised, has decided to invite Professor Lange to join it as a director on Foreign Affairs. It would undoubtedly be in the interests of unifying the Poles and of the struggle against our common foe if Lange who is a well-known Polish democratic leader would get the opportunity to come to Poland to take this post. I hope that you share this view and will not refuse the necessary support in this matter which is of such great importance to our common cause.68

  1. Copy of telegram obtained from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.↩
  2. The Polish Constitution of March 17, 1921; for text, see Michal Potulicki, Constitution de la République de Pologne du 17 mars 1921 (Varsovie, Société de Publications Internationales, 1921).↩
  3. The President’s response to this proposal is given in his telegram 42, August 12, p. 1432.↩