Lublin Committee

Lublin Committee. On 22 July 1944 Red Army units crossed the River Bug and occupied Chełm, the first Polish town lying to the west of the line agreed by the Nazi–Soviet Pact in August 1939. Accompanying the Soviet forces was the ‘Polish Committee of National Liberation’, a seventeen-member group recruited from among the ranks of the communist National Council for the Homeland (see Poland, 2(e)) and the Union of Polish Patriots (see Poland, 4). Its president was the leader of the National Council, Bolesław Bierut (1892–1957), the assumed name of a long-time Comintern agent.

On the day the committee arrived in Chełm it published its Manifesto to the Polish People (the ‘July Manifesto’) setting out a political programme, which had clearly been drafted under Moscow's influence. On 26 July the committee moved to Lublin, which had just been captured by the Red Army, where the ‘Lublin Committee’ signed an agreement with the Soviet government, under the terms of which it received the power to administer those territories liberated by the Red Army which the Soviets acknowledged to be Polish, i.e. those lying west of the Bug (see Polish–Soviet frontier). The committee also sanctioned the Soviet annexation of the former Polish provinces east of the Bug and provided for the uprooting of some 4.5 million Poles from these regions. Indeed, it assumed many of the tasks of a legitimate government, enforcing conscription, printing currency, and carrying out land reform.

On 31 December 1944, in response to the ‘will of the people’, Moscow ‘agreed’ that the Lublin Committee be transformed into a ‘Provisional Government of the Polish Republic’. It was this sham ‘government’, headed by Bierut, which formed the basis for the Provisional Government of National Unity recognized by the UK and the USA on 5 July 1945.

Keith Sword

Bibliography

Kersten, K. , The Establishment of Communist Rule in Poland, 1943–1948 (Oxford, 1991).
Rozek, E. , Allied Wartime Diplomacy. A Pattern in Poland (London, 1958).