(2 of 2)
At the start, the negotiators discovered that the Yalta agreement to broaden the Warsaw Government meant one thing to Molotov, another to Clark Kerr and Harriman. The Commissar insisted that the agreement required just a few changes in the Government, all subject to veto by the present Warsaw Poles. The U.S. and British Ambassadors would have none of this. They insisted on a complete over haul, keeping elements of the present Gov ernment as a nucleus but also including Poland's non-Communist parties on an equal basis. From these extremes, the negotiators labored toward compromise.
In London, Poland's ex-Premier Stanislaw Mikolajczyk indicated his terms for joining the new Government: the Russians must halt all deportations, withdraw their secret police (the NKVD, formerly the GPU), release all Poles from concentration camps, freely admit the foreign press to Poland, grant complete political freedom to all Poles (presumably including Russia's avowed enemies), guarantee Allied super vision of Polish elections. Addressing the House of Commons, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden bluntly warned Moscow that the British Government regarded the present Warsaw Poles with extreme distaste, expected something much more decent to emerge.
In response to all the criticism, Moscow did not explode and go its lone way, as it certainly would have done in the past. Instead, the Russians quietly released Mme. Tomasz Arciszewska, wife of the London Poles', anti-Russian Premier, whose arrest in Poland had touched off a storm of British protest. If Yalta had done nothing else, it had put the Russians on their best public behavior.