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Gomulka took no part in this. But when the Germans attacked Russia, he petitioned Moscow to be allowed to form a Communist underground in Poland. Moscow did not answer, but after Stalingrad, Stalin put his own plan for a Polish Communist underground into operation. The Communist Party was to be reconstituted as the Polish Workers Party. New leaders, Poles who had been living in Moscow, were dropped by parachute. But like all Stalin's undergrounds, this one had peculiar duties: it was more interested in liquidating the political opposition, i.e., the Home Army underground, than the Germans. At least one of its leading members collaborated with the Gestapo on this basis, tipping it off. But this did not prevent the Nazis from killing the Communists, and after several of the Moscow importations had disappeared, the leadership of the underground fell to Gomulka. There is no evidence that he pursued the Stalinist policy of doublecrossing others in the underground, and for this reason he is grudgingly respected by some Poles who loathe his politics. Those who knew him at this time say that he fought the Nazis with courage and resolution.
Stalin's policy of liquidating the effective Home Army, which reached its brazen peak in 1944 when Marshal Rokossovsky's army stood idly in the outskirts of Warsaw while the Nazis systematically bombed, shelled and dynamited the city, killing 250,000 people, was the logical outcome of the "Russian problem.'' What Stalin did not obtain by force, he won politically at the conference tables at Yalta and Potsdam. The Western Allies agreed that Poland should fall within the Soviet sphere.
Because of Western insistence on "free, unfettered elections" and party government, Stalin arranged that the provisional government (Deputy Premier: Gomulka) should include the Polish Peasant Party and the Social Democrats as well as the Communists, but he had his men ceaselessly working to surround, isolate, blackmail, and even to murder, the democratic politicians. "Poland's secret government,'' wrote Polish Peasant Party Leader Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, "is headed by a man few Poles have ever seen—the Russian general Malinov. His name has never appeared in a Polish newspaper. He has never made a public appearance in Poland. He towers above all other officials—public or secret." Malinov's real name: Ivan Serov, Stalin's specialist in liquidation, who had already deported 1,500,000 Poles to Siberia. Serov, now Russia's secret police boss, last week was working in Hungary.
On a lower level, Deputy Premier Gomulka was working as hard as any other Communist to undermine democracy. "You can't kill all of us, Gomulka. You can't exterminate a whole people or crush its determination to be independent," Mikolajczyk told him on one occasion. Gomulka leaped from his chair, his hand on the gun he carried in his pocket, but Mikolajczyk calmly asked for a cigarette. Said Gomulka: "We'll get the people. And we'll get you." Two years later, Mikolajczyk was forced to flee into exile, and the only "democrats" left in the Polish government were Communist stooges.