POLAND: Child of the People

Konstantin Rokossovsky, who only the week before had been a marshal of the Red army and a Soviet citizen, settled down in Warsaw to his new job as Marshal of Poland and Minister of National Defense. In Paris, the journal La Croix mused: “What would our Communist papers say if France were to appoint an American or ah Englishman as Minister of National Defense?”

Polish papers had not very much to say, except to welcome Poland’s new military boss obsequiously. The Red propaganda mill promptly ground out some fetching facts to fit Poland’s new made-in-Russia national hero. “We receive the news of his appointment with great emotion, that a child of the people should have returned to the People’s Army,” cried Radio Warsaw. “He has returned to his native city where he was brought up, to the Poniatowski Bridge which he helped build in 1913, to the Polish working class with whom he undertook his first fighting steps and with whom he shared a prison cell.”

Strapping (6 ft. 4 in.), blue-eyed, blond Konstantin Rokossovsky, 52, a hard-hitting Red army field commander in World War II, had in point of fact been born in Poland. His native city, however, was not Warsaw, but the small town of Slovuta, in Volhynia, a province which for centuries has been alternately Polish and Russian. Far from being a child of the working class, he was reared at the aristocratic Nicholas Officers’ School in St. Petersburg. In World War II he commanded the armies that relieved Stalingrad, crossing the Don to close a ring around the Nazis’ besieging divisions. In mid-1944 he headed the Soviet forces which ignominiously sat outside his “native” Warsaw while Polish patriots inside, having been signaled by the Russians to rise, were slaughtered by the Nazis.

Last week, taking over the Polish army “as a Pole,” Rokossovsky announced that one of its general orders would be to guard “the inviolability of the frontier [with Germany] on the Oder and Neisse.” U.S. observers had several more or less plausible theories on why Rokossovsky had been sent to Warsaw: i) the Soviet army was going to be dramatically withdrawn from Germany, but it would now be able to dig in permanently in Poland, a short 50 miles from Berlin; 2) the previous heads of the Polish army were not reliable; 3) the way to prevent future Titos was to incorporate the satellites, lock, stock & barrel, into the U.S.S.R,