ABSTRACT
Paradoxically, the war years were psychologically the most normal time during Stalin’s rule: for once, the country was not fighting ‘enemies of the people’ who were figments of his imagination. The threat of defeat forced Stalin to seek help even from those he most hated, among them the Polish people: he agreed to allow the formation of a Polish Army on Soviet territory. At the end of July 1941 General Wladislaw Sikorsky, the head of the Polish government in exile, and Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to Britain, signed an agreement that all Polish citizens and prisoners-of-war would be released from Soviet camps and jails and allowed to join the Polish Army. The question of the Soviet-Polish frontier was left unsettled. It was stated only that all the Nazi-Soviet treaties of 1939 had ‘lost their validity’. The existence of the secret protocols on the partition of Poland was not known at the time.
