An Irishman's Diary

There is an attractive café called Kawiarnia Noworolski in the middle of the large market square in old Krakow. On the afternoon I was there the sun was shining and there were tables and chairs so that customers could have their lunches or their ice creams and watch passersby.

The square is awash in cafés but the Nowonolski is unique, not just because of its age and art deco style and its position in the centre rather than at the edge of the square, but also because it is one of the few locations outside the former Soviet Union known to have been visited by the former dictator Josef Stalin. He came to Krakow twice in the years prior to the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, and went to the café on occasion with his co-conspirator and then boss, Josef Lenin.

Stalin travelled to Krakow in late 1912 along with Valentina Labova, a married Bolshevik with whom he may have had an affair on the journey, according to Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Young Stalin.

Lenin was staying in Krakow at the time, and he and his wife Krupskaya put Stalin up during his visit. Stalin returned again in December 1912, again travelling with Labova. He was working on, of all things, a nationalities policy for the Bolsheviks.

Lenin is said to have been fond of the Noworolski café, which was a favourite with the chattering classes of Krakow. It’s odd to think of Lenin and Stalin holding meetings there when you’re sitting watching a stream of passing tourists.

The fact of the meetings in the café between the two Bolsheviks had been mentioned at a dinner I had attended in Warsaw a few days prior to my trip to Krakow. The dinner was hosted by the Irish ambassador, Declan O’Donovan, during a visit by a small number of Irish journalists to Poland. The Irish ambassador’s residence in Warsaw is in an old former school, in one of the city’s many parks. Old buildings are a rarity in Warsaw, of course, because the city was systemically flattened by the Nazis in the wake of the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944. Which brings us back to Stalin. When the imperial powers of central Europe collapsed in the latter stages of the first World War, Lenin arrived by train at Finlandia Station keen to seize power in Russia.

He and his co-revolutionaries didn’t really wrest power from the ruling authorities but rather found power lying in the street and stooped and picked it up. Something similar happened with the Polish soldier and left wing activist Jozef Pilsudski, who was released from prison in November 1918, and made his way to Warsaw.

He proposed to the German command there that they leave, and they agreed and did so. Pilsudski took power in Poland while two of its former occupiers, Russia and Germany, collapsed, and the third, the Austro-Hungarian empire, simply disappeared. By the end of the first World War Poland, not having existed as an independent nation for more than 120 years, was back in control of its own affairs.

It wasn’t born with a silver spoon in its mouth. It was a poor and underdeveloped country with a mix of nationalities, religions, languages, currencies and a railway system that didn’t join up, much in the way of the Dublin Luas, though with better reason. Not only that, but by 1920 the Red Army was sweeping over from Russia, determined to blast its way through to Germany.

However, the Polish army out-manoeuvred that section of the Red Army approaching Warsaw and soon the Reds were rushing back to Russia. Lenin became concerned his regime might collapse and sued for peace. The rout is known in Poland as the miracle on the Vistula, the river that flows through Warsaw.

Some consider the win by the Polish army to have been a truly huge event in European history. In his book on Poland, God’s Playground, the historian Norman Davies quotes the British ambassador to Berlin at the time, Lord D’Abernon: “Had Pilsudski and Weygand failed to arrest the triumphant advance of the Soviet army at the Battle of Warsaw, not only would Christianity have experienced a dangerous reverse, but the very existence of western civilisation would have been imperilled. The Battle of Tours saved our ancestors from the yoke of the Koran: it is probable that the Battle of Warsaw saved central and parts of western Europe from a more subversive danger – the fanatical tyranny of the Soviet.” At the dinner in the Irish ambassador’s residence, it was speculated that the defeat of the Red Army in 1920 may have affected Warsaw’s fate in the second World War.

The agreement between Stalin and Hitler to divide up Poland between them brought to an end the period of Polish independence that began when Pilsudski seized power. The Nazis swept in and some time later, the Soviets from the opposite side. Between the Gestapo, the SS and the Soviet NKVD, the Polish found themselves being categorised as either German, non-German, Jewish, reactionary, a class enemy and so on, depending on which invader they were suffering under. Summary execution, imprisonment and deportation were the order of the day. Davies is of the view that if Hitler had not decided to attack Stalin, the two monsters between them could have put paid to the Polish nation forever.

The Red Army was nearing the Vistula again at the time of the Warsaw Rising. However it paused and the Germans, who had been on the retreat, were given the time to take their revenge, and to raze the city from the ground, as ordered by Hitler. By pausing to watch the slaughter and destruction, the Soviets were getting the Nazis to do their dirty work for them. But might they, and Stalin, have also paused because of the memory of what had happened almost a quarter of a century earlier, when another Red Army had set out to cross the Vistula?