The Chain of Command: The Soviet General Staff and the Warsaw Pact

Gen. Jaruzelski: An important step was the creation in 1969 of the Staff of the Unified Armed Forces. I will not assess once again its limitations, defects, and, of course, the domination of the “elder brother.” It is still a fact that of the staff’s 523 essential personnel, 173 were officers from outside the Soviet Army, and of them, 43 in various specialized sections were representatives of the Polish Army. They had, of course, in terms of decisions, “short hands,” but also “eyes and ears open.” They were in their own way to some degree a fortifying bridgehead in the coalition structure. [Jaruzelski talk, p. 6]

Gen. Szklarski: In 1968, the Staff of the Unified Armed Forces was created, although it was far from what we had envisioned it should look like. We had many reservations. The Staff settled only and exclusively a series of problems associated with the functioning of the Warsaw Pact structure and the Polish Army in peacetime. Only in peacetime, in preparing the armies for action in case of war.

Q: In the case of an armed conflict, would the staff have been capable of waging war?

Gen. Szklarski: At the time it was created, certainly not. Only later did it to some extent begin to approximate something that could begin to think about it. After all, the status of the Staff of the Unified Armed Forces as the command in time of war was sanctioned for the first time in ’78, but also with great opposition.

Q: Was the role of the staff in the case of armed conflict specified?

Gen. Szklarski: No. But I think that until the end its place and role were not specified. Because at the moment of the creation of this Staff and the announcement in ’78 of the status of the Unified Armed Forces, it was then made – if only briefly – the command for the Theaters of Military Operations. There was no command in the Western Theater – it could be that personnel issues compelled it a bit because at the time, Marshal Ogarkov became the first supreme commander of the Western Theater. In other words, the structure arose, it was on top, there were strategic links in the form of commands in the theaters; beside which, these commands were already formed in coalition systems, because there was always an operational group from us, and already in the final stage, already in the ‘80s, it even led to the officers having mobilization allowances for allotment to the command. Such a group under the direction of then General Jasiński was always going to the exercises and taking part – always the same officers.

Q: Could you characterize, the organizational structure of this staff? Organization, staffing, responsibilities.

Gen. Szklarski: The whole time it was a peacetime structure. There were no prerogatives in wartime. After all, there were also no prerogatives of command in peacetime. Kulikov never gave any guidelines and did not have the authorization to give them. Thus, Kulikov was the commander, he had deputies – there was the so-called first deputy, who was Chief of Staff of the Unified Armed Forces – besides which, let us remember, the supreme commander was simultaneously the First Deputy Minister of National Defense, and at the same time, the chief of staff was the First Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Soviet Union. That was constantly being questioned by us.

Q: But where did you question it?

Gen. Szklarski: In discussions. [Szklarski, pp. 3-4]

Q: Did the directives that came from the General Staff of the Soviet Army come in from the Staff of the Unified Forces? Were they somehow transformed in the Staff, or was it only a transmitter?

Gen. Siwicki: No, rather not. The Supreme Commander of the Unified Armed Forces was the First Deputy Minister of Defense of the USSR, and the Chief of Staff was the First Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the USSR, so they dovetailed completely. I can’t imagine that the former would have acted without the consent, or despite or without the participation of the latter. Although I do not know, that’s what I believe. Those changes were always with the participation of the Staff of the Unified Armed Forces, but also with the participation of representatives of the General Staff of the Polish Army. It was the Chief of the Operational Administration of the General Staff, or the Chief of Staff personally; everything depended upon the extent of the change. There were many such changes in the period when I was Chief of the Staff, but there were certain corrections.

Q: They came in from the Staff of the Unified Armed Forces to you, General?

Gen. Siwicki: Yes. There was always a directive with a designated attachment, or we also derived from the chart ourselves the designated changes and transferred them to the operational plans at our level.

Q: And you made the decision, General?

Gen. Siwicki: That was already dependent upon whether it was of such a scale that the premier should be engaged because it was linked to the [Polish state] budget; then one would report it. If not, then it was presented to the State authorities on an informational basis. [Siwicki, pp. 7-8]

Gen. Tuczapski: No problems of an operational nature were resolved with the Warsaw Pact, with the Staff of the Warsaw Pact. All the matters that touched upon operational planning were resolved with the Main Operational Administration of the General Staff and with the General Staff [of the Soviet Union].

Q: As the Deputy Supreme Commander, did you have any influence over Poland’s operational armies, or concretely over the working out of certain decisions relative to the Polish Front. I am not talking about organizational matters.

Gen. Tuczapski: It derived from the assignments that we, as Poland, received, including what might happen if war broke out. [Tuczapski, p. 6]

Q: Could you characterize what the Military Council was engaged in? What problems came before the Council?

Gen. Tuczapski: Training above all else. The Military Council of the Warsaw Pact occupied itself above all else with training problems. Besides that, it also occupied itself with the issue of armaments for our army.

Q: What was the process of deliberations during a session of the Military Council of the Pact?

Gen. Tuczapski: There was always a speech, or some sort of statement by the Supreme Commander of the Pact – so it was either Grechko or Jakubovskii. Later, there were presentations by various deputies from different countries.

Q: Did this take the character of discussions, or did it have an informal, ideological, character?

Gen. Tuczapski: No, not ideological either. Above all, it had the character of a discussion, because when we spoke up, we took a position on certain matters. It was not like we listened to everything, said, “That’s right,” and left. We had our own comments, our own claims with regard to this or that issue. We had our own proposals. And they were presented. When I came, we spoke first of all with the Chief of the General Staff, with the other deputies, and later I reported to the minister [of defense] that I would be going and I would be voicing an opinion on this and that issue. The minister would also say yes, it will be taken care of. Then I traveled, reported, and wrote a memorandum about what happened there. So the discussion was only in this context because there could not be any sort of mouthing off, of course. [Tuczapski, p. 6].

Q: And the command of the Warsaw Pact? How do you assess it?

Gen. Jaruzelski: In wartime, it would fill a support role. The General Staff of the Soviet Army would have had greater significance in the sense of coordination than the command that it had at its disposal. The ministers [of defense] would have had more to do; they probably would have had to meet then.

Q: In other words, a “stavka” [defense council] would be created?

Gen. Jaruzelski: Some sort of stavka was created, in which they naturally would have also had participation. [Jaruzelski, pp. 42-3]

1979 Statute on Command in Wartime

Gen. Jaruzelski: An exegesis of this document [1] discloses without difficulty some of its provisions with which it was not easy to concur. This dealt of course with the highly visible role of the General Staff of the Soviet Army. The essence of the matter came down to the fact that only the USSR, the Soviet Army, had the full palette of strategic possibilities, and, above all else, the nuclear missile forces for itself. The discussion lasted several years; it was difficult at times, even heated and contentious. Moreover, the Supreme Commander – Marshal Kulikov – also, mainly for prestige considerations, had serious reservations. On the other hand, the statutory provision stating that the Supreme Commander of the Unified Armed Forces was appointed and that the composition of the Unified Supreme Command would be decided on the basis of a decision by the member states of the Warsaw Pact was considered important. That is, through the coalition. Finally, the matter was finished, leaving a wicket for further research, experience, and discussion. They continued in fact until the end. [Jaruzelski talk, p. 6]

Gen. Siwicki: In 1978, after much torment — probably almost a year-and-a-half — a statute for wartime was finished. At the time, there still were not commanders in the Theater; they answered to the Front. And then it was recognized that the command would be determined based on the situation in a given strategic direction. In other words, our front would be adjusted and set up by us in terms of personnel; there would be the matter of jurisdiction. It isn’t true that they were to take jurisdiction over our armies. We would have never agreed to that, although they did torment us for a long time. All of it remained at our disposition. On the other hand, the Front would be subordinated operationally in wartime, depending on what structure arose and who would be in command.

Q: And did you think, General, that the Staff of the Unified Armed Forces was sufficiently developed for operational command?

Gen. Siwicki: No. In peacetime it was absolutely not. Nevertheless, the Staff at the Theater, which Ogarkov commanded, was to a large extent already deployed. Only to a certain extent; in terms of mobilization, it was completed.

Q: But the enemy alliance for us at the time—NATO—still had a command for Northern, Central, and Southern Europe, while the Warsaw Pact up to the moment of the establishment of a command at the Theater had one less level of command. Was the supreme command of the Unified Armed Forces of the Warsaw Treaty in a state to comprehend this?

Gen. Siwicki: But we understood it so at the time that the Soviet army group in the GDR possessed a Staff, that had in fact two Fronts, because there were five armies there, plus the Northern Group of Forces of the Soviet Army in Poland, which was also connected there as well. For that Staff would have also assumed command of our front, which went there. Although we never trained this way, it would have logically resulted in this. In this regard, there was not complete clarity up to the end. At the same time, when the Staff was created for the Western Theater, clarity came, and Kulikov was dissatisfied as a result, because suddenly he remained without opportunities for decision. He retained only opportunities for political coordination.

Q: With regard to the very equivocal system of leadership, weren’t you and your colleagues anxious about the subordination of the Polish Front to rather vague structures? That is, anxiety about the result of strategic operations, because it meant the lives of several hundred thousand people.

Gen. Siwicki: We did not have such anxieties because the Front was commanded by Polish command organs, and the command was always clear. The command of armies at the front was on a national basis. And its use had to be with the permission of our state authorities at the central level. The issue of operational subordination—whether to this staff or the other—absorbed us less. [Siwicki, pp. 8-9]

Gen. Tuczapski: [In 1978] it was finally the moment when the creation of staffs in strategic directions occurred — in the western direction, in the southern direction — and then we began also to push that it could no longer be like that; that what the deputy was supposed to do was unknown. And under the influence of these pressures they began to think that they wanted to make a staff out of the Staff of the Warsaw Treaty that would lead through these two strategic directions. The General Staff of the Soviet Army did not give its approval to this and did not ever want to approve it. At the same time, they appointed those two people — Gerassimov and Ogarkov — to those two directions, and they created staffs for wartime, which were also being established for mobilization. [Tuczapski, p. 7]

Gen. Jasiński: Up to the end of the Warsaw Pact’s existence, the role of the Supreme Commander was not specified. There was the question: General Staff, Command at the Theater, and General Staff of the Soviet Army. A conflict existed between the Supreme Commander and the General Staff of the Soviet Army. It was not resolved.

Q: NATO had a prepared structure in the event of war. Everything was already prepared. [Jasiński, pp. 5-6]

Relations with Big Brother

Gen. Tuczapski: Please remember that Great Russians were still in the majority, who always looked through the prism of that Pole, the lord, the nobleman, to whom they related with a certain reserve. One should realize that they were constantly being raised this way, and it came out from time to time, usually in crisis situations. Because one should say that under normal circumstances, they strove to act on the basis of partnership. Of course, some were able to apply this very elegantly; others in a more simplified fashion, but they did not permit themselves to treat us as if we were beneath them. Still, though, in difficult situations, that Russian spirit came out: “We are a great power, we are the great general — what are you doing there? You don’t want to, you didn’t manage it, you didn’t figure it out.”... That development of relations was also a matter of a certain evolution. [Tuczapski, p. 15]

Gen. Tuczapski: It was dialectical. The evolution of our relations with them, and their relationship to us. Just as they began to examine what NATO was doing. Do they have training? Do they have concrete staffs? And also who does what? And they reached the conclusion — on the basis of the Berlin and Cuban Crises — that it could no longer be like that, that they should resolve the matter. And the person who began to act on this material was of course the Chief of the General Staff, Ogarkov. [Tuczapski, p. 7]

Gen. Tuczapski: We never did receive from the Soviet Union what they had that was best or first-rate, what they introduced into their basic units. They tried to give us something different than what we had, but it was not the newest. It was this way with airplanes, it was this way with tanks. Not with artillery, because the artillery remained the same with them for a certain time, until the 152's on caterpillars appeared. And that artillery—the 122 howitzers—existed of course up to the final period. They were never interested in somebody getting too far out in front. They believed: Us the one and only, the irreplaceable. That’s how they were educated, and that’s how it was pounded into their heads. And moreover, the issue here again, that it was unsuitable to speak loudly about it. They did not always believe in us in the end. That is, they were able to be elegant in those matters in which was needed and they had to be in order not to insult anybody. At the same time, when it came down to their ego, when something did not please them — let’s say some sort of criticism — then they acted in a very inelegant fashion. [Tuczapski, p. 18]

Gen. Tuczapski: In the seventies and eighties we were not the ones who did apprenticeships with Soviet officers; we were the ones who had already learned enough to lead armed forces — all of that which is called, broadly understood, defense of the state —so we could speak about whatever we wanted. At the same time, whenever questions of an operational or strategic nature arose, which were linked with everything that was to be eventually done in the Western theater of military operations if war came, then we had to subordinate ourselves to conceptions that were Soviet. Because they were, generally speaking, responsible for it in practice; they represented the greatest force. And we especially could not leap out.

Q: The Polish Army was the second-largest power in the Pact. But, considering that, did the Soviets treat you differently, favor you in some way, single you out in relationship to others, or not?

Gen. Tuczapski: They saw in us a very serious partner. Especially at the end of the sixties and in the seventies, when we trained a sufficient number of cadres who acted responsibly regarding operational and strategic questions. [Tuczapski, pp. 1-2]

Gen. Barański: Regulations for battle were also a Polish matter. Still, Russian regulations of battle were always taken into account. The Russians were counting on the fact that the Poles were a thinking nation, making its contribution to the military strategy of the Pact. After all, such a matter, for example, was the Territorial Defense—that was a Polish innovation, and it was received with due respect in the other armies. [Barański, p. 9]

Gen. Siwicki: We were the second army. They counted on our officers, our staff work; at symposia, before a doctrine was established, or an operational style, or a tactic in operations linked to a change in weaponry — our ideas were also in there. And if it had to do with functioning and preparing for military action, we had the best-developed system for mobilization. The Soviets came to us, and often made use of our models — not to mention the Hungarians, or also the Czechs and Bulgarians; they utilized our experience because we had perfectly designed solutions for mobilization. Later, we had very good, different, better-designed preparations at the non-commissioned officer and ensign level, minimizing the number of officers. [Siwicki, pp. 12-13]

The Aloof Party Leadership

Q: In conjunction with the fact that you were the deputy supreme commander, the commander of the Front, did you have an audience from time to time with our party leadership?

Gen. Tuczapski: In the Central Committee there was practically no organ that dealt with matters broadly understood as defense. There was an administrative division, which dealt with the Ministry of the Interior, and there was the director of that division. They came from time to time, put in an appearance, and that was it. One could put it this way: the entire structure of the Ministry of National Defense arose the way it did with us — that is, the minister of defense, the deputies, including the deputy for matters of Territorial Defense — because no one else in the state, in the state administration, or in the economic administration, dealt with defense matters.

All of it fell into my hands — when I left the General Staff and the Inspectorate for Training to become the commander of the Front, General Jaruzelski transferred this very function to me so that I would hold all elements of military preparation for territorial defense by the armies for Territorial Defense, hold the training of the state and voivodship [provincial] administration, and Civil Defense. The Chief Inspector for Territorial Defense was a person who was simultaneously Chief Inspector for Territorial Defense, Chief of Civil Defense, and Secretary of the Committee for National Defense. And all of this was in my hands.

I have to say that all of this was not so stupid because there was someone in the state who was responsible for all these matters. And later, we approved all of this with the Chief of the General Staff, and all of these defense matters were somehow linked together. It was not as if one person did this, another did that, and nobody knew about it. All of this was later contained in the General Staff. The organ that dealt with this on a daily basis was of course the Chief Inspector for National Defense, with those three functions and staffs. Because there was a Staff for Territorial Defense, an Inspectorate of Territorial Defense, there was the Staff for Civil Defense, and the Secretariat of the Committee for National Defense. So all of these matters were put together.

Once I was talking with General Jaruzelski, and he said that it should of course be arranged so that there would be somebody in the Central Committee because we had a pile of problems to overcome. Jaruzelski said to me: “Listen, as bad as it is there, at least we won’t have additional problems with them.” And he was right, because if a person had come who knew about things, with whom we spoke a common language, we could have resolved problems. And then a civilian apparatchik comes. Of course, we have examples of this today. You know, I am not against civilian leadership, I am as in favor of it as I can possibly be, under one condition: that the civilian director is prepared for it. If the civilian director comes, and he is learning, then nothing will come of it.

Gen. Tuczapski: But there. There was a person, I do not remember his name, some little guy. I will tell you next how things looked. In the fifties, Spychalski’s idea was to establish in time of war — instead of offices, industrial and transportation divisions — a division in the Central Committee simply in order to ease command. When I arrived in ‘60, I said that this was idiotic. Because if the state went to war, one could not create new organs then, but just prepare those organs that existed in peacetime. And we had all those divisions that had been created (because there were such divisions: the vice-premier, let’s say, and also two, three offices would join and out of it there would be some sort of industrial division, or something else there). It could be that you have heard of it. And there was such a division in the Central Committee. But it was not an organ of the Committee for National Defense. [Tuczapski, pp. 7-8]

Q: You have suggested, General, that our PRL [People’s Republic of Poland] leaders did not know the plan for the use of the Armed Forces in case of war?

Gen. Skalski: No....

Q: The Chairman of the State Council of course could not know, but the General Secretary of the CC [Central Committee] of the PZPR [Polish United Workers’ Party] — Gomułka, Edward Gierek, Jaruzelski — we’re talking about them here. Do you think that they did not know?

Q: Jaruzelski, probably.

Gen. Skalski: Jaruzelski, yes.

Q: On the grounds that it was military?

Gen. Skalski: That it was military.

Q: General, it could be that you are right, because it would be better not to know, that the Polish Front went against the Constitution. It went beyond the country’s borders. Beyond that, it is against the Constitution. It’s better not to know about it.

Gen. Skalski: Probably so.

Q: Because then you could always take those generals to court who made that sort of decision.

Gen. Skalski: Well, of course. [Skalski, p. 19]

 

Notes

[1] The secret document, which came into effect on 18 March 1980, is published here for the first time (in its German version, preserved in the Federal Military Archives in Freiburg, AZN 32854).