The immediate circumstances of the Uprising were dramatic. With Nazi forces reeling under the impact of the determined push west launched by the Red Army in mid-1944, a German withdrawal from Warsaw began to seem a possibility. The Armia Krajowa (Polish Home Army) or AK as they were commonly known, the largest of the Polish resistance forces (indeed, with over 400,000 soldiers, the largest resistance force anywhere in Europe) were thereby confronted by an agonizing dilemma. On one side, they were being strongly urged by the Allies to co-operate actively with advancing Soviet forces in driving back the Nazis. On the other, news of the treatment being meted out to AK units in areas of eastern Poland already liberated by the Red Army served to confirm the long-held suspicion that there was little, if any, room for the AK or its political backing - the Polish government-in-exile in London - in the Soviet scheme of things to come, a fact chillingly symbolized in news of the Soviet detention of AK units in the ex-Nazi concentration camp at Majdanek.

Throughout the second half of July, AK Commander Tadeusz Komorowski , known as Bor , hesitated over which course of action to take. With the arrival of the first Soviet tanks in the eastern suburbs of the city (Praga), the decision to launch a single-handed attack on the Germans was taken and on August 1, the main Warsaw AK corps of around 50,000 poorly armed troops sprang an assault on the city centre. For the first few days the element of surprise meant AK forces were able to capture large tracts of the city centre. By August 5, however, the tide was already beginning to turn against them. Supported by dive bombers and hastily drafted reinforcements, Nazi troops under the command of ruthless General von dem Bach-Zelewski began the task of clearing out the insurgents. Partisans and civilians alike were treated as legitimate targets for reprisals by the fearsome collection of SS and Wehrmacht units - including three battalions of half-starved Soviet POWs, an "anti-partisan" brigade made up of pardoned criminals and the notorious RONA Red Army deserters brigade - assembled for the task. The Nazi recapture of the Wola district , the first to be retaken on August 11, was followed by the massacre of over 8000 civilians. Even worse followed in Ochota , where over 40,000 civilians were murdered. Hospitals were burned to the ground with all their staff and patients; during the initial attack, women and children were tied to the front of German tanks to deter ambushes, and rows of civilians were marched in front of infantry units to ward off AK snipers.

With German troops and tanks systematically driving the beleaguered partisans into an ever diminishing pocket of the city centre, the decision was made to abandon the by now devastated Stare Miasto. On September 2, around 1500 of the surviving AK troops, along with over 500 other wounded, headed down into the city sewers through a single manhole near pl. Krasinski - an event imprinted firmly on the national consciousness as much thanks to Wajda's legendary film Kanal , a stirring 1950s rendition of the Uprising, as to its symbolic depiction in the contemporary Warsaw Uprising monument. Fighting continued for another month in the suburbs and pockets of the city centre until October 2, when General Bor and his troops finally surrendered to the Germans, 63 days after fighting had begun. Heavy AK casualties - around 20,000 dead - were overshadowed by the huge losses sustained by the city's civilian population, with over 225,000 killed during the fighting.

With the AK and eventually almost the entire population of Warsaw out of the way, Nazi demolition squads set about the task of fulfilling an enraged Hitler's order to wipe the city off the face of the map, dynamiting and razing building after building until the city centre had to all intents and purposes ceased to exist, as confirmed in the photos taken when the Soviets liberated Warsaw in January 1945.

Of the many controversial aspects of the Uprising, the most explosive, in Polish eyes at least, remains that of the Soviet role . Could the Red Army have intervened decisively to assist or save the Uprising from defeat? Throughout the postwar years, the official Soviet line combined the (arguably accurate) claim that the Uprising was a mistimed and strategically flawed diversion from the goal of driving the Germans west in 1944 with absurd ideological denigrations of the AK as reactionary, anti-Soviet nationalists whose actions were a betrayal of the anti-Nazi cause. Certainly Soviet action, or lack of it, during August 1944 was fertile ground for subsequent Polish misgivings about Stalin's real intentions. The Soviet tanks that had reached Praga, for example, sat idly by throughout September 1944 as the Germans pounded the city across the river. Equally significantly, on several occasions the Soviet authorities refused Allied access to Soviet airbases for airlifts of supplies to the beleaguered insurgents, and the secret telegram correspondence between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the time reveals a Stalin deeply scornful of the whole operation, arguing on one occasion that sooner or later "the truth about the handful of criminals who started the Warsaw disturbance to take over power, will become known to all".

Crudely stated, a common Polish interpretation of all this was that Stalin had simply allowed the Germans to do what his future plans for Poland would have anyway necessitated - the systematic annihilation of the sections of Polish society that formed the core of the AK forces with their uncompromising commitment to a free, independent postwar Poland. With sentiments like these around, it's not surprising that the Warsaw Uprising has remained, if no longer a taboo subject, then certainly a continuing area of disagreement in Polish-Russian relations.

Tensions surfaced visibly during the solemn fiftieth anniversary commemorations of the start of the Uprising, held in the city throughout August 1994. In a move widely criticized in Poland, particularly among older sections of Polish society, President Walesa invited his Russian and German counterparts to participate at the opening ceremony held in Warsaw on August 1. While the German President Roman Herzog accepted the invitation (reportedly under the mistaken impression that the 1943 Ghetto Uprising was being commemorated) and made a speech asking Polish forgiveness for the country's treatment at the hands of the Nazis, Russian President Boris Yeltsin declined the invitation, sending a lower-level aide instead, giving rise to the wry popular quip that the Russians had accepted the invitation but decided to stay in Praga instead.