re: August 1, 1944: The Polish Home Army rises up

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Stalin encourage the Poles to rebell and then held his army back so the Nazis would kill them.

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Eh yes and no. The Soviets had been calling for the Poles to rebel for well over a year and the Red Army was advancing on Warsaw, but there's isn't really any evidence that Stalin purposefully halted the advance of the Red Army. At that point the Soviets had been advancing rapidly in Operation Bagration for several months and outdistanced their supply lines, so the Soviet fronts 20 miles outside of Warsaw, many commanded by Zhukov, had largely run out of steam. In that way Stalin didn't really stop the Red Army and it was going to take weeks to regroup. BUT Stalin, with his cold calculating political skill, realized that the destruction of the non-communist Home Army would greatly assist his plans to dominate post-war Poland. In Stalinist Russia any group that exhibited independent initiative was considered dangerous, even more so if they were not communists. So he didn't push his commanders to quickly regroup and, more importantly, didn't allow bombers and transports from the Western Allies to land in Soviet territory after flying support missions to Warsaw, which helped doom the uprising.

Essentially it ends up being a little bit of both. Did Stalin purposefully halt the advance of the Red Army? No and its unlikely that the Soviet formations could have advanced because of supply problems and fierce German resistance along the Vistula. HOWEVER, Stalin did as little as possible to help the Poles, particularly by frustrating the attempts of the Western Allies to bombing German positions and drop supplies to the Home Army.