Polish–Soviet frontier

Polish–Soviet frontier, the source of considerable acrimony between the Polish government-in-exile in London and the USSR during the Second World War. Why the eventual frontier was chosen can only be understood in the context of earlier attempts to find a solution to this problem.

The Versailles settlement that followed the First World War never defined a permanent Polish–Soviet boundary, and its recommendation ( 8 December 1919) that the line of the River Bug should form a ‘provisional minimum frontier’ was never implemented. This frontier was then revived at the Spa conference ( July 1920), and agreed to by the Poles, as a potential truce line for terminating the Polish–Soviet war, and it was at Spa that it became known as the Curzon Line, so-named after the then British foreign secretary.

However, the Curzon Line remained undefined in eastern Galicia, and though it was agreed at Spa that the truce line there should run where the armies stood when the truce came into effect, the telegram explaining this to Moscow contained a glaring ambiguity. For it simultaneously proposed two lines in eastern Galicia: one to the east and the other to the west of the city of Lwów.

In any case the line was never implemented, as the truce was soon broken when the Bolshevik armies advanced across it and eventually it was events on the battlefield which determined the boundary between the two countries, with the Treaty of Riga ( 1921) establishing a frontier considerably east of the Curzon Line. For the Poles this closed the matter, but the signing of the German–Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Co-operation, and Demarcation (see Nazi–Soviet Pact) on 28 September 1939 resulted in a German–Soviet partition of Poland. This established a line mostly to the west of the Curzon Line. In eastern Galicia it followed the part of the Curzon Line mentioned in the Spa telegram that ran to the west of Lwów.

Later in the war, when negotiations with the USSR began over the future of Poland, Stalin maintained that the line established by the Riga treaty was defunct. At the wartime conferences at Teheran (see Eureka) and Yalta (see ARGONAUT) the USSR, the UK, and the USA agreed to a revived Curzon Line as the post-war Polish–Soviet frontier. The USSR successfully exploited the ambiguity of the Spa telegram to obtain the Curzon Line which, in its southernmost reaches, excluded Lwów from Poland. The UK and the USA urged the Polish government-in-exile to accept the Soviet version of the Curzon Line in 1944, and in the end the new boundary became a fait accompli.

Paul Latawski

Bibliography

Kirkien, L. , Russia, Poland, and the Curzon Line (London, nd).