Nelson Evening Mail. SATURDAY. MAY 1, 1943 POLAND’S FRONTIERS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 78, 1 May 1943, Page 4

Nelson Evening Mail. SATURDAY. MAY 1, 1943 POLAND’S FRONTIERS

DESPITE intense diplomatic activity aimed at healing the breach between Poland and Russia it is proving unyielding. The Polish ambassador has left Russia and the Sikorski government is incurring the extreme displeasure of Moscow. Soviet suspicion—or professed suspicion—that it contains and is in league with Fascist elements is not easily dispelled and apparently Moscow has another regime it would far sooner see installed in its stead. This dissatisfaction has been accentuated by a certain carelessness on the part of the Polish government in checking statements used in official propaganda. That the coldness between them springs from a deeper cause than the uncertain fate of a body of prisoners of war is very apparent. It is merely another chapter in an agelong story of suspicion and hostility between two mutually distrustful neighbours.

Even for a Continental nation Poland has had a dark and troubled history, and from the Middle Ages onward she has found herself in constant conflict with Russia. At one time her eastern frontier stretched far into the Ukraine, including such distant cities as Smolensk, Kiev and Odessa. But she wore herself out with internal quarrels and foreign wars; in 1772 her domains were considerably abridged by the First Partition Treaty, and some twenty years later she disappeared as an independent state altogether, her territories being divided among her neighbours Russia, Prussia and Austria. Russia took the largest share, and proved the hardest taskmaster. All through the nineteenth century the people of Russian Poland were harshly oppressed; their free institutions were abolished, their administration flooded with Russian officials, and their language proscribed for official purposes. Two attempts at revolution, in 1830 and 1863, were followed by the usual crop of exiles, floggings and executions. Nevertheless the Poles retained a vigorous and tenacious spirit of nationality, and when

the Peace Conference came in 1919 their demand for the restoration of their former independence was accepted without question. The fixing of their frontier, however, caused considerable difficulty. There was little in the way of geographical features to guide the statesmen of Versailles, and almost everywhere the peoples and languages were so intermingled that the incorporation of minorities was inevitable. On the eastern flank this difficulty was aggravated by the fact that in 1919 the Bolshevik administration in Russia was still in a state of chaos, and was virtually at war with the rest of Europe. The eastern boundary finally granted them was drawn by a committee under the chairmanship of Lord Curzon. It followed fairly closely the division between Polish and non-Polish peoples, though it was accepted by the Poles with reluctance. Fortune played into their hands; for war with Russia followed, in which the Poles, after some initial reverses, won a series of astounding victories, and forced the Russians, by the Treaty of Riga, to extend the frontier about one hundred miles east of the Curzon Line. The Russians have always resented this enforced cession, holding that in the disputed territory, though the Poles are the largest single race unit, they form only 40 per cent, of the total. When the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, it was this area that the Russians hastened to occupy. The Poles seem to have regarded the Russian occupation with as much bitterness as the invasion of the Germans, but the entry of Russia into the war in 1941 made some kind of understanding between the two countries essential. A compact was signed in July of that year, but no definite statement was made regarding the boundaries. The Poles, however, have insistently demanded the frontier fixed at Riga; the Russians take their stand on the Curzon Line. It is in this boundary dispute, and in centuries of traditional hostility, rather than in the alleged massacre of the Polish officers, that the seeds of the present trouble lie. The Allied nations will watch it with some apprehension, and hope that both governments will realise, before a more serious quarrel develops, “that the road to victory is too long to permit the luxury of squabbles by the way.”