POLISH-SOVIET BOUNDARIES POSITION

It was only when the Polish army was hopelessly crushed and the Polish Government had fled to Rumania and the Nazis were sweeping unopposed toward "Eastern Poland" that the Red Army moved in to stop the Nazis at the ethnographic boundaries of Russia and to rescue thirteen million White Russians, Ukrainians and Jews from Nazi enslavement. Shortly after, in accordance with the laws laid down by the Soviet Constitution, the population of Western White Russia and Western Ukraine voted in a plebiscite to join their brothers in the White Russian Soviet Republic and the Ukrainian Soviet Republic.1

When the Soviet Union was drawn into the war and became ipso facto an ally of Poland, the Soviet Government signed a treaty with the Polish Government-in-Exile giving it facilities to recruit its only mass army among the Polish war prisoners and refugees in Russia and formally arranging to postpone all boundary disputes while the war was raging. In 1942, the Polish Government broke this treaty pledge and publicly insisted on its claim to "Eastern Poland." The Soviet Government then had no alternative but to make known its indisputable ethnographic position on White Russia and the Ukraine, a position in accord with the Atlantic Charter.2

The Polish Government insists upon the restoration of its pre-war boundaries, that is to say, the status quo of 1939. But the fact is that international banditry did not start abruptly in 1939. Japan, for example, might conceivably be willing to settle for the boundaries it enjoyed in China in 1939, but China might want to go back to 1931 or even further back to recover its territorial integrity. Neither Czechoslovakia nor Ethiopia nor Albania nor for that part Loyalist Spain, might consider the status quo of 1939 particularly satisfying. It is not strange, therefore, that Western White Russia and Western Ukraine, which had been despoiled by Polish imperialism in 1921, just ten years before Manchuria was wrested by Japan from China—should prefer to go back to the status quo of 1920 or 1940 rather than the status quo of 1939 when they enjoyed the privilege of being Polish colonies.3

It should be clear even to the Poles who have raised this issue, that the interests of their country can best be served by the quickest and most complete defeat of Hitler Germany. Anything that threatens the unity of the United Nations delays and threatens that outcome. Let the Polish people mark the forces that have most loudly taken up the issue. They will find them to include those forces that speak, suspiciously, in echoes of Goebbels' short wave messages, in echoes, that is, of the voice of their real enemy.


1The partition of Poland between Hitler and Stalin was pre-ordained and mutually congratulated upon. Soviet "elections" were a fraud.
2There was no alliance. Even in the course of war the USSR was making machinations to re-annex Polish territory. The Atlantic Charter was also cited in support of fraudulent plebiscites in the Baltic States. In defence of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt supported that characterization as well.
3The USSR quoted prior "status quo" justifying its territorial aggrandizement all along its western border. Nor has that habit changed as post-Soviet Russia characterized its conquest of the Crimean Tatar homeland as reuniting "historically Russian Crimea."
Updated: April, 2021
"Behind the Polish-Soviet Break" was published by Soviet Russia Today, New York. We do not endorse the Soviet account of historical events or their circumstances contained therein.
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