Curzon Line

Poland
Territorial changes of Poland
in the 20th Century

The Curzon Line was a demarcation line proposed in December 1919 by the British Foreign Secretary, George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, as a possible armistice line between the Second Polish Republic to the west and the Bolshevik Russian sphere of influence to the east, during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–20. Curzon's plan was initially not accepted by the Soviets, as the military situation was at that time in their favour, and later was not accepted by the Poles when the military situation had shifted to their favour. As such, the line did not play any role in establishing the Polish-Soviet border in 1921. Instead, the final Peace of Riga (or Treaty of Riga) provided Poland with almost 135,000 km² (52,000 sq mi) of land east of the line, which on average was about 200 km east from the Curzon line. A close approximation of the Curzon line is the current border between the countries of Belarus, Ukraine and Poland.

With minor variations, the Curzon line lay approximately along the border which was established between the Prussian Kingdom and the Russian Empire in 1797, after the third partition of Poland, which was the last border recognised by the United Kingdom. The line separating the German and Soviet zones of occupation following the defeat of Poland in 1939 followed the Curzon Line in places, while diverging from it around Białystok in the north and in the southern region of Galicia. While there is a widespread perception by historians that the line was based on the ethnic composition of the area, [1][2][3][4][5] this viewpoint has been disputed by other historians who describe its origins as diplomatic and historical..

The Curzon line was used by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin as a significant argument in the talks with the Allied Powers during 1942-1945. Stalin argued that the Soviet Union could not demand less territory for itself than the British Government had reconfirmed via Curzon some two decades prior. This has been described as a strong strategic move by Stalin, adding more land to the Soviet Empire than a pure ethnodemographic study of the time would have justified.

There were two versions of the line "A" and "B". Version "B" allocated Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine) to Poland. The line "A" was used in 1945 as the basis for the permanent border between Poland and the Soviet Union, although with some differences.

Contents

History

Historian Henryk Zieliński's interpretation of dominant nationalities in and around Poland, 1931.

At the end of World War I, the Allies agreed that an independent Polish state should be recreated from territories previously part of the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany. The Treaty of Versailles in 1919 said that the eastern border of Poland would be "subsequently determined." The lands lying between Poland and its eastern neighbours were inhabited by a mixed population of Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, with no group being a majority. Lord Curzon of Kedleston, on behalf of the Triple Entente, in 1920 suggested a line running from Hrodna through Brest-Litovsk to Lwów, awarding this city to Poland (Line "B" - see map). However, a year later it was altered by an unknown employee (some evidence put the guilt on Lewis Bernstein Namier) of the British Foreign Office, so that it did not include the city on the Polish side. This fact had great influence on the negotiations about the Polish eastern border on the peace conferences in Teheran and Yalta.

“Poland & The New Baltic States” map from a British atlas in 1920, showing still-undefined borders in the situation after the treaties of Brest and Versailles and before the Peace of Riga

Because the Russian Empire had collapsed into a state of civil war following the Russian Revolution of 1917, there was no recognised Russian government with which the eastern border of Poland could be negotiated. However, one of the first acts of the new Russian government was to publicly denounce the treaties which had partitioned Poland. That left Poland in legal possession of the territories that Poland had held before the Partitions of Poland in 1772. The Bolshevik regime in Russia, on the other hand, wanted to invade Poland in order to carry the socialist revolution into the heart of Europe and particularly into Germany. The Polish-Soviet War ensued.

In December 1919, the Allied powers made the following declaration: "The Principal Allied and Associated Powers, recognising that it is important as soon as possible to put a stop to the existing conditions of political uncertainty in which the Polish nation is placed and without prejudging the provisions, which must in the future define the eastern frontiers of Poland, hereby declare that they recognize the right of the Polish Government to proceed, according to the conditions previously provided by the Treaty with Poland of June 28, 1919, to organise a regular administration of the territories of the former Russian Empire situated to the West of the line described below. The rights that Poland may be able to establish over the territories situated to the East of the said line are expressly reserved."

During the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1921, in May 1920, the Bolsheviks gained the advantage and advanced into Poland; in July, the Poles appealed to the Allies to intervene. On 11 July, Lord Curzon of Kedleston proposed to the Soviet government a ceasefire along the line which had been suggested the previous year. The Soviets, believing they had the upper hand, rejected the proposal and fighting continued. In August the Soviets were defeated by Poles just outside Warsaw and forced to retreat. At the Treaty of Riga in March 1921 the Soviets had to concede a frontier well to the east of the Curzon Line, giving Poland both Lwów and Wilno (today Vilnius). The area around Wilno, called Central Lithuania, was the subject of a referendum in 1922, followed by incorporation to Poland according to the wish of 65% of the voters. The Polish-Soviet border was recognised by the League of Nations in 1923 and confirmed by various Polish-Soviet agreements.

The Curzon Line, 1945

The terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 provided for the partition of Poland along the line of the San, Vistula and Narew rivers which did not go along Curzon Line but reached far beyond it and awarded Soviet Union with territories of Lublin and near Warsaw. In September, after the military defeat of Poland, the Soviet Union annexed all territories east of the Curzon Line plus Białystok and Eastern Galicia. The territories east of this line were incorporated into the Byelorussian SSR and Ukrainian SSR after staged "referendums" and hundreds of thousands of Poles and a lesser number of Jews were deported eastwards into the Soviet Union. In July 1941 these territories were seized by Germany in the course of the invasion of the Soviet Union. During the German occupation most of the Jewish population was killed.

In 1944 the Soviet armed forces recaptured eastern Poland from the Germans. The Soviets unilaterally declared the former Soviet-German border (approximately the Curzon Line) to be the new frontier between the Soviet Union and Poland. This time, however, Białystok was retained by Poland. The Polish government-in-exile in London bitterly opposed this and at the Teheran and Yalta conferences between Stalin and the western Allies, the allied leaders Roosevelt and Churchill asked Stalin to reconsider, particularly over Lwów, but he refused. The altered Curzon Line thus became the permanent eastern border of Poland and was recognised by the western Allies in July 1945.

When the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, the Curzon line became Poland's eastern border with Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine.

Ethnography to the east of the Curzon Line

The territory which lay between the Curzon Line and the 1921 eastern border of Poland had a population of about 12 million people in an area of 188,000 square kilometres. According to statistics from the Polish census of 1931 (which was unlikely to underestimate the number of Poles), the population of these territories by mother-tongue was:

Poles 4,794,000 39.9%
Ukrainians and Rusyns 4,139,000 34.4%
Jews 1,045,000 08.4%
Belarusians 993,000 08.5%
Russians 120,000 01.0%
Lithuanians 76,000 00.6%
Others and not given 845,000 06.4%

(The majority from "Others and not given" were Poleszuks from Polesie.)

By religion the population was classified as follows:

Roman Catholics 4,016,000 33.4%
Greek Catholics or Uniates 3,050,000 25.4%
Orthodox 3,529,000 29.3%
Other Christians: 180,000 01.5%
Jewish 1,222,000 10.2%

It can be seen from these figures (ten years after the Treaty of Riga) that none of the ethnic and national groups in the region formed a majority. While the Poles had become probably the largest ethnic and religious group in these territories after the settlement policies of the 1920s, according to Polish state's census, Ukrainians were a large second (the Ukrainians outnumbering Poles in combined southern sections). Other groups included Rusyns, Belarusians and Poleszuks, who were often included to the Poles' number. Due to the long reign of Polish rule over these areas, much of the Polish population was urban, while much of the Ukrainian and Belarusian population was rural. The countryside was Rusyn or Ukrainian in character, the cities were Polish.

The deportations of Poles to the Soviet Union in 1939–1941 (see Polish minority in Soviet Union) and the murder of the Jewish population between 1941 and 1945 probably left Ukrainians and Belarusians as a majority of the population in the territories, though far from a large one. The cities of Lwów, Wilno, Grodno and some smaller towns still had Polish majorities during this period. After 1945, most of the Polish population of the area east of the new Soviet-Polish border fled or was expelled to the newly formed territory of communist-controlled Poland and the area today is almost entirely Belarusian (in the north) or Ukrainian (in the south). Despite the expulsion, nowadays there are still around 500,000 Poles in Belarus (5% of the Belarus population).

Ethnography to the west of the Curzon Line

Similar problems pertained to West of the Curzon line. The Polish population was generally overwhelmingly predominant in the towns and especially the cities but the opposite situation, based on older settlement patterns, was often in evidence in the rural districts. A sizeable Belarusian rural population was incorporated into modern Poland around Białystok, south of this a similar Ukrainian population lived around Chełm. The extreme south had a large Ukrainian population too, but this time of Galician descent. Much of this population was forcibly settled in Poland's newly "recovered territories" of Silesia, Pomerania, Lubusz Land, Warmia and Masuria after World War II in a military operation called Operation Wisła. These were pre-1937 territories of Germany from which the German population fled or was expelled.

See also

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Zara S. Steiner (2005). The Lights that Failed: European International History, 1919-1933. Oxford University Press. http://books.google.com/books?id=rJ9JJIVmFpkC&pg=PA149&dq=curzon+line+ethnographic&as_brr=3&client=firefox-a. 
  2. ↑ William L. Shirer (1990). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany. Simon and Schuster. http://books.google.com/books?id=sY8svb-MNUwC&pg=PA459&dq=curzon+line+ethnographic&as_brr=3&client=firefox-a#PPA460,M1. 
  3. ↑ Aviel Roshwald (2001). Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, 1914-1923. Routledge. http://books.google.com/books?id=ef0wXYsJATwC&pg=PA162&dq=curzon+line+ethnographic&lr=&as_brr=3&client=firefox-a. 
  4. ↑ Joseph Marcus (1983). Social and Political History of the Jews in Poland, 1919-1939. Walter de Gruyter. http://books.google.com/books?id=82ncGA4GuN4C&pg=PA15&dq=curzon+line+ethnographic&lr=&as_brr=3&client=firefox-a. 
  5. ↑ Sandra Halperin (1997). In the Mirror of the Third World: Capitalist Development in Modern Europe. Cornell University Press. http://books.google.com/books?id=0lULSVxl9VYC&pg=PA41&dq=curzon+line+ethnographic&lr=&as_brr=3&client=firefox-a. 

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