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Poland (Polish: Polska) is a country in Central Europe[1][2] bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north. The total area of Poland is 312,679 square kilometres (120,726 sq mi),[3] making it the 69th largest country in the world and the ninth largest in Europe.
From a nucleus between the Odra and Vistula rivers on the North European Plain, Poland has at its largest extent expanded as far as the Baltic, the Dnieper, the Black Sea and the Carpathians, while in periods of weakness it has shrunk drastically or even ceased to exist.[4]
In 1492, the territory of Poland-Lithuania - not counting the fiefs of Mazovia, Moldavia and East Prussia - covered 1,115,000 km2 (431,000 sq mi), making it the largest territory in Europe; by 1793 it had fallen to 215,000 km2 (83,000 sq mi), the same size as Great Britain, and in 1795 it disappeared completely.[4] The first 20th century incarnation of Poland, the Second Polish Republic, occupied 389,720 km2 (150,470 sq mi) while since 1945, a more westerly Poland covered 312,677 km2 (120,725 sq mi).[5]
The Poles are the most numerous of the West Slavs and occupy what some believe to be the original homeland of the Slavic peoples. While other groups migrated, the Polanie remained in situ along the Vistula, from the river's sources to its estuary at the Baltic Sea.[6] There is no other European nation centred to such an extent on one river.[7] The establishment of a Polish state is often identified with the adoption of Christianity by Mieszko I in 966 CE (see Baptism of Poland), when the state covered territory similar to that of present-day Poland. In 1025 CE, Poland became a kingdom. In 1569, Poland cemented a long association with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania by signing the Union of Lublin, forming the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was one of the largest and most populous countries in 16th- and 17th-century Europe.[8][9][10][11]
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had many characteristics that made it unique among states of that era. The Commonwealth's political system, often called the Noble's Democracy or Golden Freedom, was characterized by the sovereign's power being reduced by laws and the legislature (Sejm), which was controlled by the nobility (szlachta). This system was a precursor to the modern concepts of broader democracy[12] and constitutional monarchy.[13][14] The two comprising states of the Commonwealth were formally equal, although in reality Poland was a dominant partner in the union.[15] Its population was hallmarked by a high level of ethnic and confessional diversity, and the state was noted for having religious tolerance unusual for its age,[16] although the degree of tolerance varied over time.[17]
In the late 18th century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth began to collapse. Its neighbouring states were able to slowly dismember the Commonwealth. In 1795, Poland's territory was completely partitioned among the Kingdom of Prussia, the Russian Empire, and Austria. Poland regained its independence as the Second Polish Republic in 1918 after World War I, but lost it in World War II through occupation by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Poland lost over six million citizens in World War II, emerging several years later as the socialist People's Republic of Poland within the Eastern Bloc, under strong Soviet influence.
During the Revolutions of 1989, communist rule was overthrown and Poland became what is constitutionally known as the "Third Polish Republic." Poland is a unitary state made up of sixteen voivodeships (Polish: województwo). Poland is a member of the European Union, NATO, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Poland currently has a population of over 38 million people,[3] which makes it the 34th most populous country in the world[18] and one of the most populous members of the European Union.
In the period following the emergence of Poland in the 10th century, the Polish nation was led by a series of rulers of the Piast dynasty, who converted the Poles to Christianity, created a sizeable Central European state, and integrated Poland into European culture. Formidable foreign enemies and internal fragmentation eroded this initial structure in the 13th century, but consolidation in the 14th century laid the base for the Polish Kingdom.
Beginning with the Lithuanian Grand Duke Jogaila, the Jagiellon dynasty (1385–1569) ruled the Polish-Lithuanian Union. The Lublin Union of 1569 established the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as an influential player in European politics and a vital cultural entity.
In 1525, during the Protestant Reformation, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, Albert of Hohenzollern, secularized the order's Prussian territory, becoming Albert, Duke of Prussia. His duchy, which had its capital in Königsberg, was established as a fief of the Crown of Poland.[19]
Sweden, weakened by involvement in the Thirty Years' War, agreed to sign the Armistice of Stuhmsdorf (also known as Treaty of Sztumska Wieś or Treaty of Stuhmsdorf) in 1635, favourable to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in terms of territorial concessions.[20]
In the history of Poland and Lithuania, the Deluge refers to a series of wars in the mid- to late 17th century that left the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in ruins.[21]
The Deluge refers to the Swedish invasion and occupation of the western half of Poland-Lithuania from 1655 to 1660 and the Khmelnytskyi Uprising in 1648, which led to Russia's invasion during the Russo-Polish War.[21]
The Treaty of Wehlau was a treaty signed on September 19, 1657, in the eastern Prussian town of Wehlau (Welawa, now Znamensk) between Poland and Brandenburg-Prussia during the Swedish Deluge. The treaty granted independence to Prussia in recognition of its help against the Swedish forces during the Deluge.[22]
In the Treaty of Oliva, the Polish King, John II Casimir, renounced his claims to the Swedish crown, which his father Sigismund III Vasa had lost in 1599. Poland formally ceded Swedish Livonia and the city of Riga, which had been under de facto Swedish control since the 1620s.[23] The signing of the treaty ended Swedish involvement in the Deluge.
The War for Ukraine ended with the Treaty of Andrusovo of January 13, 1667.[24] The peace settlement gave Moscow control over the so called Left-bank Ukraine with the Polish Commonwealth retaining Right-bank Ukraine.[24] The signing of the Treaty ended Russian occupation of the Polish confederation and the Deluge war. Since the war started the population of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been nearly halved by war and disease. War had destroyed the economic base of the cities and raised a religious fervour that ended Poland's policy of religious tolerance.[21]
As a result of the Polish–Ottoman War the Polish commonwealth ceded Podolia in the 1672 Treaty of Buczacz.[25][26]
The Eternal Peace Treaty of 1686 was a treaty between the Tsardom of Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth signed on May 6, 1686 in Moscow. It confirmed the earlier Truce of Andrusovo of 1667. The treaty secured Russia's possession of the Left-bank Ukraine, Zaporozh'ye, Seversk lands, the cities of Chernihiv, Starodub, and Smolensk and its outskirts, while Poland retained Right-bank Ukraine.[27]
The Treaty of Karlowitz, or Treaty of Karlovci, was signed on January 26, 1699, in Sremski Karlovci, a town in modern-day Serbia. The Treaty of Karlowitz was signed following a two-month congress between the Ottoman Empire and the Holy League of 1684, a coalition of various European powers including the Habsburg Monarchy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Republic of Venice, and the Russia of Peter I Alekseyevich.[28] The treaty concluded the Austro-Ottoman War of 1683–1697, in which the Ottoman side had finally been defeated at the Battle of Senta. The Ottomans ceded most of Hungary, Transylvania, and Slavonia to Austria while Podolia returned to Poland. Most of Dalmatia passed to Venice, along with the Morea (the Peloponnesus peninsula) and Crete.[27]
In February 1772, an agreement for the partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was signed in Vienna.[29] Early in August Russian, Prussian and Austrian troops simultaneously entered the Commonwealth and occupied the provinces agreed upon among themselves.
By the first partition in 1772, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth lost about 211,000 square kilometres (81,000 sq mi) (30% of its territory, amounting at that time to about 733,000 square kilometres (283,000 sq mi)), with a population of over four to five million people (about a third of its population of 14 million before the partition).[30][31]
By the 1790s the First Polish Republic had deteriorated into such a helpless condition that it was successfully forced into an unnatural and ultimately deadly alliance with its enemy, Prussia. The alliance was cemented with the Polish-Prussian Pact of 1790.[32] The conditions of the Pact were such that the succeeding and final two partitions of Poland were inevitable. The May Constitution of 1791 enfranchised the bourgeoisie, established the separation of the three branches of government, and eliminated the abuses of Repnin Sejm.
Those reforms prompted aggressive actions on the part of Poland's neighbours, wary of a potential renaissance of the Commonwealth. In the second partition, Russia and Prussia took so much territory that only one-third of the 1772 population remained in Poland.[33]
Kosciuszko's ragtag insurgent armies, who fought to regain Polish territory, won some initial successes but they eventually fell before the superior forces of the Russian Empire.[34] The partitioning powers, seeing the increasing unrest in the remaining Commonwealth, decided to solve the problem by erasing any independent Polish state from the map. On 24 October 1795 their representatives signed a treaty dividing the remaining territories of the Commonwealth between their three countries.[35]
Napoleon's attempts to build and expand his empire kept Europe at war for almost a decade and brought him into conflict with the same eastern European powers that had beleaguered Poland in the last decades of the previous century. An alliance of convenience was the result of this situation. Volunteer Polish legions attached themselves to Bonaparte's armies, hoping that in return the emperor would allow an independent Poland to reappear out of his conquests.[36]
The Duchy of Warsaw was a Polish state established by Napoleon in 1807 from the Polish lands ceded by the Kingdom of Prussia under the terms of the Treaties of Tilsit. The duchy was held in personal union by one of Napoleon's allies, King Frederick Augustus I of Saxony.[36]
Following Napoleon's failed invasion of Russia, the duchy was occupied by Prussian and Russian troops until 1815, when it was formally partitioned between the two countries at the Congress of Vienna.[37]
Congress Poland was created out of the Duchy of Warsaw at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, when European states reorganized Europe following the Napoleonic wars.[38]
The Grand Duchy of Posen was a region in the Kingdom of Prussia in the Polish lands commonly known as "Greater Poland" between the years 1815–1848. According to the Congress of Vienna it was to have autonomy. In practice it was subordinated to Prussia and the proclaimed rights for Poles were not respected. The name was unofficially used afterwards for denoting the territory, especially by Poles, and today is used by modern historians to describe different political entities until 1918. Its capital was Posen (Polish: Poznań).[38]
The Free, Independent, and Strictly Neutral City of Kraków with its Territory, more commonly known as either the Free City of Kraków or Republic of Kraków, was a city-state created by the Congress of Vienna in 1815.[39]
After the November Uprising, Congress Poland lost its status as a sovereign state in 1831 and the administrative division of Congress Poland was reorganized. Russia issued an "organic decree" preserving the rights of individuals in Congress Poland but abolished the Sejm. This meant Poland was subject to rule by Russian military decree.[40]
In the aftermath of the unsuccessful Kraków Uprising, the Free City of Kraków was annexed by the Austrian Empire.[39]
After the defeat of Congress Poland, many Prussian liberals sympathised with the demand for the restoration of the Polish state. In the spring of 1848 the new liberal Prussian government allowed some autonomy to the Grand Duchy of Posen in the hope of contributing to the cause of a new Polish homeland.[41] Due to a number of factors, including the outrage of the German-speaking minority in Pozen, the Prussian government reversed course. By April 1848, the Prussian army had already suppressed the Polish militias and National Committees that emerged in March. By the end of the year the Duchy had lost the last vestiges of its formal autonomy, and was downgraded to a Province of the Prussian kingdom.[42]
The West Ukrainian People's Republic was proclaimed on November 1, 1918 with Lviv as its capital. The Republic claimed sovereignty over Eastern Galicia, including the Carpathians up to the city of Nowy Sącz in the west, as well as Volhynia, Carpathian Ruthenia and Bukovina. Although the majority of the population of the Western-Ukrainian People's Republic were Ukrainians, large parts of the claimed territory were considered Polish by the Poles. In Lviv the Ukrainian residents supported the proclamation, the city's significant Jewish minority accepted or remained neutral towards the Ukrainian proclamation, and the Polish minority was shocked to find themselves in a proclaimed Ukrainian state.[43]
In the aftermath of World War I the Polish people broke out in the Greater Poland Uprising on December 27, 1918 in Poznań after a patriotic speech by Ignacy Paderewski, a famous Polish pianist. The fighting continued until June 28, 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed, which recreated the nation of Poland. From the defeated German Empire. Poland received the following:
On July 17, 1919 a ceasefire was signed in the Polish–Ukrainian War with the West Ukrainian People's Republic (ZUNR). As part of the agreement Poland kept ZUNR territory. The West Ukrainian People's Republic then merged with the Ukrainian People's Republic (UNR).[47] On June 25, 1919 Supreme Allies Council transferred East Galicia (ZUNR territory) to Poland.[46]
The Polish–Soviet War (February 1919–March 1921) was an armed conflict between Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine on the one hand and the Second Polish Republic and the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic on the other. The war was the result of conflicting expansionist ambitions. Poland, whose statehood had just been re-established by the Treaty of Versailles following the Partitions of Poland in the late 18th century, sought to secure territories it had lost at the time of the partitions. The aim of the Soviet states was to control those same territories, which the Russian Empire had gained in the partitions of Poland.[48]
The Polish-Lithuanian War was an armed conflict between Lithuania and the Second Polish Republic, lasting from August 1920 to October 7, 1920, in the aftermath of World War I, not long after both countries had regained their independence. It was part of a wider conflict over disputed territorial control of the cities of Vilnius (Polish: Wilno), Suwałki and Augustów.
In the aftermath of the war the Republic of Central Lithuania was created in 1920 following the staged rebellion of soldiers of the 1st Lithuanian-Belarusian Infantry Division of the Polish Army, supported by the Polish air force, cavalry and artillery.[49] Centered on the historical capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Vilna (Lithuanian: Vilnius, Polish: Wilno), for eighteen months the entity served as a buffer state between Poland, upon which it depended, and Lithuania, which claimed the area.[50]
Soon after the Battle of Warsaw (1920) the Bolsheviks sued for peace. The Poles, exhausted, constantly pressured by the Western governments and the League of Nations, and with its army controlling the majority of the disputed territories, were willing to negotiate. The Soviets made two offers: one on September 21 and the other on September 28. The Polish delegation made a counteroffer on October 2. On the October 5, the Soviets offered amendments to the Polish offer, which Poland accepted. The armistice between Poland on the one side and Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Russia on the other was signed on October 12 and went into effect on October 18.[51] Long negotiations ensued, with the Treaty of Riga being signed in March 1921. The assessment of relative advantage is not universally agreed. Russian and Polish historians tend to assign victory to their respective countries. Outside assessments vary, mostly between calling the result a Polish victory and being inconclusive. However, in his secret report to the 9th Conference of the Bolshevik Party on 20 September 1920, Lenin called the outcome of the war "In a word, a gigantic, unheard-of defeat"[52]
During the closing years of World War I Polish and Czechoslovakian diplomats met to arrange a common border between the two new countries. By the time armistice was declared, most of the border was agreed except for three small politically-sensitive areas with both Polish and Czechoslovak residents.
The Cieszyn Silesia or the Duchy of Cieszyn (German: Teschen and Czech: Tesin) was a small area that the pre-World War I census showed was predominantly Polish in three districts (Teschen, Bielsko and Frysztat) and mainly Czech in the fourth district of Frydek. The economic importance of Cieszyn Silesia lay in the rich coal basin around Karvina and in the valuable Košice–Bohumín Railway, which linked Bohemia with Slovakia. In northern Cieszyn Silesia, the railroad junction of Bohumín (German: Oderberg and Czech: Bohumin) served as a crossroads for international transport and communications.[53]
Claims over these regions turned violent in 1919 with a brief military conflict, the Seven-day war, between Polish and Czechoslovak units. The Allied governments pressed for a ceasefire and on 3 February 1919 a Polish-Czech border agreement was signed on the basis of the 5 November 1918 ethnic division agreement.[46] This was later changed at the Conference of Ambassadors in Spa, Belgium on 28 July 1920. Cieszyn (German: Teschen) was divided along the Olza river between the two newly-created states of Poland and Czechoslovakia. The smaller western suburbs of Cieszyn were joined to Czechoslovakia as the new town of Český Těšín along with the railroad and the Karvina coal basin.[54][53] Poland received the portion of Cieszyn east of the Olza river.[53] The Conference of Ambassadors divided the region just as the Red Army was nearing Warsaw. It was later learned that this award resulted from a secret deal between Edvard Beneš and French and British officials.[55]
The county of Orawa (Slovak: Orava) arose before the 15th century. The county's territory is situated along the Orava River between Zazriva and the Tatra Mountains. Spisz (Slovak: Spiš) is situated between the High Tatras and the Dunajec River in the north, the springs of the Váh River in the west, the Slovak Ore Mountains and the Hnilec River in the south, and a line running from the town of Stara Ľubovňa, via the Branisko Mountains, to the town of Margecany in the east. While the Orawa and Spisz border was in arbitration, many groups fought to be a part of Poland, including a number of Polish authors. They began to write about an alleged three hundred thousand Poles living in the Orawa territory.[56]
The Conference of Ambassadors decided that Czechoslovakia would cede to Poland a number of villages from the Orawa and Spisz regions, including the municipalities of Oravy Srnie, Podvlk, Harkabúz, Nižná Zubrica, Vyšná Zubrica, Oravka, Bukovina-Podsklie, Pekelník, Jablonka, Chyžné, Hladovka, Suchá Hora, Vyšná Lipnica, a part of Nižné Lipnice and 4.2% of the rather Belá new communities, with Fridman (Falštin settlement), Krempach, Tribš, Durštín, Čierna Hora, Jurgov, Repiská, Vyšné lapse, Nižné lapse, Nedeca, Kacvín and Lapšanka.[57]
In late 1921 a border adjustment between the Weimar Republic and Poland took place as a result of the Silesian Uprisings. The uprising were a series of three armed rebellions that took place between 1919 and 1921 by the Polish people in the Upper Silesia region against the Weimar Republic. The Polish people of the region wanted to join the Second Polish Republic, which had been established following World War I. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles had called for a plebiscite in Upper Silesia in 1921 to determine whether the territory should be a part of Germany or Poland.[58]
The plebiscite took place on March 20, 1921, two days after the signing of the Treaty of Riga, which ended the Polish-Soviet war. In the plebiscite, 707,605 votes were cast for Germany, and 479,359 for Poland.[58] The Germans had a majority, by 228,246 votes. In late April 1921, rumours flew that Upper Silesia would stay in Germany. This led to the Third Polish Uprising in May–July 1921.[58] The question of the Upper Silesia problem was turned over to a council of the League of Nations. The commission, consisting of four representatives—one each from Belgium, Brazil, Spain, and China. The commission gathered its own data, interviewing Poles and Germans from the region. On the basis of the reports of this commission and those of its experts, on October 1921 the Council awarded the greater part of the Upper Silesian industrial district to Poland.[58]
After a variety of delays, a disputed election to join Poland took place on January 8, 1922, and the Republic of Central Lithuania became part of Poland.[59]
The Polish government was not satisfied with the Czechoslovakia-Polish border decided from the Paris Peace Conference or from the Conference of Ambassadors. The conflict was only resolved by the Council of the League of Nations' Permanent Court of International Justice on March 12, 1924, which decided that Czechoslovakia should retain the territory of Javorzyna.[60] and which entailed (in June of the same year) an additional exchange of territories in Orava - the territory around Lipnica Wielka (Nižná Lipnica) went to Poland, the territory around Suchá Hora (Sucha Gora) and Hladovka (Glodowka) went to Czechoslovakia.[61]
As Czechoslovakia was being absorbed into the German Reich, Zaolzie, the Czech half of Cieszyn was annexed by Poland in 1938 following the Munich Agreement and the First Vienna Award. At noon on September 30, Poland gave an ultimatum to the Czechoslovak government. It demanded the immediate evacuation of Czech troops and police from Zaolzie and gave Prague until noon the following day. At 11:45 a.m. on October 1 the Czech foreign ministry called the Polish ambassador in Prague and told him that Poland could have what it wanted. Poland was accused of being an accomplice of Nazi Germany – a charge that Warsaw was hard put to deny.[62]
Poland seized land from northern Spisz and northern Orawa, including territories around Suchá Hora and Hladovka, around Javorina, around Leśnica in the Pieniny Mountains, a small territory around Skalité, and some other very small border regions. They officially received the territories on 1 November 1938. Polish military groups began to carry out assimilation of the population. Polish was introduced as the only official language and the Slovak Intelligence were displaced from the territories.[63]
In 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland and partitioned it pursuant to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.[64]
After the invasion, Germany annexed the lands it was forced to give to a reformed Poland in 1919–1922 by the Treaty of Versailles: the Polish Corridor, West Prussia, the Province of Posen, and parts of eastern Upper Silesia. The council of the Free City of Danzig voted to become a part of Germany again, although Poles and Jews were deprived of their voting rights and all non-Nazi political parties were banned. Parts of Poland that had not been part of Wilhelmine Germany were also incorporated into the Reich.
Two decrees by Adolf Hitler (October 8 and October 12, 1939) provided for the division of the annexed areas of Poland into the following administrative units:
These territories had an area of 94,000 square kilometres (36,000 sq mi) and a population of 10,000,000 people. The remaining Polish territory was annexed by the Soviet Union or made into the German-controlled General Government occupation zone. Eastern areas of Poland became part of either Soviet Belarus (including Białystok, Łomża, Baranowicze and Brest) or Soviet Ukraine (including Lwów, Tarnopol, Lutsk, Rowne and Stanisławów). The city of Vilnius (Polish: Wilno) with its adjacent area was annexed and returned to Lithuania.
After the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the district of Białystok, which included the Białystok, Bielsk Podlaski, Grajewo, Łomża, Sokółka, Volkovysk, and Grodno Counties, was "attached to" (not incorporated into) East Prussia.
On Victory in Europe Day (V-E Day: May 8, 1945) World War II Allies formally accepted the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany.
After World War II, there were extensive changes to the territorial extent of Poland, following the decision taken at the Teheran Conference of 1943 at the insistence of the Soviet Union. The Polish territories east of the Curzon Line, which the Soviet Union had occupied in 1939 along with the Bialystok region, were permanently annexed.[65] While a large portion of this area was predominately populated by Ukrainians and Belarussians, most of their Polish inhabitants were expelled.[66] Today these territories are part of Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania.
Poland received former German territory east of the Oder-Neisse line, consisting of the southern two thirds of East Prussia and most of Pomerania, Neumark (East Brandenburg), and Silesia. The German population was expelled before these formerly occupied territories were repopulated mainly with Poles from central Poland and those expelled from the eastern regions.[67] Early expulsions in Poland were undertaken by the occupying Soviet and Polish Communist military authorities[67] even before the Potsdam Conference ("wild expulsions"). To ensure territorial incorporation into Poland, Polish Communists ordered that Germans were to be expelled: "We must expel all the Germans because countries are built on national lines and not on multinational ones." A citation from the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers Party, May 20–21, 1945.[68] Germans were defined as either Reichsdeutsche, people enlisted in first or second Volksliste groups, and those of the third group, who held German citizenship. People of Slavic descent (autochthones, almost exclusively in Upper Silesia and Masuria) could apply for "verification", as Poles and were allowed to stay.[69]
Winston Churchill was not present at the end of the Yalta Conference as the results of the British election had made it clear he had been defeated. Churchill later claimed that he would never have agreed to the Oder-Western Neisse line, and in his famous Iron Curtain speech declared that:
The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place.—Winston Churchill[70]
On August 16, 1945 a border agreement between Poland and the USSR was signed. The western portion of the Byelorussian SSR was granted to Poland. The Belastok Voblast was divided into Soviet Brest Voblast, Hrodna Voblast and Polish Białystok Voivodeship.[71]
After World War II the Czechoslovakian government wanted to return to the 1920 border between the two nations, while Polish inhabitants of Zaolzie were in favour of the boundary of August 31, 1939. On May 20, 1945 in Trstena an agreement for a return to the 1938 borders of Poland was signed and the following day the Czechoslovak border guards moved to the old Czechoslovakian border. At several places there were fights between Polish and Czechoslovakian militias, but the situation calmed with the arrival of Polish troops on July 17, 1945.[72] The Polish government still did not want to give up Zaolzie, and on June 16, 1945, Marshall Michał Rola-Żymierski issued directive number 00336, which ordered the 1st Armoured Corps of the Polish Army to concentrate in the area of Rybnik, and to seize Zaolzie[73] However, the Soviets decided to hand the region to Czechoslovakia, and the Poles followed the Moscow directive. The Czechs demanded former German areas of Klodzko, Glubczyce, and Racibórz, but after Soviet mediation, all sides signed a treaty on September 21, 1945, which accepted the December 31, 1937 Polish - Czechoslovak and Czechoslovak - German borderline as the boundary between the two countries.[74]
The Polish border underwent a minor correction in 1948, when the village of Medyka near Przemyśl was transferred to Poland.[75]
On February 15, 1951 Aleksander Zawadzki, the president of the Polish Republic, and Andrey Vyshinsky, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, signed Treaty No. 6222. Agreement between the Polish republic and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics concerning the exchange of sectors of their state territories. The treaty was a border adjustment, with Poland and the Soviet Union exchanging 480 square kilometres (190 sq mi). [76]
In 1955 a small area of land on Usedom Island (Uzman) was ceded from the GDR (Eastern Germany) to Poland. The water pump station of Swinemünde lies on that land and was therefore handed over to Poland.
On June 13, 1958 the Agreement concerning the final demarcation of the state frontier between Czechoslovakia and Poland was signed in Warsaw. Adam Rapacki signed for Poland and Václav David signed for Czechoslovakia. The treaty confirmed the border at the line of January 1, 1938, the situation before the Nazi-imposed Munich Agreement transferred territory from Czechoslovakia to Poland.[77]
In March 1975 Czechoslovakia and Poland modified their border along the Dunajec to permit Poland to construct a dam in the Czorsztyn region, southeast of Kraków.[78]
In 2002, Poland and Slovakia made some further minor border adjustments:
Territory of the Republic of Poland with a total area of 2,969 m2 (31,958.05 sq ft), including:a) in the area of a viewing tower on the surface of the saddle Dukielskie about 376 m², according to documents limit referred to in Article 1, paragraph 2
b) on the nameless island with an area of 2,289m², according to documents limit referred to in Article 1, paragraph 3
c) in the Polish village Jaworzynka region with an area of 304 m², according to documents limit referred to in Article 1, paragraph 4, including real estate, equipment and plants are transferred to the ownership of the Slovak Republic.
Territory of the Slovak Republic with an area of 2,969 m², including:a) in the area of a viewing tower on Dukielskie enters an area of 376 m², according to documents limit referred to in Article 1, paragraph 2
b) Nokiel on the island with an area of 2,289 m², according to documents limit referred to in Article 1, paragraph 3
c) in the Slovak village Skalité region with an area of 304 m², according to documents limit referred to in Article 1, paragraph 4, including real estate, equipment and plants are transferred to the ownership of the Republic of Poland.— Dziennik Ustaw z 2005 r. Nr 203 poz. 1686, .[79]
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