The Curzon Line was a demarcation line between the Second Polish Republic and Bolshevik Russia, first formally published on December 8, 1919 in an Allied Supreme Council declaration. In the wake of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the two countries disputed their borders, and the Polish-Soviet War erupted. The Allied Supreme Council tasked the Commission on Polish Affairs with recommending Polish eastern borders. The Allies forwarded it as an armistice line several times during the war, most notably in a note from the British government to the Soviets signed by Foreign Secretary George Curzon. Both parties disregarded the line when the military situation lay in their favour and it did not play a 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 that was, on average, about 250 km east of 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. Along most of its length, the line followed an ethnic boundary - areas west of the line contained an overall Polish majority while areas to its east were inhabited by Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, Jews, and Lithuanians. Its 1920 northern extension into Lithuania divided the area disputed between Poland and Lithuania. There were two versions of the southern portion of the line: "A" and "B". Version "B" allocated Lviv to Poland.
The line was a geopolitical factor during World War II, when Joseph Stalin successfully pressed for its use as a Polish-Russian border. Throughout the war until the Teheran Conference, the British Government did not agree that Poland's future eastern border should be moved west to the Curzon Line; but Churchill's position changed after the Soviet victory at the Battle of Kursk. Following a private agreement at the Tehran Conference, confirmed at the 1945 Yalta Conference, the Allied leaders Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Stalin issued a statement affirming the use of the Curzon line, with some five-to-eight kilometer variations, as the eastern border between Poland and the Soviet Union. When Churchill proposed to add parts of East Galicia, including the city of Lviv, to Poland's territory (following Line B), Stalin argued that the Soviet Union could not demand less territory for itself than the British Government had reconfirmed previously several times. The Allied arrangement involved compensation for this loss via the incorporation of formerly German-held areas (the Recovered Territories) into Poland.
History
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 the
German Empire. The thirteenth of US President
Woodrow Wilson's
Fourteen Points included the statement "An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea..." Article 87 of the
Versailles Treaty stipulated that "The boundaries of Poland not laid down in the present Treaty will be subsequently determined by the Principal Allied and Associated Powers." In accordance with these declarations, the Allied Supreme Council tasked the
Commission on Polish Affairs with proposing Poland's eastern boundaries in lands that were inhabited by a mixed population of Poles,
Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Belarusians.
transferred to Poland after the war.
Grey area: Pre WWII Polish territory east to the Curzon Line annexed by the Soviet Union after the war.]]
The Supreme Council continued to debate the issue for several months. On December 8 the Council published a map and description of the line along with an announcement that it recognized "Poland's right to organize a regular administration of the territories of the former Russian Empire situated to the West of the line described below."
Polish forces pushed eastward, taking Kiev in May 1920. Following a strong Soviet counteroffensive, Prime Minister Władysław Grabski sought Allied assistance in July. Under pressure, he agreed to a Polish withdrawal to the 1919 version of the line and, in Galicia, an armistice near the current line of battle. On July 11, 1920 Curzon signed a telegram sent to the Bolshevik government proposing that a ceasefire be established along the line, and his name was subsequently associated with it. The December note did not address the issue of Galicia, since it had been a part of the Austrian Empire rather than the Russian, nor did it address the Polish-Lithuanian dispute over the Vilnius Region, since those borders were demarcated at the time by the Foch Line. This portion of the line did not correspond to the current line of battle in Galicia, as per Grabski's agreement, and its inclusion in the July note has lent itself to disputation. In August the Soviets were defeated by the Poles just outside Warsaw and forced to retreat. During the ensuing Polish offensive, the Polish government repudiated Grabski's agreement with regard to the line on the grounds that the Allies had not delivered support or protection. At the March 1921 Treaty of Riga the Soviets conceded a frontier well to the east of the Curzon Line, where Poland had conquered a great part of the Vilna Governorate (1920/1922), including the town of Wilno (today Vilnius), and East Galicia (1919), including the city of Lviv, as well as most of the region of Volhynia (1921). The treaty provided Poland with almost 135,000 km² (52,000 sq mi) of land that was, on average, about 250 km east of the Curzon line. The Polish-Soviet border was recognised by the League of Nations in 1923 and confirmed by various Polish-Soviet agreements. Within the annexed regions Poland founded several administrative districts, such as the Volhynian Voivodeship, the Polesie Voivodeship, and the Wilno Voivodeship.
As concerns possible expansions of Polish territory, in history Polish politicians traditionally could be sub-divided into two opposite groups advocating contrary approaches: restoration of Poland based on its former western territories one side and, alternatively, restoration of Poland based on its previous holdings in the east on the other. During the first quarter of the 20th century a representative of the first political group was Roman Dmowski, an adherent of the pan-slavistic movement and author of several political books and publications of some importance, who suggested to define Poland's eastern border in accordance with the ethnographic principle and to concentrate on resisting a more dangerous enemy of Polish nation than Russia, which in his view was Germany. A representative of the second group was Jozef Pilsudski, a socialist who was born in the Luthuanian Vilna Governorate annexed at the 1795 occasion of the 3rd partition of the Polish-Luthuanian Commonwealth by the Russian Empire, whose political vision was essentially a far reaching restauration of the borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Because the Russian Empire had collapsed into a state of civil war following the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Soviet Army had been defeated and been weakened considerably at the end of World War I by Germany's army, resulting in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Pilsudski took the chance and used military force in an attempt to realise his political vision by concentrating on the east and involved himself in Polish-Soviet War.
World War II
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 the 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 deported or killed by Germans.
In 1944 the Soviet armed forces recaptured eastern Poland from the Germans. The Soviets unilaterally declared a new frontier between the Soviet Union and Poland (approximately the same as the Curzon Line). 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. During the negotiations at Yalta, Stalin posed the question "Do you want me to tell the Russian people that I am less Russian than Lord Curzon?" 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 ethnic composition of these areas proved difficult to measure, both during the interwar period and after World War II. A 1944 article in
The Times estimated that in 1931 there lived between 2.2 and 2.5 million Poles east of the Curzon Line. A similar contemporary estimate (under 2.5 million Poles) was given by historian
E. H. Carr. According to historian Yohanan Cohen's estimate, in 1939 the population in the territories east of the Curzon Line gained via the Treaty of Riga totalled 12 million, consisting of over 5 million Ukrainians, between 3.5 and 4 million Poles, 1.5 million Belarusians, and 1.3 million Jews.
During World War II, politicians gave varying estimates of the Polish population east of the Curzon line that would be affected by
population transfers.
Winston Churchill mentioned "3 to 4 million Poles east of the Curzon Line".
Stanisław Mikołajczyk, then Prime Minister of the
Polish government in exile, counted this population as 5 million.
Ukrainians and Poles formed the largest ethnic groups. Ukrainians and Belarussians outnumbered Poles in the combined southern sections. Other Eastern Slav groups such as the Rusyns and Belarusians were often included as Poles in the statistics. Encouraged by the Polish resettlement policies, much of the urban population were either ethnic Poles or Polish speaking Jews, while the rural population continued to speak Ukrainian or Belarusian. As a result, the countryside was Belarusian or Ukrainian in character, whereas the cities had a Polish flavour.
Around the beginning of the 20th century Ukrainians and Belorussians had formed the plurality populations in the rural regions of the Kresy, where some towns, in particular Lviv and Vilnius had Polish majority. After the deportation of Poles and Jews in 1939–1941 (see Polish minority in Soviet Union) and the Holocaust the Polish population in the territories had decreased considerably. The cities of Wilno, Lwów, Grodno and some smaller towns still had significant Polish populations. After 1945, the Polish population of the area east of the new Soviet-Polish border was in general confronted with the alternative either to accept a different nationality or to emigrate. According to more recent research, about 3 million Poles lived east of the Curzon line, of which about 2.1 million to 2.2 million persons died, fled, emigrated or were expelled to the newly annexed German territories. The area today is almost entirely Belarusian (in the north) or Ukrainian (in the south). Despite the emigrations and expulsions, there were about 500,000 Poles in Belarus in 2000 (5% of the Belarus population).
The cities of Vilnius, Grodno and some smaller towns still have significant Polish populations. Sapotskin remains almost entirely Polish to this day.
Ethnicity west of the Curzon Line
West of the Curzon line the Polish population was generally predominant in urban centres, especially the cities but not in the rural districts. A significant Belarusian rural population was incorporated into modern Poland around Białystok. A similar situation existed with the Ukrainian population around
Chełm. The extreme south had a large rural Ukrainian population also. Much of the Ukrainian population was forcibly resettled scattered in the new Polish
"recovered territories" of
Silesia,
Pomerania,
Lubusz Land,
Warmia and
Masuria after World War II in a military operation called
Operation Vistula.
See also
Oder-Neisse line
Molotov Line
Spa Conference
I Saw Poland Betrayed by Arthur Bliss Lane
Revision of borders of Poland (1945)
1893 Afghanistan’s Durand Line
1914 India-China McMahon Line
1947 India-Pakistan Radcliffe Line
Footnotes
References
Borsody, Stephen. 1993. The New Central Europe. New York: Boulder, Chapter 10: "Europe's Coming Partition". ISBN 0-88033-263-8
Nabrdalik, Bart. April 2006. Hidden Europe-Bieszczady, Poland. Escape from America Magazine. Vol. 8, Issue 3
Rogowska, Anna. Stępień, Stanisław (in Polish) Polish-Ukrainian Border in the Last Half of the Century. (Curzon line from the historical perspective)
Wróbel, Piotr. 2000. The devil's playground: Poland in World War II. The Wanda Muszynski lecture in Polish studies. Montreal, Quebec: Canadian Foundation for Polish Studies of the Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences.
Byrnes, James F. Speaking Frankly. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1947, pp. 25–32. From the memoirs of James F. Byrnes, on the Yalta Conference.
Churchill, Winston S. Closing the ring. 2nd ed. Tome 5. London: The Reprint Society Ltd, 1954, pp. 283–285; 314-317. From the memoirs of Winston Churchill.
Churchill, Winston S. Triumph and Tragedy. 2nd ed. Tome 6. London: The Reprint Society Ltd, 1956, pp. 288–292. From the memoirs of Winston Churchill, on the Yalta Conference.
Cromea Conference, in Parliamentary Debates. 1944-45, No. 408; fifth series, pp. 1274–1284. Winston Churchill's statement to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, 27 February 1945, describing the outcome of the Yalta Conference.
Further reading
Bohdan, Kordan. Autumn 1997. "Making Borders Stick: Population Transfer and Resettlement in the Trans- Curzon Territories, 1944–1949". International Migration Review, Vol. 31, No. 3., pp. 704–720.
External links
Slavic Research Center
Category:History of Belarus (1918–1939)
Category:History of Poland (1918–1939)
Category:History of Poland (1939–1945)
Category:History of Lithuania (1918–1940)
Category:History of Ukraine
Category:Poland – United Kingdom relations
Category:Foreign relations of the Soviet Union
Category:Belarus–Poland border
Category:Poland–Ukraine border
Category:Poland – Soviet Union border
Category:Poland – Soviet Union relations
