Turning the pages back... August 16, 1945 (08/16/98)

Turning the pages back...

August 16, 1945

In 1919 an axis known as the Curzon line (after George Nathaniel Curzon, the United Kingdom's foreign secretary) was proposed at Versailles by the Allied Powers to divide Poland from a then nascent Western Ukrainian National Republic (ZUNR) to settle the question of eastern Galicia. However, the Allied Powers buckled under Polish and Soviet pressure, ZUNR ceased to exist, and Marshal Jozef Pilsudski's military expansion of Poland's eastern border brought much of eastern Galicia under Polish control.

Although Poles subjected Ukrainians in Galicia to a pacification campaign, in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles, nevertheless Ukrainians in the territory were spared Stalinist depredations for about 18 years, until the Curzon line was revived in the secret Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland in 1939.

As World War II drew to a close Stalin and his henchmen, with the active connivance of Winston Churchill, first marginalized the Polish government-in-exile in London and then pressed their case with the Lublin Committee, an administration consisting mostly of Moscow-trained Polish Communist cadres, with a Polish nationalist-convert-turned-"realist" from the exile group, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, to "legitimize" them.

At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945 the Soviets managed to deflect American concerns about the satellization of Poland by promising to respect democratic elections that would be held forthwith. What should have tipped the Soviets' hand was a suggestion that they would arrange for Polish post-war reparations out of their share (which ensured the country's dependence).

In July 1945 the new Polish Provisional Government signed a trade pact and an agreement on citizenship and repatriation with Stalin's administration.

Then, on August 16, 1945, Edward Osobka Morawski, the provisional prime minister of Poland, traveled to Moscow, to sign the treaty establishing the Curzon line (with some deviations in favor of the Poles) as the Soviet-Polish frontier. The Soviet official who affixed his signature to the document was a man quite familiar with that demarcation - Viacheslav Molotov, the author of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Thus it was that the Sian (including Peremyshl), Kholm and Lemko regions were ceded to Poland, while much of eastern Galicia and all of Volhynia were claimed for the Ukrainian SSR.

A massive population transfer, involving Poles living in Ukraine and Ukrainians living in Poland, under way since the fall of 1944, intensified. A forcible eviction of Germans living in the newly Polish territories was put in motion. By 1947, Mikolajczyk was ousted from any position of influence and except for some minor adjustments made in 1951, the border between Poland and Ukraine stands as it was determined by Stalin and his puppets.

Sources: Jakub Karpinski, "Poland Since 1944: A Portrait of Years" (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995); Adam Ulam, "Expansion and Coexistence" (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1968); "Galicia," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).

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