Польша мен КСРО арасындағы шекара: Керзон сызығының тарихы

Historical demarcation of territories of Poland and the Soviet Union

The Curzon Line was a proposed demarcation line between the Second Polish Republic and the Soviet Union, two new states emerging after World War I. Based on a suggestion by Herbert James Paton, it was first proposed in 1919 by Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary, to the Supreme War Council as a diplomatic basis for a future border agreement. The line became a major geopolitical factor during World War II, when the USSR invaded eastern Poland, resulting in the split of Poland's territory between the USSR and Nazi Germany roughly along the Curzon Line in accordance with final rounds of secret negotiations surrounding the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact. After the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, Operation Barbarossa, the Allies did not agree that Poland's future eastern border should be changed from the pre war status quo in 1939 until the Tehran Conference. 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 kilometre variations, as the eastern border between Poland and the Soviet Union. When Churchill proposed to annex parts of Eastern 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 areas (the so called Recovered Territories) into Poland. As a result, the current border between Poland and the countries of Belarus and Ukraine is an approximation of the Curzon Line.

At the end of World War I, the Second Polish Republic reclaimed its sovereignty following the disintegration of the occupying forces of three neighbouring empires. Imperial Russia was amid the Russian Civil War after the October Revolution, Austria Hungary split and went into decline, and the German Reich bowed to pressure from the victorious forces of the Allies of World War I. The Allied victors agreed that an independent Polish state should be recreated from territories previously part of the Russian, the Austro Hungarian and the German empires, after 123 years of upheavals and military partitions by them. The Supreme War Council tasked the Commission on Polish Affairs with recommending Poland's eastern border, based on spoken language majority, which became later known as the Curzon Line. Their result was created December 8th 1919. The Allies forwarded it as an armistice line several times during the subsequent Polish Soviet Wars, 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 Lwów (Lviv) to Poland.

The 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 Supreme War 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. The Supreme Council continued to debate the issue for several months. On 8 December, 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 , 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 (Vilnius), and East Galicia (1919), including the city of Lwów, as well as most of the region of Volhynia (1921). The treaty provided Poland with almost of land that was, on average, about 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 a concern of possible expansion of Polish territory, Polish politicians traditionally could be subdivided 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 approached the issue pragmatically, but advocating for incorporation of available land based on a ethnographic principle combined with a theory of easy assimilation of Belarusians within a centralised Polish state the task potentially to be shared with Russia concerning Belarusians beyond the border which he viewed it would be possible to incorporate and assimilate. This resulted in a modification of the Dmowski Line in negotiations for the Treaty of Riga, in which the Polish delegation (consisting of a majority of parliamentary representatives, Dmowski’s Zjednoczenie Ludowo Narodowe being the strongest party) unilaterally ceding claims to the Minsk area without basis on the line of actual control, and despite it having a higher Polish identified population (in absolute and proportionally) than many of the areas still claimed within the border. The goal is thought to be jeopardising Józef Piłsudski’s ambitions for creating a Polish Belarusian federation, as a remnant of his ‘federationist idea’ (opposed to Dmowski’s ‘incorporation its idea’) with a Belarusian capital in Minsk. It was predicted that a Belarusian entity without Minsk would be deemed politically illegitimate and untenable to the local population. An anti communist, but believing in the inevitability of a White victory in the Russian Civil War he wished to concentrate on resisting a more dangerous enemy of the Polish nation than Russia, which in his view was Germany. The most powerful representative of the opposed group was Józef Piłsudski, a former socialist who was born in the Vilna Governorate annexed during the 1795 Third Partition of Poland by the Russian Empire, whose political vision was essentially a far reaching restoration of the borders of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, ideally in the form of a multinational federation. 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, Piłsudski took the chance and used military force in an attempt to realise his political vision by concentrating on the east and involving himself in the Polish–Soviet War.

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 the 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 falsified 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 Nazi 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 the 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, insisting on the "Riga line". At the Tehran 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. The border was later adjusted several times, the biggest revision being in 1951. When the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, the Curzon Line became Poland's eastern border with Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine.

According to Piotr Eberhardt, in 1939, the population of all territories between the Oder Neisse Line and the Curzon Line—all territories which formed post 1945 Poland—totalled 32,337,800 inhabitants, of whom the largest groups were ethnic Poles (approximately 67%), ethnic Germans (approximately 25%), and Jews (2,254,300 or 7%), with 657,500 (2%) Ukrainians, 140,900 Belarusians and 47,000 people of all other ethnic groups also in the region. Much of the Ukrainian population was forcibly resettled after World War II to Soviet Ukraine or scattered in the new Polish Recovered Territories of Silesia, Pomerania, Lubusz Land, Warmia and Masuria in an ethnic cleansing by the Polish military in an operation called Operation Vistula.