Curzon Line

For other uses of Curzon, see Curzon (disambiguation).

The Curzon Line was a demarcation line proposed in 1919 by British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon of Kedleston as a possible armistice line between Poland to the west and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (Russian SFSR) to the east during the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–20. Curzon's plan was not accepted by the Russian SFSR, and in fact it did not play any role in establishing the Polish-Soviet border in 1921 because of the Polish demands. The final peace treaty in Riga (1921) provided Poland with almost 135,000 km² (52,000 sq mi) of land east of the line (on average about 200 km east from the Curzon line).

However, Curzon line was used by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as a significant argument in the talks with the Allied Powers during 1942-1945. Curzon line was similar to the border between the Soviet Union and the Nazi Germany agreed secretly to in the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. Stalin, in talks with the Allies, argued that the Soviet Union could not demand less territory for itself than Lord Curzon of Kedleston in 1919.

It lay approximately along the border which was established between Prussia and Russia 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.

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.

It is sometimes said that the Curzon Line represented an ethnic border between Roman Catholic Poland to the west and Russian Orthodox Ukraine and Belarus to the east. This was not the intention when Lord Curzon of Kedleston proposed the line: its origins were diplomatic and historical (the third partition of Poland between Prussia and Russia). Nevertheless it did run along a line which, with some notable anomalies, approximated a division between regions to the west which were mixed, but majority Polish, and regions to the east which were mixed but majority non-Polish.

History of the Curzon Line

At the end of World War I, the Allies agreed that an independent Polish state should be formed 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, Jews, 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 Grodno 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 Ministry, so that it didn't 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.

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 whom 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. In these circumstances, war was inevitable, and hostilities broke out in late 1919.

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 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 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. 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 so-called 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 Ruthenians	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 were the largest ethnic and religious group in these territories, Ukrainians were the second (the Ukrainians outnumbering Poles in combined southern sections). Other groups included Rusyns, Belarusians and Poleszuks. 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 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 Belarussians 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 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 settled in Poland's newly Recovered Territories of Silesia, Pomerania, Lubus Land, Warmia and Masuria after World War II.