The Polish–Soviet border agreement

On 16 August 1945 in Moscow the Prime Minister of the Provisional Government of National Unity (TRJN), Edward Osóbka-Morawski, and the Soviet People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, signed the agreement on the Polish–Soviet state border. From then on Poland’s eastern border was to run along the Curzon Line, with minor deviations in Poland’s favour. With this the government in Warsaw formally renounced the eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic, including Wilno (Vilnius) and Lwów (Lviv), which the Red Army had occupied in 1939 and a second time in the summer of 1944. On the same day the two politicians signed a second document – an agreement on compensation for the damage caused by the German occupation, which set out what share of reparations Poland would receive from the Soviet Union and what it would pay for it.

From Tehran to Moscow

The dispute over the eastern border had weighed on Polish–Soviet relations since the beginning of the war. After the invasion of 17 September 1939 the USSR incorporated Poland’s eastern provinces into the Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSRs, and handed the Wilno region to Lithuania, only to seize it in 1940 together with the whole Lithuanian state. The Polish government in London regarded the border established by the Treaty of Riga of 1921 as binding, whereas Moscow demanded a line close to the 1939 border, calling it the Curzon Line – after the British Foreign Secretary who in July 1920 had proposed it as an armistice line in the Polish–Bolshevik War.

The fate of these territories was decided by the leaders of the three powers. At the Tehran Conference in November and December 1943 Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed in principle to Joseph Stalin’s demand that the Soviet–Polish border should be based on the Curzon Line and that Poland should be compensated at Germany’s expense. Stanisław Mikołajczyk’s government took no part in these talks. In Moscow in October 1944 Molotov told him that the matter had been settled, and Churchill pressed the Prime Minister to accept the new border; Mikołajczyk refused and resigned in November. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945 the powers stated in their communiqué that Poland’s eastern border would follow the Curzon Line “with digressions from it in some regions of five to eight kilometres in favour of Poland”.

The Polish Communists had accepted this solution much earlier. On 27 July 1944, a few days after the creation of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN), its representatives signed a secret agreement in Moscow in which they consented to a border along the Curzon Line. Stalin’s only concession at the time, according to historians, was the western part of the Białowieża Forest; the PKWN delegation, it is generally believed, did not dare to raise the question of Lwów. In the autumn of 1944 and the spring of 1945 the Soviet authorities handed over to the Polish administration further districts that had been incorporated into the Byelorussian and Ukrainian SSRs in 1939–1941 – among them Białystok and most of the former Białystok Province, and in March 1945 Przemyśl as well.

As the border moved, so did people. In September 1944 the PKWN signed agreements with the governments of the Ukrainian, Byelorussian and Lithuanian SSRs on the “evacuation” of population – Poles and Jews who had been Polish citizens before 17 September 1939 to the west, and Ukrainians, Belarusians and Lithuanians from Poland to the east. Formally departure was voluntary; in practice it was determined by NKVD repression, conscription into the Red Army and, in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, the memory of the massacres committed by the UPA. After the capture of Wilno and the fighting for Lwów in July 1944 the NKVD disarmed and arrested Home Army units, and Poles from both cities began to leave even before any border agreement had been signed.

After the Provisional Government of National Unity was formed in June 1945 and recognised by the United States and Britain on 5 July, nothing stood in the way of recording the Yalta arrangements in a bilateral agreement. The Potsdam Conference, which ended during the night of 1–2 August, placed under Polish administration the lands east of the Oder and the Lusatian Neisse and the southern part of East Prussia, while Königsberg (Kaliningrad) and the northern part of the province went to the Soviet Union. Two weeks later in Moscow the two sides were able to define the entire common border, from the Baltic to the Carpathians.

The terms of the border agreement

The agreement had four articles. In the first, citing the decision of the Crimea Conference, the parties fixed the border along the “Curzon Line” with deviations in Poland’s favour “in some regions of five to eight kilometres”. In addition, two larger areas were ceded to Poland: the territory east of the Curzon Line as far as the Bug and the Sołokija, south of Kryłów, with a deviation of up to 30 kilometres; and part of the Białowieża Forest with Hajnówka, Białowieża, Niemirów and Jałówka, with a deviation of up to 17 kilometres. The second article described the course of the border from the sources of the San, past the area around Solina, east of Przemyśl and west of Rawa Ruska, along the Sołokija and the Bug, to the junction of the borders of Poland, the Lithuanian SSR and East Prussia, with an explicit proviso that Grodno would remain on the Soviet side. A mixed commission based in Warsaw was to demarcate the border on the ground.

The third article concerned the former East Prussia. In accordance with the decision of the Berlin Conference, the Baltic section was to run eastwards from the Gulf of Gdańsk, north of Braniewo and Gołdap – but only “pending the final settlement of territorial questions at the peace settlement”. The last article provided that the agreement would enter into force on the exchange of the instruments of ratification in Warsaw.

The text spoke only of deviations “in Poland’s favour”, and that was how the new authorities’ propaganda presented it. In reality the border did not keep to the Curzon Line everywhere: in Galicia the variant of the line adopted left Lwów and the oil basin near Borysław on the Soviet side, and in the north, according to some Polish studies, the border deviated from the Curzon Line to Poland’s disadvantage over a stretch of some 80 kilometres, by as much as 22 kilometres in the Grodno area. A participant in the talks, the geographer Stanisław Leszczycki, later judged that all the Polish amendments had been rejected and that the border had been “dictated without any substantive discussion”. Poland lost to the USSR almost half of its pre-war territory – some 178,000 square kilometres of the eastern borderlands.

The reparations agreement

The second agreement signed on 16 August followed from the Potsdam decisions. There the powers had agreed that the USSR would satisfy Poland’s reparation claims from its own share of reparations. In the agreement the Soviet Union renounced in Poland’s favour all claims to German property and assets throughout Polish territory, including the lands assigned to Poland at Potsdam, and undertook to pass on to Poland 15 per cent of the reparation deliveries from its own occupation zone and 15 per cent of the industrial equipment it was to receive from the western zones. In return Poland undertook, from 1946 and for the whole period of the occupation of Germany, to supply the USSR with coal at a “special contractual price”: 8 million tonnes in the first year, 13 million tonnes a year in each of the following four years and 12 million tonnes a year thereafter. According to historians, a secret protocol fixed this price at $1.22 a tonne, a small fraction of the market price. The details of deliveries to Poland were to be settled by a mixed commission of three representatives from each side.

In March 1947 the USSR agreed to halve the coal deliveries, but at the same time Poland’s share of reparations was also halved, to 7.5 per cent. Deliveries of “reparations” coal continued until 1953, and on 23 August that year the government of the Polish People’s Republic – under pressure from Moscow, as is generally accepted – announced that it was renouncing reparations from Germany with effect from 1 January 1954.

Reactions and ratification

The authorities in Warsaw presented the agreement as a just settlement which, combined with the gains in the west, gave Poland a nationally homogeneous state made secure by its alliance with the USSR. The Polish government-in-exile of Prime Minister Tomasz Arciszewski, no longer recognised by the Western powers since 5 July, did not recognise the agreement, just as it had earlier refused to recognise the Yalta decisions, and continued to regard the Riga border as binding. Its position, however, no longer had any influence on the course of events. Mikołajczyk, Deputy Prime Minister of the Provisional Government since June, had accepted the Yalta decisions – and with them the Curzon Line – when he joined the government. Many inhabitants of the lands east of the new border long believed that Soviet administration was temporary.

The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR ratified the agreement on 13 January 1946, and the President of the State National Council, Bolesław Bierut, on 4 February 1946. The instruments of ratification were exchanged in Warsaw on 5 February 1946, and from that day the agreement was in force.

Significance

The agreement of 16 August closed a dispute that had divided Poland and the USSR since 1939 and, from 1943, also the London government and its Western allies. Poland’s eastern border took on a shape close to today’s; it was altered once more by the exchange of territory of 1951, in which Poland gave up the area around Bełz and Sokal in return for the Ustrzyki Dolne area. Moving the border meant the migration of millions of people. According to the most frequently cited estimates, in 1944–1946 some 1.5 million Poles and Jews left the lands incorporated into the USSR (the resettlement of Poles from the eastern borderlands), while, according to various estimates, some 480,000 Ukrainians were deported or resettled from Poland to the Ukrainian SSR (the resettlement of Ukrainians from Poland to the USSR). Many of those displaced from the east settled in the lands being vacated by Germans in the west and north.

The reparations agreement, for its part, tied the economy of a Poland in the midst of reconstruction to the USSR. For reparation deliveries that were cut as early as 1947, Poland paid for eight years with coal at a price many times below the market rate. Both agreements also showed how little freedom of action the Provisional Government of National Unity had: the border and the economic terms were in practice fixed by Moscow, and the Polish Prime Minister’s signature merely gave them the form of a bilateral agreement.