Curzon Line

Naming and origins

The line is named not for the December 1919 delimitation itself but for Curzon's telegram of July 1920 proposing an armistice on it. The December 1919 line was prepared by the Allied Supreme Council on the recommendation of the Commission on Polish Affairs, guided by spoken-language majority; one account credits Herbert Paton's suggestion and another treats the line as Curzon's own work, so the authorship of the initial demarcation cannot be attributed to Curzon alone.

Background

After World War I the Allies decided to recreate an independent Poland out of former Russian, Austro-Hungarian and German territories, and Article 87 of the Versailles Treaty left boundaries not laid down in the treaty to the Principal Allied and Associated Powers. On 8 December 1919 the Supreme Council published a map and description of the line, recognized Poland's right to organize a regular administration west of it, and stated that it was not prejudging Poland's future eastern frontiers and reserved Poland's rights east of it.

Path and ethnographic character

The line ran from Lithuania in the north to Czechoslovakia in the south, through Grodno and Brest-Litovsk along the Bug, then almost straight south-west to the Carpathians. It broadly corresponded to the division between predominantly Polish-speaking areas and eastern regions populated mainly by Ukrainians, Belarusians and Lithuanians, but the borderlands were mixed and the line did not fully match the ethnic settlement limits of those peoples, which made it a compromise rather than an ethnic self-determination boundary.

The 1920 war and the Treaty of Riga

On 11 July 1920 Curzon sent the Bolshevik government a telegram proposing a ceasefire along the line; Britain demanded that Soviet forces halt on it, withdraw fifty kilometres east, and conclude an armistice with Poland and Wrangel's government, warning that otherwise the Entente would support Poland by all means at its disposal. The Soviet side rejected this: the party leadership voted by majority to refuse in the expectation of sovietizing Poland and sparking revolution in Western Europe, and the Council of People's Commissars refused British mediation and demanded direct negotiations with Poland. Both belligerents disregarded the line when the military situation favoured them, and the Treaty of Riga of 18 March 1921 fixed a frontier far to its east, assigning Wilno, Lwów in East Galicia and most of Volhynia to Poland; that border was recognized by the League of Nations in 1923.

Accounts of how far east of the Curzon Line Poland's gains at Riga lay differ, giving roughly 160 kilometres, about 200 kilometres, or about 250 kilometres. The entry reports the discrepancy rather than asserting one figure.

World War II and the postwar settlement

The demarcation line of the secret additional protocol to the German-Soviet pact of August 1939 ran along the Narew, Vistula and San rivers and did not coincide with the Curzon Line, reaching instead to Lublin and the vicinity of Warsaw. In September 1939 the Soviet Union annexed the territories east of the Curzon Line together with Białystok and Eastern Galicia and deported hundreds of thousands of Poles eastwards. At the Tehran Conference of November-December 1943 Churchill's proposal was adopted that the territories occupied by the USSR in 1939 be compensated at Germany's expense and the eastern frontier be the Curzon Line. After Soviet forces recaptured eastern Poland in 1944 the USSR unilaterally declared a new frontier approximately the same as the Curzon Line, which the Polish government-in-exile in London opposed in favour of the Riga line. In February 1945 the Yalta Conference decided that Poland's eastern frontier should follow the Curzon Line with digressions of five to eight kilometres in Poland's favour in some regions, and that Poland should receive substantial accessions in the north and west. The Soviet-Polish frontier treaty signed in Moscow on 16 August 1945 finally determined the border, which was later modified by the frontier-regime agreement of 8 July 1948 and the exchange-of-sectors agreement of 15 February 1951. With the dissolution of the USSR the line became the frontier between Poland on one side and Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine on the other.

Distinctions

The Curzon Line was post-war Poland's eastern frontier, while the Oder-Neisse line marked its westward shift of some 160 kilometres, granted as compensation for territory lost in the east; the two are frequently mentioned together but are geographically and legally distinct borders. The Curzon Line itself was divided in its southern portion into Line A, which kept Lwów and the Drohobycz oil fields out of Poland, and Line B, which left Lviv to Poland if a Ukrainian State were created. The December 1919 note did not address the Polish-Lithuanian dispute over the Vilnius Region, then demarcated by the Foch Line, whereas the July 1920 note did.

Ethnic consequences and current status

From September 1945 the Polish government began forced resettlement of Ukrainians to the USSR, moving about 483,000 by August 1946, and in 1947 Operation Vistula deported the remaining non-Polish population to Poland's north-west. Of the some three million Poles who had lived east of the Curzon Line, about two million were resettled to Poland between 1945 and 1949. The Helsinki Final Act of 1975 enshrined the inviolability of frontiers among participating states, but no new treaty on Poland's eastern border was concluded with Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union.