760C.61/7–944: Telegram
The Chargé to the Polish Government in Exile (Schoenfeld) to the Secretary of State
[Received July 10—5:25 a.m.]
62 Poles. For the Secretary and the Under Secretary. Premier Mikolajczyk has given me the following account of recent conversations regarding possible resumption of Polish-Soviet relations. He requests that the fact of such conversations as well as their substance be kept completely secret.
Since his return from Washington he has had three conversations with Ambassador Lebedev.39 These talks started out with a certain amount of promise but the early hopes were not fulfilled. The talks have been broken off.
I understand that Mikolajczyk when in Washington reported tenor of certain preliminary conversations between Grabski40 and Lebedev and between Beneš and himself. I shall therefore not review them.
Grabski and Lebedev had a further meeting on June 10. L [ebedev] inquired as to the results of the Beneš-Mikolajczyk meeting. G[rabski] said that as far as he knew it concerned the problem of Polish Government personalities which was an internal problem. [Page 1293] L concurred but said that if those problems were settled on Polish initiative all controversial problems between Russia and Poland could be settled later very easily and favorably for Poland and M’s visit to Moscow could take place very soon.
G replied that when the principle of collaboration should be agreed upon the problem of personalities would be no obstacle. L said if, however, M made any changes after his visit to Moscow this would create a bad impression in the world, for this should be Poland’s internal question. Hence it would be well if he would settle this problem now. It was agreed to have a meeting with M on his return from Washington.
Such a meeting took place on June 20. G was also present. M inquired as to what L thought should be done to reestablish diplomatic relations. L said he had no instructions but he could state that Stalin intends to come to an agreement with a Polish Government friendly towards Russia. If the Polish Government would drop those persons concerning whom Russia had reservations and thus guarantee a friendly collaboration in the future, all controversial problems could be easily settled in direct negotiations between Stalin and M.
M said a change of the President was out of the question and all problems of changes of personalities had to remain Poland’s internal problem. It was necessary first of all to agree on the principles of collaboration and then to adjust the composition of the Cabinet accordingly, so that the agreed obligations could be carried out loyally and exactly.
L inquired as to those principles and M said they were (a) resumption of normal diplomatic relations; (b) a common plan of action for the Polish home forces and the Soviet armies; (c) cooperation between the home authorities of the Polish Government in their administrative capacity with the Soviet military authorities entering Poland; (d) possible changes of frontier to be postponed until the end of the war.
L said he did not think there would be any difficulties regarding the problem of administration. The Czech-Soviet agreement41 provides that the Czechoslovak authorities should take over administration immediately and unlike some other treaties, it had been published. He was convinced a Polish-Soviet agreement on administration would not be less favorable.42
[Page 1294]L suggested that when Moscow’s replies to the four points were received, they should be kept secret and that certain changes in the Polish Government should then be made so that M would go to Moscow as the Prime Minister of this new government. All decisions concerning the four points would be announced in Moscow during his visit. As to Moscow’s reply to those four points, L felt confident it would be rather favorable.
On June 22 L proposed a further meeting to take place that day. He and M arranged to meet at 6:00 that evening. L indicated he did now [not?] see difficulties regarding resumption of diplomatic relations and an agreement concerning administration on Polish territories. He desired elucidation, however, as to what was meant by postponing the problem of the future Polish-Soviet frontier until the end of the war.
M explained that constitutionally the Polish Government was not empowered to cede any part of Poland’s territory and therefore could not enter now into any agreement that would change the hitherto existing frontier between Poland and Russia. The Polish Government, however, had already declared its readiness to enter into discussions on problems of frontiers in conjunction with the whole of future territorial problems. At the present moment it was important to establish a demarcation line, to the west of which there would be Polish state administration. This demarcation line should assure the maximum war effort on the part of the Polish nation and should leave under the administration of the Polish state those territories with the greatest concentration of Poles. Yet the ethnographic frontier was not simple. In the north and in the south the main concentrations of Poles were more to the east than in the center and therefore the demarcation line could not be identical with any future frontier. They had to be treated separately and differently.
L said the Soviet Government standpoint was still that in principle the Curzon line43 should be the future frontier and that here the discussion should start.
M said a frontier drawn alone this line would deprive Poland of half its territory and of 11 millions of its population, including at least 5 million Poles. Therefore a frontier drawn along this line was unacceptable and would wrong the Polish nation so grievously as to make a friendly Polish-Russian cooperation afterwards impossible.
L said Poland would have far more favorable frontier in the west.
M said that at present there was only one frontier between Poland and Russia, namely, the one existing in 1921. The Ribbentrop-Molotov line was a Russo-German frontier and had been abolished by the [Page 1295] Polish-Soviet agreement of 194144 and neither the Soviet Union nor Poland had ever legally recognized the Curzon line nor had this line ever existed in southern Galicia. If the Soviet Government desired to enter into negotiations on frontiers, Poland was ready to negotiate a change of its eastern frontiers only in conjunction with discussions on the problem of assuring better frontiers in the west and in the north. The principle that Poland could not emerge from this war wronged and diminished had to be upheld, whereas all that was now being proposed to Poland represented only one-third of what it would lose by accepting a frontier along the Curzon line.
L asked whether this meant that the territory of Poland, including gains in the west and the north, could not be smaller than the territory Poland had before 1939. M answered: Yes.
L asked for an approximate description of the demarcation line and proposed a continuation of the discussion next day.
On June 23, M, L, and G met again. At this meeting L said he had had no instructions from Moscow regarding the demarcation line of which he had never heard anything before the preceding day. As to the future frontier, the Soviet Government’s standpoint was that it should be run along the Curzon line. To the west of that line Polish administration would be established as soon as the Soviet Armies crossed it. L asked what was the Polish viewpoint.
M said the Government had no right to cede any part of Polish territory. It could not discuss a revision of the Riga treaty, not knowing what would happen regarding Polish frontiers in the west and north. The best thing would be to postpone discussions on the Polish-Soviet frontier until the end of the war and to agree now on the principles of future negotiations only. These principles were: Poland cannot emerge from the war with diminished territory; Poland does not wish to retain within its frontiers those who would not wish to remain there; thus if the Soviet Government should wish to discuss the whole problem of frontiers the Polish Government would not evade such discussions.
L said he could inform M of the Soviet standpoint. This was as follows: Before the resumption of diplomatic relations, the following conditions had to be fulfilled. President Raczkiewicz, General Sosnkowski, Minister Kukiel and Minister Kot had to resign the posts enabling them to influence the policy of the Polish Government. A reconstruction of the Government had to take place and the new Cabinet had to include representatives of Poles from London, the USSR, the U.S.A., and the National Council in Poland. The reconstructed [Page 1296] government would condemn the previous government for its mistake in the Katyn affair. The Curzon line was to be the new frontier.
After the foregoing conditions had been fulfilled it would be possible to resume diplomatic relations and an agreement on Polish administration on Polish territories would be signed.
L asked M whether there was anything he could transmit to the Soviet Government. M replied that he had nothing to say. As to the conditions, he merely wished to stress that they did not seem to denote either good intentions with respect to renewing diplomatic relations or the wish not to wrong Poland in the interest of future friendly Polish-Soviet relations and collaboration.
M tells me that the conversations were thus broken off and there has been no contact since. He expressed the opinion that the Soviet Government, as its recent propaganda suggests, would renew its efforts to develop pro-Soviet support among different Polish elements. He thought if it failed, it might later be disposed to enter upon discussions again.
He asked me whether I had had any word from Washington regarding a recent message from the President to Premier Stalin regarding him. I told him I had not. He said he understood such a message had been sent.
I inquired whether Washington had been informed of developments through Ambassador Ciechanowski. M said Ciechanowski had not been informed. He did not desire this information to pass through too many hands. It was known to only a very few persons.
- Viktor Zakharovich Lebedyev, Ambassador of the Soviet Union to many of the Governments in Exile at London, succeeding Alexander Efremovich Bogomolov.↩
- Stanislaw Grabski, Chairman of the National Council of the Republic of: Poland, in London.↩
- Agreement between the Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Government regarding the administration of liberated areas of Czechoslovakia, signed at London, May 8, 1944; for text, see Louise W. Holborn (ed.), War and Peace Aims of the United Nations, vol. ii, 1943–1945 (Boston, World Peace Foundation, 1948), pp. 767–769.↩
- Such an agreement on relations between the Soviet High Command and the Polish administration following the entrance of Soviet troops on Polish territory was signed in Moscow on July 26, 1944, by the Soviet Government with the Polish Committee of National Liberation, represented by Osubka-Morawski; for text, see ibid., pp. 770–771.↩
- See footnote 15, p. 1220.↩
- Agreement for mutual aid, with a protocol, signed at London on July 30, 1941; for text, see British and Foreign State Papers, vol. cxliv, p. 869. See also telegram 3292, July 30, 1941, from London, Foreign Relations, 1941, vol. i, p. 243.↩