Questions about Curzon Line
Short answers, pulled from the story.
What is the Curzon Line and why was it created?
The Curzon Line was a proposed demarcation between the Second Polish Republic and the Soviet Union, first put forward in 1919 by Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary, to the Supreme War Council. It was drawn by the Commission on Polish Affairs based on spoken language majority, broadly separating Polish-majority territories to the west from areas where Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Lithuanians predominated to the east. Its result was created on the 8th of December, 1919.
Did Poland accept the Curzon Line after World War I?
Poland did not accept the Curzon Line after World War I. The March 1921 Treaty of Riga instead gave Poland almost 135,000 square kilometres of land that was, on average, about 250 kilometres east of the Curzon Line. The Soviet Union conceded this frontier after the Poles defeated the Soviet Army outside Warsaw in August 1920.
How did the Curzon Line become Poland's permanent eastern border after World War II?
At the Tehran Conference and confirmed at the 1945 Yalta Conference, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Stalin agreed to use the Curzon Line, with variations of five to eight kilometres, as Poland's eastern border. The western Allies formally recognised it in July 1945. Stalin argued that he could not demand less territory for the Soviet Union than the British government itself had reconfirmed the Curzon Line represented.
How many people lived east of the Curzon Line before World War II?
According to historian Yohanan Cohen, in 1939 the population of the territories of interwar Poland east of the Curzon Line totalled 12 million people. That population included over 5 million Ukrainians, between 3.5 and 4 million Poles, 1.5 million Belarusians, and 1.3 million Jews.
What happened to Poles living east of the Curzon Line after 1945?
About 3 million Roman Catholic Poles lived east of the Curzon Line within interwar Poland's borders. Of those, roughly 2.1 to 2.2 million died, fled, emigrated, or were expelled to newly annexed German territories after 1945. The Soviet census of 1959 still counted around 1.4 million ethnic Poles remaining in the USSR, with the largest group of 538,881 in the Byelorussian SSR.
What were Line A and Line B of the Curzon Line?
Line A and Line B were two versions of the southern portion of the Curzon Line, differing in how they handled Eastern Galicia. Line A placed the city of Lwów and its nearby oil fields within Soviet Russia. Line B allocated Lwów to Poland. When Churchill proposed at Yalta that Lwów be given to Poland under Line B, Stalin refused, and the line that became the permanent border kept Lwów on the Soviet side.