Stalin Fixes the Oder-Neisse Line

Abstract

It was Joseph Stalin himself who finally set Poland's present borders. When his own circumstances required it, he made his choices on these border issues involving thousands of square kilometres, and millions of people, without consulting his Western allies. Indeed, he deliberately set out to deceive them. We can now be certain of this. For reliable witnesses have come forward to put in place the keystone of a historical proof which has long been emerging in the slow publication of documents and memoirs of the second world war from the eastern side of Europe. Chief among these witnesses is Marian Spychalski, former Marshal of People's Poland, and President of its Council of State. He was, among others who have given important testimony, present at the meetings in 1944 when the events which ultimately fixed what became Poland's post-war borders took place. The history of the establishment of Poland's post-war borders, finally clarified by Spychalski's and other memoirs of those days,1 is long and complicated, yet critical to the understanding of the beginnings of the cold war, and so far only partially told. Those governments involved in the crucial decisions have not yet rushed forward to open their archives to independent scholars for historical study. But Spychalski's testimony in particular adds one vitally important link to a long, yet imperfect, chain of evidence. It shows exactly the kind of Soviet actions which, both duplicitous and conceived with reckless disregard for the amenities of 'Grand Alliance' politics, inevitably turned the West's earlier naive, wartime trust of the Soviets into suspicion, and changed Western willingness to co-operate with the Soviet Union to enmity toward that country. Unilateral Soviet deeds which had to be dealt with by the unwillingly confrontational, but freshly alerted, Westerners in the spring and summer of 1945, gave rise to the East-West political antagonism which eventually was called the 'cold war'.