Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Polish-Soviet Frontier, by Stanislaw Grabski. 1944

The Case For the Kresy Rightfully Belonging to Poland

Stanislaw Grabski summarizes the Polish claims to the Kresy. Besides the Polish cultural dominance and significant ethnic Polish minority status, the Polish presence in the Kresy, and further east, is illustrated by the large territories in which over 35% of those elected to the 1914 Russian Zemstvos (Provincial Autonomous Councils) had been Poles. (p. 18).

Now consider religious affiliation. Both Poles and non-Poles form Roman Catholic majorities over large areas of the southeast and especially northeast Kresy. (p. 31).

TRYING TO MAKE POLAND AS GEOGRAPHICALLY SMALL AS POSSIBLE

Britons and Americans who refer to what should be the “proper” eastern boundary of Poland take a tacit minimalist view of Poland. To begin with, the recently nonexistent Poland should never be the standard for a resurrected Poland. The British and Americans forget that the Partitions of Poland had been an illegal act, violently resisted by generations of Poles. Also, the Curzon line (the eventual post-WWII Polish-Soviet boundary) had been the very minimal extent of nominally-existing, subjugated Poland. It was the eastern boundary of the Duchy of Warsaw (1809) and the Kingdom of Poland in 1815. (pp. 9-11).

POLISH CLAIMS TO THE KRESY ARE NOT THE LEAST BIT UNREASONABLE

Far from being imperialistic, Poland’s claims against the USSR in the wake of the 1920 Polish-Soviet War had been quite moderate. In fact, the Soviet-proposed armistice line of January 1920 ran nearly 100 km parallel to, and EAST of, the eventual Riga boundary! (p. 26). The Polish side voluntarily settled for less when they agreed to the Riga line as the boundary.

THE BOGEYMAN OF ETHNOGRAPHIC FRONTIERS

Those who complain about the “ethnographic” factors of the Kresy focus on the fact that Poles constituted an ethnic minority (albeit a large one) in the Kresy. They forget that this went BOTH WAYS. About 1.5 million Poles were left stranded, in the Soviet Union, east of the Riga boundary. (p. 35). Now, with the acceptance of the Curzon line as the Polish-USSR boundary, another over-million Poles had to be uprooted, or find themselves now living in the Soviet Union.

MOST UKRAINIANS LACKED NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS, THUS GUARANTEEING THE FAILURE OF THE PILSUDSKI-PETLURA ALLIANCE IN ADVANCE

Stanislaw Grabski describes his personal experiences, part of which he used to support his opposition to the Pilsudski-Petlura (Petliura) alliance. “In 1917 and 1918 I had travelled through the length and breadth of the Ukraine and had reached the conclusion that Ukrainian national consciousness existed at that time only among a small intellectual minority, while to the masses of peasants and workers it was still completely foreign.” (p. 19). The alliance was doomed to failure, even though Hetman Makhno, who supported Pilsudski for a time, had the support of the Ukrainian peasantry. (p. 22).