A Lesson in Maneuver

The Poles say that the Russians are Slavs, but that the Poles are Slavs with hearts. The Russians say that the Poles learn nothing and forget nothing. Europeans in general say that Poland cannot exist as a nation without the friendship of either Germany or Russia, who for centuries have used Poland's flat land as a battleground, between Slavs and Teutons.

No monument to U.S., British, Russian or Polish diplomacy was the climactic culmination of errors which brought last week's "suspension" of relations between the Russians and the Poles. The Poles had capped their old enmity toward Russia by supporting the Nazi propaganda story that 10,000 missing Polish officers had been found in mass graves in the forest of Katyn. Herr Goebbels said the Russians slaughtered them. Long distrust of Russia had conditioned the Poles to believe the German account. Without notifying either Britain or Russia, they fed the flames of anti-Soviet suspicion by demanding an International Red Cross investigation. The Red Cross (in Geneva) refused; the chastened Poles hastily announced that their request would "lapse."

As quickly as the Poles appealed to the Red Cross, the Russians lashed at the Poles. At week's end Ambassador Tadeusz Romer left Moscow for Kuibyshev en route to Teheran. U.S. Ambassador William H. Standley saw him off. British Ambassador Sir Archibald Clark Kerr gave him a bottle of Scotch. Then they turned to seeking a settlement that would patch up the break for the duration. On the urgency and merits of this issue, the U.S. State Department and No. 10 Downing Street were in complete accord: nothing must be allowed to create a final schism between Russia and the Anglo-American coalition; yet, if possible, the Polish Government and the postwar integrity of Poland had to be preserved.

At hand was: 1) the worst example yet of what failure to coordinate political aims and understandings with war aims could bring about; 2) an object lesson in the lengths to which the U.S.S.R. could go to compel understanding on its own terms; 3) a preview of postwar confusions. Now, as never before, the time was ripe for a personal meeting sometime soon between Joseph Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt.

The Polish Stand. For Poland's Premier in Exile, General Wladslaw Sikorski, the cleavage with Russia was a personal tragedy. Opposition Poles in Britain and the U.S.* have attacked him ever since he defied Polish tradition and signed a Polish-Russian pact in July 1941, followed it with a friendship declaration in December 1941. A patriot, liberal enough to be anathema to rightist emigres, Sikorski has showed great political courage in trying to deal with Russia. For a time, he succeeded so well that Stalin once called him the only Polish leader with whom the Kremlin could deal. But pressure inside & outside his Government has confounded him. Emigres in London for months have printed anti-Russian, anti-Semitic and pro-fascist newspapers. The chauvinists' clamor, and that of an anti-Sikorski Polish press in the U.S., impelled Sikorski last Feb. 25 to demand a showdown with Stalin on the return of Poland's eastern provinces. From then on, relations between the two Governments have gone from bad to debacle.

Back of the fears of the emigres and of all Poles is the historical fact that Poland was partitioned out of existence from 1795 until the Versailles Treaty. They fear that Poland will again disappear after World War II. They point to Poland's mighty contribution of flyers, soldiers, underground workers to the Allied effort. They never forget that Poland was the first nation to fight Hitler. As allies under the laws of war and the promises of the Atlantic Charter, they expect the U.S. and Britain to see that Poland is reborn again as a sovereign nation.

For gallant patriotism the Poles have few equals. But as diplomats they are traditional bunglers. While loudly demanding the postwar return of all their territories, they have purposefully neglected to repudiate their Munich-time move into Czecho-Slovakia's Teschen. In the midst of war and while Russia was battering the Germans, the Poles' barrage of claims and threats embarrassed their allies and gave Russia an opportunity to press its claims with every weapon of logic, invective and propaganda in the Soviet arsenal.

The Russian Stand. Soviet policy moves neither in haste nor in anger, although it can sometimes make a great show of useful rage. It has definite ends in view. Those ends last week stuck up through the marsh of recrimination and polemics. Stalin had decided that there was no advantage in further dealings with the Sikorski Government. Instead, Russia was prepared to sponsor its own Free Poland movement (but probably not a separate Free Polish Government), to back Russia's border claims, and incidentally to recruit Polish soldiers for the Russian front. Leftist Writer Wanda Wasilewska, first mouthpiece of the new movement, called on Poles inside Europe to disavow the exiles in London.

To refute Poland's claims of territorial sovereignty, Russian spokesmen have advanced the right of self determination for some 10,000,000 Byelo Russians and Ukrainians in Poland's eastern provinces. Settlements after World War I gave those peoples and territories to Poland; Russia took them back in 1939, lost them to the Germans in 1941. In the long view, Russia has plainly indicated that she wants and intends to have most of the eastern provinces, as well as the Baltic states and chunks of the Balkans.

The Allied Position. Last week the U. S. and Britain did not specifically commit themselves to support the Russian claim. They simply turned the heat on the Poles, made them subside for the moment at least, said and did nothing whatsoever to ruffle the Russians. The vital fact was that Russia was staking out claims for the peace--and against the possibility of a World War III--that would be difficult to deny. The lesson was that, lacking any definite Anglo-Russian-U.S. postwar understandings, Premier Joseph Stalin plans to run eastern Europe just about as he pleases.

* Most violent opposition from the Polish press in the U.S. has come from Detroit's Dziennik Polski (Polish News), published by Frank Januszewski, and New York's Nowy Swiat (New World), published by Maximilian Francis Wegrzynek. Both publishers made prewar fortunes importing Polish hams.

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