Anatomy of a Feud

Across the bleak barrens of prewar eastern Poland armies surged last week, as they have for 1,000 years. The stolid peasants who saw the Red Army drive bewildered Germans back are descendants of patient men who have straightened up to watch fire & sword swoop by for 30 generations.

Vladimir the Great of Kiev took the lands along the Bug and the San from the Poles in 981. Boleslas the Brave, second king of Poland, stormed Kiev in 1018. These were but the first recorded instances in a long line of futile attempts to nail down a firm frontier where no natural barrier exists.

Rise & Fall. More than once in the next 300 years, the Poles marched as far as Kiev; more than once men from the East, notably the Tatars, swept into Poland. Casimir the Great was the first Pole to encompass a large block of non-Poles (Ruthenians) in his domains. His great-niece, Jadwiga, married Jagiello of Lithuania in 1386. The union of the two kingdoms prospered for almost exactly 300 years; the tide did not turn until 1667 (see map). Said Ivan III of Muscovy, when Poland's expansion was in full flower: between Russians and Poles, there can never be permanent peace. Only truces.

Dark days came for Poland as the Russians began to come out of their endless birch forests and drift westward, seeking a place in Europe. The era culminated in the three partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795. At the end, there was no Poland; Russia, Prussia and Austria had swallowed everything.

Rebirth. One hundred and twenty-three years later, Woodrow Wilson brought about the resurrection of Poland. Out of the wreck of the central powers and the Russian Empire, new states were created, Poland and the Baltic States among them. Almost at once the Poles found themselves in a new war with the Russians. Marshal Pilsudski led the Polish Army to Kiev to support Hetman Petlura's attempt to carve out an independent Ukraine. The infant Red Army drove out Petlura, chased Pilsudski to the gates of Warsaw. There, General Maxime Weygand of France, in collaboration with the Polish general staff, devised a brilliant strategy, sent the Russians stumbling back.

As the exhausted armies lunged feebly at each other, Lord Curzon, on behalf of the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers, suggested a mutually satisfactory line of demarcation, resolving as best it could the impossible ethnographic interming-lings left over after 1,000 years of strife. Neither side would listen. In the end the Poles were able to dictate a peace at Riga in 1921, establishing an eastern frontier which lasted until 1939 and the fourth partition of Poland.

In London last week the cautious Sunday Observer reported informal Russian offers to withdraw to the Curzon Line, perhaps even enough farther in the south to restore historic Lwow to Poland. Such an offer, if actually made, might finally bring peace in place of truce where great armies now battle.

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