Pretty Kettle

There was trouble between Moscow and London this week. A row broke into the open, ostensibly over the shape and complexion of postwar Poland. But the sound of the brawling stirred the old ghosts which plain people everywhere had hoped were laid for good & all at Teheran.

Moscow was angry. London was huffy and worried. Washington, acutely interested in the continuing good name of Teheran, was acutely uneasy. Seven weeks after Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill pledged themselves and their countries to ". . . work together in the war and in the peace . . ." the Big Three found themselves, not in collaboration, but in a test case which may well determine the future of world amity.

The implications, and probably the real roots, of the row went beyond the sore question of Poland's boundaries and Government. But, at least on the surface, that troubled issue had precipitated the quarrel.

Green Light. Early last week Moscow made an oblique gesture toward reestablishing normal relations with Poland. To the "Polish people" the Russians offered a "strong and independent Poland," an opportunity to join the new Soviet-Czechoslovak Alliance, an assurance that the eastern border of Poland could be fixed by agreement--provided it followed more or less closely the Curzon Line and left the western Ukraine and western White Russia in the Soviet Union.*

Moscow suggested that Poland might in return take slices of Germany --presumably East Prussia, Upper Silesia and perhaps a sliver of Pomerania--territories to which Poland has dim historic rights and some strategic claim. Ethnologically and morally, Poland's claim to parts of Germany is no better than her claim to the eastern provinces; the single merit of such a gerrymander is that it would strengthen Russia and Poland, weaken Germany. There is much evidence that this idea was discussed at Teheran.

Yellow Light. In making these proposals, Moscow dismissed the Polish Government in Exile as "cut off from its people . . . incapable of establishing friendly relations with the Soviet Union . . . equally incapable of organizing an active struggle against the German invaders in Poland itself."

To the trained ear of the British Foreign Office, the charge was a challenge. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden set to work to make sure that hotheaded Poles gave a soft answer to Red wrath. In his endeavor he had the aid of reasonable, democratic Premier Stanislaw Mikolajczyk and of a Polish Socialist, Deputy Premier Jan Kwapinski. With other moderates in the Polish Cabinet, these men labored long last week to produce an answer which--so they thought--would mend the worst fracture in the United Nations' frame. Five times the Cabinet met. Five times Mikolajczyk or Foreign Minister Tadeusz Romer or Ambassador Count Edward Raczynski rushed to Eden's office, scurried back for more talk.

At week's end Eden had every reason to believe that he had succeeded: the Poles announced that they were ready to resume relations with Moscow, discuss all outstanding questions--if Russia would let the U.S. and Britain sit in, and if these powers would share responsibility for the final settlement.

Premier Mikolajczyk's more passionately nationalistic colleagues had opposed this much of a concession. President Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz, a stanch Pilsudski man in his time, noticeably did not attend the conferences, reportedly threatened to resign rather than propitiate Moscow. Die hard General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, commander of all Polish forces, almost certainly threw the weight of the officer caste against conciliation. Many a Polish officer hails from the eastern provinces, thus has a personal reason for standing firm against Moscow.

Red Light. The State Department cau tiously informed Moscow that the U.S. would join the negotiations -- if the Krem lin were agreeable. Official Britain began applauding the moment the Poles pub lished their statement. "It shows," said a Foreign Office mouthpiece in a burst of unaccustomed enthusiasm, "that in the view of the Polish Government, as in that of the Soviet Government, all outstanding questions that divide them are open to negotiation. . . ."

The mouthpiece was wrong. From Moscow came a cold, hard blast like a winter wind across the steppes. Said Moscow to the Poles: 1) the Poles have rejected the Curzon Line; 2) the Poles forget that they have no diplomatic relations with the U.S.S.R., hence cannot negotiate; 3) the lack of relations is the fault of the Poles who joined the Germans in an anti-Soviet slander about the murder of Polish officers in Katyn Forest (TIME, April 26); 4) the present Polish Government clearly does not want to establish good relations with Russia. In effect, said Moscow to the U.S. and Great Britain: stay out.

Pravda, official Communist Party organ, published a presumably meaningful story the same day: a New York Pole (D. A. Penzik) had suggested formation of a Polish National Committee of Liberation, composed of Socialists, Peasant Party members, the Communist Union of Polish Patriots in Moscow and democratic Polish groups in the U.S. and elsewhere. Mikolajczyk is a Peasant Party leader; Kwapinski a Socialist. Moral: according to the Russians all the Poles have to do to win recognition is to throw out the more violently anti-Soviet members of their Government.

Stop Sign. But Moscow was not yet through. Pravda that day ran a story which shouted to the world that the issue ran deeper than the Polish controversy. Said Pravda: From "reliable Greek and Yugoslav sources" in Cairo, it had learned that a secret meeting took place recently in a seacoast city of the Pyrenees between two British officials and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop--"to find out the conditions of a separate peace with the Germans. It is understood that the meeting did not remain without results."

The Kremlin made no comment but, significantly, it permitted Moscow correspondents to cable a lie of a kind which had not come from Moscow since the abrupt end of the Soviet Union-German pact in 1941. The British Government spoke stiffly, swiftly: "There is no truth whatever in the story."

Such words might mean that: 1) Moscow wanted to distract attention from its refusal to deal with the Poles whom the U.S. and Britain recognize; 2) Moscow was acutely displeased over Britain's continuing sponsorship of a Government in Exile that the Kremlin considers anti-Soviet and unrepresentative; 3) the Russians had reiterated what they have said many times in many ways: the Soviet Union's western boundaries and neighbors are the Soviet Union's exclusive business.

Actually Lord Curzon had practically nothing to do with "the Curzon Line." It is so called for no better reason than that he, as British Foreign Secretary, in 1920 signed the telegram to Moscow giving the British proposals, drafted by others, for an armistice boundary between Poland and Russia.

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