From Failure to Victory

POLAND From Failure to Victory

When the Big Three agreed this week on a tripartite occupation of Germany (see INTERNATIONAL), it was a shrunken Germany they were talking about. For in the name of its Warsaw Government of Poland, Russia had in effect taken over and set up its rule in the most important areas of eastern Germany last week. By this move Russia also took over Germany's (and Europe's) No. 2 industrial region.

Into the factory city of Oppeln and as close to the battling Red Armies as they could crowd, the Polish Government's plenipotentiaries pushed toward a proposed frontier that would follow the Oder River from the Bohemian mountains through Pomerania to the Baltic Sea.

Perfect Timing. The timing of this move was as perfect as the Kremlin's recognition of its puppet Polish Government, 24 hours before the Red Army offensive into the Reich. The Warsaw Government's President Boleslaw Bierut was specific about the meaning of the move. Said he to Allied correspondents: "On Polish soil there should be a Polish administration regardless of the opinions that may be expressed at the international [Big Three] conference''. He added that he did not believe that any of the Allies "will be willing to interfere." (This week the Big Three agreed on a modified Curzon Line and, more vaguely, on territorial compensation for Poland in Germany.)

The Moravian Gate. President Bierut discussed two territorial divisions--East Prussia and the former Czech industrial district of Teschen--in detail. Poland and Russia's common frontier in East Prussia, he said, had not yet been worked out. But since there were many Lithuanians living around Koenigsberg, he presumed that that section of East Prussia would be incorporated in the Lithuanian Soviet Republic. Bierut "hoped and believed" that the Teschen question could be settled amicably with the Czech Government. In any case, Teschen would remain Polish.

This was important because Teschen flanks the Moravian Gate, the No. 1 pass into the natural fortress of Bohemia. Bismarck had laid it down as a political maxim that "whoever controls Bohemia controls Europe. " It was almost as axiomatic that whatever strong power controlled Silesia controlled Prussia.

Thus Marshal Stalin had entered the Big Three conference with the key to Europe in his trousers pocket. The Big Three's award to Russia of an administrative slice of eastern Germany was almost academic. Stalin had also realized one of the oldest Bolshevik dreams.

Lenin's Problem. It was barely 26 years since Lenin faced the knotty question : would it be necessary to sacrifice the Bolshevik Revolution for the sake of a successful Communist Revolution in Germany, the key country of Europe? In Berlin, history in the peculiar form of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Wilhelm Pieck, now a member of Moscow's Free Germany Committee, had begun the Spartacus revolt against the Weimar Republic. It was Communism's first bid for control of Germany. It failed when Liebknecht and Luxemburg were killed and their bodies thrown in the Spree Canal.

The Second Bid. In 1920 Russia made its second bid for control of the west during its war with Poland. Stalin was political commissar of the Red Army which invaded roughly the same area of Poland invaded 25 years later by Marshal Ivan Konev--just as this time a Provisional Government of Poland, headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, followed hard on the heels of the Red Army. Like Bierut, Dzerzhinsky was a Pole. Like Bierut, he was in the Russian secret police (later he organized the Ogpu). Russia's second bid for western power failed when French General Maxime Weygand (now a German prisoner) reorganized Polish resistance. The third try--the present Red Army's--succeeded. Last week Stalin, who had learned his history lessons the hard way, converted the Russian military failure of 1920 into a political triumph.

-The Czech Government in Exile, at which the Kremlin has been looking squint-eyed, presumably because of its slowness in recognizing the Warsaw Government, this week prepared to install itself in the liberated section of Czechoslovakia.

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