Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Curzon Line
Summary
The Curzon Line was a proposed demarcation line between the Second Polish Republic and the Soviet Union, two new states emerging after World War I. Based on a suggestion by Herbert James Paton, it was first proposed in 1919 by Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary, to the Supreme War Council as a diplomatic basis for a future border agreement.
The line became a major geopolitical factor during World War II, when the USSR invaded eastern Poland, resulting in the split of Poland's territory between the USSR and Nazi Germany along the Curzon Line. After the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, Operation Barbarossa, the Allies did not agree that Poland's future eastern border should be kept as drawn by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 until the Tehran Conference. Churchill's position changed after the Soviet victory at the Battle of Kursk.
Following a private agreement at the Tehran Conference, confirmed at the 1945 Yalta Conference, the Allied leaders Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Stalin issued a statement affirming the use of the Curzon Line, with some five-to-eight-kilometre variations, as the eastern border between Poland and the Soviet Union. When Churchill proposed to annex parts of Eastern Galicia, including the city of Lviv, to Poland's territory (following Line B), Stalin argued that the Soviet Union could not demand less territory for itself than the British Government had reconfirmed previously several times. The Allied arrangement involved compensation for this loss via the incorporation of formerly German areas (the so-called Recovered Territories) into Poland. As a result, the current border between Poland and the countries of Belarus and Ukraine is an approximation of the Curzon Line.
At the end of World War I, the Second Polish Republic reclaimed its sovereignty following the disintegration of the occupying forces of three neighbouring empires. Imperial Russia was amid the Russian Civil War after the October Revolution, Austria-Hungary split and went into decline, and the German Reich bowed to pressure from the victorious forces of the Allies of World War I known as the Entente Powers.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.