page_title: Curzon Line
section_title: End of World War I
hierarchical_section_title: Curzon Line / End of World War I
context_page_description: The Curzon Line is a proposed demarcation line between Second Polish Republic and the Soviet Union, two new states emerging after World War I. It was first proposed by the British Foreign Secretary George Curzon to the Supreme War Council in 1919 as a diplomatic basis for a future border agreement.
  The line became a major geopolitical factor during World War II, when Joseph Stalin invaded eastern Poland and split its territory with Adolf Hitler 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 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.
context_section_description: The US President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points included the statement "An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea..." Article 87 of the Versailles Treaty stipulated that "The boundaries of Poland not laid down in the present Treaty will be subsequently determined by the Principal Allied and Associated Powers." In accordance with these declarations, the Supreme War Council tasked the Commission on Polish Affairs with proposing Poland's eastern boundaries in lands that were inhabited by a mixed population of Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians and Belorussians. The Commission issued its recommendation on 22 April; its proposed Russo-Polish borders were close to those of the 19th-century Congress Poland.
  The Supreme Council continued to debate the issue for several months. On 8 December, the Council published a map and description of the line along with an announcement that it recognized "Poland's right to organize a regular administration of the territories of the former Russian Empire situated to the West of the line described below." At the same time, the announcement stated the Council was not "...prejudging the provisions which must in the future define the eastern frontiers of Poland" and that "the rights that Poland may be able to establish over the territories situated to the East of the said line are expressly reserved." The announcement had no immediate impact, although the Allies recommended its consideration in an August 1919 proposal to Poland, which was ignored.
caption: Polish ethnographic map from 1912, showing the proportions of Polish population according to pre-WW1 censuses
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