The question of Poland came closer than any other to uncovering what the Yalta conferees, each for his own reason, did not want to face: the gulf that separated Communist Russia from the democracies. Serious consideration of postwar Germany could be postponed. The Far East could be settled by thrusting concessions upon Stalin. The deeply symbolic differences in the U.N. Charter could be bridged by words never destined to bear the stress of reality. But Poland was immediate and concrete, already the subject of angry public debate. How the fate of Poland was settled at Yalta is a story that contains, in a small-scale model, all the elements of the larger story of how the West lost the peace.
The Background. A fiercely independent people without natural east or west frontiers, the Poles had been four times partitioned among their stronger neighbors. Their anti-Russian feeling had been fanned anew by the fourth partition, the German-Russian Pact of 1939, which started the war. In addition, as Roman Catholics, the Poles were strongly opposed to Communism.
Britain had entered the war in defense of a free Poland. The U.S. and Britain in the Atlantic Charter had again emphasized, as a principle of world order, the right of self-determination for such distinct but relatively weak peoples as the Poles. When Stalin's returning armies drove the Germans out of Eastern Poland, he set up at Lublin a "provincial government" of Poland in rivalry to the Polish government, which had fled to London after the Hitler-Stalin invasions. The London Polish government was not a creature of Britain; it derived from the Poland created after World War I by Patriots Paderewski and Pilsudski. The Lublin government, though made up of Poles, was a creature of the Communist Party, the Russian secret police and the Red army.
The Issues. Out of this background issued two questions for Yalta: 1) the Polish boundaries, and 2) the even more important question of whether Poland would have its own government or be ruled by Russian stooges.
The boundary question arose from Stalin's insistence on annexing part of Eastern Poland. Before Yalta, it was understood that the Poles would be compensated by giving them German territory in the West. U.S. policy, as defined by the State Department in preparation for Yalta, was to hold down the size of Stalin's grab, thus minimizing the cruel displacement of population on both of Poland's borders.
On the political question, the U.S. wanted an independent Poland, friendly to Russia and open to diplomatic and commercial intercourse with the West. In practice, this meant a provisional government formed around the London government and including leaders from among the anti-Nazi Polish patriots. Such a government would preside over free Polish elections in which the Poles would pick their own postwar leaders.