Russian, Polish rupture called blow at Roosevelt
Churchill’s diplomacy also suffers because break between Allies bring comfort to Axis
By Lyle C. Wilson, United Press staff writer
Washington –
The rupture of Polish-Russian diplomatic relations was viewed realistically today as a major defeat for President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s diplomacy if for no other reason than it will comfort the Axis.
It came at a moment when Washington was apparently moving further to appease the Soviet Union with a major diplomatic rebuff to Finland – a state with which Russia is at war and the United States is at peace. There are unconfirmed rumors that the United States is about to break relations with the Finns.
The abrupt Moscow announcement that relations with the Polish government-in-exile in London had been broken came without an advance hint to Washington or London.
Upsetting to Congress
It might be interpreted as a hurry-up prod from Moscow for establishment of a second front and for Washington and London to recognize Moscow’s post-war territorial claims as being exempt from the no-aggrandizement provisions of the Atlantic Charter.
While the State Department “regretted” the Polish-Russians break, some others thought it was grounds for even more emphatic expressions of diplomatic sorrow. Senator Theodore F. Green (D-RI) considered it “tragic,” and other Congressional commentators expressed misgivings.
But there seemed to be no immediate tendency to reproach the Russians. In general, there was uneasiness over a break in the United Nations front and a tendency to charge the Germans with having smartly fostered Polish-Russian friction.
Takes Russian side
Senator Arthur Capper (R-KS), a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, said:
I am inclined to take Russia’s side in this matter. Russia has done a good job and I am very sorry to see this break.
The Polish-Russian break may lead to establishment of a new exiled Polish government, this time in Moscow. If so, Premier Stalin could easily negotiate with it a settlement of one of his major post-war territorial claims involving eastern Poland. These claims have been set out in detail by the communist press. They embrace an undisclosed but not necessarily large part of Finland; all of the three Baltic states which are Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia; eastern Poland, comprising nearly half of that nation; and all of the Romanian province of Bessarabia and part of the province of Bukovina.
Would expand borders
That would considerably expand Russian borders beyond their limits of Sept. 1, 1939. The Russian thesis is that those areas would be absorbed without the territorial aggrandizement which is proscribed by the Atlantic Charter, and Moscow is bidding for Washington’s agreement that the charter terms do not cover the special circumstances involved.
The Russians assert that those areas owe allegiance to Moscow because they were parts of Czarist Russia or, briefly, of the newborn Soviet Union in 1918-20, or voted to become Soviet republics after they were invaded by the Red Armies in 1939-40.
Formal Russian announcement that eastern Poland would be taken over after the war would raise difficult problems for Washington since it would involve an interpretation of the Atlantic Charter which the Roosevelt administration might be reluctant to make. And the issue is complicated further by the fact that there are considerable numbers of Americans of Polish extraction in the United States – a minority which would be heard and which, in some areas, would be potent at election time.