The Second Promise

Last night's meeting of the Council on Post-War Problems clearly defined the threat which victorious Soviet Russia can present to a successful peace settlement. It served to make doubly welcome Sumner Welles' disclosure of plans for a United Nations conference on post-war problems in the near future. Unless satisfactory agreements can be reached during wartime, the Allies will find themselves forced to compromise drastically the democratic ideals at the time of the Peace Conference. The Russo-Polish boundary settlements offer a problem which is arising even now.

In reply to a Soviet note conferring Russian citizenship on all former inhabitants of East Poland, the Polish Government in Exile last week denounced the Polish Soviet Treaty of July, 1941 as unilateral and intimated that it expects Poland's post-war eastern frontier to be restored as of September, 1939. "Tass," Russia's official news agency, answered by charging Premier Sikorski and his refugee cabinet with the "imperialistic" desire to hold against their will the four million Russians put under Polish rule by a peace treaty of 1921. The Soviet organ also leveled an accusation at the Poles for their "Fascist-minded" pre-war government under Colonel Beck.

This dispute exemplifies the major territorial problem which will face Allied peace-makers, the problem of securing an honest and fair-minded adjustment of the rights of the small nations and at the same time recognizing Russia's demand for security. Mindful of the economic and militaristic advantage to be gained from those areas taken in 1939, Russia may be expected to insist on retaining them. On the other hand, the small states legitimately protest against such a violation of their sovereignty.

It will be a hard decision to make. Already reactionaries and Russo-phobes are utilizing the dispute to sow dissension between Russia and the West. The British have produced what seems a just and reasonable solution in their proposal to apply the principle of self-determination to the disputed areas, plebiscites to be taken to ascertain their loyalties. But the fundamental solution of the problem can be secured not merely through frontier rectifications; Russia must be given security from aggression by an establishment of that collective security for which Maxim Litvinov waged a fruitless battle throughout the Thirties. In 1919, Clemenceau and Foch gave up their demands to German territory for an Anglo-American promise to institute an effective system for main-taining peace; that promise was not kept. At the end of World War II, Russia may be expected to cooperate with the United Nations only if guaranteed a peace system that will substitute the olive-branch, for the mailed fist and replace the ultimatum with arbitration. We must make the promise of peace once more; this time we must keep it.