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By Root 1006 0

was deteriorating as Poles rose up against the Germans, partly because the Allies had trouble finding the troops. There were also disagreements over whether only those actually living in Silesia could vote (the choice of the Polish government) or whether former residents could vote as well (as the Germans preferred). The German government won that argument and on a Sunday in March 1921, as trainloads of German Silesians rolled in to the sound of band music, the vote finally took place. The north and west chose Germany, the south Poland, and the middle, which with all its industry was what both Poland and Germany wanted, divided almost evenly. Further months of negotiations, with the British backing Germany and the French Poland, produced only deadlock. The whole issue was finally turned over to the League, where four powers with no direct interest in the matter—Belgium, China, Spain and Brazil—drew a line that left 70 percent of the area in Germany but gave most of the industries and mines to Poland. In 1922, in one of the longest treaties ever seen, Germany and Poland agreed on economic and political cooperation and the protection of their respective minorities.34 But the Germans resented the loss of Upper Silesia as much as that of Danzig and the corridor. In 1939, Hitler annexed the whole to Germany. In 1945, it went back to Poland and most, but not all, of the Germans living there fled or were expelled.

Settling Poland’s borders in the east, where anarchists, Bolsheviks, White Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Baltic Germans were jostling for power, was even more difficult. The peacemakers did not know how many countries they would be dealing with, or which governments. The Commission on Polish Affairs was instructed to go ahead anyway and duly worked out a border that brought all the clearly Polish territories into Poland. In December 1919, what was left of the Supreme Council approved what came to be known as the Curzon Line (roughly the line of Poland’s eastern border today). The Polish government did not have the slightest intention of accepting this. While the peacemakers had been busy with their maps, Polish forces had been equally busy on the ground. All along the disputed borderlands, Poland had staked out much greater claims, which were to be settled largely by success or failure in war.

PiƗsudski’s emotions were most deeply engaged in the northeast. On his father’s side he came from a Polish-Lithuanian family; an ancestor had helped to create the union between Poland and Lithuania in the fifteenth century. Vilna was the only place where he truly felt at home. 35 He wanted his birthplace for Poland, together with a slice of southeastern Lithuania. This brought Polish demands up against those of the emerging Lithuanian nation and into the whole peace settlement in the Baltic.

A map of the eastern end of the Baltic in 1919 would have shown many question marks. Only Finland in the north had managed to establish a precarious sort of independence from Russia, after a vicious civil war between its own Whites and Reds. The Peace Conference recognized Finland in the spring of 1919. To its south the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians had also tried to declare themselves independent from Russia, but they had to deal with a German occupation and their own German or Russian minorities. None had secure borders or established governments, and what the Russians had not destroyed in their retreat, the Germans had requisitioned. White Russians, Red Bolsheviks, Green anarchists, the Baltic Barons, German freebooters, embryonic national armies and simple gangsters ebbed and flowed across the land. Cities and towns changed hands repeatedly. At sea, the remnants of the Russian Imperial Navy, now under Bolshevik command, darted out from Petrograd to spread revolution.

The Allies had concerns but no coherent policy. If they recognized the Baltic nations, they were, in a sense, interfering in Russia’s internal affairs. The Americans were for self-determination but hesitated to accord full recognition because