Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

by Stephen Kotkin

French government, still angry at Piłsudski’s recklessness, nonetheless suggested an anti-Bolshevik operation; the British government, on July 11, sent the Bolsheviks a note signed by Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon proposing an armistice on western territorial terms favorable to Soviet Russia, an armistice with Wrangel and a neutral zone in Crimea (Wrangel’s sanctuary), accompanied by a stern warning not to cross into “ethnographical” Polish territory. The note seemed to establish a Polish-Soviet boundary some fifty miles east of the Bug (essentially the 1797 border between Prussia and imperial Russia); it would become known as the Curzon Line.83 The Poles were taken aback: the British appeared to be giving away eastern territories the Poles viewed as their “historic” patrimony (whoever might be living there as of 1920).84 To Lenin, it looked like the British wanted, Gibraltar style, to annex the Crimean peninsula, pointing a dagger, like White Poland, at the Reds; on July 12–13, he urged “a frantic acceleration of the offensive against Poland.”