Foreign News: A Lesson in Maneuver

The Poles say that the Russians are Slavs, but that the Poles are Slavs with hearts. The Russians say that the Poles learn nothing and forget nothing. Europeans in general say that Poland cannot exist as a nation without the friendship of either Germany or Russia, who for centuries have used Poland's flat land as a battleground, between Slavs and Teutons.

No monument to U.S., British, Russian or Polish diplomacy was the climactic culmination of errors which brought last week's "suspension" of relations between the Russians and the Poles. The Poles had capped their old enmity toward Russia by supporting the Nazi propaganda story that 10,000 missing Polish officers had been found in mass graves in the forest of Katyn. Herr Goebbels said the Russians slaughtered them. Long distrust of Russia had conditioned the Poles to believe the German account. Without notifying either Britain or Russia, they fed the flames of anti-Soviet suspicion by demanding an International Red Cross investigation. The Red Cross (in Geneva) refused; the chastened Poles hastily announced that their request would "lapse."

As quickly as the Poles appealed to the Red Cross, the Russians lashed at the Poles. At week's end Ambassador Tadeusz Romer left Moscow for Kuibyshev en route to Teheran. U.S. Ambassador William H. Standley saw him off. British Ambassador Sir Archibald Clark Kerr gave him a bottle of Scotch. Then they turned to seeking a settlement that would patch up the break for the duration. On the urgency and merits of this issue, the U.S. State Department and No. 10 Downing Street were in complete accord: nothing must be allowed to create a final schism between Russia and the Anglo-American coalition; yet, if possible, the Polish Government and the postwar integrity of Poland had to be preserved.

At hand was: 1) the worst example yet of what failure to coordinate political aims and understandings with war aims could bring about; 2) an object lesson in the lengths to which the U.S.S.R. could go to compel understanding on its own terms; 3) a preview of postwar confusions. Now, as never before, the time was ripe for a personal meeting sometime soon between Joseph Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt.

The Polish Stand. For Poland's Premier in Exile, General Wladslaw Sikorski, the cleavage with Russia was a personal tragedy. Opposition Poles in Britain and the U.S.* have attacked him ever since he defied Polish tradition and signed a Polish-Russian pact in July 1941, followed it with a friendship declaration in December 1941. A patriot, liberal enough to be anathema to rightist emigrés, Sikorski has showed great political courage in trying to deal with Russia. For a time, he succeeded so well that Stalin once called him the only Polish leader with whom the Kremlin could deal. But pressure inside & outside his Government has confounded him. Emigrés in London for months have printed anti-Russian, anti-Semitic and pro-fascist newspapers. The chauvinists' clamor, and that of an anti-Sikorski Polish press in the U.S., impelled Sikorski last Feb. 25 to demand a showdown with Stalin on the return of Poland's eastern provinces. From then on, relations between the two Governments have gone from bad to debacle.