Behind the Polish-Soviet BreakAlter Brody, introduced by Corliss Lamont

RECENTLY the American educational world was shocked by a survey which revealed how woefully ignorant our college students are of the most elementary facts of American history and geography. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the public as a whole should be even less well informed on the subject of Russo-Polish history and geography. Yet, much of the suspicion and hostility which have been engendered in American-Soviet relations by the ill-timed boundary dispute which the Polish Government has seen fit to launch at this most critical period of a war which, for the Polish as well as for the American, British, Russian, Chinese, and other United Nations, is a war for survival—could have been dissipated at once by a wider knowledge of the basic facts of Russo-Polish history. These facts are as indisputable and as verifiable as the fact that Abraham Lincoln was President of the United States during the Civil War and not Jefferson Davis, as many of our students thought; that William James was the brother of Henry James and not of Jesse James; or that California was not one of the thirteen original colonies.

It would of course be naive to believe that a mere recital of objective ethnographic and historic facts is all that is necessary to clear the air. There were political rather than ethnographic motives behind the Sikorski government's sudden reopening of the boundary controversy which, according to the Soviet-Polish treaty of 1941, was to have been postponed till after the war. And there are political rather than ethnographic motives for the lively interest which certain circles in America are taking in the matter. The American public as a whole, however, has no political axe to grind in the dispute and to them this verifiable outline of the ethnographic and historic background of the controversy is submitted.