386 GRANICE
sanctify the decision of 1945, was almost as breathtaking as the great Settlement
itself. It was as if the builders of the Suez Canal or of the Grand Coulee Dam felt
obliged to explain their handiwork as nothing more than that which sun, tides,
and geology would have achieved in the normal course of events.
In Poland after the War, a whole generation was instructed to assume that the
frontiers of the People's Republic defined the territory on which the Polish
nation had evolved since time immemorial. They were encouraged to believe
that the Polish macierz or 'Motherland' had always occupied this same fixed
location, even when large parts of it happened to be inhabited for centuries by
large numbers of 'aliens', or when political boundaries happened to run in com-
pletely different directions. According to the official view, the Poles had always
possessed the inalienable and exclusive right to inhabit the Recovered
Territories of the west and north, even when force majeure prevented them from
exercising it. By the same token, their own presence at any time on any plot or
patch beyond the eastern bounds laid down by the Potsdam Conference must be
regretted as a dastardly infringement of other nations' rights (even if some of
those nations did not then exist). In brief, the People's Republic was to be seen
as the natural product of History. It was delineated by men, whose deliberations
under Soviet guidance were inspired by a correct appraisal of scientific prin-
ciples, enabling them not merely to create a new Poland, but rather to recover
the old one. In many ways, this was an extremely romantic picture, where the
skill of the statesmen of 1945 was seen to have restored a classical masterpiece,
cleaning the canvas of the accumulated grime and the clumsy retouching of the
centuries, in order to reveal the ancient map of Poland in all its pristine splen-
dour. For all the pretence of scientific method, the argument was purely teleo-
logical. Its appeal, to a nation that had known such protracted insecurity, was
not rational but emotional.
In 1945, all Poland's eastern neighbours were incorporated into the USSR.
From the purely territorial point of view, they attained much. The Lithuanians
had their Lithuanian SSR and, since 1940, their capital of Vilnius. The
Byelorussians had their Byelorussian SSR, which stretched from beyond the
Dvina to beyond the Pripet, and from Brest on the Bug to Vitebsk, Mogilev, and
Gomel. The Ukrainians had their Ukrainian SSR which embodied the 'Great
Ukraine from the San to the Don'. From other points of view, however, these
Soviet nationalities had little to celebrate. Their incorporation into the USSR
was accompanied by the physical liquidation of all independent national lead-
ers, and by the mass deportation of whole segments of the population. Whilst
receiving the nominal control of their language, culture, and national territory,
they were subordinated to the monopoly rule of the ail-Union Communist
Party, which acted as the instrument of a centralized, autocratic, Russian-
dominated empire. Their constitutional rights were a sham. Their subjection
was all too real. With the exception of the members of the ruling apparat, they
tended to look on their former Polish connections with a mixture of regret and
envy. (See Map 2.1.)