APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070029-7
1918
- January
- President Wilson makes independent Poland with access to the sea one of the 14 points constituting Allied war aims.
- November
- Polish Republic proclaimed on 3 November; General Josef Pilsudski, supreme commander of Polish forces, arrives in Warsaw.
- December
- Creation of Communist Workers Party.
1919
- January
- Pilsudski becomes head of state; Versailles Conference draws borders of Poland, but frontier with revolutionary Russia remains unsettled.
1920
- April
- Russo-Polish border war between Bolshevik forces and Pilsudski, who seeks to extend Poland into Ukraine along Jagiellonian concept; Polish forces advance to Kiev, but are rolled back to Warsaw where, on 15 August, they defeat the Red Armies.
1921
- March
- Treaty of Riga embodies Polish-Soviet territorial compromise.
1919-1926
- Succession of weak coalition governments results in domestic instability and emboldens Germany to territorial demands.
1925
- March
- Communist Workers Party is renamed Communist Party of Poland.
1926
- May
- Pilsudski engineers military coup d'etat, and rules until his death in 1935 via a series of surrogate presidents.
1932
- July
- Nonaggression pact signed with USSR.
1934
- January
- Nonaggression pact signed with Nazi Germany.
1935
- April
- New constitution, greatly increasing the power of the President, is proclaimed, but is vitiated by political controversies; a succession of authoritarian military cliques, the "colonels' regimes," rules Poland until outbreak of World War II.
1938
- Communist Party of Poland is dissolved by the Comintern, having become a liability to Stalin. The Comintern action, shrouded in silence and never precisely dated, was declared invalid in 1955.
1939
- August
- German-Soviet (Molotov-Ribbentrop) nonaggression pact concluded; secret clauses provide for partition of Poland between the two powers.
- September
- Nazi Germany attacks Poland and defeats Polish forces in 3 weeks of "blitzkrieg"; USSR occupies eastern half of the country.
1940
- July
- Polish Government-in-exile formed in London and headed by General Wladyslaw Sikorski; recognized by Western Allies but not by USSR.
1941
- July
- Under Allied pressure Sikorski agrees to establish relations with Moscow.
1942
- June
- Communist party reestablished in Poland as the underground Polish Workers Party, led by Wladyslaw Gomulka.
1943
- April
- Uprising begins 19 April in the Warsaw Ghetto; ends on 10 May with systematic destruction of the area by Nazi forces.
- Moscow breaks diplomatic relations with Sikorski's government over latter's appeal to the International Red Cross to investigate the massacre of 10,000 Polish officers in the Katyn Forest.
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070029-7
