If the Red Army reached Berlin tomorrow, most diplomats, from Herbert Hoover to Henry Wallace and back would be anxious to see the wave of Comrades recede from Unter den Linden as soon as possible. But how far back do they hope and expect a victory-flushed Red Army to go? If not all the way back, what is to become of Poland's claim for her pre-war eastern boundary? To date this is the most perplexing boundary problem facing the United Nations. Aside from the claims and counterclaims of the Polish government in exile and the master in the Kremlin, little has been done by the Allied powers to harmonize these discordant factions in their own camp before the rigidity of a territorial fait accompli makes a conference-table settlement impossible.

In the period of small-scale unoffical wars which followed World War I, no territorial settlement led to so much actual fighting or violent controversy as did the definition of Poland's boundaries. Then it was the Russians who were weak and the Poles, who disregarding the ethnologically just "Curzon Line" drawn at the peace conference, swept into Russia's easternmost provinces and incorporated them by the treaty of Riga in 1921. It is this Treaty which Stalin denounced after Sikorski's rejection of the Polish Soviet Treaty of 1939, which reestablished the border at the Bug River.

The Russians have not remained silent and inscrutable. They have pledged to assist in creating a strong Poland, but the leaders of Hitler's most effective foe do not interpret this as conflicting with their intention of recovering the eastern region of Poland.

The Polish claim, based entirely on her possession after the aggression of 1920, is inextricably tied up with her internal political conflict which involves a more liberal element under General Sikorski disputing the Polish leadership with a powerful group which represents the old landlord-nobility-military coterie of pre-war days. This Junker-like school of Polish political thought, which had control in Warsaw under Mr. Josef Beck before the German invasion, has been termed Fascist-minded by the Soviet government, and is the Polish faction which is causing the Kremlin the most worry.

It is not mere coincidence that the Polish-Soviet controversy should flare up just at the time that Beck, who fled his country in its dark days together with his Commander in Chief, Smigly-Ridz, and his landlord friends, is emerging from obscurity. The question of the former provinces of eastern Poland is deeply involved with the desire of these feudalistic landowners to recapture their vast plantations in the east together with the masses of semi-enserfed labor, much of it of Russian origin, to work them. In spite of the huge plebiscite vote of the eastern provinces in 1939 to adhere to Russia after the fall of Poland, the Polish nobles in exile have brought great pressure to bear upon General Sikorski which has resulted in the current lack of harmony in Polish-Soviet relations.

It is probable that Sikorski, a realistic soldier could be swayed to accept the Bug River line, which is ethnologically sound, militarily feasible, and politically sane, together with the friendship of Russia which he has helped create by numerous mutually useful pacts and agreements. The danger is that the power of the ultra-conservative Polish nobility will make Sikorski an inarticulate puppet when the time comes to face Stalin, who feels about Russia's western approaches much the same as Secretary Knox feels about our Pacific approaches, as the keystones of security. M. I. G.