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 APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200070027-9

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-RDP01-00707R000200070027-9