Peace Conference, it was inevitable that only a tentative solution could be found for the involved question of the Russo-Polish frontier.1 In December 1919 the 'Curzon line' set up a minimum demarcation between the two countries, but while the diplomats bickered and bartered, Pilsudski of Poland acted energetically to accomplish his own settlement for the western border areas. Polish troops occupied Vilno in April 1919 and drove out Soviet forces. Pilsudski aimed to detach Russia's former western border provinces from Soviet grasp by creating a 'federation' of new states, whose leader could only be Poland. Russian imperialism, whether Red or White, remained for Pilsudski the principal enemy. This consideration weighed with his calculated refusal to launch an all-out offensive against the Bolsheviks in 1919, when such an action would have rendered Denikin substantial assistance and may perhaps even have brought him to Moscow. 2

In pursuit of Polish interests, fighting had broken out between the Polish and Ukrainian Nationalist troops as the Poles strove to keep the vitally important area of Eastern Galicia under their rule. By July 1919 Polish forces had completed the military occupation of this region. The cause of Ukrainian independence itself crumbled away before the onset of the Russian Bolsheviks, the imperialist claims of the Russian anti-Bolsheviks and the vacillations of the Allied Supreme Council. At the end of that year Petiura, the nominal head of the Ukrainian separatist government, saw that salvation might be won by turning to the Poles, at a time when Poland - though by no means a French satellite - found itself under increasing pressure from some French quarters to adopt a more aggressive anti-Bolshevik position.