The Geneva Summit (1955) in the political thought of Polish emigrants in London

Abstract

This article contains an analysis of the views of Polish political emigrants after World War II regarding the conference of the leaders of the four major world powers: the United States, USSR, Great Britain and France, held in Geneva in July 1955. The analysis involves documentation gathered primarily at The Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum and the Polish Library in London, as well as press articles. In the first part of the article, I present three factors that led to the Geneva Summit: the situation in the USSR after the death of Joseph Stalin and the fi erce struggle for power at the Kremlin Olympus, as a result of which General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev gained the strongest position in 1955; the election of the US president Dwight Eisenhower; as well as the weakening position of Great Britain and France. In the second part of the article, I describe the position of the Polish emigration elites (politicians and journalists) before the conference regarding the powers’ attitude to the Polish issue, the problems of Central and Eastern Europe, German issues and international security. Importantly, the article also presents conclusions from the  conference made by the analysts of ‘Polish London’, who tried to answer the question of which party obtained more political benefits during the conference. In summary, I try to show how the Geneva Summit changed the way of thinking of Polish political emigrants about the possibility of Poland’s liberation by the Western countries, particularly the United States.