The " Bierut Decrees " are named after Bolesław Bierut , installed by the occupying Soviet forces as the leader of communist government of Poland between 1944 and his death in Moscow in 1956 . The term also presents a conscious echo of the Beneš decrees which have been seen by critics as providing a blue print for the ethnic cleansing of German and Hungarian minorities from Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1948 . Bierut functioned as head of the Provisional National Council , a Soviet influenced quasi-parliament ( '' Krajowa Rada Narodowa '' ) , from 1944 to 1947 . Following German defeat in May 1945 , political leaders from the allied powers met at Potsdam between July 17 and August 2 in order to progress agreement on the post-war settlement . Russian plans for Germany and Poland involved reducing Germany and forcible annexation of the eastern half of the prewar Poland into the outlying republics of the Soviet Union . The Soviet acquisitions first proposed in the 1939 agreement with Adolf Hitler , were defined by the terms of the secret protocol of the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact ( in 1945 for most purposes the Nazi-Soviet agreement was still a secret ) . On the western side of Poland the border was to be moved westward at the expense of Germany , to a new frontier following the Rivers Oder and Neisse . By the time of the Potsdam conference , Poland and eastern Germany were already occupied by Russian troops . A puppet government , loyal to Moscow , was well advanced with the systematic consolidation of control over Poland as defined according to the new de facto frontiers . The westward relocation of Poland became part of the agreed approach of the Potsdam conference
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Potsdam Conference
Bierut Decrees