Seventeen days after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, which marked the beginning of the Second World War, the Soviet Union entered the eastern regions of Poland (known as the ) and annexed territories totalling with a population of 13,299,000. Inhabitants besides ethnic Poles included Belarusian and Ukrainian major population groups, and also Czechs, Lithuanians, Jews, and other minority groups.
These annexed territories were subsequently incorporated into the Lithuanian, Byelorussian, and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republics and remained within the Soviet Union in 1945 as a consequence of European-wide territorial rearrangements configured during the Tehran Conference of 1943 (see Western Betrayal). Poland was compensated for this territorial loss with the pre-War German eastern territories, at the expense of losing its eastern regions. The Polish People's Republic regime described the territories as the "Recovered Territories". The number of Poles in the Kresy in the year 1939 was around 5.274 million, but after ethnic cleansing in 1939-1945 by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Ukrainian nationalist forces, Kresy consisted of approximately 1.8 million inhabitants. The post-World War II territory of Poland was slightly smaller than the pre-1939 land areas, shrinking by some (roughly equalling that of the territories of Belgium and the Netherlands combined).
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
Early in the morning of August 24, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed a 10-year non-aggression pact, called the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. Most notably, the pact contained a secret protocol, revealed only after Germany's defeat in 1945, according to which the states of Northern and Eastern Europe were divided into German and Soviet "spheres of influence".Text of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, executed August 23, 1939 In the North, Finland, Estonia and Latvia were assigned to the Soviet sphere. Poland was to be partitioned in the event of its "political rearrangement"—the areas east of the Narev, Vistula and San Rivers going to the Soviet Union while Germany would occupy the west.Wilson Center, Secret Texts of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact, 1939 Point 1 of the secret supplementary protocol signed on August 23, 1939, is changed so that the territory of the Lithuanian state is included in the sphere of interest of the USSR because, on the other side, Lublin voivodeship and parts of Warsaw voivodeship are included in the sphere of interest of Germany Initially annexed by Poland in a series of wars between 1918 and 1921 (primarily the Polish-Soviet War), these territories had mixed urban national populations with Poles and Ukrainians being the most numerous ethnic groups, with significant minorities of Belarusians and Jews. Also in: Wrocławskie Studia Wschodnie, Wrocław, 1997. Much of this rural territory had its own significant local non-Polish majority (Ukrainians in the south and Belarusians in the north).Jan Tomasz Gross, Revolution from Abroad, pp. 4, 5, Princeton, 2005, (Google books link)
Lithuania, adjacent to East Prussia, would be in the German sphere of influence, although a second secret protocol agreed in September 1939 assigned the majority of Lithuania to the USSR.Christie, Kenneth, Historical Injustice and Democratic Transition in Eastern Asia and Northern Europe: Ghosts at the Table of Democracy, RoutledgeCurzon, 2002, According to the secret protocol, Lithuania would retrieve its historical capital Vilnius, subjugated during the inter-war period by Poland.
Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, 1939–1941
The Polish–Soviet border, as of 1939, had been determined in 1921 at the Treaty of Riga peace talks, which followed the Polish–Soviet War.Heart of Europe. A Short History of Poland by Norman Davies. Oxford: Oxford University Press paperback 1986. , pp. 115–121 Under the terms of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, two weeks after the German invasion of western Poland, the Soviet Union invaded the portions of eastern Poland assigned to it by the Pact, followed by co-ordination with German forces in Poland. See map.
During the Interbellum period, the Second Polish Republic had carried out an oppressive programme of Polonization against its Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Jewish minorities. In a programme referred to as the Pacification of Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia, the buildings, belongings, and property of Ukrainians were destroyed and their inhabitants were often beaten and arrested. According to Ukrainian-Canadian historian, Orest Subtelny, these events constituted "collective punishment" meted out on thousands of "mostly innocent peasants" and resulted in the exacerbation of animosity between the Polish state and the Ukrainian minority. Similar oppressive actions were also carried out against the Belarusian population of Poland. The Soviet Union cited a "need to protect" the Ukrainian and Belarusian majority populations in these regions as a reason justifying the Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland (including Western Ukraine and Belarus), carried out in the wake of Poland's dismemberment under the Nazi invasion with Warsaw being besieged and with Poland's government being in the process of evacuation.Telegram of the German Ambassador in the Soviet Union, (Schulenburg) to the German Foreign Office Moscow, Moscow, September 16 : ...the Soviet Union had thus far not concerned itself about the plight of its minorities in Poland and had to justify abroad, in some way or other, its present intervention. Consequently, many Ukrainians, Belarusians and Jews welcomed the Soviet troops into the occupied territories. The total area, including the area given to Lithuania, was , with a population of 13.299 million, of which 5.274 million were ethnic Poles and 1.109 million were Jews.Concise statistical year-book of Poland, Polish Ministry of Information. London June 1941 pp. 9 & 10 An additional 138,000 ethnic Poles and 198,000 Jews fled the German occupied zone and became refugees in the Soviet occupied region.Poland's Holocaust, Tadeusz Piotrowski, 1998 p. 14 The borders were finalized in the September 28 German–Soviet Frontier Treaty, most of whose contents were kept secret.
Soviet authorities immediately started a campaign of sovietization. Passportization and residence registration of the population in the newly acquired territories began. Inhabitants of Kresy, on whom Soviet citizenship was imposed in November 1939, had to return documents issued by "former Poland" and obtain new citizenship of the USSR. The NKVD used the passportization system to carefully select people still living in Western Belarus and Western Ukraine. Those who did not receive the citizenship or refused to accept it (claiming that they were Polish citizens or not agreeing to enter Ukrainian or Belarusian nationality) were arrested or deported.
In March 1940, the authorities also decided about the fate of refugees from western Poland, who from September 1939 were in Kresy. Deportation of this group of about 75–80 thousand people, consisting mainly of Jews (about 84%), finally began on June 29, 1940, and lasted for nearly a month.
The Soviets organized staged elections, the result of which was to become a legitimization of Soviet annexation of eastern Poland. Soviet authorities attempted to erase Polish history and culture, withdrew the Polish currency without exchanging ruble, collectivized agriculture, Encyklopedia PWN, "OKUPACJA SOWIECKA W POLSCE 1939–41", last accessed on 1 March 2006, online , Polish language and nationalized and redistributed private and state-owned Polish property. Soviet authorities regarded service for the pre-war Polish state as a "crime against revolution" and "counter-revolutionary activity", and subsequently started arresting large numbers of Polish citizens. During the initial Soviet invasion of Poland, between 230,000 to 450,000 Poles were taken as prisoner, some of whom were executed. NKVD officers conducted lengthy interrogations of the prisoners in camps that were, in effect, a selection process to determine who would be killed.Fischer, Benjamin B., "The Katyn Controversy: Stalin's Killing Field", Studies in Intelligence, Winter 1999–2000. On March 5, 1940, pursuant to a note to Stalin from Lavrenty Beria, the members of the Soviet Politburo (including Stalin) signed an order to execute POWs, labeled "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries", kept at camps and prisons in occupied western Ukraine and Belarus. This became known as the Katyn massacre, in all some 22,000 were executed.Sanford, Google Books, pp. 20–24.
During Perestroika, former top ministers of Stalin such as Lazar Kaganovich and Vyacheslav Molotov claimed that in Katyn, of the 22,000 Polish officers, roughly 3,000 were killed by the NKVD in 1940, while others were later executed by Nazis.
During 1939–1941 1.45 million of the people inhabiting the region were deported by the Soviet regime, of whom 63.1% were Poles, and 7.4% were Jews. Previously it was believed that about one million Polish citizens died at the hands of the Soviets,Franciszek Proch, Poland's Way of the Cross, New York 1987. p. 146 however recently Polish historians, based mostly on queries in Soviet archives, estimate the number of deaths at about 350,000 people deported in 1939–1945.Project In Posterum (go to note on Polish Casualties by Tadeusz Piotrowski) Andrzej Paczkowski puts the number of Polish deaths at 90–100,000 of the 1.0 million persons deported and 30,000 executed by the Soviets.
The Vilnius Region, annexed by Poland in 1920, was transferred to Lithuania on the basis of Lithuania-Soviet Union agreement. Other northern territories were attached to Belastok Region, Hrodna Region, Navahrudak Region (soon renamed to Baranavichy Region), Pinsk Region and Vileyka (later Maladzyechna) Region in Byelorussian SSR. The territories to the south were transferred to the Ukrainian SSR: Drohobych Oblast, Lviv Oblast, Rivne Oblast, Stanislav (later known as Ivano-Frankivsk) Oblast, Ternopil Oblast and Volyn Oblast.
German occupation 1941–1944
These areas were conquered by Nazi Germany in 1941 during Operation Barbarossa. The Nazis divided them up as follows: Bezirk Białystok (district of Białystok), which included the Białystok, Bielsk Podlaski, Grajewo, Łomża, Sokółka, Vaukavysk, and Hrodna counties and was "attached to" (not incorporated into) East Prussia; Generalbezirk Litauen – the Vilna Province was incorporated into Lithuania, itself incorporated into the Reichskommissariat Ostland; Generalbezirk Weißruthenien – most of the Polish part of White Ruthenia (the western section of modern-day Belarus) was incorporated into the Reichskommissariat Ostland; Generalbezirk Wolhynien und Podolien – the Polish provinces of Volhynia and Polesie, which was incorporated into the Reichskommissariat Ukraine; and District Galicia, East Galicia, which was incorporated into the General Government and became its fifth district.
During 1943–1944 ethnic cleansing operations took place in Ukraine (commonly known as the Massacres of Poles in Volhynia) which brought about an estimated 100,000 deaths and an exodus of ethnic Poles from this territory.
The Polish and Jewish language population of the regions in 1939 totaled about 6.7 million. During the war, an estimated 2 million persons perished (including 1.2 million Jews). These numbers are included with Polish war losses. 2 million (including 250,000 Jews) became refugees to Poland or the West, 1.5 million were in the territories returned to Poland in 1945 and 1.2 million remained in the USSR.Krystyna Kersten, Szacunek strat osobowych w Polsce Wschodniej. Dzieje Najnowsze Rocznik XXI– 1994, pp. 46 & 47 Contemporary Russian historians also include the war losses of Poles and Jews from this region with Soviet war dead.Rossiiskaia Akademiia nauk. Liudskie poteri SSSR v period vtoroi mirovoi voiny: sbornik statei. Sankt-Peterburg 1995 p. 84