On the basis of a secret clause of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17, 1939, capturing the eastern provinces of the Second Polish Republic. Lwów (present-day Lviv), the capital of the Lwów Voivodeship and the principal city and cultural center of the region of Galicia, was captured and occupied by September 22, 1939 along with other provincial capitals, including Tarnopol, Brześć, Stanisławów, Łuck, and Wilno to the north. The eastern provinces of interwar Poland were inhabited by an ethnically mixed population, with ethnic Poles as well as Polish Jews dominant in the cities, and ethnic Ukrainians dominating the countryside and overall. These lands now form the backbone of modern Western Ukraine and Western Belarus.Norman Davies, God's Playground (Polish edition). Second volume, pp. 512-513.

The addition of these territories, along with other posterior territorial gains from Romania, resulted in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic gaining in area, and increasing its population by over seven million people from 1938 to 1941. Eastern Galicia and Volhynia were the regions that contributed the most to this.Ukraine: A Concise Encyclopedia, Volume I (1963). Edited by Volodymyr Kubiyovych. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. pp. 831–833 and pp.872–874Orest Subtelny. (1988). Ukraine: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 455–457. Some other Polish territory also invaded by the Soviet Union was given to Soviet Belarus.

History

On September 17, 1939 the Red Army entered Polish territory, acting on the basis of a secret clause of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union would later deny the existence of this secret protocol, claiming that it was never allied with the German Reich, and acted independently to protect the Ukrainian and White Ruthenian (modern Belarusian) minorities in the disintegrating Polish state.Anna M. Cienciala (2004). The Coming of the War and Eastern Europe in World War II (lecture notes, University of Kansas). Retrieved 15 March 2006. Composed of mostly ethnic Ukrainian Soviet troops under the command of Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, the Soviet forces occupied the eastern areas of Poland within 12 days, capturing the regions of Galicia and Volhynia with little Polish opposition, and occupying the principal city, Lwów, by September 22.

According to Volodymyr Kubiyovych, Soviet troops were greeted with genuine joy by the Ukrainian villagers due to the Polish government's discrimination against the Ukrainian minority in previous years. Not all Ukrainians trusted the Soviet regime, however, mainly due to its role in the Ukrainian Famine of 1932–1933. pp. 1001–1003. In practice, the poor generally welcomed the Soviets, while the elites tended to join the opposition, despite supporting the unification of Ukraine.Andrzej Nowak, The Russo-Polish Historical Confrontation, Sarmatian Review, January 1997, Volume XVII, Number 1. Retrieved 16 July 2007.

Immediately after entering Poland's territory, the Soviet army helped to set up "provisional administrations" in the cities and "peasant committees" in the villages in order to organize one-list elections to the new "People's Assembly of Western Ukraine". The elections were designed to give the annexation an appearance of validity, but in practice voters often were only presented with a single candidate, usually a local communist or someone sent to western Ukraine from Soviet Ukraine,Paul Robert Magocsi. (1983). Galicia: A historical Survey and Bibliographic Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press pg. 207 for each position of deputy; the Communist Party commissars then provided the assembly with resolutions that would push through nationalization of banks and heavy industry and transfers of land to peasant communities., pp. 29–30. Elections took place on October 22, 1939; the official numbers reported participation of 93 percent of the electorate, 91 percent of whom supported the appointed candidates. Based on these results, the People's Assembly of Western Ukraine, headed by Kyryl Studynsky (a prominent academic and figure in the Christian Social Movement), consisted of 1,484 deputies. They met in Lwów on October 26–28, where they were addressed by Nikita Khrushchev and other representatives of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The assembly voted unanimously to thank Stalin for liberation and sent a delegation headed by Studynsky to Moscow to ask for formal inclusion of the territories into the Ukrainian SSR. The Supreme Soviet voted to do so on November 1, 1939, and on November 15 a law was passed officially making the former eastern Polish territories a part of the Ukrainian SSR.

Soviet policies in the newly annexed territories Law and order

A week after the start of World War II, on 8 September 1939, Lavrentiy Beria issued an order, according to which Narkom of the NKVD in the Ukrainian SSR Ivan Serov had to organize the NKVD operational groups (opergroups).Konstantin Nikitenko. The bloody "Gold" of the 1939 September. Sovietization of Western Ukraine (Кровавое "золото" сентября 1939-го. Советизация Западной Украины). The Mirror Weekly. 11 September 2015 They were tasked among other functions with the clearing of "liberated" regions from the "anti-Soviet elements". Despite that, to assist, the NKVD special groups out of the Kiev Special Military District (from July 1939 to June 1941 Kiev Military District had status "special") were allocated several additional battalions of 300 warriors each, Serov asked Beria to allow him to create new groups and increase staff of "punishers". The First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine Nikita Khrushchev asked the chief of the Special Department of the Ukrainian Front Anatoliy Mikheyev, a 28 year old major, "What kind of a job is it when no one is executed?"

On 14 December 1939, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine adopted a resolution "On the payment of pensions to pensioners of the former Western Ukraine (О выплате пенсий пенсионерам бывшей Западной Украины)" which in the first months in Lviv alone left over 4,300 residents without pensions (those included former police servicemembers, civil officials, judges, "cult servants"). The majority of those pensioners lived the rest of their lives in shelters for the infirm and disabled.

For the Red Army and its servicemembers, law and order in occupied Lviv was a merely a formality. Pogroms, rape, robberies, and unreasonable executions became an everyday occurrence. The military shot prisoners as well as civilians. Looting spread. The unlawful incidents became so big a problem that the 6th Army prosecutor Nechyporenko was forced to write a personal letter to Stalin asking to intervene and stop the atrocities. Special brutality was noted against priests and bishops; in particular, the Chekists (members of Cheka) made bishop Symon walk naked on the streets of Kremenets towards a local prison hitting him with rifle stocks on the way.

Government and administration

The lands annexed by the Soviet Union were administratively reorganized into six oblasts similar to those in the rest of the Soviet Union (Drohobych Oblast, Lviv Oblast, Rivne Oblast, Stanislav (later Ivano-Frankivsk) Oblast, Tarnopil Oblast and Volyn Oblast). The civilian administration in those regions annexed from Poland was organized by December 1939 and was drawn mostly from newcomers from eastern Ukraine and Russia; only 20% of government employees were from the local population. It was falsely assumed by many Ukrainians that a disproportionate number of people working for the Soviet administration came from within the Jewish community. The reason for this belief was that most of the previous Polish administrators were deported, and the local Ukrainian intelligentsia who could have taken their place were generally deemed to be too nationalistic for such work by the Soviets. In reality, most positions were staffed by ethnic Ukrainians from the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, in the eyes of many Ukrainians the Jews came to be associated with Soviet rule, which contributed to rising anti-Jewish sentiments.Ukrainian Collaboration in the Extermination of the Jews during the Second World War: Sorting Out the Long-Term and Conjunctural Factors by John-Paul Himka, University of Alberta. Taken from The Fate of the European Jews, 1939–1945: Continuity or Contingency, ed. Jonathan Frankel (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Studies in Contemporary Jewry 13 (1997): 170–189. The Polish language was eliminated from public life, and Ukrainian became the language of the government and the courts. All Polish institutions were abolished, and all Polish officials, civil servants, and police were deported to Siberia or Central Asia.Paul Robert Magocsi. (1996). A History of Ukraine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press

Ukrainian organizations not controlled by the Soviets were limited or abolished. Hundreds of credit unions and cooperatives that had served the Ukrainian people between the wars were shut down. All local Ukrainian political parties were abolished, and between 20,000 and 30,000 Ukrainian activists fled to German-occupied territory; most of those who did not escape were arrested. For example, Dr. Dmytro Levitsky, former head of the moderate Ukrainian political party Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance (UNDO) that had dominated Ukrainian political life between the world wars and chief of the Ukrainian delegation in the pre-war Polish parliament, was arrested alongside many of his colleagues, deported to Moscow, and never heard from again.John Armstrong (1963). Ukrainian Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press, pg. 65 The elimination of the individuals, organizations and parties that represented moderate or liberal political tendencies left the extremist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which operated in the underground, as the only political party with a significant organizational presence left in western Ukraine.

Education and healthcare

Due to the sensitive location of western Ukraine along the border with German-held territory, the Soviet administration made attempts, initially, to gain the loyalty and respect of the Ukrainian population. Healthcare, especially in the villages, was improved dramatically. Between the two world wars, Poland had drastically reduced the number of Ukrainian-language schools. Many of these were now reopened and, although Russian became a mandatory foreign-language course, the schools were taught in Ukrainian. Ukrainian was reintroduced in the University of Lviv (where the Polish government had banished it during the interwar years), which became thoroughly Ukrainized and renamed after Ukrainian writer Ivan Franko. The Soviet authorities established a branch of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Lviv, and some leading non-Communist Ukrainian scholars were invited to staff these institutions. University students from Eastern Ukraine were brought to Lviv and western Ukrainian students, professors, and other cultural figures were sent on Soviet-funded trips to Kiev. An unintended result of such exchanges was that the Galician youth were disagreeably surprised by the material poverty and widespread use of Russian in Soviet Ukraine, while the incoming students to western Ukraine became exposed to and sometimes came to adopt the typical form of Ukrainian nationalism dominant in the west.John Armstrong (1963). Ukrainian Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 63–72 In contrast to the dramatic expansion of educational opportunities within the Soviet system, non-Soviet controlled educational institutions such as the popular Prosvita society reading rooms, the Shevchenko Scientific Society, libraries and community theaters, and the Russophile Stauropegion Institute were closed or abolished.