Kresy

• 1. Introduction

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  Kresy - a word that simply means "edge" in Polish - once described a vast territory stretching across what is now Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania. Nearly half the land of interwar Poland sat east of the Curzon Line, home to as many as 12 million people of wildly different languages, faiths, and origins. Poles were only a third of that population. Ukrainians made up another third. Jewish communities filled the small towns, which were in most cases shtetls. And yet this immense, plural territory became one of the most fought-over, mourned, and mythologized landscapes in Polish history. How did a borderland region become a wound that millions of Poles still carry? What happened to the people who lived there - and to those who were forced to leave? And what does it mean today that the cities of Lwów and Wilno, once centers of Polish learning and culture, now go by the names Lviv and Vilnius?

• 2. The Word Itself

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  Wincenty Pol first brought the word kresy into Polish literature in 1854, in his poem "Mohort," and in the work "Pieśń o ziemi naszej." Pol defined Kresy as the line between the Dniester and Dnieper rivers, near the Tatar borderland. The word itself is the plural of kres, meaning edge. Zbigniew Gołąb traced it back to a medieval borrowing from a German word for borderline, circumscribed territory, or delineation. Samuel Linde, in his Dictionary of the Polish Language, offered a different origin entirely - that kresy referred specifically to the boundary between Poland and the Crimean Khanate, along the lower Dnieper. Both etymologies point at the same idea: a frontier, a limit, the outermost reach of something.

  At the beginning of the 20th century, the word's meaning expanded. Kresy came to include all the former eastern provinces of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, east of the Lwów-Wilno line. In the Second Polish Republic, it referred to the historically Polish-settled lands beyond the Curzon Line, the frontier proposed in December 1919 by the British Foreign Office as the eastern border of a re-emerging Poland. The concept kept widening even after the territory was lost. Today it reaches back past the Second Republic to encompass lands that had been part of the Commonwealth before 1772 - anywhere Polish communities still exist. A word for an edge became a way of naming an absence.

• 3. Empires and Settlement

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  Polish settlement in the eastern borderlands goes back to 1018, when King Bolesław I the Brave invaded Kievan Rus', captured Kyiv, and annexed the Cherven Cities. By 1340, Red Ruthenia had come under Polish control, deepening Catholic settlement in the east. After the Union of Lublin in 1569, more settlers moved into the vast Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, mostly from the Polish provinces of Mazovia and Lesser Poland. They moved gradually into sparsely inhabited territory already home to Lithuanians and Ruthenians. Over generations, the indigenous upper classes adopted Polish Catholicism, culture, and language.

  The year 1772 ended that expansion. The first partition of the Commonwealth began, and by 1795 the whole eastern half of the state had been annexed - Russia taking the bulk, alongside the Habsburgs and Prussia's Hohenzollerns. The Russian takeover dramatically enlarged what the empire called its Jewish population. Kresy and the superimposed Pale of Settlement held a Jewish population of over five million, representing at that time 40% of the world Jewish population. The Pale itself had been devised by Catherine II of Russia to keep Jews from settling in the Orthodox Christian core of the empire - in cities like Moscow and Saint Petersburg. It extended from demarcation lines in the east to the borders with Prussia and Austria-Hungary, covering about 20% of European Russia, and largely tracing the old boundaries of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The area within the Pale was acquired through a series of military conquests and diplomatic moves between 1654 and 1815. Though the Pale's edicts were framed in religious terms - conversion to Russian Orthodoxy released individuals from its restrictions - historians argue the underlying motivations were primarily economic and nationalistic.

  For the Poles who remained, the partition era meant something different. Their lands became, from their perspective, "Stolen Lands." The Russian authorities responded to Polish-Lithuanian insurgencies, including the November Uprising and the January Uprising, with intensified persecution, property confiscations, penal deportations to Siberia, and systematic Russification. Institutions like Vilnius University, Jan Kazimierz University, and Krzemieniec Lyceum became embattled sites of Polish learning under pressure from the empire.

• 4. Poverty and Decline

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  After the Abolition of Serfdom in Poland in 1864 and the dispossession of Polish-Lithuanian landowners following the insurrections, the Russian Empire largely abandoned Kresy. The devastation of country estates halted large-scale economic activity that had depended on agriculture, forestry, brewing, and small industries. Southern Kresy - present-day Ukraine - was famous for its fertile soil and known across Europe as a bread basket. But even that reputation could not stop a broader collapse. By the late 19th century, the decline was acute enough that trade and food supplies became unreliable.

  Large-scale emigration followed. Jewish communities in particular began heading west, toward Western Europe and the United States. The German historian quoted in Polish sources called Kresy "the poorhouse of Poland." The Yad Vashem historian Leonid Rein went further, writing that it would not be an exaggeration to call it "the poor-house of the whole of Europe." By the time the Polish state re-emerged after World War I, the eastern borderlands had the lowest literacy levels in the country, because education had not been compulsory under Russian rule. The regions had suffered decades of neglect and underinvestment, and were less economically developed than western Poland. In the years between the wars, the Polish government undertook an active policy of Polonizing the region - enforcing Polish in schools and settling military colonists known as Osadniks - but these measures generated opposition from local Ukrainians and contributed to frequent conflicts in the southeastern part of Kresy, including the pacification of Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia.

• 5. September 1939 and Its Aftermath

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  On the 17th of September 1939, two and a half weeks after Germany invaded Poland from the west, Soviet forces crossed from the east. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had divided Eastern Europe between the two powers, and the whole of Kresy was now absorbed into Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania - often by means of terror. The new boundary was formalized in the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, signed on the 29th of September 1939. Newly created communist governments for Western Ukraine and Western Belarus immediately announced their intention to join the Soviet Union.

  In 1943-1944, a different horror unfolded. Units of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, with the help of Ukrainian peasants, carried out mass exterminations of Poles living in southeastern Kresy - events now known as the Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. The Soviet army re-annexed the territory by the end of July 1944. At the Tehran Conference in 1943, the Allied powers had already agreed to a new Soviet-Polish border, effectively ratifying Soviet acquisitions from September 1939, over the protests of the Polish government-in-exile in London.

  The result was a forced migration on a scale that reshaped Poland's internal geography. Poles from southern Kresy - now Ukraine - were forced mainly to Silesia. Those from the north, in Belarus and Lithuania, moved to Pomerania and Masuria. Polish residents of Lwów settled not only in Wrocław but also in Gliwice and Bytom. Between 1944 and 1946, more than a million Poles from Kresy were moved to the so-called Recovered Territories, including 150,000 from the area of Wilno, 226,300 from Polesia, 133,900 from Volhynia, 5,000 from Northern Bukovina, and 618,200 from Eastern Galicia. The so-called First Repatriation was chaotic. People waited weeks or months at railroad stations, where they were robbed by locals, Soviet soldiers, or Soviet rail workers. In Lithuania, at some point a one-suitcase policy was introduced, forcing people to abandon almost everything. In the years 1955-1959, a second mass repatriation took place. Over the whole period from 1945 to 1960, over two million Polish people left Kresy.

• 6. Living on Suitcases

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  Those who moved west did not feel at home. Sociologist Zdzisław Mach of the Jagiellonian University explained that people forced to resettle in the west had left land they considered sacred and moved to areas they associated with the enemy. Communist authorities initially refused to invest in the Recovered Territories because, like the settlers themselves, they were unsure how long those borders would hold. Polish settlers in former German areas remained insecure about their future there until the 1970s. As Mach described it, people in western Poland for years lived "on their suitcases," belongings packed for a return east that never came.

  In 1948, people born in the Eastern Borderlands made up 47.5% of the population of Opole, 44.7% of Baborów, and 47.5% of Wołczyn. By 2011, people with Kresy background still made up 25% of the population of the Opole Voivodeship. The village of Biała, near Chojnów, was split into Lower Biała and Upper Biała by the transplanted communities that settled it - and every year in September it hosts a festival called Kresowiana. A survey conducted in early 2012 found that almost 15% of Poland's population - between 4.3 and 4.6 million people - declared they were either born in Kresy or had a parent or grandparent from the region. In Lubusz Voivodeship, 51% of inhabitants said their family had ties to Kresy. One of the adages of the postwar years captured the mood precisely: "Just one atom bomb, and we will be back in Lwów again. Just a second one, small but strong, and we will be back in Wilno again."

• 7. Cradle of Polish Culture

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  Adam Mickiewicz, considered one of the greatest poets of Polish literature, was born in Zaosie in what is now Belarus. His Pan Tadeusz opens with the invocation: "O Lithuania, my fatherland, thou art like good health." Juliusz Słowacki, called the father of modern Polish drama, was born in Krzemieniec in present-day Ukraine. Czesław Miłosz, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in Seteniai in current Lithuania. Karol Szymanowski, the composer, was born in Tymoszówka, now Ukraine. Ignacy Jan Paderewski - composer, diplomat, pianist, and prime minister of Poland - was born in the village of Kurilovka, also in current Ukraine. Joseph Conrad, who wrote his novels in English, was born in Berdychiv in what is now Ukraine. Tadeusz Kościuszko, national hero of Poland, Lithuania, the United States and Belarus, was born in the village of Mereczowszczyzna in current Belarus.

  Under Communist rule, all Kresy-related topics were banned from publication. People born in the Eastern Borderlands were officially recorded as born in the Soviet Union. Very few Kresy-themed books or films passed the state censor. One of the exceptions was a comedy trilogy directed by Sylwester Chęciński - Sami swoi from 1967, Nie ma mocnych from 1974, and Kochaj albo rzuć from 1977 - an enormously popular series following two quarreling families resettled from what is now western Ukraine to Lower Silesia. After the fall of Communism, the old Kresy returned as a Polish cultural theme. Roman Aftanazy published a monumental eleven-volume work between 1991 and 1997 documenting the cultural heritage of estates and grand residences across the former Kresy. The Encyclopedia of Kresy eventually reached 3,600 articles, with a foreword written by Stanisław Lem, who was himself a notable figure from that world.

• 8. What Remains

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  In Lithuania today, Poles are the largest ethnic minority in the country. In Belarus, they are the second largest after Russians. According to the 2021 Lithuanian census, 183,000 Poles live there; the 2019 Belarusian census counted 288,000; the 2001 Ukrainian census recorded 144,130, though some Polish organizations dispute that figure and put the actual number as high as two million, most of them assimilated. A Polish minority of around 50,000 also lives in Latvia.

  The Wróblewski Library in Vilnius holds 160,000 volumes and 30,000 manuscripts, now belonging to the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. In Lviv, the Ossolineum remains one of the most important Polish cultural centers. A mass public campaign in Poland in 1945 aimed to transport the entire Ossolineum collection to Wrocław; it succeeded in recovering only 200,000 volumes, as the Soviets kept the bulk of the library in Lviv. Polish academics from Lwów helped establish the Polish University of Wrocław, taking over from the old German University of Breslau; those from Vilnius founded Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. In 2007, more than 700 Polish teachers were working across the former Soviet territories, most of them in Kresy. Since 2007, annual medals called Heritage of Eastern Borderlands have been awarded in Wrocław - the 2011 recipient was emeritus Archbishop of Wrocław, Henryk Gulbinowicz. The northern Kresy dialect survives along the Lithuanian-Belarusian border; the southern dialect, spoken in western Ukraine, is now considered endangered.