Soviet invasion of Poland

• 1. Introduction

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  On the morning of the 17th of September 1939, Polish schools were still open across the six easternmost voivodeships of Poland. Rail lines were running. Factories were operating. A French Navy ship loaded with Renault R35 tanks was sailing toward Romania. By all appearances, Poland was still fighting. Then the Red Army crossed the border, and everything changed.

  The Soviet invasion of Poland came sixteen days after Nazi Germany had struck from the west. It arrived without a formal declaration of war, without warning to the Polish population, and with a declaration from Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov that the Polish state had simply ceased to exist. What followed over the next twenty days would dissolve the Second Polish Republic entirely and divide its territory between two of the most powerful and ruthless regimes on earth.

  How did a country that had rebuilt itself after the First World War find itself swallowed from both sides in a matter of weeks? And what happened to the 13.5 million Polish citizens who suddenly found themselves subjects of the Soviet Union?

• 2. The Secret Pact

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  Joseph Stalin had been sending quiet signals to Berlin since at least 1936. Robert C. Grogin, author of Natural Enemies, contends that Stalin had been putting out feelers to the Nazis through personal emissaries years before the invasion ever happened. What Stalin wanted above all was an ironclad guarantee for his sphere of influence and a buffer zone stretching from Finland to Romania.

  The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed on the 23rd of August 1939, gave him exactly that. Beyond the public non-aggression clauses lay secret protocols that carved up northern and eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres. Poland would be partitioned. The territories east of the Pisa, Narev, Vistula, and San rivers would fall to the Soviet Union, along with Latvia, Estonia, and Finland.

  The economic arrangements came first. On the 19th of August 1939, German and Soviet officials concluded the 1939 German-Soviet Commercial Agreement: Soviet raw materials would be exchanged for German weapons, military technology, and civilian machinery. Two days later, the Soviet Union suspended its ongoing tripartite military talks with Britain and France.

  On the 25th of August, one day after the political pact was signed, Soviet negotiator Kliment Voroshilov met with French and British military delegations and told them plainly that in view of the changed political situation, no useful purpose could be served by continuing their conversations. Britain and Poland signed their own Mutual Assistance Pact the same day, but a secret protocol within that agreement specified that the European power Britain was obligated to defend Poland against was Germany. Germany alone.

• 3. Poland Still Standing

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  Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly, the Polish commander-in-chief, had ordered a general retreat to the southeast toward the Romanian Bridgehead on the 10th of September. By the 17th of September, historians Leszek Moczulski and Czesław Grzelak estimated between 650,000 and 750,000 Polish soldiers were still active in the field. Moczulski argued the Polish Army remained larger than most European armies.

  The territory still under Polish authority stretched roughly 200 kilometres wide and 950 kilometres long, from the Daugava in the north to the Carpathian Mountains in the south. Warsaw, Lwów, Wilno, Grodno, Tarnopol, and Lublin were still in Polish hands. Seventeen French cargo ships were at sea, heading toward Romania carrying fifty tanks, twenty airplanes, and large quantities of ammunition.

  In the city of Pińsk, workers were still assembling PZL.37 Łoś aircraft in a factory relocated out of Warsaw. Radio Lwów and Radio Warsaw II were still broadcasting on the 17th of September, though Radio Baranowicze and Radio Wilno had been bombed off the air the day before by the German Luftwaffe.

  Poland's military planners had not anticipated a Soviet attack. When drawing up the defensive Plan West in 1938, strategists assumed the Soviet Union would remain neutral. The entire eastern border was left to a Border Protection Corps of approximately twenty under-strength battalions with a maximum strength of 20,000 troops. Against what was coming, that number would prove staggeringly inadequate.

• 4. The Invasion Itself

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  A Red Army force of seven field armies entered eastern Poland on the 17th of September 1939, with combined strength estimated at between 450,000 and over 800,000 troops by Polish sources. Marshal Semyon Timoshenko commanded the Ukrainian Front while General Mikhail Kovalyov led the Belarusian Front.

  At 4:00 a.m. that morning, Rydz-Smigly ordered Polish troops to fall back and engage Soviet forces only in self-defense. But the German invasion had already shattered the Polish communication network. General Wilhelm Orlik-Rückemann, who had taken command of the Border Protection Corps on the 30th of August, received no official directives after his appointment. He and his subordinates kept fighting, only dissolving their unit on the 1st of October.

  Several Polish cities, including Dubno, Łuck, and Włodzimierz Wołyński, welcomed the Red Army peacefully, convinced it was marching against the Germans. General Juliusz Rómmel issued an unauthorized order to treat Soviet forces as allies before the situation became clear. Soviet forces took Wilno on the 19th of September after a two-day battle and captured Grodno on the 24th after a four-day battle. Lwów surrendered on the 22nd of September, after German troops had abandoned their own siege and handed it over to the Soviets.

  On that same the 22nd of September, German General Heinz Guderian and Soviet Brigadier Semyon Krivoshein held a joint military parade in the town of Brest, after the Brest Fortress had been passed from German to Soviet hands. By the 28th of September, the Red Army had reached the Narew-Western Bug-Vistula-San rivers line, the border agreed upon in advance with Germany.

  The last organised Polish resistance ended on the 6th of October 1939 when General Franciszek Kleeberg surrendered after the four-day Battle of Kock. On the 31st of October, Molotov reported to the Supreme Soviet: "A short blow by the German army, and subsequently by the Red Army, was enough for nothing to be left of this bastard state created at the Treaty of Versailles."

• 5. Terror and Annexation

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  Some 320,000 Poles were taken prisoner during the campaign. Soviet troops regularly failed to honor accepted terms of surrender. On the 24th of September, Soviet soldiers killed 42 staff and patients at a Polish military hospital in the village of Grabowiec, near Zamość. All Polish officers captured at the Battle of Szack on the 28th of September were executed.

  The NKVD killed 22,000 Polish military personnel and civilians in what became known as the Katyn massacre in 1940. Torture was widely used in NKVD prisons, especially in smaller towns. Soviet authorities confiscated, nationalized, and redistributed all private Polish property. Between the start of the occupation and the German invasion of 1941, Soviet police arrested approximately 100,000 Polish citizens.

  In November 1939, the Soviet government formally annexed the entire territory under its control. Show elections run by the NKVD in an atmosphere of terror were used to claim legitimacy for the takeover. The 13.5 million Polish citizens who fell under Soviet rule were declared Soviet subjects. Between 1939 and 1941, the NKVD sent hundreds of thousands of people from eastern Poland to Siberia and other remote parts of the Soviet Union in four major waves of deportation.

  Estimates on the total toll varied for decades because of denied access to Soviet archives. After the archives opened following 1989, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance announced in August 2009 that research placed the number of people deported to Siberia and those who had perished under Soviet wartime rule at around 150,000 Polish citizens in total.

• 6. A Divided Population

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  According to the last official Polish census, the 13.5 million inhabitants of the newly annexed territories were 38% Poles, 37% Ukrainians, 14.5% Belarusians, 8.4% Jews, 0.9% Russians, and 0.6% Germans. That ethnic complexity shaped how different communities experienced the invasion.

  Many Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Jews initially welcomed the Soviet troops. Local Communists gathered people to greet the Red Army in the eastern suburbs of Brest with bread and salt, decorated a triumphal arch with spruce branches and flowers, and hung a banner glorifying the USSR. The party official Lev Mekhlis reported to Stalin that the people of West Ukraine greeted Soviet troops like true liberators.

  Both Ukrainians and Belarusians in Poland had been subjected to Polonization policies and had suffered repression of separatist movements. The poor generally welcomed the Soviets; educated elites tended to oppose them, even if they supported the idea of reunification. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which had actively resisted Polish rule since the 1920s, found itself suppressed by Soviet authorities.

  Elections held on the 26th of October in both the Belorussian and Ukrainian communities were used to provide a veneer of legitimacy for the annexation. The Soviets introduced full Sovietization across Western Belorussia and Western Ukraine, including compulsory collectivization. All political parties and public associations were destroyed and their leaders imprisoned or executed as enemies of the people. The unifications of 1939 nonetheless proved to be decisive events in the histories of Ukraine and Belarus, creating the precursors to the two republics that eventually achieved independence after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

• 7. Denial and Memory

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  Soviet Politburo language styled the invasion a "liberation campaign" from its very beginning, and that framing persisted throughout Soviet history in all official publications. Even after a recovered copy of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was published in the Western press in 1979, the Soviet Union continued to deny their existence until 1989. Censorship was applied in the People's Republic of Poland to protect the official image of Polish-Soviet friendship. Underground publishers and artists kept challenging the official story, including the 1982 protest song Ballada wrześniowa by Jacek Kaczmarski.

  After the Soviet archives began opening following 1989, serious historical research became possible for the first time. Attempts to reconstruct the fully detailed history of the invasion and its consequences only became viable after the fall of the USSR in 1991.

  In 2009, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin wrote in a letter to the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 had been immoral. Six years later, as President, he reversed course: he expressed agreement with Russia's culture minister, who praised the pact as a triumph of Stalin's diplomacy for ensuring Soviet security.

  In 2016, Russia's Supreme Court upheld a conviction against blogger Vladimir Luzgin for "rehabilitation of Nazism" after he posted text on social media characterizing the 1939 invasion as a joint effort by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. On the 17th of September 2021, Russia's Foreign Ministry marked the 82nd anniversary of the invasion with a statement describing it as a campaign of liberation.