Territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union

• 1. Introduction

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  Seventeen days after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the Soviet Union sent its own forces across Poland's eastern border. The region they entered was known as the Kresy, a vast stretch of land totaling more than 200,000 square kilometers, home to nearly 13.3 million people. What followed was not a rescue or a liberation. It was an annexation, carefully planned in secret months before the first German tank crossed a Polish frontier.

  The people caught in this eastward sweep included Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Jews, Lithuanians, Czechs, and others. Their fates were tangled together in deportations, executions, and ethnic cleansing that would continue for years. And the land itself, once part of the Polish state, would not return to Polish hands. It would be swallowed into the Soviet republics of Ukraine and Byelorussia and stay there.

  How did a secret agreement signed in the early hours of the 24th of August 1939, determine the fate of millions of people? What happened to the Poles who stayed, and the ones who were taken? And what did the postwar world decide to do about all of it?

• 2. The Secret Pact

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  Early in the morning of the 24th of August 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed what they called a 10-year non-aggression pact. Its public face was unremarkable. What made it consequential was a secret protocol buried within it, one that would not be revealed until after Germany's defeat in 1945.

  That protocol divided Northern and Eastern Europe between the two powers. Finland, Estonia, and Latvia went into the Soviet sphere. Poland would be split: the east would go to the Soviets, the west to Germany. The dividing line followed the Narev, Vistula, and San rivers. Lithuania initially fell into the German sphere, but a second secret protocol agreed in September 1939 assigned the majority of Lithuania to the USSR instead. Part of the arrangement gave Lithuania its historical capital, Vilnius, which Poland had held during the interwar period.

  The eastern Polish territories in question had not always been Polish. They were annexed by Poland in a series of wars between 1918 and 1921, primarily through the Polish-Soviet War. Their populations were far from uniform. Poles and Ukrainians were the most numerous groups in the cities, while the countryside in the south was predominantly Ukrainian and the countryside in the north predominantly Belarusian. Jews made up significant minorities throughout.

• 3. Invasion and Sovietization

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  The Soviet army crossed into eastern Poland under a stated pretext: the need to protect the Ukrainian and Belarusian majority populations living there. That framing was not entirely without basis. During the interwar period, the Second Polish Republic had carried out what historian Orest Subtelny described as "collective punishment" against thousands of "mostly innocent peasants" in a programme of oppression against Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Jewish minorities. A specific campaign, referred to as the Pacification of Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia, destroyed buildings and property and resulted in beatings and arrests.

  As a result, many Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Jews initially welcomed the Soviet troops. The total area occupied, including the portion transferred to Lithuania, came to 201,015 square kilometers. Its population of 13.299 million included 5.274 million ethnic Poles and 1.109 million Jews. An additional 138,000 ethnic Poles and 198,000 Jews fled the German-occupied zone and became refugees in the Soviet-occupied region.

  Soviet authorities moved fast. A campaign of sovietization began immediately. The authorities imposed Soviet citizenship on the inhabitants in November 1939 and required them to surrender documents issued by what they now called "former Poland." The NKVD used the resulting passportization system to identify and sort the population. Those who refused Soviet citizenship or claimed to be Polish citizens were arrested or deported. Soviet authorities withdrew the Polish currency without exchanging rubles, collectivized farms, and nationalized private and state-owned property. Service for the pre-war Polish state was reclassified as a "crime against revolution."

  Staged elections were organized to provide a legal cover for annexation. The borders were formally sealed on the 28th of September 1939, through the German-Soviet Frontier Treaty, most of whose contents remained secret.

• 4. Deportation and the Katyn Massacre

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  Between 1939 and 1941, the Soviet regime deported 1.45 million people from the occupied eastern Polish territories. Of those deported, 63.1% were Poles and 7.4% were Jews. In March 1940, Soviet authorities decided the fate of the roughly 75,000 to 80,000 refugees from western Poland who had fled into Kresy after September 1939. About 84% of that group were Jews. Their deportation began on the 29th of June 1940, and lasted nearly a month.

  On the 5th of March 1940, something far more deliberate took place. Lavrenty Beria submitted a note to Stalin recommending the execution of Polish prisoners of war held in camps and prisons in occupied western Ukraine and Belarus. Members of the Soviet Politburo, including Stalin himself, signed the order. The men targeted were labeled "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries." NKVD officers had already conducted lengthy interrogations in the camps, effectively selecting who would die. In all, some 22,000 people were executed. This became known as the Katyn massacre.

  Decades later, during the Perestroika period, former top Stalinist ministers including Lazar Kaganovich and Vyacheslav Molotov offered a much lower figure, claiming only around 3,000 were killed by the NKVD in 1940 and that the rest were executed by the Nazis. Polish historians, drawing on queries into Soviet archives, have since estimated total Polish deaths at the hands of the Soviets at around 350,000 for the period 1939-1945. Andrzej Paczkowski puts the number of Polish deaths at 90,000 to 100,000 of approximately 1 million people deported, plus 30,000 executed.

• 5. German Occupation and Mass Death

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  Operation Barbarossa in 1941 expelled the Soviets from these territories, and Nazi Germany took control. The Germans divided the region into several administrative units. Bezirk Bialystok was attached to East Prussia. Much of what had been western Belarus was absorbed into the Reichskommissariat Ostland. The provinces of Volhynia and Polesie were incorporated into the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. East Galicia was made the fifth district of the General Government, under which most of occupied Poland already fell. The Vilna Province was incorporated into Lithuania, itself subsumed into the Reichskommissariat Ostland.

  In 1943 and 1944, ethnic cleansing operations in Ukraine, commonly known as the Massacres of Poles in Volhynia, killed an estimated 100,000 people and drove ethnic Poles from the territory. The Polish and Jewish language populations of the entire region in 1939 had totaled about 6.7 million. By the end of the war, an estimated 2 million had perished, including 1.2 million Jews. Another 2 million, including 250,000 Jews, became refugees in Poland or the West. About 1.5 million were in the territories returned to Poland in 1945, and 1.2 million remained in the USSR.

• 6. Yalta, Potsdam, and Permanent Loss

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  When Soviet forces re-entered Poland in July 1944 in pursuit of the German army, the Polish prime minister in exile flew to Moscow alongside Churchill. He attempted to prevent the permanent Soviet annexation of eastern Poland. He offered to cede a smaller section of land. Stalin declined, offering instead to let the exiled government participate in the Polish Committee of National Liberation.

  At the Yalta Conference, the Allies reluctantly agreed that the Soviet Union would annex the entirety of its designated portion of eastern Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Poland would receive part of eastern Germany in exchange. These arrangements were confirmed at the Potsdam Conference. The Western Allies were unaware, at the time, that the secret clause dividing Poland between Hitler and Stalin in 1939 had already drawn the line along what was called the Curzon Line.

  On the 16th of August 1945, the Communist-dominated Provisional Government of National Unity signed a treaty formally ceding these territories to the USSR. Some portions, covering 21,275 square kilometers and 1.5 million inhabitants near Bialystok and Przemysl, were returned to postwar Poland. The rest was absorbed permanently into the Ukrainian and Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republics. Poland ended the war slightly smaller than before: its total territory shrank by roughly 77,000 square kilometers, an area approximately equal to Belgium and the Netherlands combined. The regime that replaced the prewar Polish state called the compensatory German eastern territories the "Recovered Territories."

• 7. After the War

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  The populations of the annexed territories who had survived the war were extraordinarily diverse. According to the 1931 Polish census, the territories permanently annexed by the USSR held about 10.653 million people, a figure that had grown to roughly 11.6 million by 1939. By language group, Ukrainians made up 37.1%, Poles 36.5%, Belarusians 15.1%, Yiddish speakers 8.3%, and others 3%. By religion, Eastern Orthodox adherents made up 31.6%, Roman Catholics 30.1%, Ukrainian Greek Catholics 26.7%, Jews 9.9%, and others 1.7%.

  The violence did not end in 1945. Between 1944 and 1952, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought an armed struggle against the Soviet communists. The Soviets responded by deporting 600,000 people from those territories, and 170,000 people were killed in the fighting. Red Army soldiers also continued to attack the civilian population in what became postwar Polish territory. In March 1998, Polish historian Wladyslaw Mochocki published an article documenting these attacks, based on material from Polish archives, covering the period from 1945 to 1947.

  The Kresy that had held around 5.274 million Poles in 1939 was reduced after years of war, ethnic cleansing, and deportation to approximately 1.8 million inhabitants. In June 1951, the Soviet-Polish border was realigned in two areas, the last formal adjustment to a boundary that had been drawn, ultimately, by the secret handshake of two dictators in the summer of 1939.