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Soviet invasion of Poland (1939)
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The 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland was a military operation that started without a formal declaration of war on 17 September 1939, during the early stages of World War II, sixteen days after the beginning of the Nazi German attack on Poland. It ended in a decisive victory for the Soviet Union's Red Army.
In early 1939, the Soviet Union tried to form an alliance against Nazi Germany with the United Kingdom, France, Poland, and Romania; but several difficulties arose, including the refusal of Poland and Romania to allow Soviet troops transit rights through their territories as part of collective security.
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The 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland was a military operation that started without a formal declaration of war on 17 September 1939, during the early stages of World War II, sixteen days after the beginning of the Nazi German attack on Poland. It ended in a decisive victory for the Soviet Union's Red Army.
In early 1939, the Soviet Union tried to form an alliance against Nazi Germany with the United Kingdom, France, Poland, and Romania; but several difficulties arose, including the refusal of Poland and Romania to allow Soviet troops transit rights through their territories as part of collective security. With the failure of the negotiations, the Soviets shifted from their anti-German stance and on 23 August 1939 signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. As a result, on 1 September, the Germans invaded Poland from the west; and on 17 September, the Red Army invaded Poland from the east. The Soviet government announced that it was acting to protect the Ukrainians and Belarusians who lived in the eastern part of Poland, because the Polish state had collapsed in the face of the German attack and could no longer guarantee the security of its own citizens.
The Red Army quickly achieved its targets, vastly outnumbering Polish resistance. About 230,000 Polish soldiers or more (452 500) were taken prisoners of war. The Soviet government annexed the territory newly under its control and in November declared that the 13.5 million Polish citizens who lived there were now Soviet citizens. The Soviets quelled opposition by executions and by arresting thousands. They sent hundreds of thousands (estimates vary) to Siberia and other remote parts of the USSR in four major waves of deportations between 1939 and 1941.
The Soviet invasion, which the Politburo called "the liberation campaign", led to the incorporation of millions of Poles, western Ukrainians and western Belarusians into the Soviet Ukrainian and Byelorussian republics. During the existence of the People's Republic of Poland, the invasion was a taboo subject, almost omitted from the official history in order to preserve the illusion of "eternal friendship" between members of the Eastern Bloc.
Prelude
In the late 1930s, the Soviet Union tried to form an anti-German alliance with the United Kingdom, France and Poland. The negotiations, however, proved difficult. The Soviets insisted on a sphere of influence stretching from Finland to Romania and asked for military support not only against anyone who attacked them directly but against anyone who attacked the countries in their proposed sphere of influence. From the beginning of the negotiations with France and Britain it was clear that Soviet Union demanded the right to occupy the Baltic States (Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania). Finland was to be included in the Soviet sphere of influence as well and the Soviets finally also demanded the right to enter Poland, Romania and the Baltic States whenever they felt their security was threatened. The governments of those countries rejected the proposal because, as Polish foreign minister Józef Beck pointed out, they feared that once the Red Army entered their territories, it might never leave. The Soviets did not trust the British and French to honour collective security, since they had failed to assist Spain against the Fascists or protect Czechoslovakia from the Nazis. They also suspected that the Western Allies would prefer the Soviet Union to fight Germany by itself, while they watched from the sidelines. In view of these concerns, the Soviet Union abandoned the talks and turned instead to negotiations with Germany.
On 23 August 1939, the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany, taking the allies by surprise. The two governments announced the agreement merely as a non-aggression treaty. As a secret appendix reveals, however, they had actually agreed to partition Poland between themselves and divide Eastern Europe into Soviet and German spheres of influence. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which has been described as a license for war, was a key factor in Hitler’s decision to invade Poland.
The treaty provided the Soviets with extra defensive space in the west. It also offered them a chance to regain territories ceded to Poland twenty years earlier and to unite the eastern and western Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples under a Soviet government, for the first time in the same state. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin saw advantages in a war in western Europe, which might weaken his ideological enemies and open up new regions to the advance of communism.
Soon after the Germans invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, the Nazi leaders began urging the Soviets to play their agreed part and attack Poland from the east. The German ambassador to Moscow, Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, and the Soviet foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, exchanged a series of diplomatic communiqués on the matter.
The Soviets delayed their intervention for several reasons. They were distracted by crucial events in their border disputes with Japan; they needed time to mobilise the Red Army; and they saw a diplomatic advantage in waiting until Poland had disintegrated before making their move. On 17 September 1939, Molotov declared on the radio that all treaties between the Soviet Union and Poland were now void, because the Polish government had abandoned its people and effectively ceased to exist. On the same day, the Red Army crossed the border into Poland.
Military campaign
The Red Army entered the eastern regions of Poland with seven field armies and between 450,000 and 1,000,000 troops. These were deployed on two fronts: the Belarusian Front under Mikhail Kovalyov, and the Ukrainian Front under Semyon Timoshenko. By this time, the Poles had failed to defend their western borders, and in response to German incursions had launched a major counter-offensive in the Battle of the Bzura. The Polish Army originally had a well-developed defensive plan to deal with the threat of the Soviet Union, but they were unprepared to face two invasions at once. By the time the Soviets invaded, the Polish commanders had sent most of their troops west to face the Germans, leaving the east protected by only 20 under-strength battalions. These battalions consisted of about 20,000 troops of border defence corps (Korpus Ochrony Pogranicza), under the command of general Wilhelm Orlik-Rueckemann.
At first, the Polish commander-in-chief, Marshal of Poland Edward Rydz-Smigly, ordered the border forces to resist the Soviets. He then changed his mind after consulting with Prime Minister Felicjan Slawoj Skladkowski and ordered them to fall back and engage the Soviets only in self-defense.
The two conflicting sets of orders led to confusion, and when the Red Army attacked Polish units, clashes and small battles inevitably broke out. The response of non-ethnic Poles to the situation added a further complication. In some cases, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Jews welcomed the invading troops as liberators. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists rose against the Poles, and communist partisans organised local revolts, for example in Skidel.
The Polish military's original fall-back plan was to retreat and regroup along the Romanian Bridgehead, an area in south-east Poland near the border with Romania. The idea was to adopt defensive positions there and wait for a promised French and British attack in the west. This plan assumed that Germany would have to reduce its operations in Poland in order to fight on a second front. The allies expected Polish forces to hold out for up to several months, but the Soviet attack made this strategy obsolete.
The Polish political and military leaders knew that they were losing the war against Germany even before the Soviet invasion settled the issue. Nevertheless, they refused to surrender or negotiate a peace with Germany. Instead, the Polish government ordered all military units to evacuate Poland and reassemble in France. The government itself crossed into Romania at around midnight on 17 September 1939 through the border-crossing in Zaleszczyki. Polish units proceeded to manoeuvre towards the Romanian bridgehead area, sustaining German attacks on one flank and occasionally clashing with Soviet troops on the other. In the days following the evacuation order, the Germans defeated the Polish Armies Kraków and Lublin at the Battle of Tomaszów Lubelski, which lasted from 17 September to 20 September.
Soviet units often met their German counterparts advancing from the opposite direction. Several notable examples of co-operation occurred between the two armies in the field. The Wehrmacht passed the Brest Fortress, which had been seized after the Battle of Brzesc Litewski, to the Soviet 29th Tank Brigade on 17 September. German General Heinz Guderian and Soviet Brigadier Semyon Krivoshein then held a joint parade in the town. Lwów (Lviv) surrendered on 22 September, days after the Germans handed the siege operations over to the Soviets. Soviet forces had taken Wilno on 19 September after a two-day battle, and they took Grodno on 24 September after a four-day battle. By 28 September, the Red Army had reached the line of the rivers Narew, Western Bug, Vistula and San—the border agreed in advance with the Germans.
Despite a tactical Polish victory on 28 September at the Battle of Szack, the outcome of the larger conflict was never in doubt. Civilian volunteers, militias, and reorganised retreating units held out in the Polish capital, Warsaw, until 28 September. The Modlin Fortress, north of Warsaw, surrendered the next day after an intense sixteen-day battle. On 1 October, Soviet troops drove Polish units into the forests at the battle of Wytyczno, one of the last direct confrontations of the campaign.
Some isolated Polish garrisons managed to hold their positions long after being surrounded; but the last operational unit of the Polish Army to surrender was General Franciszek Kleeberg's Independent Operational Group Polesie (Samodzielna Grupa Operacyjna "Polesie"). Kleeberg surrendered on 6 October after the four-day Battle of Kock (near Lublin), which ended the September Campaign. The Soviets were victorious. On 31 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 ugly creature of the Treaty of Versailles".
Allied reaction
The reaction of France and Britain to Poland's plight was muted, since neither wanted a confrontation with the Soviet Union at that stage. Under the terms of the Anglo-Polish Agreement of 25 August 1939, the British had promised Poland assistance if attacked by a European power; but when Polish Ambassador Edward Raczynski reminded Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax of the pact, he was bluntly told that it was Britain's business whether to declare war on the Soviet Union. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain considered making a public commitment to restore Polish statehood, but in the end he issued only general statements of condemnation.
The French had also made promises to Poland, including the provision of air support, and these were not honoured. Once the Soviets moved into Poland, the French and the British decided there was nothing they could do for Poland in the short term and began planning for a long-term victory instead. The French had advanced tentatively into the Saar in early September, but after the Polish defeat, they retreated behind the Maginot Line on 4 October. Many Poles resented this lack of support from their western allies, which aroused a lasting sense of betrayal.
Aftermath
In October 1939, Molotov reported to the Supreme Soviet that the Soviets had suffered 737 deaths and 1,862 casualties during the campaign, though Polish specialists claim up to 3,000 deaths and 8,000 to 10,000 wounded. On the Polish side, between 6,000 and 7,000 soldiers died fighting the Red Army, with 230,000 to 450,000 taken prisoner. The Soviets often failed to honour terms of surrender. In some cases, they promised Polish soldiers freedom and then arrested them when they laid down their arms.
The Soviet Union had ceased to recognise the Polish state at the start of the invasion. As a result, the two governments never officially declared war on each other. The Soviets therefore did not classify Polish military prisoners as prisoners of war but as rebels against the new legal government of Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia. The Soviets killed tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war. Some, like General Józef Olszyna-Wilczynski, who was captured, interrogated and shot on 22 September, were executed during the campaign itself. On 24 September, the Soviets killed forty-two staff and patients of a Polish military hospital in the village of Grabowiec, near Zamosc. The Soviets also executed all the Polish officers they captured after the Battle of Szack, on 28 September 1939. Over 20,000 Polish military personnel and civilians perished in the Katyn massacre. About 300 Poles were executed after the Battle of Grodno .
Torture was used on a wide scale in various prisons, especially those in small towns. Prisoners were scalded with boiling water in Bobrka; in Przemyslany, people had their noses, ears, and fingers cut off and eyes put out; in Czortkow, female inmates had their breasts cut off; and in Drohobycz, victims were bound together with barbed wire. Similar atrocities occurred in Sambor, Stanislawow, Stryj, and Zloczow. According to historian Jan T. Gross:
"We cannot escape the conclusion: Soviet state security organs tortured their prisoners not only to extract confessions but also to put them to death. Not that the NKVD had sadists in its ranks who had run amok; rather, this was a wide and systematic procedure."
The Poles and the Soviets re-established diplomatic relations in 1941, following the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement; but the Soviets broke them off again in 1943 after the Polish government demanded an independent examination of the recently discovered Katyn burial pits. The Soviets then lobbied the Western Allies to recognise the pro-Soviet Polish puppet government of Wanda Wasilewska in Moscow.
On 28 September 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany had changed the secret terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. They moved Lithuania into the Soviet sphere of influence and shifted the border in Poland to the east, giving Germany more territory. By this arrangement, often described as a fourth partition of Poland, the Soviet Union secured almost all Polish territory east of the line of the rivers Pisa, Narew, Western Bug and San. This amounted to about 200,000 square kilometres of land, inhabited by 13.5 million Polish citizens.
The Red Army had originally sown confusion among the locals by claiming that they were arriving to save Poland from the Nazis. Their advance surprised Polish communities and their leaders, who had not been advised how to respond to a Soviet invasion. Polish and Jewish citizens may at first have preferred a Soviet regime to a German one. However, the Soviets were quick to impose their ideology on the local ways of life. For instance, the Soviets quickly began confiscating, nationalising and redistributing all private and state-owned Polish property. During the two years following the annexation, the Soviets also arrested approximately 100,000 Polish citizens and deported between 350,000 and 1,500,000, of whom between 250,000 and 1,000,000 died, mostly civilians.
Territories of Second Polish Republic annexed by Soviet Union
Of the 13.5 million civilians living in the newly annexed territories, Poles were the largest single ethnic group; but Belarusians and Ukrainians together made up over 50% of the population. The annexation did not give the Soviet Union control of all the areas where Belarusians or Ukrainians lived, some of which fell west of the new German–Soviet border. Nonetheless, it united the vast majority of the two peoples within the expanded Soviet Byelorussian and Ukrainian republics.
On 26 October 1939, "elections" to Byelorussian and Ukrainian assemblies were held, to give the annexation an appearance of validity. The Belarusians and Ukrainians in Poland had been increasingly alienated by the Polonization policies of the Polish government and its repression of their separatist movements, so they felt little loyalty towards the Polish state. Not all Belarusians and Ukrainians, however, trusted the Soviet regime responsible for the Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33. In practice, the poor generally welcomed the Soviets, and the elites tended to join the opposition, despite supporting the reunification itself.
The Soviets quickly introduced Sovietization policies in Western Byelorussia and Western Ukraine, including compulsory collectivization of the whole region. In the process, they ruthlessly broke up political parties and public associations and imprisoned or executed their leaders as "enemies of the people". The authorities even suppressed the anti-Polish Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which had actively resisted the Polish regime since the 1920s; despite their change of overlord, Ukrainian nationalists continued to aim for an independent, undivided Ukrainian state. The unifications of 1939 were nevertheless a decisive event in the history of Ukraine and Belarus, because they produced two republics which eventually achieved independence in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Censorship
Soviet censors later suppressed many details of the 1939 invasion and its aftermath. The Politburo had from the first called the operation a "liberation campaign", and later Soviet statements and publications never wavered from that line. On 30 November 1939, Stalin stated that it was not Germany who had attacked France and England, but France and England who had attacked Germany; and the following March, Molotov claimed that Germany had tried to make peace and been turned down by "Anglo-French imperialists". All subsequent Soviet governments denied that there had ever been a secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; but when the document was "found" in the Soviet archives in 1989, the truth was finally acknowledged. Censorship was also applied in the People's Republic of Poland, to preserve the image of "Polish-Soviet friendship" promoted by the two communist governments. Official policy allowed only accounts of the 1939 campaign that portrayed it as a reunification of the Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples and a liberation of the Polish people from "oligarchic capitalism.” The authorities strongly discouraged any further study or teaching on the subject. However, various underground publications (bibula) addressed the issue, as did other media, such as the 1982 protest song of Jacek Kaczmarski (Ballada wrzesniowa.)
Orders of battle
See articles:
Bibliography
- This section lists printed references used for this article. For inline citations, see references section above.
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