The USSR annexes eastern Poland

On 1 November 1939 an extraordinary session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in Moscow passed a law “on the incorporation of Western Ukraine into the Union of SSR and its reunification with the Ukrainian SSR”, and the next day, 2 November, a similar law on “Western Byelorussia”. By these two acts the Soviet Union formally seized some 200,000 square kilometres of the Republic’s territory – more than half of its pre-war area – with around 13 million inhabitants. The two laws are often bracketed together under 1 November. In fact the south-eastern lands were annexed on 1 November and the north-eastern ones a day later. The annexation was preceded by a carefully stage-managed procedure: “elections” to people’s assemblies, their “requests” for admission to the USSR and ceremonial votes in Moscow. It was meant to show the world that the Red Army had not conquered a foreign country but had “liberated” Ukrainians and Byelorussians who themselves wished to live in the Soviet state.

From occupation to “liberation”

When on 17 September the Red Army crossed Poland’s eastern border, Soviet propaganda presented the invasion as help for “our Ukrainian and Byelorussian brothers”, abandoned by a disintegrating Polish state. In fact it was carrying out the provisions of the secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which divided Poland between Germany and the USSR. The final dividing line, along the Pisa, Narew, Bug and San rivers, was laid down by the Boundary and Friendship Treaty of 28 September. To the east of it lay the voivodeships of Wilno, Nowogródek, Białystok, Polesie, Volhynia, Tarnopol and Stanisławów and the eastern part of the Lwów voivodeship, with Lwów (Lviv), Wilno (Vilnius), Grodno, Brest and Białystok.

It was a land of many nations. According to estimates cited by the historian Elżbieta Trela-Mazur, Poles made up about 38 per cent of the population here, Ukrainians about 37 per cent, Byelorussians about 14.5 per cent and Jews more than 8 per cent. Several hundred thousand refugees from western and central Poland, who had fled the Germans in September, had also arrived. Poles predominated in the towns and in parts of the northern voivodeships, Ukrainians in the countryside of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia, Byelorussians in Polesie and the Nowogródek region. Moscow exploited this diversity, and the real grievances of the minorities in the Second Polish Republic, in its propaganda. Some of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian rural poor, and some Jewish youth, at first greeted the Soviet troops with hope, or with relief that it was not the Germans who had come.

From the very first days the Red Army set up “provisional administrations” in the towns and districts of the occupied lands, and “peasant committees” in the villages, which shared out the landowners’ estates. At the same time NKVD operational groups were at work, arresting officials, policemen, officers, landowners, political activists of all parties, Ukrainian and Jewish ones included, and clergymen. At communist instigation, or with the new authorities standing by, Polish soldiers, policemen and settlers were murdered. Political oversight of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia was exercised by the First Secretary of the party in Ukraine, Nikita Khrushchev, and of the northern lands by his Byelorussian counterpart, Panteleimon Ponomarenko.

Elections without a choice

On 1 October 1939 the party’s Politburo in Moscow decided to convene two people’s assemblies, a Ukrainian one in Lwów and a Byelorussian one in Białystok, which were to “request” admission to the USSR. A Polish assembly for the Lublin region and eastern Mazovia had originally also been considered, but after 28 September those lands fell to Germany and the plan was dropped. On 7 October the election campaign began. Its slogans were the confiscation of the landlords’ estates, the nationalisation of banks and factories, and union with the Soviet Union. Candidates were designated in advance by the party and the military authorities, usually one per constituency. They included local communists and sympathisers, but also people sent from the east, as well as figures well known locally whose names were meant to lend the list credibility.

Voting took place on Sunday 22 October. Agitators went from door to door, and those who did not come to the polling station were visited with a ballot box. Uniformed NKVD officers and soldiers stood in the electoral commissions and at the polling stations. Failing to vote was regarded as a hostile act, and many voters feared that their names would end up on lists. According to official figures, turnout was 92.8 per cent in “Western Ukraine” and 96.7 per cent in “Western Byelorussia”, and the designated candidates received more than 90 per cent of the votes. Even in these conditions, in a dozen or so constituencies (according to Polish studies, 11 in the south and 2 in the north) the candidates failed to win a majority and the vote had to be repeated. Historians agree that the elections were rigged and held under duress, and that the procedure itself was contrary to international law. The Fourth Hague Convention of 1907, which Russia had ratified, forbade an occupier to change the political system and the sovereignty of occupied territory before a peace had been concluded.

Lwów and Białystok

The People’s Assembly of Western Ukraine, numbering 1,484 deputies according to Soviet figures, sat on 26–28 October in the Grand Theatre in Lwów. As its oldest member, the session was opened by the Ukrainian literary historian Professor Kyrylo Studynsky, a veteran figure of Ukrainian public life in Galicia, who then led the delegation to Moscow. The guests from the east were represented by Khrushchev. On 27 October the assembly unanimously proclaimed the establishment of Soviet power, asked the Supreme Soviet to admit “Western Ukraine” to the Ukrainian SSR, and voted for the confiscation without compensation of land belonging to landlords, the Church and officials, and for the nationalisation of the banks and large-scale industry. The resolutions were full of accusations against the “Polish lords”, and 17 September was declared a holiday.

The People’s Assembly of Western Byelorussia, with more than 900 deputies, sat in Białystok from 28 to 30 October. On 29 October it adopted a similar declaration on union with the Byelorussian SSR, the confiscation of land and nationalisation. In Polish memory these proceedings are associated with the slogan “death to the white eagle”, which is said to have accompanied the assembly. Both delegations, the so-called “plenipotentiary commissions”, then travelled to Moscow.

The laws of 1 and 2 November

The extraordinary session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR convened on 31 October. That day the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars and People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Vyacheslav Molotov, gave a speech on foreign policy in which he praised the agreement with Germany and declared that one swift blow, first by the German Army and then by the Red Army, had been enough to leave nothing of “this ugly offspring of the Versailles Treaty”, as he called Poland. The phrase became one of the most frequently quoted proofs of how Moscow regarded a state to which only a few weeks earlier it had been bound by the non-aggression pact of 1932, extended until 1945.

On 1 November the deputies “heard” the request of the Lwów delegation and unanimously passed the law on the incorporation of Western Ukraine into the USSR and its “reunification” with the Ukrainian SSR. On 2 November they passed the law on Western Byelorussia and its union with the Byelorussian SSR. In mid-November sessions of the supreme soviets of both republics in Kiev and Minsk formally “accepted” the new territories (sources give dates between 12 and 15 November). The 1936 Constitution of the USSR and the whole body of Soviet law came into force in the annexed area. A decree of 4 December divided it into oblasts on the Soviet model: Lwów, Drohobycz, Stanisławów, Tarnopol, Volhynia and Równe in the south, and Białystok, Baranowicze, Brest, Wilejka and Pińsk in the north. Łomża and Zambrów, historically part of Mazovia, were also assigned to the Byelorussian lands.

Wilno for Lithuania

Moscow gave away part of its spoils. Under the agreement of 10 October, Wilno with part of the Wilno region, some 6,700–6,900 square kilometres, was handed over to Lithuania in exchange for Soviet garrisons in that country. The Lithuanian army entered the city at the end of October, while the assemblies were sitting in Lwów and Białystok. Wilno, where Poles and Jews formed the overwhelming majority and Lithuanians about one per cent, was thus not covered by the November laws, but its fate too depended on Stalin. The rest of the Wilno voivodeship, with Lida, Oszmiana and Mołodeczno, remained in the Byelorussian SSR.

Soviet citizens by compulsion

On 29 November 1939 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR issued a decree under which the inhabitants of the annexed lands who were present there at the moment of annexation automatically became Soviet citizens. No one asked for their consent. The decree brought with it the issuing of Soviet internal passports, the registration of the population and the obligation to serve in the Red Army, into which, according to various estimates, between 100,000 and 300,000 Polish citizens were conscripted in 1939–1941. Passport registration also became an instrument of control. Refugees from the German zone who refused to accept Soviet citizenship and wanted to return home, most of them Jews, found themselves on the deportation lists in the summer of 1940. In December 1939 the złoty was withdrawn from circulation and the rouble became the only currency, which overnight robbed many people of their savings.

Sovietisation embraced every sphere of life. Industry, banks, trade and apartment buildings were nationalised; schools, including denominational ones, were taken over by the state and turned into places of communist indoctrination. The university in Lwów carried on, but as a Ukrainian institution. Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish organisations, parties and cooperatives were closed down. The Churches were stripped of their property, and the clergy were burdened with taxes and arrested. The land distributed to the peasants soon began to be taken over for collective farms, which turned against the new authorities some of those who had at first welcomed them. Arrests continued without let-up. According to estimates based on Soviet documents, by June 1941 the NKVD had arrested more than 100,000 people in these lands. They included Poles, but also Ukrainian, Byelorussian and Jewish activists, Zionists and Bundists.

Poland’s protest

The Polish government-in-exile of General Władysław Sikorski in Paris recognised neither the “elections” nor the annexation. As early as 21 October the Foreign Minister, August Zaleski, issued a note protesting against the vote ordered by the occupier and declaring it devoid of legal force. Poland maintained that its eastern border was the border established by the Peace of Riga of 1921. Britain and France did not recognise the annexation, but went no further. Their guarantees concerned German aggression, and London and Paris still hoped that the Soviet Union could be detached from Hitler. From the perspective of the occupied country, the difference between the two invaders was slight in those months: in the west the Germans were annexing Polish lands to the Reich and creating the General Government, in the east the Soviet Union was annexing them to its republics.

Its place in the history of the war

The November laws completed the fourth partition of Poland. From then on Moscow treated the eastern borderlands as its own land and Polish citizens as its own, with grim consequences. On 10 February 1940 the NKVD carried out the first mass deportation, sending the families of military settlers, foresters and officials deep into the USSR. Further deportations followed in April 1940 (the families of those arrested and of prisoners of war), in June 1940 (mainly refugees) and in May–June 1941. According to NKVD documents, some 320,000–330,000 people were deported in all. Polish estimates from the war and post-war years gave much higher figures, even more than a million, and the dispute over the scale continues, since such estimates also take into account those arrested, Gulag prisoners and those conscripted into the army. In the spring of 1940 the NKVD murdered nearly 22,000 Polish prisoners of war and other prisoners in the Katyn massacre. After the Germans invaded in June 1941, the NKVD massacred thousands of inmates in the prisons of Lwów, Łuck, Brest and other towns.

In the Sikorski–Maisky agreement of 30 July 1941 the Soviet government recognised that the treaties of 1939 with Germany concerning territorial changes in Poland had “lost their validity”, but it never withdrew from the annexation. On the contrary, from 1941 it cited the October “elections” to Britain and the United States as a plebiscite in which the population had itself chosen the USSR. At Tehran and Yalta the Western powers accepted a border close to the Curzon Line – in broad outline, therefore, the line of 1939 – with minor changes in Poland’s favour that left Białystok and Przemyśl on its side. Lwów, Wilno, Grodno and Brest remained within the USSR after the war and today lie in Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus. Hundreds of thousands of Poles left these lands in 1944–1946. For the eastern borderlands, November 1939 thus marked the beginning of the end of a multinational world created together by Poles, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Jews and Lithuanians.