Soviet invasion of Poland
The 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland was a Soviet military operation that started without a formal declaration of war on 17 September 1939. It was during the early stages of World War II. Sixteen days after Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west, the Soviet Union did so from the east. The invasion ended on 6 October 1939. Germany and the Soviet union divided the whole of the Second Polish Republic.
In early 1939, the Soviet Union asked the United Kingdom, France, Poland, and Romania to make an alliance against Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union wanted Poland and Romania to let Soviet troops go through their territory. Poland and Romania both said no. The Soviet Union made a secret deal with Nazi Germany on 23 August. They planned to divide Northern and Eastern Europe into German and Soviet lands. One week later, German forces invaded Poland from the north, south, and west. Polish forces then withdrew to the southeast to wait for French and British support. The Soviet Red Army invaded the Kresy on 17 September. The Soviet government said it was acting to protect the Ukrainians and Belarusians. They lived in the eastern part of Poland.
The Soviet government added the land they won. In November 1939 they made the 13.5 million formerly Polish citizens become citizens of the Soviet Union. They sent hundreds of thousands of people from this region to Siberia and other remote parts of the Soviet Union.
Soviet forces stayed in eastern Poland until the summer of 1941. They were moved by the invading German army in the course of Operation Barbarossa. The area was under Nazi occupation until the Red Army reconquered it in the summer of 1944. An agreement at the Yalta Conference let the Soviet Union add almost all of their part of the Second Polish Republic. The People's Republic of Poland got the southern half of East Prussia and lands east of the Oder-Neisse Line. The Soviet Union added the lands into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic
The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic or in short, the Ukrainian SSR or Soviet Ukraine was in the southwestern part of the Soviet Union. It had the second largest population of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union. This lasted from 1922 to 1991.
The Ukrainian SSR was a founding member of the United Nations. It did not really have much power because it was tightly controlled by Moscow authorities. When the Soviet Union broke apart, the Ukrainian SSR became Ukraine.
During its 72-year history, the republic's borders changed many times. The eastern city of Kharkiv was the republic's first capital. However, in 1934, it was moved to the city of Kyiv. Kyiv is still the capital of Ukraine.
Linear Pottery culture
The Linear Pottery culture was an important culture in the Neolithic(later Stone Age) of Europe. It was from 5500–4500 BC.
It is abbreviated as LBK and is also known as the Linear Band Ware, Linear Ware, Linear Ceramics or Incised Ware culture.
The most evidence for the culture is in Central Europe. It is important evidence for early farming in Europe. The pottery after which it was named has simple cups, bowls, vases and jugs, without handles. They were made as kitchen dishes, or for carrying food and drink. The pots had line patterns on them.
The LBK people lived over a period of 1000 years, long before the Bronze Age and farmed crops like wheat, lentils and peas. They also kept cows and dogs, and sometimes hunted in the forests around them for other animals, like deer.
Their diet probably didn't contain enough energy for them, as they often did not grow as tall as the people who came before them, or as people do now. This might have also been because of disease, which can spread more easily in a village than it can when people are moving about a lot and not seeing many other people, as people did before the Neolithic. People in the LBK culture probably died quite young, in their twenties or thirties, and many of their children would die before they grew up.
If a person was very sick and in a lot of pain, the LBK people might have had access to opium which did not make them better but took away the pain. They probably knew how to make some illnesses better by using wild herbs as medicine.
The LBK people probably worshiped a mother goddess, who represented the fertility of the land they farmed.
Because this was before the Bronze or Iron Ages, there were no metal tools, and everything the LBK people had was made from either stone, wood and plants (such as flax which could be made into clothing, and things that could be got from animals (like leather or fur). They even had sickles, which are used for cutting down grass and are half-moon shaped blades with a handle coming off one end; however theirs were made of wood with sharp stone points glued into them for the cutting.
The LBK people lives in rectangular longhouses, and digging up an area often shows several clusters of about 6 of these long houses. The people in nearby clusters of houses probably knew each other and shared or traded their goods. Their houses were made of wood, mud and straw and they might have let their animals stay in there too.
Some LBK settlements have palisades, or long walls around them, to defend themselves from other people who might attack them. There are also some skeletons of LBK people that look like they died from battle injuries, and some look like they may have even been eaten by cannibals. This shows that there was a lot of war between nearby groups.
Important sites include Nitra in Slovakia; Bylany in the Czech Republic; Langweiler and Zwenkau in Germany; Brunn am Gebirge in Austria; Elsloo, Sittard, Köln-Lindenthal, Aldenhoven, Flomborn and Rixheim on the Rhine; Lautereck and Hienheim on the upper Danube; Rössen and Sonderhausen on the middle Elbe.
The Excavations at Oslonki in Poland had a large fortified settlement. There were nearly 30 longhouses and over 80 graves. This makes it one of the richest settlements in archaeological finds from all of central Europe.
Cimmerians
The Cimmerians or Kimmerians were ancient horse-riding nomads of Indo-European origin.
According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the Cimmerians lived in the north of the Caucasus and the Black Sea during the 8th and 7th centuries BC. They lived in what is now Ukraine and Russia. Others have said there is no evidence of Cimmerians in the southern parts of Russia.
Where the Cimmerians come from is unclear. Most think they belong to either Iranian or Thracian speaking groups. A recent DNA analysis (Oct. 2018) of three Cimmerians indicate "the appearance of East Asian haplogroups in the steppe populations might be associated with the Iron Age nomads, starting with the Cimmerians." The authors found it "noteworthy that the oldest of the Cimmerians studied here (cim357) carried almost equal proportions of Asian and West Eurasian components, resembling the Pazyryks, Aldy-Bel, and Iron Age individuals from Russia and Kazakhstan. The second oldest Cimmerian (cim358) was also the only one with both uniparental markers pointing toward East Asia. The Q1* Y chromosome sublineage of Q-M242 is widespread among Asians and Native Americans and is thought to have originated in the Altai Mountains. It has previously been identified in numerous ancient samples from Siberia, the Americas, and in representatives of the Siberian Bronze Age and nomadic populations. This is the first indication that Cimmerians did not originate in the PCS region but were nomads tracing their origin to the Far East." A new study in July 2019 revealed that 2 other Cimmerians were of haplogroup R1a-Z645 and R1a2c-B111.
Varangians
The Varangians or Varyags was the name given by Greeks and East Slavs to Vikings. Between the 9th and the 11th centuries they ruled the medieval state of Rus'. They were the personal bodyguards of the Byzantine Emperors, and formed the Byzantine Varangian Guard.