page_title: Territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union
section_title: Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, 1939–1941
hierarchical_section_title: Territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union / Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, 1939–1941
caption_attribution_description: Soviet map of expanded Ukrainian SSR (year 1940). Territories captured during the Soviet invasion of the Second Polish Republic in 1939 marked in yellow: renamed as Volynska, Drogobych, Lviv, Rivne, Stanislav, Tarnopil and Chernivitsi Oblasts. The adjacent parts of Poland occupied by Nazi Germany are labeled: area of state interests of Germany. Scale 1:6,000,000; in Russian.
context_page_description: Seventeen days after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, which marked the beginning of the Second World War, the Soviet Union invaded the eastern regions of Poland and annexed territories totaling 201,015 square kilometres with a population of 13,299,000. Inhabitants besides ethnic Poles included Czechs, Lithuanians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Jews, and other minority groups.
  These annexed territories were subsequently incorporated into the Lithuanian, Byelorussian, and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republics and remained within the Soviet Union in 1945 as a consequence of European-wide territorial rearrangements configured during the Tehran Conference of 1943. Poland was "compensated" for this territorial loss with the pre-War German eastern territories, at the expense of losing its eastern regions. The Polish People's Republic regime described the territories as the "Recovered Territories". The number of Poles in the Kresy in the year 1939 was around 5.274 million, but after ethnic cleansing in 1939-1945 by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and Ukrainian nationalist forces consisted of approximately 1.8 million inhabitants.
context_section_description: The Polish–Soviet border, as of 1939, had been determined in 1921 at the Treaty of Riga peace talks, which followed the Polish–Soviet War. Under the terms of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, two weeks after the German invasion of western Poland the Soviet Union invaded the portions of eastern Poland assigned to it by the Pact, followed by co-ordination with German forces in Poland. See map.
  The "need to protect" the Ukrainian and Belarusian majority populations was used as a pretext for Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland (including Western Ukraine and Belarus) carried out in the wake of Poland's dismemberment under the Nazi invasion with Warsaw being besieged and Poland's government being in the process of evacuation. The total area, including the area given to Lithuania, was 201,015 square kilometres (77,612 sq mi), with a population of 13.299 million, of which 5.274 million were ethnic Poles and 1.109 million were Jews. An additional 138,000 ethnic Poles and 198,000 Jews fled the German occupied zone and became refugees in the Soviet occupied region. The borders were finalized in the September 28 German–Soviet Frontier Treaty, most of whose contents were kept secret.
  Soviet authorities immediately started a campaign of sovietization. Passportization and residence registration of the population in the newly acquired territories began: Inhabitants of Kresy, who were imposed on Soviet citizenship in November 1939, had to return documents issued by "former Poland" and obtain new citizenship of the USSR. The so-called procedure NKVD used the passportization system to carefully select people still living in Western Belarus and Western Ukraine. Those who did not receive the citizenship or refused to accept it (claiming that they were Polish citizens or not agreeing to enter Ukrainian or Belarusian nationality), were arrested or deported.
  In March 1940, the authorities also decided about the fate of refugees from western Poland, who from September 1939 were in Kresy. Deportation of this group of about 75-80 thousand persons, consisting mainly of Jews (about 84%), finally began on June 29, 1940 and lasted for nearly a month.
  The Soviets organized staged elections, the result of which was to become a legitimization of Soviet annexation of eastern Poland. Soviet authorities attempted to erase Polish history and culture, withdrew the Polish currency without exchanging ruble, collectivized agriculture, and nationalized and redistributed private and state-owned Polish property. Soviet authorities regarded service for the pre-war Polish state as a "crime against revolution" and "counter-revolutionary activity", and subsequently started arresting large numbers of Polish citizens.  During the initial Soviet invasion of Poland, between 230,000 to 450,000 Poles were taken as prisoner, some of whom were executed. NKVD officers conducted lengthy interrogations of the prisoners in camps that were, in effect, a selection process to determine who would be killed. On March 5, 1940, pursuant to a note to Stalin from Lavrenty Beria, the members of the Soviet Politburo (including Stalin) signed an order to execute POWs, labeled "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries", kept at camps and prisons in occupied western Ukraine and Belarus. This became known as the Katyn massacre, in all some 22,000 were executed.
  During 1939–1941 1.45 million of the people inhabiting the region were deported by the Soviet regime, of whom 63.1% were Poles, and 7.4% were Jews. Previously it was believed that about one million Polish citizens died at the hands of the Soviets, however recently Polish historians, based mostly on queries in Soviet archives, estimate the number of deaths at about 350,000 people deported in 1939–1945.
  Territories around Wilno (now Vilnius) annexed by Poland in 1920, were transferred to Lithuania on the basis of Lithuania-Soviet Union agreement (however Lithuania was soon annexed by Soviet Union to become the Lithuanian SSR). Other northern territories were attached to Belastok Voblast, Hrodna Voblast, Navahrudak Voblast (soon renamed to Baranavic
caption: Soviet annexation of territory of eastern Poland ceded to Ukrainian SSR (yellow), 1940
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