The Soviet Invasion of Poland,
1939
(Nazi and Soviet troops hanging out together in occupied Poland on September 20, 1939 to celebrate their two countries' friendship and their complete takeover of Poland.)
September 1939 is mostly
remembered for the German invasion of Poland, the event that triggered the
Second World War in Europe. But Germany wasn’t the only power that invaded
Poland that month. The Soviets were also on their way.
Propaganda Preparations:
Germany and the Soviet Union were
unlikely allies. Hitler’s Nazi ideology included repeated condemnation of
Communism. The Nazi party itself gave capitalist businesses the sort of free
hand that Communists detested. But as the Second World War repeatedly showed,
realpolitik could be more powerful than ideology. The two countries secretly
agreed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a deal in which they would divide Poland
between them along a pre-agreed border. When the Germans invaded Poland at the
start of September 1939, the Soviets didn’t immediately react. They were
dealing with a conflict with Japan on their eastern border and needed time to
mobilize. On the 15th of September, Soviet troops began massing along the
Polish frontier. Officers were gathered for briefings on the coming campaign.
These briefings weren’t just about practical plans for the invasion but also
contained a large propaganda element. According to commanders, this would be
not an invasion but a liberation, freeing the Polish workers from the unjust
rule of the landowners. On the 16th, commissars went out among the men,
providing more of the same briefing. The plight of the Polish workers,
including their starvation and torture by landowners, was depicted in lurid
detail to fire the men up to fight.
First Clashes:
On the 17th, the invasion began.
At five in the morning, mechanized cavalry crossed the frontier, soon followed
by the rest of the army. The Poles were poorly prepared for a Soviet invasion.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was a secret, while the threat from Germany had
been clear for months. Most Polish forces had been focused in the west even
before the Germans attacked, and the fighting there had drawn more troops away.
The eastern border was poorly defended. The Polish army was large and
courageous, but it was already dealing with the chaos of the war in the west.
As the massed forces of the Red Army advanced, they swept all before them.
Defensive positions were quickly overcome. Polish troops were captured or
brushed aside, inflicting only minor losses on the invaders. During the first
day, the Soviets advanced up to 60 miles. It wasn’t long before Eastern Poland
was theirs.
A Ragged Army:
At the sound of rumbling tanks
and tramping boots, Poles emerged from their homes, frightened and bewildered,
to see what was happening. What they saw was less than impressive. Many of the
Soviet soldiers were carelessly dressed or missing parts of their uniforms.
Rear units trailed out along the roads. Supply services were poorly organized.
Tanks, tractors, and other vehicles had to be left by roadsides due to lack of
fuel. Red Army soldiers distributing the Soviet propaganda newspapers to
peasants near Wilno (Vilnius) in Soviet occupied part of Poland. Far from
finding impoverished peasants, the Soviet troops found a country apparently
wealthier than their own. Twenty-five years later, Colonel G. I. Antonov still
remembered troops disobeying the orders of their superiors to rush into shops
and buy everything they could, making the most of a favorable Soviet-set
exchange rate. Dispirited Polish civilians, unable to resist, could only accept
this sudden upheaval.
Confrontation:
Within days, the Soviets were
approaching the new border they had agreed with the Germans for the division of
Poland. Before the invasion, the Soviet troops had been ordered to avoid
fighting with the Germans when they met them, settling any disputes peacefully.
But as they drew close to the German lines, there were inevitably clashes. Both
armies were in a war zone, facing unfamiliar forces. If shots were sometimes
fired before questions could be asked, confrontations could easily escalate. This
led to a number of casualties in the new border region. But officers understood
their role in this strange new situation, stepping in to resolve disputes even
when their men had been injured or killed. In places, the Germans had passed
the new border and were occupying territory meant to go to the Soviets. This
sometimes led to tense discussions before the Germans withdrew, taking portable
property with them. On the whole, the two armies cooperated well. The Germans
handed Brest fortress over to the Red Army, then the two forces held a joint
military parade in the town. While small enclaves of Polish troops kept
fighting a doomed fight and thousands more followed their government abroad to
keep up the fight, the Soviets settled in.
Casualties in September-October
1939 Invasion:
Polish Soldiers: 3,000–7,000 dead
or missing, 20,000 wounded, 320,000-450,000 captured.
Soviet Soldiers: 1,475–3,000
killed or missing, 2,383–10,000 wounded.
Polish Civilians: 1 million to
320,000 deported by the Soviets to Siberia from September 1939- June 1941
150,000
Polish Civilians killed under Soviet Occupation from September 1939-June 1941.
Sovietization:
Now began the process of
“Sovietization”, transforming occupied Poland so that it could follow the same
political and economic model of the USSR. Led by the Soviet Union’s interior
ministry, the NKVD, this transformation would bring ruin for many Poles. Economic
change came fast. Monetary reforms saw the Soviet ruble replace the Polish
zloty, depriving Poles of their existing wealth. Goods disappeared from the
shelves of stores, forcing many to pay extortionate prices on the black market.
Private businesses were closed down, to be replaced by ones run by the
government. There was no smooth transition. Instead, people were left without
basic necessities like bread while the new systems were put in place. An
investigation by the Central Committee of the Communist Party eventually
recognized the existence of a food crisis and moved to tackle it. But the
Polish workers the Red Army had come to liberate were still worse off than they
had been under the much-demonized landowners. The greatest symbolic act came
with elections to the Supreme Council of the Polish Soviet Socialist Republic,
as the region was renamed by the Soviets. After six weeks of intense
propaganda, voters found only one option for the first member of the council –
Joseph Stalin. Poland’s fate was heavily discussed at the Yalta Conference in
1945. Joseph Stalin presented several alternatives which granted Poland
industrialized territories in the west whilst the Red Army simultaneously
permanently annexed Polish territories in the east, resulting in Poland losing
over 20% of its pre-war borders. The Soviets had quickly conquered half of
Poland, bringing in a ruinous regime. Only when the Germans came again two
years later would the Poles learn that things could be even worse.
Post War:
The Soviet Union re-occupied
Poland in 1944-1945 and remained until 1991. Soviet censors later suppressed
many details of the 1939 invasion and its aftermath. From the start The
Politburo called the operation a "liberation campaign", and later
Soviet statements and publications never wavered from that line. Despite the
publication of a recovered copy of the secret protocols of the
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in the western media, for decades, it was the official
policy of the Soviet Union to deny the existence of the protocols. The
existence of the secret protocol was officially denied until 1989. Censorship
was also applied in the People's Republic of Poland, in order to preserve the
image of "Polish-Soviet friendship" which was promoted by the two
communist governments. Official policy only allowed 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 of the subject. Various
underground publications addressed the issue, as did other media, such as the
1982 protest song "Ballada wrześniowa" by Jacek Kaczmarski.
In 2009, Russian Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin wrote in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza that the
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact concluded in August 1939 was "immoral". In
2015, then President of the Russian Federation, he commented: "In this
sense I share the opinion of our culture minister (Vladimir Medinsky praising
the pact as a triumph of Stalin's diplomacy) that this pact had significance
for ensuring the security of the USSR". In 2016 the Russian Supreme Court
upheld the decision of a lower court, which had found a blogger, Vladimir Luzgin,
guilty of the "rehabilitation of Nazism" for reposting a text on
social media that described the invasion of Poland in 1939 as a joint effort by
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
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