“Prerequisites for the Great Victory”: How the Red Army's Liberation Campaign in Poland Influenced the Course of World War II

85 years ago, the liberation campaign of the Red Army began. Its units entered the lands of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, captured by the Poles during the Soviet-Polish War of 1919-1921. By this time, battles between the troops of Poland and Nazi Germany had been going on for more than two weeks. The Polish military and political leadership had practically lost influence on events in the country. In Moscow, they feared that the Wehrmacht would reach the pre-war eastern border of Poland and find itself in critical proximity to the major urban centers of the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR. According to historians, as a result of the liberation campaign, the Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples united, and the Wehrmacht lost advantageous positions for attacking the Soviet Union.

On September 17, 1939, the liberation campaign of the Red Army began. Soviet troops recaptured the territories of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus captured by Poland and prevented the forces of Nazi Germany from occupying them.

Historical grievances

Relations between Russia and Poland have been complicated for centuries. As early as 1569, following the Union of Lublin, Poland and Lithuania united into a single state, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had a long border with the Russian state. Significant territories of ancient Russian lands came under the rule of the Poles, where they pursued a policy of national oppression.

There were several brutal wars between Russia and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the early 17th century, during the Time of Troubles, the Poles threatened the very existence of Russian statehood. But the country survived. By the end of the 18th century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had weakened. St. Petersburg had a significant influence on its policy. According to historians, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth became a hotbed of instability for all of Eastern Europe. As a result of three partitions at the end of the 18th century and the Vienna Congress of 1814-1815, Polish lands were divided between Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary.

Alexander I did not deprive the Poles of their national statehood and took the throne of a formally independent country, the Kingdom of Poland. Under the rule of Russian monarchs, Poland had its own finances, currency, court, budget, law enforcement agencies, and troops. Despite this, unrest and rebellion repeatedly occurred in the Kingdom of Poland.

During World War I, the territory of the Kingdom of Poland was occupied by German and Austro-Hungarian troops. In March 1917, the Russian Provisional Government declared its desire to create a united independent Poland, which would be a military ally of St. Petersburg. And in August 1918, the Council of People's Commissars cancelled the treaties with Prussia and Austria on the division of Polish lands, officially granting Poland independence.

After the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I, Poland became de facto independent. In December 1919, the Supreme Council of the Entente adopted the “Declaration of the Supreme Council of the Allied and Associated Powers on the Provisional Eastern Border of Poland.” A line was drawn on the map between Grodno and the Carpathians, named the “Curzon Line” in honor of the British Foreign Secretary. When determining the border, the Entente representatives were guided by the ethnic composition of the population of certain territories.

However, even before that, in the summer of 1919, Polish troops captured a significant part of the lands of Belarus and Ukraine. The leader of Poland, Jozef Pilsudski, against the backdrop of the successes of the White armies, temporarily suspended active military operations against the Soviet troops, but rejected all peace proposals from Moscow and ignored the Entente's recommendations regarding the border.

Soviet-Polish War 1919-1921 Wikimedia

“Immediately after the restoration of full-fledged statehood, Poland showed a desire for expansionism and was ready to fight for territory,” Dmitry Surzhik, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Historical Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, noted in an interview with RT.

In the spring of 1920, Poland resumed active military operations against the Soviets. The Entente countries supported it, despite the fact that Warsaw ignored their territorial recommendations. Nevertheless, the Red Army was able not only to stop the Polish offensive, but even reached the approaches to Warsaw. However, the Poles, in turn, launched a large-scale counteroffensive.

Soviet-Polish War 1919-1921 Wikimedia

The war ended unsuccessfully for the Soviets. Poland captured territories 150-200 km east of the Curzon Line. Western Ukraine, Western Belarus and part of Lithuania came under its control. Despite formal reconciliation, relations between Warsaw and Moscow remained tense. According to Dmitry Surzhik, large gangs from Poland carried out raids on Soviet territories. Activists from national minorities and opposition parties were arrested, and in 1934 the Bereza-Kartuzskaya concentration camp was created for them.

“Relations between the USSR and Poland balanced between open and cold war. They were openly hostile,” Surzhik emphasized.

“Prerequisites for Victory”

In the mid-1930s, there was a rapprochement between Poland and Nazi Germany. Following the Munich Agreement, Warsaw took part in the division of Czechoslovakia. At the same time, according to Surzhik, it demonstrated its readiness to fight the Soviet Union if Moscow tried to stop it. Soon after the annexation of the Czech lands, Hitler declared his claims to Polish territories as well.

“The USSR authorities offered Warsaw their help in defending itself from the Nazis, and tried to negotiate military cooperation with Great Britain and France. However, Poland directly rejected Moscow's proposals, and London and Paris dragged out the negotiations and eventually broke them off. The USSR was forced to normalize relations with Germany, concluding the well-known non-aggression pact with a secret protocol on the distribution of spheres of interest in Eastern Europe,” Evgenia Tarnyagina, an employee of the scientific and methodological department of the Victory Museum, told RT.

Soviet troops in Lviv Wikimedia

On September 1, 1939, the German invasion of Poland began. German troops crushed the defense of the Polish army in the border areas, cut through its front and made deep breakthroughs on the flanks of the main groups. Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, but did not take active action. On September 6, the Polish government fled from Warsaw to Lublin. Wehrmacht units rapidly advanced deep into Polish territory and by September 16 they had surrounded the main forces of the Polish army. On the night of September 16-17, the evacuation of Polish government institutions to Romania began.

“The Polish authorities had completely lost control over the situation even in that part of Poland that was not yet occupied by the Germans. The Soviet authorities were holding back, but Moscow was receiving intelligence that Hitler, if he occupied Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, might try to create puppet states there with the aim of using them as a springboard in the future. A threatening situation had developed, and Moscow needed to take urgent measures,” said Dmitry Surzhik.

Soviet soldiers hand out newspapers in a village in the Vilno regionLegion-Media piemags/ww2archive

On September 17, 1939, the liberation campaign of the Red Army began. Soviet units entered the territories of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus previously controlled by Warsaw. Units of the Belarusian and Ukrainian fronts took part in the campaign.

According to historians, in most cases the Polish army did not engage in battles with the Soviet troops, but in some places the Red Army did encounter active resistance from the Poles. As noted by Yevgeniya Tarnyagina, the presence of individual pockets of resistance from the Polish army did not have a significant impact on the situation.

By September 20, units of the Belorussian Front had reached the Vilno-Kobrin line, and on September 21-23, fighters of the Ukrainian Front occupied the territory of Western Ukraine. In the Lvov region and in a number of other places, clashes between Soviet troops and the Wehrmacht occurred, but in the end, the USSR and German units were separated. Local residents greeted the Red Army soldiers as liberators.

“The attitude of the local population to what was happening was determined by the fact that for the Ukrainians and Belarusians living there, the main enemy was the Polish gendarmes who oppressed them,” military historian Sergei Perelygin emphasized in a conversation with RT.

On September 28, the USSR and Germany signed a border treaty that largely coincided with the Curzon Line. The Vilnius region was initially annexed to the Belarusian SSR, but in 1940 the Soviet leadership transferred it to Lithuania.

On October 22, elections were held to the People's Assemblies of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. The elected deputies proclaimed Soviet power in the former Polish territories and appealed to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR with a request to reunite the Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples. On November 1-2, 1939, Western Ukraine and Western Belarus officially became part of the USSR.

Soviet stamps “Reunification of Western Ukraine with the Ukrainian SSR and Western Belarus with the BSSR (September 1939)” Wikimedia

The Red Army lost 1,475 people during the liberation campaign. More than 452 thousand Polish soldiers and officers surrendered.

“The strategic situation in Eastern Europe has changed dramatically. The border before 1939 was near Minsk. One can only imagine how much worse the situation would have been for the USSR if the Nazis had started their aggression from these borders. In addition, we did not allow ourselves to be drawn into a world war ahead of time. Therefore, the actions of the Soviet leadership in 1939 created the preconditions for our Great Victory over Nazism in 1945,” concluded Sergei Perelygin.