Accession of western Ukraine and western Belarus to the USSR. Annexation of Belarus, Volhynia, Podolia and Right Bank Ukraine

Chapter 4. The fate of Western Ukraine

Two and a half weeks after the German attack, the USSR invades Poland. Moscow says it is coming to save Western Ukrainians and Western Belarusians, and is trying not to look like an ally of Berlin. Carefully coordinating their actions, the two powers divide the country located between them in accordance with the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact - exactly in half

On the day of Germany's attack on Poland, September 1, a general military duty, the conscription age was lowered from 21 to 19 years and it was decided to triple the number of Soviet divisions. In the European part of the country, military training has been scheduled, the demobilization of serving soldiers has been postponed, and civilian rail transportation has been reduced in order to transfer trains for military needs. Future fronts will be formed on the basis of the Kyiv and Belarusian districts.

Berlin is expecting an early counter-offensive from the Red Army. On September 3, when presenting his credentials to the new USSR plenipotentiary, Hitler spoke as if it were a matter already decided:

Russia and Germany will establish the borders that existed before the World War,

that is, without Poland. However, Molotov responded to Ribbentrop’s haste on September 4 that “the moment for concrete action is not ripe.” There is a considerable risk in delaying, and the People's Commissar specifically stipulates: if the Germans have to “temporarily cross the line of contact between the interests of both sides,” then this should not interfere with the “accurate implementation of the adopted plan.” The next day, the Polish ambassador Jerzybowski hears from Molotov in a personal conversation:

The Soviet Union does not want to be drawn into this war on either side.

The Soviet official position is camouflaged as neutral until the mid-10th of September. In the meantime, propaganda is being rebuilt. Stalin summons the head of the executive committee of the Comintern, Dimitrov, and orders him not to consider Germany an aggressor. As a result, the directive to the communist parties of the world calls Poland a fascist state. The Soviet press begins a campaign against the “panish” power, which “oppressed other nationalities.” Pravda editorial "About internal reasons military defeat of Poland” was prepared by the partyologist Zhdanov and corrected by Stalin. It talks about the incapacity of the neighboring state, which “at the first military failures began to disintegrate,” and about “half-brothers” awaiting liberation. Moscow and Berlin are trying to agree in advance on a communiqué on the start of Soviet hostilities. The Germans are proposing a joint document about the “common task” of Germany and the USSR “in their natural spheres of influence,” but the Kremlin does not want to be equally involved and reveal its agreement with the Nazis. In the Soviet unilateral project, “brotherly peoples” were named not only as oppressed Poles in the past, but also as “at risk of falling under German domination” in the present. This makes the USSR intervention look much more plausible, but this is unacceptable for the Germans.

On September 9, Berlin reports the fall of Warsaw. Molotov sends congratulations. Now the Kremlin is in a hurry, intending to speak on the 12th. But the news turned out to be false, they are waiting further. Another week passes, the Wehrmacht is crossing the “line of interest” everywhere. It is impossible to hesitate, and wishful thinking is being passed off as reality - in a note from the USSR government dated September 17 it was announced:

Warsaw as the capital of Poland no longer exists,

although the surrender of the Polish capital will be signed only on September 28. But from this statement follows the main Soviet argument:

The Polish state and its government virtually ceased to exist. Thus, the agreements concluded between the USSR and Poland ceased to apply.

That is, even before Soviet intervention there was no country to which there can now be no obligations. But they are in front of the same-blooded peoples, and the Red Army was ordered to cross the border and take under its protection “the life and property of the population of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus.”

The operation begins on September 17 at 5 am. About half a million people, 4 thousand tanks, 5.5 thousand guns, 2 thousand aircraft were involved. This is more than the entire Polish Army, for which the invasion was a complete surprise. It is impossible to build a defensive front from the east; moreover, at first the Red Army’s offensive was perceived as anti-German. Soviet troops advance almost unhindered, making up to 100 km a day. It's already the 18th Ukrainian Front Rivne was taken, and Vilno (Vilnius) was taken by Belarus. Stalin, having rejected the next version of the text sent by the German Foreign Ministry, himself drew up a joint statement. It is immediately announced by Moscow and Berlin: the troops of the two powers are “operating in Poland” to

restore order and tranquility, disturbed by the collapse of the Polish state, and help the population of Poland to reorganize the conditions of their state existence.

For the Kremlin, this campaign is also a continuation of the Civil War. In 1920, during the previous Polish campaign, Stalin himself was a commissar of the Red Front, which was unable to take Lvov. Then the Entente powers demanded that Soviet Russia stop at the border of the Ukrainian and Belarusian majority of the population, recognizing this “Curzon Line” - named after the head of the British Foreign Office, from whom the note came - as the eastern Polish border. Lenin rejected the ultimatum, hoping to Sovietize all of Poland and then spark a revolution in Germany. They were in a hurry to advance - until the West intervened. As a result, the Red Army near Warsaw was then defeated, retreated, and the Poles even occupied Minsk. I had to conclude a peace treaty, ceding Western Ukraine and Western Belarus.

According to the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the demarcation with Germany mainly takes place along the “Curzon Line”. Besides Lvov, there is a large protrusion to the West, in favor of the USSR. Perhaps this is Stalin's personal trophy. Never entered Russian Empire, before 1918, Austrian Lemberg, Lviv and during the Civil War, and by the beginning of World War II, was a city of the Polish majority, Ukrainians were only third there, after Jews. The Red Army reaches these outskirts on September 19th. Lviv is already surrounded by the Germans. It comes to a collision between German and Soviet units. The Wehrmacht command insists: we will take the city and hand it over to the Russians. Then a joint assault is proposed. Moscow is adamant, and Hitler personally gives orders to his generals: to retreat 10 km to the west. The German blockade is replaced by the Red Army, and on September 22 Lviv surrenders to the Soviets. On the same day, the Belorussian Front captured Grodno, where the Poles fiercely resisted.

The withdrawal of German troops back to the “line of interests” begins everywhere. By agreement, the vanguard of the Red Army should follow 25 km after the German tail column. A military delegation flies from Berlin to Moscow to clarify the demarcation line with the People's Commissar of Defense Voroshilov and the Chief of the General Staff Shaposhnikov. And on September 27-29, Ribbentrop was again received in the Kremlin, signing a Treaty of Friendship and Borders with the Reich Minister. Germany receives the lands of the Warsaw and Lublin voivodeships, previously intended for the USSR, in exchange for Lithuania along with Vilna (Vilnius). Stalin does not need Poles in Ukraine and Lithuanians in Belarus, because soon all of Lithuania will fall to him.

In the new Soviet cities, the Wehrmacht and the Red Army hold several joint parades: in Grodno, Pinsk and the most famous - in Brest, which is hosted by General Guderian and Brigade Commander Krivoshein. The USSR received 50.4% of Polish territory, almost 200 thousand km 2 with a population of about 13 million people. There are many refugees from the German occupation zone, especially Jews. In the north they form five regions of Belarus. Of these, Bialystok will be returned to socialist Poland after the war, and the others will be enlarged. According to the later administrative division, this is entirely the Brest and Grodno and western parts of the Minsk and Vitebsk regions. In the south there are six new regions of Ukraine, of which Khmelnitsky, Rivne, Ternopil, Volyn, Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk will henceforth remain. The Supreme Council accepts these lands into the USSR, and Molotov at the session says:

It turned out that a short blow to Poland from first the German army and then the Red Army was enough for nothing to remain of this ugly brainchild of the Treaty of Versailles.

The fifth partition of Poland, carried out by participants in all previous ones (three - in the 18th century, the fourth - in 1815, after the Napoleonic wars), evokes a restrained official reaction from the guarantors of Versailles - Britain and France. A full-fledged Soviet-German military alliance would be much worse, so there is no talk of breaking off relations. The Polish government in exile was advised not to declare war on the USSR. Public opinion may be indignant: the Red Army “stabbed Poland in the back” (the Times expression), politicians are inclined to believe that Moscow has “taken its toll.” The then Lord of the Admiralty Churchill said:

The fact that the Russian armies were to stand on this line was absolutely necessary for the security of Russia against the Nazi threat. The conferences of the heads of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition in 1943-1945 will decide that the restored Poland will receive compensation for the territory at the expense of Germany.

Captured Polish soldiers - Ukrainians and Belarusians - are sent home; most of the natives of the Polish lands themselves will be handed over to Germany. In March 1940, the head of the NKVD Beria addressed the Politburo regarding the Poles detained by his department - former officers, policemen, “members of nationalist counter-revolutionary parties”, as well as “ former landowners, manufacturers, officials." As “inveterate, incorrigible enemies of Soviet power,” it was decided to shoot them. In the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, almost 22 thousand people are executed in camps and prisons.

Indeed, having suffered enough from the Poles, many Ukrainians and Belarusians, especially in the villages, are glad of the Red Army. In cities the attitude is wary. Even in Moscow, the standard of living is lower than in pre-war Lvov and Bialystok, to say nothing of Soviet Ukraine and Belarus. The “soldier-liberators” are in a hurry to acquire watches, clothes, button accordions, etc., which unpleasantly impresses the local inhabitants. Soon they themselves will learn about Soviet commodity shortages. The Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks decides to hold “elected people’s assemblies” - Western Ukrainian in Lvov and Western Belarusian in Bialystok. Their delegates are selected as deputies of the Supreme Council. The meetings approve the declarations written by the Central Committee of the union republics: we are joining the USSR, we will liquidate landownership, we will nationalize industry and banks. On November 1-2, the corresponding union laws were adopted.

Even the Communist parties of Poland, Western Ukraine and Western Belarus are not loyal enough for the Kremlin - their organizations have been dissolved, regional committees of the Communist Party (b)U and the Communist Party (b)B are being established. Communists are sent from the eastern regions of these republics, party Ukrainians and Belarusians are demobilized from the army. The local indigenous rural population, in comparison with Soviet collective farmers, is completely anti-socialist: religious, with a large “kulak layer,” “infected with nationalism.” Immediate collectivization is difficult. At the end of 1940, the NKVD will report on the “cleansing of enemy elements” from the annexed regions: in total, over 400 thousand people were arrested, 275 thousand of them were deported, over 300 “counter-revolutionary organizations” and 150 “gangster groups” were liquidated. Deportations would continue even before the war itself, in June 1941. Under Hitler's occupation, Western Ukraine would turn out to be a zone of mass collaboration; the rebel underground would be destroyed only in the 1950s (see "Forest Brothers"; "Bandera Killed"). In the post-Soviet era, the “defenders” are the most active supporters of Ukraine’s pro-Western course.

In the Soviet Union, the “reunification” of the Ukrainian people will end with the inclusion in the Ukrainian SSR of the Romanian Northern Bukovina before the war and after the war of the Czechoslovak Subcarpathian Rus (Transcarpathian region with its center in Uzhgorod).

Phenomena mentioned in the text

German attack on Poland. World War II 1939

On September 1, Germany attacked Poland. Great Britain and France declare war on the aggressor. They are not actively fighting, but there is no return to the previous state - World War II begins

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 1939

On the eve of the inevitable war in Europe, Stalin chooses Hitler's Germany as a partner for the USSR. According to a secret annex to the non-aggression pact, the two powers divide “spheres of influence” - they determine the boundaries of their conquests. With the following agreement and secret protocols to it, the parties clarify boundaries and exchange territories

1939

Two and a half weeks after the German attack, the USSR invades Poland. Moscow says it is coming to save Western Ukrainians and Western Belarusians, and is trying not to look like an ally of Berlin. Carefully coordinating their actions, the two powers divide the country located between them in accordance with the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact - exactly in half

Battle of Britain 1940

After the defeat of all forces opposing him on the European continent, Hitler approves a plan to attack the last enemy - Great Britain. But, without achieving air superiority, landing from the sea will have to be abandoned.

Beria 1938

The heads of the NKVD were replaced every two years, but the next people's commissar would remain with Stalin until the leader's death. Lavrentiy Beria was first instructed to curtail the Great Terror (see 1937)

Katyn 1990

On April 13, TASS publishes a statement about the execution of captured Polish officers in the Katyn Forest in the Smolensk region. Until now, the USSR insisted that the Germans did this in 1941. Now he admits: the Poles were executed by the Soviet NKVD in 1940

Deputies of the Soviet parliament of a new model are elected with pomp - the same fictitious one as the previous All-Russian Central Executive Committee

Forest Brothers 1948

The authorities cannot completely defeat the anti-Soviet resistance in the Baltics and, in order to eradicate its social base, are carrying out the first mass deportation of “hostile elements” since the war.

Killed by Bandera 1959

The leader of Ukrainian nationalists Stepan Bandera, living in Germany under a false name, was liquidated by a KGB agent. But the killer, awarded in Moscow, will then flee to the West, and the world will learn about the working methods of the Soviet secret service

Orange Revolution 2004

Having mobilized half of the country's electorate, the united opposition under orange banners disrupts Operation Successor in Ukraine. Outgoing President Leonid Kuchma tried to leave the current Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych in his place. Russia helps the Ukrainian authorities in word and deed. The opposition is supported by the West. As a result of the third round of voting, Orange leader Viktor Yushchenko was elected president. The second “revolution” in the CIS after Georgia looks like a wave of new democratization, which seriously scares the Kremlin

The territory of the USSR was truly huge. Despite the impressive scale of Soviet possessions, in 1939 the current leadership of the country sent forces to annex the regions of Western Ukraine, some of which, after the complete German defeat, were part of Poland.

First of all, Stalin was interested in these territories as new possessions of a powerful power. An equally important factor for him was security from the western borders.

Taking advantage of the favorable moment after the defeat by the Germans, the Red Army occupied part of Eastern Poland, as well as almost the entire territory of Galicia, without much difficulty. Special difficulties there was none, since after the defeat the Polish troops did not particularly try to defend themselves, retreating to the Romanian or Hungarian borders. Therefore, there were practically no serious battles. On the part of the Soviet government, all actions related to the occupation of the lands of Western Ukraine were interpreted as a “sacred duty” to help the fraternal peoples who inhabited Poland at that time. Although the entry of Soviet forces into Poland was not entirely accepted. There was both warm support and complete hostility among the local population.

A mass exodus was noted among Polish officers and government officials. Not wanting to put up with the “occupation” policy, they fled to the West. But the bulk of the population hoped for support from the Soviet government, so many residents of defeated Poland took a wait-and-see attitude. Especially during that period, Soviet troops supported socially vulnerable sections of the population. And the USSR took every action to “beautifully” present its rise to power. Loud slogans about social justice brought results, making it possible to easily adjust local residents to their ideological way. But, according to modern historians, Soviet authority I didn’t take into account that at that time Western Ukraine was a completely alien region for the USSR in terms of social and ideological aspects.

The role of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in the annexation of Western Ukrainian lands

Many historians today assign a decisive role in the distribution of lands in Western Ukraine to the Germans. Thus, after the conclusion of the Pact, the Ukrainian lands, which were part of Poland, safely became part of the mighty Soviet power in the fall of 1939. Already on September 28, the agreement concluded between Germany and the USSR completely erased Polish lands from the map.

In addition to non-aggression obligations between the USSR and Germany, the pact included a separate protocol that clearly stated the territorial structure of the states. According to the agreement, most of the lands that were part of Poland were to become part of the Soviet Union. Then, having annexed the territory, the Soviet Union significantly expanded its territorial borders westward by 250 - 350 km, respectively, increasing the population in the western regions of Ukraine, which were subsequently assigned to the Soviet Union. Today, these territories are already part of Belarus and Ukraine.

Who are we going to help?

The Soviet government ordered the High Command of the Red Army to order troops to cross the border of Poland and take under their protection the lives and property of the population of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus.

Operational reports from the General Staff of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, published yesterday and today, show that Soviet troops are successfully fulfilling the task assigned to them by the USSR government. In the cities, towns and villages of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, which are occupied by the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, the population greets our units with great joy and jubilation.

Comrade V.M. Molotov, in his radio speech on September 17, explained why the Soviet government declared the agreements concluded between the USSR and Poland terminated and went to the aid of half-blooded Ukrainians and Belarusians living in Poland.

Only two weeks of the Polish-German war had passed, and Poland had already lost all its industrial centers, lost most of big cities And cultural centers. The Polish ruling circles have gone bankrupt, no one knows about the seat of the Polish government. The population of Poland is abandoned by its hapless, insolvent leaders to the mercy of fate.

The world press is full of information that the President of Poland Mościcki, ministers and generals have migrated to Romania. The Polish army lost its unified command and broke up into separate demoralized units. A report from a correspondent for the American newspaper New York Herald Tribune characterizes the state of the Polish army as follows: “The Polish army is completely demoralized. Soldiers are wandering around the country without food."

The Polish state and the Polish government virtually ceased to exist.

The collapse of the Polish state created a situation in Poland that required special care on the part of the Soviet Government regarding the security of its state. For Poland has become a convenient field for all sorts of accidents and surprises that could pose a threat to the USSR.

At the same time, “The Soviet government considers it its sacred duty to lend a helping hand to its Ukrainian brothers and Belarusian brothers inhabiting Poland.”

The Soviet government simultaneously declared that it intended to take all measures to rescue the Polish people from the ill-fated war into which they had been plunged by their foolish leaders, and to give them the opportunity to live a peaceful life.

For twenty years the whole world witnessed how the Polish ruling classes plunged the people into suffering, poverty and, finally, into an ill-fated war. Now the whole world sees what the management of the Polish magnates has led to. The multinational state of Poland, artificially created twenty years ago, is collapsing because the oppressed national minorities and the oppressed working masses of Poland are acutely aware that they have no reason to fight for that Poland, which was not their mother, but an evil stepmother.

What have the Polish lords and Polish magnates turned Poland into? At one time, Deputy Prime Minister Kwiatkowski publicly divided Poland into two economic territories: territory “A” and territory “B”. Territory “B” is mainly Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. The entire coal, metallurgical industry, 80 percent of textile, sugar, cement, electrical and other industries are located in Poland “A”.

Here, according to the authoritative statement of Mr. Kwiatkowski, over 80 percent of gas plants and water pipelines are located. An extensive railway network has been built here, there are trams in cities, over 80 percent of printing houses, cultural and sanitary institutions. Poland A consumes 93 percent of all electricity, 80 percent of artificial fertilizers and agricultural machinery, over 80 percent of iron and over 95 percent of coffee and tea.

The opposite picture is presented by Poland “B”, i.e. Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. This is literally an internal colony of Polish financial capital, Polish imperialism. Poland “A” sells the goods of its factories at increased prices to Poland “B” and buys raw materials and agricultural products from this internal colony for next to nothing.

The industry of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus was in to a large extent liquidated after occupation by the Poles. And so, despite the fact that Western Belarus produces almost a quarter of the potatoes in Poland, the Polish government almost completely eliminated the potato processing industry in Belarus - distilleries, molasses, and starch factories. Flax processing factories in Belarus were also liquidated.

Western Belarus - the most important area of ​​​​flax growing - was returned to the exhausting spinning wheel. The leather industry of the Vilna region, for which it was once famous, was liquidated. In the textile industry of Białystok, the largest textile region, the picture is the same. In 1929, the number of workers in the Białystok textile industry was 47 percent. pre-war level, in 1930 - 40 percent, in 1931 - 37 percent, and then it got even worse!

The forests of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus are being rapaciously destroyed. The furniture industry of Western Belarus has been almost completely liquidated. At one time, Poland granted a match monopoly to the famous exploiter and later failed “match king” Kreiger. Kreiger closed all the factories except one, throwing thousands of men and women workers out into the streets and doomed to starvation.

What is the agriculture of Poland, the agriculture of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus in particular? What is the situation of the peasantry there, what did the peasants of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus receive from Poland? The Polish government robbed them in favor of the Polish landowners. In Poland, numerous feudal remnants have been preserved - the striped system, the labor system and other forms of feudal exploitation.

16,000 Polish landowners seized 45 percent of all land; 2 thousand of the largest landowners (a thousand or more hectares) concentrated in their hands one fifth of all the lands of Poland. Landowner estates occupy twice the area than peasant farms up to 5 hectares in size.

The Polish government carried out predatory “land management”. It carried out farming in Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, and in most cases the best lands on these farms were given to Polish colonists - “siegemen”, former military men, and the poor were pushed to the sands and swamps. The peasants of Poland know the unlimited power of such magnates as Carol Radziwill, who has 170 thousand morgens of land in the “Dawidgrudok” estate in Polesie alone, over 100 thousand morgens have the Counts Mauritius Zamoyski and Sapieha, over 50 thousand each - the Counts of Skorzewski, the Princes of Czartoryski, The Lubomirskis, Potocki, Janusz Radziwill and many others, widely known to the peasants as predatory exploiters.

According to the 1927 census, horseless farms in Poland accounted for 44 percent, and 14 percent for cows. Proletarian and poor farms together accounted for 76.2 percent (8.8 plus 67.4). Behind last decade the peasantry became even more impoverished.

In September 1933, the Institute social economy in Warsaw after major peasant uprisings in Central Galicia, which alarmed the entire Polish bourgeoisie, conducted a questionnaire among the peasants. A very small part of the responses to this questionnaire, carefully filtered of course, was published. A terrible picture! The famous Polish writer Jan Victor, horrified by this hopeless situation of the peasants, wrote: “To characterize the situation of the people, one would have to write not with a pen, but with a fist, not with a complaint, but with a curse, not with blood, but with iron.”

What do the peasants themselves write?

From Mekhovsky district: “Nowadays, on the estates, the landowners oppress the worker in the most shameful way, without any embarrassment... The landowners do not take into account the existing laws, rules and contracts at all; the worker is forced to work according to the former tsarist laws.” (Pages 209-210).

From Lassky district: “The village now sees no future for itself. Great hopelessness now dominates the village. People wander around mindlessly; everywhere there is poverty, devastation and despair... Villages look more like a cemetery than the center of human life.” (Page 81).

“Despair seizes a person! - writes a peasant from Buchatsky district. - This is a sin crying out for vengeance to heaven. There is plenty of bread, but we peasants are half-starved, and some are completely hungry. There is a lot of clothing, shoes and fuel in Poland, but we are cold and destitute... How hard it is to live, I cannot describe with a pen.”(Page 96).

“Do they know in Warsaw,” asks this peasant, “that a pack of tobacco is divided into four parts with a knife so that it can be bought more easily, that matches are bought by the piece... that salt is bought by the gram, and kerosene is bought by the quarter, the eighth of a liter , and that several huts use one lighter.”(Page 102).

A landless peasant from the Lodz district writes: “This is not life, but a prison, death is better than such a life.”

One could cite dozens of such statements from peasants even from this series of carefully selected letters. It is not surprising that some peasants come to the conclusion that “this cannot continue”, that “with time there must come a fair social order, then all exploitation will be destroyed.” Millions of people in Poland live in hopes of establishing this just system, which will destroy exploitation. But don’t they know now that this system will not fall from the sky for them, that no Mother of God of Czestochowa will give them this happiness?

In 1927, Labor member Becket, a member of the English Parliament, who visited Western Ukraine, wrote:

“We visited Vladimir (Volynsky) in Western Ukraine. I know India, and you, of course, have heard about the terrible poverty of Indian villages. But I have never seen such depressing and desperate poverty... Now we understand why Poland maintains such a large army.”

The situation of the peasants of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine has deteriorated significantly since then. Since 1927, sugar consumption in the villages of Volyn and Polesie has decreased over 10 years by 93 percent, salt by 72 percent, and coal by 50 percent. For many, even a match became inaccessible; they returned to flint and steel. From a kerosene lamp - to a splinter, from an iron plow - to an antediluvian wooden plow.

This is how this robbed, disenfranchised, humiliated peasant of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine lived for years. From abroad, joyful songs of free collective labor reach him. He sees how there, on the best lands, in the boundless expanses, joyful work is going on, steel machines, tractors, and combines are working. He knows that the power of the Radziwills, Sapiehas, Czartoryskis, Lubomirskis and the like has been destroyed there forever. And he thinks: do I really have to fight to maintain the power of the lords over me, who put me in the position of a powerless pariah? And with hope, with prayer, he turns his gaze to the east, to his brothers, the Ukrainians and Belarusians of the USSR.

More than once over the years the peasant Zap rose up to fight against the unbearable situation. Ukraine and Hall. Belarus. Any attempts by peasants to defend their rights were suppressed in the most brutal manner. “Rzeczpospolita” in the issue dated October 2, 1925. wrote: “A fatal situation has created on our outskirts: if there is no change within several years, there will be one continuous armed uprising. If we do not drown it in blood, it will tear away several provinces from us... There is only one answer to the uprising - the gallows - and nothing more. It is necessary to subject the entire population there from top to bottom to such terror that their blood freezes in their veins.”

The most prominent Polish “figure” and enemy of the USSR, Wladislav Studnitsky, wrote: “There can be no talk of any Belarusian people, since Belarusians do not have any traditions of their own. It is impossible to talk about Belarusian culture in view of the fact that Belarusians have no cultural unity.”.

The entire history of the last twenty years has shown that the Polish government is pursuing a policy of forced polonization towards the Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian peoples, desecration of the national culture of these peoples, and the forcible liquidation of the cultural institutions of these peoples. The work of enlightenment has been left to the obscurantists. A very eloquent fact was cited at one time by the newspaper Tydzien Robotnici (issued June 23, 1935): the director of the department of education and culture of the Warsaw city government, Pan Bilik, publicly stated at a general meeting of teachers that “ten educated citizens cause the state much more trouble than a whole thousand illiterate people.” This is the sergeant-major, placed “in Voltaire,” who must, and does, instill culture!

And the government's policy is aimed at destroying the national school. When delegates of the Belarusian school organization complained about the closure of almost all Belarusian schools, Minister Skulsky answered them: “I assure you that in 10 years in Poland you will not find a single Belarusian.” Deputy Velikanovic, in his parliamentary speech published in the Dilo newspaper on February 12, 1935, cited the following data: at the time of the creation of the Polish state, there were 3,600 Ukrainian schools on the territory of Western Ukraine.

In the 1934-35 academic year, according to official data, there were 457 of them, and in these schools, history and geography, and sometimes other subjects, were taught only in Polish. In 1919, there were 1,050 Ukrainian schools in Volyn, and in 1936 - only 5. The Polish occupiers closed more than 3 thousand schools in Ukraine, more than 400 in Western Belarus, closed 4 Belarusian gymnasiums and 3 teachers' seminaries.

In schools abandoned by the Polish occupiers, children are beaten. The newspaper "Courier Poranna" published letters from parents in 1934, in which they wrote:

“They beat me up at school. The manager beats, the priest beats, and prompted by the example from above, the others beat...We in the village are accustomed to teachers beating, for us a teacher going to school without a ruler for beating - “on the paws” or without rods - is a direct sensation.”

Such is the European “civilization” that the Polish lords implanted in Poland, Western Ukraine and Western Belarus! As a result, in Galicia only 5 percent. Children are taught in their native language, and in Volyn, Polesie, and Kholm region, only 0.02 percent of Ukrainian children are taught in their native language. More than 10 million of the Polish population are illiterate. “Courier wounded” in the issue dated September 3, 1936. wrote: “The 1936-37 school year in primary schools begins under the sign of an ever-deepening school crisis... One and a half million school-age children are deprived of the opportunity to attend school, 16 thousand teachers are unemployed.”

Isn’t it clear that the working people of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus declared a war not to the belly, but to the death, against such vile mockery?

The unbearable situation of Ukrainians and Belarusians was so terrible that in 1930. signed by sixty Labor Party deputies and two Liberals, a petition was sent to the Council of the League of Nations through Henderson, which stated that in 700 Ukrainian and Belarusian villages in Poland “hundreds of men, women and children were beaten, and many of those beaten died from beatings ... Thousands of people were driven into prison, and many libraries, clubs and cooperative shops were looted and destroyed.”

Apparently these gentlemen have a short memory if they forgot about all this today.

In Poland, according to the constitution, all power belongs to the president, who is responsible only “before God and history.” One-third of the Senate is appointed by the president, the remaining two-thirds are “elected” by persons with higher education.

All youth under 25 are deprived of voting rights. And how elections to “self-government bodies” take place, a peasant from Lassky district talks about this: “In our village, elections to the village council took place. But, essentially speaking, no one chose anyone, but the voit (headman) simply brought a list, ordered everyone to sign - and that’s the end of it.”

The class exploitative nature of power is so exposed that the former Prime Minister of Poland Wladislaw Grabski in his book “The Idea of ​​Poland” was forced to admit that “the peasant began to feel that the gentry was again ruling Poland.” And this gentry could rule all these years only through unbridled terror. Any attempt to protest against the unbearable situation of workers, peasants, Ukrainian and Belarusian intelligentsia led to the most severe repressions. The so-called “pacification” was carried out, i.e., simply, the extermination of the Belarusian and Ukrainian peoples. It is enough to take only the book “Requests from Belarusian Ambassadors to the Polish Sejm.” Here is an index of the nature of these requests:

“Persecution in the field of education and schools; persecution of the Belarusian press; violent agricultural policies; military colonization; administrative lawlessness and persecution; mass lawless arrests, torture, bullying; torture and violence in prisons; police killings, banditry and terror; the pursuit public organizations; religious persecution; illegal imposition of taxes and all kinds of exactions; economic oppression and exploitation; prohibition and persecution of the Belarusian language; violations of constitutional guarantees; political provocation; bullying of soldiers against the population; bullying and beating of students."

The most savage violence, the unpunished murder of peasants and agricultural workers by landowners, was a response to the legitimate demands of Belarusian and Ukrainian peasants. Entire povets and voivodeships went bankrupt. They did not spare the elderly, women and children, destroyed peasant property, and burned entire villages.

The situation of agricultural workers became especially unbearable. It got to the point where they started selling children. Thus, the Illustrated Courier of Tsodzenna reported the sale of an 11-year-old child for 10 zlotys, 5 pounds of bread and several pounds of potatoes. In many voivodeships, in order to get a job, you must have, in addition to professional qualifications, a police certificate of trustworthiness, a priest’s certificate of confession, and a certificate of the anti-popular reactionary fascist organization “Strelets”.

The most revolutionary class - the working class - is terrorized. The best workers are in prison, sentenced to hard labor. Provocation has made its nest in the working class. The working class did not stop fighting for a single minute, despite the fact that the Polish government managed to place its agents of traitors and provocateurs everywhere. The working class of Poland has many bright pages of class struggle in the past. He will find his way, because he knows that the Belarusian and Ukrainian peasants, forcibly polarized, fighting for liberation from triple oppression, are fighting at the same time for the creation of a system in which such an anti-people policy as has been pursued all these years would be unthinkable ruling classes of Poland.

“A people who oppresses other peoples cannot be free,” said the greatest representatives of consistent democracy of the 19th century, Marx and Engels,” Lenin wrote in the article “On national pride Great Russians" during the imperialist war. What weighs heavily on the masses in “peaceful” times, these masses feel with particular acuteness during war, when all social contradictions intensify and deepen. This should be especially true about the wars of the era of imperialism.

We see in what a difficult, powerless, oppressed, unbearable situation the masses of the working people of Poland are, especially the working people of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus.

“Nor can we demand from the Soviet government an indifferent attitude towards the fate of the same-blooded Ukrainians and Belarusians living in Poland who were previously in the position of powerless nations, and now completely abandoned to chance.” This is what the head of the Soviet government, Comrade Molotov, said.

Now the fate of these peoples is being decided. It concerns us deeply. The working people of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, the working people of Poland know that with all their hearts, best thoughts the Soviet people are with them. That is why they greet the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army with jubilation.

Here is one of the many reports about how the Red Army is greeted in Western Belarus:

In many places the population is still just approaching Soviet troops tearing down Polish flags and signs of government agencies, hanging red banners in the streets.”

The measures of the Soviet government, which were discussed on September 17 in his speech on the radio by the head of the Soviet government, Comrade. V.M. Molotov, receive the unanimous approval of the entire Soviet people, who understand that the current situation in Poland requires special care on the part of the Soviet government regarding the security of the socialist state. The peoples of the great Soviet Union greet with deep joy our heroic Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, which has taken under its protection the lives and property of the population of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus.

All digital data are taken from the collection “The Agrarian Question and the Peasant Movement,” reference book, vol. II, ed. International Agrarian Institute, 1936

Polish peasants about their lives. Ed. International Agrarian Institute, Moscow, 1936. Letters from Peasants, published by the Institute of Social Economics in Warsaw.

Bernard Lekash, “Poland without a mask”, Leningrad, 1928, p. 126

I quote from the book “Requests from Belarusian ambassadors to the Polish Sejm. 1922-1926 A collection of documents about the master’s violence, torture and abuse of peasants and workers in Western Belarus.” Belarusian state publishing house Minsk, 1927, p. XIX

Page XVII. based on materials by A. Novak