For the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, the Second Polish Republic was a transitional state, the so-called „bastard child of the Treaty of Versailles”, which should cease to exist at the first convenient moment. For this reason, relations between the two countries, Poland and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, were tense and unfriendly for almost the entire interwar period, despite the non-aggression pact (1932) concluded by both countries.
During the period described above, Stalin did much to destabilise Poland’s internal situation. For example, he was extremely pleased with the coup staged in 1926 by Marsh. Józef Piłsudski. The Bolshevik leader hoped that this event would lead to more internal turbulence in the country on the Vistula than it did. In addition, he located three illegal, subversive communist parties on the territory of the Second Republic: The Communist Party of Poland, the Communist Party of Western Belarus and the Communist Party of Western Ukraine. In addition, Soviet saboteurs very often crossed the eastern border of the Second Republic, carrying out various illegal activities. In order to block these actions, as early as 1924, the Border Protection Corps was established to protect the border between Poland and the USSR.
The destruction of Poland became real for Stalin at the time of the USSR’s rapprochement with the German Third Reich, which took place in the late 1930s. This was made possible by the complicated diplomatic efforts of representatives of both countries. The peak of good relations between Germany and Soviet Russia occurred in the second half of 1939. Then, on 23 August of that year to be exact, the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed. This document, in its official layer, was a non-aggression pact. However, it contained a secret protocol in which both sides agreed on their spheres of influence in Central and Eastern Europe and expressed their willingness to partition Poland once again. The border between the two countries was to run along the rivers Narew, Vistula and San.
The above pact, described in great detail, was one of the key documents that led to the outbreak of the Second World War. It began on 1 September 1939 with the attack of the German Wehrmacht on the Second Republic. The Polish Army tried to put up resistance. It was at times very fierce, as exemplified by Westerplatte. However, stopping the German war machine was not easy. The German military advantage was considerable, which the most important Polish officials and commanders were aware of. Initially, no one imagined that the defensive war would last little more than a month. In the first days of September, both Polish society and our decision-makers placed great hopes in the armed forces of England and France, with whom Poland had signed appropriate agreements. What is more! On the 3rd of September 1939, both countries declared war on Germany, leading the Poles to real euphoria. Unfortunately… the leaders of both countries did not even intend to move troops out of their garrisons, leaving the Second Republic on its own.
The German and Anglo-French actions were major blows that put Polish sovereignty in great danger. The decisive blow, however, came from the east. A foreshadowing of what would come in a few hours’ time were the events that took place on 17 September 1939, at around 3 a.m. in the morning. It was then that the Polish ambassador in Moscow, Waclaw Grzybowski, was summoned to the headquarters of the People’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs of the USSR, Vyacheslav Molotov. There he learned that the Red Army would be crossing the border of the Second Republic. According to the Soviets, the reasons for this included „the internal bankruptcy of the Polish state” and „the Soviet Government’s concern for the Ukrainian and Belorussian peoples living on Polish territory”, as well as the alleged flight of the Polish authorities from the country. All the above arguments were untrue. The actual reason for the actions of the Soviet armed forces was the obligations arising from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
A few dozen minutes after the note was handed to Ambassador Grzybowski, the Red Army struck Poland. In doing so, it took a direct part in the start of the Second World War, the bloodiest conflict in the history of the world, which claimed millions of lives.
The Bolsheviks attacked Poland along an entire border line of nearly one and a half thousand kilometres. Although the state of the Bolshevik armed forces was poor, in every possible respect, the Second Republic, attacked from two flanks, had no chance of defending itself effectively. After all, the Poles had to fight against enemies who had a crushing military advantage. After all, it is worth remembering that Poland was invaded by two Soviet fronts: the Belorussian, with five armies, and the Ukrainian, with four armies, although one of them did not participate in the operation. In addition, the regular army units were followed by units of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, or the notorious NKVD, and Razvydupru – the Red Army Intelligence Board, which aimed to annihilate the entire Polish administration in the occupied territories and locate their representatives there.
From the very beginning of the Soviet aggression, the Poles resisted. They fought heroically for Grodno and Vilnius, among others. Heroic battles were fought for example at Kodziowce and Shatsk. A lot of blood was shed by soldiers of Polish units such as the above-mentioned KOP and the Independent Operational Group „Polesie”.
Unfortunately, the overwhelming superiority of the Soviets and Germans led to the fall of Poland. Both occupants used methods of ruthless terror from the very beginning of the aggression. Researchers estimate that the Bolsheviks, at the very time of the aggression – that is, de facto within a few days – murdered more than two thousand Poles, mostly soldiers, policemen and members of the administration. The murders in Grodno, Rohatyn or near Sarny, where an entire company of the local KOP battalion was killed, have gone down in history. In addition, the Soviets unscrupulously murdered the commander of Corps District No. III in Grodno, General Józef Olszyna-Wilczyński.
The examples cited above were a prelude to the horrors that took place in that part of Poland which was overrun by the Soviets during the Second World War. For it is worth recalling that tens of thousands of Polish officers were taken prisoner in the fighting with the Red Army, of whom more than twenty thousand died in the Katyn Massacre. In addition, the Soviets organised large-scale deportations of Polish civilians deep into the USSR. These people underwent a Gehenna in the East, and many of them never returned to Poland. In addition to the facts described above, the Soviets, like the Germans, unleashed a terror in the occupied part of the Second Republic that could affect any Polish citizen, simply because he was Polish….
