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Before the Red Army even entered Poland, the Soviet Union pursued a strategy of eliminating pro-Western resistance there, in order to ensure that Poland would fall under its sphere of influence. [29] In 1943, after the revelation of the Katyn massacre, Stalin suspended relations with the Polish government-in-exile in London. [30]
The history of Poland from 1939 to 1945 encompasses primarily the period from the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to the end of World War II.Following the German–Soviet non-aggression pact, Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany on 1 September 1939 and by the Soviet Union on 17 September.
After the secret Molotov–Ribbentrop pact in 1939 between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Germany invaded Western Poland. Two weeks later, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland. As a result, Poland was divided between the Germans and the Soviets (see Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union).
Large territories of Polish Second Republic were ceded to the Soviet Union by the Moscow-backed Polish government, and today form part of Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. Poland was instead given the Free State of Danzig and the German areas east of the rivers Oder and Neisse (see Recovered Territories), pending a final peace conference with ...
There were extensive changes to the territorial extent of Poland, following the decision taken at the Tehran Conference of 1943 at the insistence of the Soviet Union. The Polish territories east of the Curzon Line (known as the Kresy), which the Soviet Union had occupied in 1939 along with the Bialystok region were permanently annexed ...
By the end of the Polish Defensive War the Soviet Union had taken over 52.1% of the territory of Poland (circa 200,000 km 2), with over 13,700,000 people.The estimates vary; Professor Elżbieta Trela-Mazur gives the following numbers in regards to the ethnic composition of these areas: 38% Poles (ca. 5.1 million people), 37% Ukrainians, 14.5% Belarusians, 8.4% Jews, 0.9% Russians and 0.6% Germans.
The Border Agreement between Poland and the USSR of 16 August 1945 established the borders between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the Republic of Poland. It was signed by the Provisional Government of National Unity (Tymczasowy Rząd Jedności Narodowej) formed by the Polish communists .
[2] [4] Nevertheless, Poland and the Soviet Union nominally became “allies” after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. In 1944, the Polish Home Army timed their capital's uprising to coincide with the Lublin-Brest Offensive by the Red Army and First Polish Army on the eastern suburbs of the city and the retreat of German forces. However ...