Soviet annexation of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia

. The Ukrainian text reads: "Let's forever eliminate the border between Western and Soviet Ukraine. Long Live the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic!" On September 17, 1939 the Red Army entered Polish territory, acting on the basis of a secret clause of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union would later deny the existence of this secret protocol, claiming that it was never allied with the German Reich, and acted independently to protect the Ukrainian and White Ruthenian (modern Belarusian) minorities in the disintegrating Polish state. Composed of mostly ethnic Ukrainian Soviet troops under the command of Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, the Soviet forces occupied the eastern areas of Poland within 12 days, capturing the regions of Galicia and Volhynia with little Polish opposition, and occupying the principal city, Lwów, by September 22. According to Volodymyr Kubiyovych, Soviet troops were greeted with genuine joy by the Ukrainian villagers due to the Polish government's discrimination against the Ukrainian minority in previous years. In practice, the poor generally welcomed the Soviets, while the elites tended to join the opposition, despite supporting the unification of Ukraine. Immediately after entering Poland's territory, the Soviet army helped to set up "provisional administrations" in the cities and "peasant committees" in the villages in order to organize one-list elections to the new "People's Assembly of Western Ukraine". The elections were designed to give the annexation an appearance of validity, but were far from free or fair. The voters had a choice of only one candidate, often a local communist or someone sent to western Ukraine from Soviet Ukraine for each position of deputy; the communist party commissars then provided the assembly with resolutions that would push through nationalization of banks and heavy industry and transfers of land to peasant communities. Elections took place on October 22, 1939; the official numbers reported participation of 93 percent of the electorate, 91 percent of whom supported the appointed candidates. Based on these results, the People's Assembly of Western Ukraine, headed by Kyryl Studynsky (a prominent academic and figure in the Christian Social Movement), consisted of 1,484 deputies. They met in Lwów on October 26–28, where they were addressed by Nikita Khrushchev and other representatives of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The assembly voted unanimously to thank Stalin for liberation and sent a delegation headed by Studynsky to Moscow to ask for formal inclusion of the territories into the Ukrainian SSR. The Supreme Soviet voted to do so on November 1, 1939 and on November 15 a law was passed making the former eastern Polish territories a part of the Ukrainian SSR. ==Soviet policies in the newly annexed territories==

Law and order A week after the start of World War II, on 8 September 1939, Lavrentiy Beria issued an order, according to which Narkom of the NKVD in the Ukrainian SSR Ivan Serov had to organize the NKVD operational groups (opergroups). They were tasked among other functions with the clearing of "liberated" regions from the "anti-Soviet elements". Despite that, to assist, the NKVD special groups out of the Kiev Special Military District (from July 1939 to June 1941 Kiev Military District had status "special") were allocated several additional battalions of 300 warriors each, Serov asked Beria to allow him to create new groups and increase staff of "punishers". The Polish language was eliminated from public life, and Ukrainian became the language of the government and the courts. Ukrainian organizations not controlled by the Soviets were limited or abolished. Hundreds of credit unions and cooperatives that had served the Ukrainian people between the wars were shut down. All local Ukrainian political parties were abolished, and between 20,000 and 30,000 Ukrainian activists fled to German-occupied territory; most of those who did not escape were arrested. For example, Dr. Dmytro Levitsky, former head of the moderate Ukrainian political party Ukrainian National Democratic Alliance (UNDO) that had dominated Ukrainian political life between the world wars and chief of the Ukrainian delegation in the pre-war Polish parliament, was arrested alongside many of his colleagues, deported to Moscow, and never heard from again. The elimination of the individuals, organizations and parties that represented moderate or liberal political tendencies left the extremist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which operated in the underground, as the only political party with a significant organizational presence left in western Ukraine. In contrast to the dramatic expansion of educational opportunities within the Soviet system, non-Soviet controlled educational institutions such as the popular Prosvita society reading rooms, the Shevchenko Scientific Society, libraries and community theaters, and the Russophile Stauropegion Institute were closed or abolished. Land reform In the annexed territories, over 50 percent of the land had belonged to Polish landlords while approximately 75% of the Ukrainian peasants owned less than two hectares of land per household. Starting in 1939, lands not owned by the peasants were seized and slightly less than half of them were distributed to landless peasants free of charge; the rest were given to new collective farms. Its leader, Andrey Sheptytsky, was seen as a "father figure" by most western Ukrainians. Using his moral influence, Sheptytsky persuaded all but approximately 100 of the Ukrainian Catholic priests in western Ukrainian to stay with their flock in western Ukraine rather than flee from the Soviet regime. Due to its immense popularity, as well as that of Sheptytsky, among the western Ukrainian people, the Soviet Union did not attempt to abolish the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church nor persecute its leader at that time. Instead, it sought to limit the Church's influence by banishing its presence from schools, preventing it from printing (20 Ukrainian Catholic journals or newspapers were shut down), confiscating lands from which it derived income, closing monasteries and seminaries, levying high taxes, and introducing anti-religious propaganda into schools and the media. Deportations and demographic changes Initially, the Soviet authorities deported primarily political figures as well as all Polish officials, civil servants, police, and Polish citizens who had fled from the Germans. The exact number of Poles deported to Siberia or Central Asia between 1939 and 1941 remains unknown, and has been estimated at from under 500,000 to over 1,500,000. Additionally, tens of thousands of German-speaking people from Volhynia were also moved to German-controlled territory. ==Aftermath==

Following the Soviet annexation of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia, the Ukrainian SSR would gain more land following the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Due to it, Ukraine gained Northern Bukovina, Northern Bessarabia, Budjak (Southern Bessarabia) and the Hertsa region from Romania. However, the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (Moldavian ASSR) within Ukraine was abolished and half of it (Transnistria) was given to the newly created Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic (Moldavian SSR), which emerged from the rest of Bessarabia. On June 22, 1941 Operation Barbarossa began, and western Ukraine was captured within weeks. Prior to retreating, the Soviet authorities, unwilling to evacuate prisoners, chose to kill all inmates whether or not they had committed major or minor crimes and whether or not they were held for political reasons. Estimates of the number of people killed vary from 15,000 to 40,000. Due to the brutality of the Soviet administration, many Ukrainians initially welcomed the German invasion. On June 30, 1941, Ukrainian nationalist commandos under German command captured Lviv which had been evacuated by Soviet forces and declared an independent state allied with Nazi Germany. This movement was quashed by the Germans, who split up western Ukraine. Galicia, which had once been part of Austria, was made part of the General Government together with occupied Poland, while Volhynia was split off and attached to the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Romania also regained its former lands and expanded further into Ukrainian territory, including the important city of Odessa, through the formation of the Transnistria Governorate, not formally annexed by Romania but administrated by it. All of these regions would be captured and reintegrated into Soviet Ukraine in 1944. The Ukrainian SSR's borders would change during the rest of World War II and shortly after it. It was given Carpathian Ruthenia from Czechoslovakia and some Danubian islands and the Snake Island in the Black Sea from Romania but lost Zakerzonia to Soviet-occupied Poland. The same thing would happen with the Belastok Region of Soviet Belarus. The 1954 transfer of Crimea from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR would ultimately consolidate the legally and internationally recognized borders of Ukraine as they are today. ==Importance for the Ukrainian and Belarusian statehood==

The Soviet annexation of some 51.6% of the territory of the Second Polish Republic, where about 13,200,000 people lived in 1939 including Poles and Jews, was an important event in the history of contemporary Ukraine and Belarus, because it brought within Ukrainian and Belarusian SSR new territories inhabited in part by ethnic Ukrainian and Belarusian people, and thus unified previously separated branches of these nations. The postwar population transfers imposed by Joseph Stalin, and the mass killings of the Holocaust, solidified the mono-ethnic character of these lands by nearly a complete eradication of the Polish and Jewish presence there. Ukraine and Belarus achieved independence in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union and became sovereign nation states delineated by 50-year-old borders of the former republics. "The process of amalgamation", wrote Orest Subtelny, a Canadian historian of Ukrainian descent, "was not only a major aspect of the post-war period, but an event of epochal significance in the history of Ukraine." File:Nationalities in Second Polish Republic ca. 1931.png|Nationalities in Second Polish Republic ca. 1931 File:Ukrainian SSR 1939.jpg|Ukrainian SSR in 1939 after the Soviet annexation of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia. Bessarabia, then part of Romania, is shaded as it was claimed by Ukraine's Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. ==See also==