Kresy

Eastern Borderlands

Kresy Wschodnie
Part of the Second Polish Republic
In the 1939 German-Soviet Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact the Eastern Borderlands (grey) were annexed directly into the Soviet Union. The Soviet gains east of the Curzon line devised in 1919 were confirmed (with minor adjustments in the areas around Białystok and Przemyśl) by the Western Allies at the Tehran Conference, the Yalta conference and the Potsdam conference. In 1945 most of Germany's territory east of the Oder–Neisse line (pink) was ceded to what remained of Poland (white), both of which would compose the newly created People's Republic of Poland
Historical region
Period	1919–1939; 1945
Area	Territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union in the Invasion of Poland of 1939
Today part of	Ukraine  Belarus  Lithuania

Eastern Borderlands^[1] (Polish: Kresy Wschodnie) or simply Borderlands (Polish: Kresy, Polish pronunciation: [ˈkrɛsɨ]) was a term coined for the eastern part of the Second Polish Republic during the interwar period (1918–1939). Largely agricultural and extensively multi-ethnic with a Polish minority,^[2] it amounted to nearly half of the territory of interwar Poland. Historically situated in the eastern Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, following the 18th-century foreign partitions it was divided between the Empires of Russia and Austria-Hungary, and ceded to Poland in 1921 after the Treaty of Riga. As a result of the post-World War II border changes, all of the territory was ceded to the USSR, and none of it is in modern Poland.

The Polish plural term Kresy corresponds to the Russian okrainy (окраины), meaning "the border regions".^[3] During the existence of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Kresy only referred to the borderlands of the Kingdom of Poland and not the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.^[4] Kresy is also largely co-terminous with the northern areas of the Pale of Settlement, a scheme devised by Catherine II of Russia to limit Jews from settling in the homogenously Christian Orthodox core of the Russian Empire, such as Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The Pale was established after the Second Partition of Poland and lasted until the Russian Revolution in 1917, when the Russian Empire ceased to exist. In the aftermath of the Polish wars against Ukraine, Lithuania and Soviet Russia, the latter of which was ended by the Treaty of Riga, large parts of the Austrian and Russian partitions became part of Poland. As many as 12 million inhabitants lived in the Eastern Borderlands, but ethnic Poles only were a third of that population, with another third being Ukrainian.^[4][5] Most small towns in the Borderlands were shtetls.^[5]

Administratively, the Eastern Borderlands territory was composed of Lwów, Nowogródek, Polesie, Stanisławów, Tarnopol, Wilno, Wołyń, and Białystok voivodeships (provinces). Today, all these regions are divided between Western Ukraine, Western Belarus, and south-eastern Lithuania, with the major cities of Lviv, Vilnius, and Grodno no longer in Poland. During the Second Polish Republic, the Eastern Borderlands denoted the lands beyond the Curzon Line proposed after World War I in December 1919 by the British Foreign Office as the eastern border of the re-emerging sovereign Polish Republic, after over a century of partition. In September 1939, after Germany invaded Poland and follow-up invasion by Soviet Union, in accordance with Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact all Eastern Borderlands territories were incorporated into the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, often by means of terror.^[6]

Soviet territorial annexations during World War II were later ratified by the Allies at the Conferences of Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam and most of Poles here were expelled after the end of World War II in Europe. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was no change to the post-World War II borders. Despite the former provinces of the Eastern Borderlands no longer being part of Poland, a Polish minority remains.