The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact - ELTE BTK Történelem Szakos Portál

possible future opposition to the Soviet system. 10 The Soviet plan too intended
to erase the political, military and mental leadership of Poland and to leave no
opportunity for organised resistance. The mass shootings in Katyn and other
places have reached sad prominence among the many crimes of this war. 11
With regard to the Ukrainian and White Russian people, the Soviet
propaganda claimed that the Red Army had come as a liberator from their Polish
oppressors. 12 According to David Murphy, the Red Army‘s arrival was - in part -
actually seen as the long-yearned liberation from the Polish yoke. He attributes
this feeling in large part to the Ukrainian‘s and White Russian‘s hope for national
independence. As he states, the people in these regions had no actual knowing of
the Soviet state and thus no idea of what they were to expect. 13
Following the statement of liberation, the former Eastern Polish territories
were incorporated into the Ukrainian and White Russian SSRs respectively,
according to the majority of people living in a given area. The population was
ordered to elect assemblies and vote in favour of the incorporation, which they
did. 14 These votes were, as Wanda Krystina Roman puts it, the juridical and
political basis for overtaking the Polish territories. 15 And George Sanford goes
even further, in claiming, that the incorporation was the basis for a wide range
of terror against the former Polish citizens. Passports were handed out to the
inhabitants of the newly acquired territories, they became Soviet citizens; this
gave the Soviet leadership not only legal power and control over its new
subjects, but also unleashed the whole range of terror unto them. 16 The
liberators and helpers soon became prison-wards. 17
10
ROBERTS, Geoffrey: Stalins Kriege - Vom Zweiten Weltkrieg bis zum Kalten Krieg.
Düsseldorf, 2008. 61.
11
For Katyn see SANFORD, George: Katyn and the Soviet massacre of 1940 - Truth, justice
and memory. London, 2007. OVERY, Richard: Russlands Krieg - 1941-1945, Reinbek bei
Hamburg, 2003. 95.
12
SANFORD, George: Katyn and the Soviet massacre of 1940 - Truth, justice and memory.
London, 2007. 20. Soviet Note to the Polish government, 17th September 1939, cited from
KENNAN, George F.: Soviet Foreign Policy 1917-1941. Princeton, 1960. 179.
13
MURPHY, David E.: What Stalin knew - The enigma of Barbarossa. New Haven, 2005. 31.
14
According to GROSS, the population became accomplices by taking part in these elections, as
they accepted the Soviet‘s rules. GROSS, Jan T.: Revolution from Abroad - The Soviet conquest of
Poland‘s Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia. Princeton, 2002. 54. By contrast Honigsman,
whom one has to attribute a very subjective Soviet-Ukrainian-Jewish point of view, speaks of an
atmosphere of euphoria. HONIGSMAN, Jakob: Juden in der Westukraine - Jüdisches Leben und
Leiden in Ostgalizien, Wolhynien, der Bukowina und Transkarpatien 1933-1945. Konstanz, 2001. 114.
15
Nevertheless her Polish perspective: ROMAN, Wanda Krystina: Die sowjetische Okkupation
der polnischen Ostgebiete 1939 bis 1941. In: CHIARI, Bernhard: Die polnische Heimatarmee-
Geschichte und Mythos der Armia Krajowa seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. München, 2003. 94.
16
SANFORD, George: Katyn and the Soviet massacre of 1940 - Truth, justice and memory.
London, 2007. 24. Sanford further explains that Stalin used these events later to claim the
incorporation of these territories on the conferences of Yalta and Teheran. The treatment of Polish
prisoners as counterrevolutionaries was, according to Sanford, another output of it. 40-42.
17
OVERY, Richard: Russlands Krieg - 1941-1945, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2003. 93.
172