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the German Blitzkrieg were promptly incorporated inthe Ukrainian and White Russian S.S.R. after electionsto national assemblies conducted according to theCommunist version of self-determination. To theselands the Union had claims of close kinship and, as heirto Russia, historic title. They formed part of the disputedterritory which was the second of the causes sodeeply dividing Russia and Poland in the past; 'thewestern lands' for Russia, 'the eastern lands' for Poland.' The western lands,' roughly those west of the Dnieperand the Dvina and east of the Bug (see map 5), had beenacquired by Russia by the three partitions of Poland of1772, 1793, and 1795, and been ruled by her continuouslyuntil her breakdown in 1917. The outcome of thePolish-Soviet war of 1920 had been that they wereapproximately divided between the two, except for thenorthern portion which became Lithuania (but not Vilna,seized by the Poles in 1920) and part of Latvia.The outcome of the German-Soviet partition ofSeptember 1939 was that the Soviet Union acquired thewhole of 'the western lands' and in addition easternGalicia, which had never been included in the Russianempire, but had been under Austria since the firstpartition (1772) and then regained by Poland in 1919-20by force of arms against the Ukrainians.'The western lands' and eastern Galicia were, andalways had been, non-Polish in the sense that, taken asa whole, the great majority of the inhabitants wereUkrainian and White Russian or Lithuanian. 1 Exceptfor eastern Galicia, they had formed part of the grandduchyof Lithuania since the fourteenth century, whichitself was more and more closely linked with the kingdomof Poland, since 1386 through a common dynasty, since1569 (the Union of Lublin) in a species of federatedunion. Thus the great Poland of the fifteenth to theeighteenth centuries was (like the Muscovite empire) acomposite state, with the western half Polish, the eastern1See the later section on the Ukrainian question. In this section Iuse the terms Ukrainian and White Russian to mean those inhabitantsof 'the western lands' who spoke what gradually developed intoUkrainian and White Russian.200