World War II Behind Closed Doors (4 page)

But as the Germans invaded Poland from the west, the Soviet Union made no move to invade from the east. Consequently,
Ribbentrop was concerned about Stalin's reaction to any German incursion into eastern Poland, the region that adjoined the Soviet Union and that it had just been agreed was within the Soviet sphere of influence. He cabled Schulenburg, the German ambassador in Moscow, on 3 September: ‘We should naturally, however, for military reasons, have to continue to take action against such Polish military forces as are at that time located in the Polish territory belonging to the Russian sphere of influence. Please discuss this at once with Molotov and see if the Soviet Union does not consider it desirable for Russian forces to move at the proper time against Polish forces in the Russian sphere of influence and, for their part, to occupy this territory. In our estimation this would not only be a relief for us, but also, in the sense of the Moscow agreements, be in the Soviet interest as well’.
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The Soviet leadership did not respond immediately to the German suggestion. Stalin was never a man to act on impulse. And there were important issues to consider. What, for example, would be the likely British and French response to any Soviet incursion? The Western Allies had just declared war on Germany because they had agreed by treaty to protect Poland against aggression. If the Red Army moved into eastern Poland, would they now decide to fight the Soviet Union as well? In fact, was the pact of ‘non-aggression’ with the Nazis about to drag the Soviets into the very war it had been designed to exclude them from?

But there remained strong arguments in favour of military action. The Soviets didn't just recognize the obvious material benefits to be gained from annexing a large chunk of another country – they were motivated by powerful historical reasons as well. Not least because Stalin felt he had a score to settle with the Poles. He still remembered with bitterness the war the Bolsheviks had fought with the Poles between 1919 and 1920 (most often called the Polish-Soviet war, although the ‘Soviet Union’ was only agreed in principle in 1922 and was not formally recognized until 1924). Poland, which had vanished as an independent country in the eighteenth century, carved up between its more powerful neighbours, was reconstituted by the Versailles peace treaty at the end of the
First World War. And whilst the Polish leader Józef Piłsudski wanted to push the border as far east as possible, Lenin saw Poland as an obstruction on the road the Communists needed to take in order to spread the revolution into Europe, particularly into a postwar Germany that he believed was ripe for Marxist conquest.

Initially the Bolshevik army performed well, advancing by the summer of 1920 almost to Warsaw. But then the Poles counter-attacked and defeated them at the battle of the river Niemen. Subsequently, through the Treaty of Riga, which was signed in March 1921, the Poles gained western Ukraine and western Belarus and this new border was ratified at an Allied conference in 1923. (It was this tortuous history that lay behind Molotov's infamous remark that Poland was ‘the monstrous bastard of the Peace of Versailles’.)
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Significantly, this whole Polish affair was not just a general humiliation for the Bolsheviks but an individual humiliation for the Commissar of the South-Western Front – a man called Joseph Stalin. When Marshal Tukhachevsky, the Bolshevik commander, called for reinforcements, Stalin had failed to send them. In 1925 Stalin even attempted to conceal this blot on his early career by removing the relevant documents from the Kiev archives.
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But although he felt a strong antipathy towards the Poles, in September 1939 Stalin wasn't about to let his emotions decide his next move. He also knew that the Soviets could attempt to legitimize any incursion into Polish territory with propaganda, hiding behind a proposal that in 1919 Lord Curzon, then British Foreign Secretary, had put forward as the border between Poland and its eastern neighbours – the so-called ‘Curzon Line’. This suggestion was rejected by the Bolsheviks at the time, but it was, as it happened, broadly similar to the border that Stalin and Molotov had just agreed with Ribbentrop would divide their ‘spheres of influence’ in Poland. Moreover, the Poles were not in a majority in these eastern territories. Whilst around 40 per cent of the population were of Polish origin, 34 per cent were Ukrainian and 9 per cent Belarusian. This, the Soviet propagandists realized, allowed any incursion to be couched as an act of ‘liberation’ – freeing the ‘local’ population from Polish domination.

A combination of all these factors meant that on 9 September, six days after Ribbentrop had sent his original cable, Molotov replied to say that the Red Army was about to move into the agreed Soviet ‘sphere of influence’ in Poland. At a meeting in Moscow the following day with the German ambassador, Molotov told Schulenburg that the pretext for the invasion would be that the Soviet Union was helping Ukrainians and Belarusians. ‘This argument’, he said, ‘was to make the intervention of the Soviet Union plausible and at the same time avoid giving the Soviet Union the appearance of an aggressor’.
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THE SOVIETS INVADE POLAND

On 17 September six hundred thousand Soviet troops crossed into eastern Poland, led by Marshal Kovalov in the north on the Belarusian front and Marshal Timoshenko in the south on the Ukrainian front. In a radio broadcast that same day, Molotov justified the Soviet action by relying on the ‘plausible’ argument he had outlined to Schulenburg. He announced that this military action was necessary in order to save the ‘blood brothers’ of the Soviet people who lived in eastern Poland. Not to have taken action would, according to Molotov, have been an act of ‘abandonment’.

‘We officially extended the hand of friendship to our brother Russians and Ukrainians’, says Georgy Dragunov,
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one of the Soviet soldiers who entered former Polish territory that September. ‘Our military propaganda literature and our political officers tried to brainwash us into believing that the workers needed our help and that they were being exploited by the Polish bureaucracy’. The Red Army was initially welcomed in many places. Indeed, there was confusion as to whether this was actually an invasion at all. Perhaps, some thought, the Soviet troops had really come to ‘help’. Maybe they would just motor through the flat countryside of eastern Poland and confront the Germans, who had already captured most of the west of the country.

Boguslava Gryniv
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and her family lived near Lwów,
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one of
the major cities of southeast Poland. They were of Ukrainian descent, so felt they had little to fear from the Soviets. ‘People welcomed them [the soldiers] by waving at them’, she says. ‘People also sometimes welcomed them with flowers and also with the [Ukrainian] blue-yellow flag…. All they [the Red Army soldiers] did was open up the hatches on their tanks and smile at the population. That was how they arrived…. We didn't expect anything terrible to happen…. My father said so himself when my mother asked to leave. He said: “These are not the same Bolsheviks as in 1919. After twenty years there is already culture, there is already a state, there is already a justice system”. In other words, he hoped that…well, that they would not be bandits’.

‘When the Red Army arrived in 1939, people, me included, did not feel negatively towards them but nor was there any love’, says Zenon Vrublevsky,
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who was a twelve-year-old schoolboy at the time. ‘People really were very divided. You know, we lived on the same floor as a number of other families. Some of them were glad that [the Red Army] had come. And others said: “Just you wait, they will show you! Siberia is really big, they will take you away to Siberia!” And I didn't really feel either of those things. Neither love nor hate. I just accepted them as a new army, a new government, a new power’.

The Polish army was initially ordered by their government to pull back and not confront the Soviets – though some clashes did occur, notably at Grodno – but it quickly became clear to the Polish leadership that the Red Army had not come to ‘help’. However, the Poles knew they had no hope of surviving against the combined aggression of the Germans and Soviets. They realized that, just as Poland had been swallowed up by its mighty neighbours at the end of the eighteenth century, it was about to be swallowed up once again.

But as the Red Army marched into eastern Poland that September, they did not resemble the mighty army of an immense power. In fact, they stank. ‘The smell that came off them’, says Zenon Vrublevsky, ‘to us it was like the smell of toilet disinfectant. The type we used in public toilets’. ‘They smelt rather odd’,
confirms Anna Levitska,
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another inhabitant of Lwów. ‘It was a kind of distinctive, sharp smell’. Many locals remarked on the contrast between the ‘elegant’ and ‘well turned out’ soldiers of the Polish army with their shiny leather and immaculate uniforms, and the malodorous, tattered rag-bag of a force that now entered their towns and villages. ‘Many people used to laugh at them’, says Zenon Vrublevsky. ‘Look at what they're wearing! Look at these beggars who have come!’

‘As we moved ahead we saw that [Polish] people were much better off, both in military life and in everyday life’, says Georgy Dragunov, who was astonished to witness the disparity in wealth between the Communist Soviet Union and the capitalist Poland. ‘We saw beautifully furnished houses – even peasant houses. [Even] their poorest people were better off than our people – their furniture was polished. Only later did we start to furnish our apartments with similar sorts of furniture. Each poor peasant [in eastern Poland] had no less than two horses and every household had three or four cows and a lot of poultry. This was so unexpected for us because of the propaganda – which was [now] wasted on us because we could see electricity in the peasants’ houses whereas in Soviet Belarus we didn't have electricity'.

Wiesława Saternus, a Polish schoolgirl who lived with her family near the border with the Ukraine, was surprised at her first sight of a soldier of the Red Army: ‘This Russian soldier was running through this empty field and he was shouting that we should give him something to eat. And he came into our house and he wasn't dressed well, in proper dress, and his weapon was hanging on a string. And my mother said that he would get some food…. [Then] this Russian soldier got a small clock which sat on the table and he put it in his pocket without even asking whether he could take this clock or not, and he was just [still] shouting, “Give me some food,” and my mother gave him lots of food and he was [also] packing this food in his coat’.

In a cultured city like Lwów, which had once been a jewel – albeit a provincial one – in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, many of the new arrivals from the Soviet Union felt as if they had entered
a kind of fairyland. Much was strange to them. Anna Levitska saw the wife of a Red Army officer wearing a nightgown she had found, calling it a ‘pretty dress’; and on a visit to the market the same woman bought a chamber pot and announced that she had purchased a nice ‘bowl’. Elsewhere there were reports of Red Army soldiers wearing bras as earmuffs.

Not surprisingly, many of the Soviets felt insecure in this bourgeois wonderland and took to vainglorious boasting about what they had left behind. ‘They would say: “We have so much”’, remembers Zenon Vrublevsky. ‘“Jobs? We have so many jobs!” “Do you have such and such?” “Yes! We have so much of that!” But people guessed that these things were not true’.

Once, in the centre of Lwów, Vrublevsky watched as one of the locals teased two Red Army soldiers: ‘He said: “Comrades, do you have typhus back home?” And the soldiers said: “Of course we do – we have loads of it. We'll be bringing you two trainloads of it soon!” Then the people burst out laughing, and the soldiers realized they had said something stupid and left’.

Anna Levitska witnessed a similar conversation between a Red Army officer and her mother. ‘He said: “Everything here is for the bourgeois. Everything is for them and the simple people cannot obtain anything. But in our country, the Soviet Union, these things are available to anyone who works. We have a surfeit of everything, you know. Oranges which are made in a factory. You can get as many as you want. Caviar of the finest quality. From a factory. It is being sent out. It is all being sent out, so soon we will have it here too…. That's what it is like in our country. We manufacture oranges, tangerines, caviar – it's all made in the factories. So everyone can afford it”. This really made us smile! How could these things possibly be made in factories’?

But a far darker side to the Soviet occupation quickly became apparent. It ranged from casual theft – there were cases of Soviet soldiers simply taking any jewellery they fancied from passers-by – to more serious crime. Anna Levitska knew of two school-friends who were raped by Red Army officers: ‘Those two girls were shaking the entire time that they were telling me about
what had happened. They were in tears. They simply did not understand how this could have happened. They were dreadfully affected by it, and, of course, I too was affected when they told me about it’.

And though theft and rape were officially crimes in the Red Army, there was a sense from the very beginning of the occupation that the Soviets were intent on despoiling eastern Poland – despoiling property, despoiling people, despoiling ideas. In pursuit of the Marxist ideal of ‘equality’, the Soviet authorities turned conventional values upside-down. To be rich was no longer pleasurable but dangerous. Whereas before it had been acceptable to stroll, smartly dressed, down the central promenade in Lwów past the ornate opera house, now it was evidence of ‘bourgeois’ behaviour and rendered you liable to arrest. It is often forgotten that just as the Nazi occupation of western Poland in 1939 was driven by ideological beliefs, so was the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland.