Population exchange between Poland and Soviet Ukraine

Last updated January 05, 2025

The population exchange between Poland and Soviet Ukraine at the end of World War II was based on a treaty signed on 9 September 1944 by the Ukrainian SSR with the newly-formed Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN). The exchange stipulated the transfer of ethnic Ukrainians who had Polish citizenship before September 17, 1939 to the Ukrainian SSR and of ethnic Poles and Jews who had Polish citizenship before September 17, 1939 (date of the Soviet Invasion of Poland) to post-war Poland, in accordance with the resolutions of the Yalta and Tehran conferences and the plans about the new Poland–Ukraine border.^[1] Similar agreements were signed with the Byelorussian SSR (see Population exchange between Poland and Soviet Belarus) and the Lithuanian SSR (see Population exchange between Poland and Soviet Lithuania); the three documents are commonly known as the Republican Agreements [ pl ].

History

The population transfer, which took place in 1944 to 1946, became part of a mass movement of people expelled from their homes in the process of ethnic consolidation throughout nations of Central and Eastern Europe.^[2]^[3]

The new border between post-war Poland and the Soviet Union along the Curzon Line, as requested by Soviet Premier Josef Stalin at the Yalta Conference with the Western Allies, had been ratified. There was an ensuing population exchange that affected close to half a million ethnic Ukrainians and about 1.1 million Poles and Polish Jews.^[4]

The eastern and central areas of the Soviet republics remained unchanged, but the western regions of the Ukrainian and the Byelorussian SSR underwent dramatic expansion at the expense of the Second Polish Republic. The so-called repatriation pertained to rural populations as much as the inhabitants of provincial capitals and stripped them of their prewar economic catchment areas (Grodno, Brest, Lviv, Przemyśl).^[5] About 480,000 people from Zakerzonia, west of the Curzon Line, were moved eastward to the territory, which became part of Soviet Ukraine and Belarus.^[6]

With the signing of the agreement in September 1944, people who were required to register for resettlement were identified only by ethnicity, not by the country of birth. Ukrainians residing west of the border were required to register with the Polish authorities, and the Poles living east of the border registered with the Soviet NKVD.^[4] To guarantee efficiency and prevent the haulage of empty wagons, the resettled people were loaded onto the same returning trains on both sides of the new border. According to statistical data, rural inhabitants (453,766 people) represented 58% of all relocated Poles, while urban residents (328,908 people) accounted for the remaining percentage.^[4]

The number of Ukrainians registered between October 1944 and September 1946 was 492,682. Of the total, 482,880 individuals were eventually relocated to Soviet Ukraine, settling primarily in the Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Lviv Oblasts (provinces), in the southern and south-western oblasts of Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk, and to a lesser extent the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The largest resettlement of Ukrainians from Poland took place in the border counties of Hrubieszów, Przemyśl and Sanok, followed by Lubaczów, Tomaszów, Lesko, Jarosław and Chełm.^[7]^{[ citation needed ]}

Logistics

During the resettlement campaign, all eligible individuals were required to register with local Polish district commissions set up in the key cities of Jarosław, Gorlice, Krasnystaw, Chełm, Lublin, Biłgoraj, Jasło, Zamość and Nowy Sącz. The function of the commissions, which were staffed with both Polish communists and Soviet personnel, was not only to register, coordinate and facilitate the transportation of individuals, but also to conduct propaganda work among the target population. Because of the propaganda, which falsely promised Ukrainians better living conditions in Soviet Ukraine, there was some initial success. However, the number of applications for resettlement tapered off by mid-1945, as word spread concerning the true conditions of the agreement, and by the fact that the Ukrainians were not permitted to leave Soviet Ukraine.

In August 1945, the campaign to resettle entered a new phase. To achieve the political objective of relocating the Ukrainian ethnic population from Poland, the Polish government abandoned the relatively-benign character of the policy toward a more aggressive approach. There was significant resistance, as most Ukrainians did not want to abandon their ancestral lands and resettle to Soviet Ukraine. In that regard, Polish and Soviet security forces were deployed (KBW and MVD, respectively) to force people to relocate. With time, the pretence of "voluntary resettlement" was dropped. Groups and entire villages were forced out of their homes and directed to embark on transports bound for the Soviet Union. Within the course of a single year, July 1945–July 1946, close to 500,000 Ukrainians and Rusyns had been uprooted and deported in that manner. The resettlement operation concluded in September 1946.

The campaign to resettle Ukrainians was in large part intended to remove any base for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which had conducted the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia since 1943. The UPA was somewhat successful in disrupting the 1944–1946 transfers. Difficulties in suppressing the UPA insurgency, however, prompted the Polish and Soviet communist governments to pursue Operation Vistula in 1947, which entailed the resettlement of the Ukrainians remaining in southeastern Poland into the Recovered Territories. Orest Subtelny, a Canadian historian of Ukrainian descent, concluded "that the separation of the two people was a necessary precondition for the development of a mutually beneficial relationship between them. Apparently, the old adage that 'good fences make for good neighbors' has been proven once more," he wrote.^[2]

Notable persons

Stanisław Lem, Polish science fiction writer and his family; resettled from Lwów (now Lviv) to Kraków
Kazimierz Górski, Polish football coach.
Stefan Żywotko, Polish football coach.

Related Research Articles

The Curzon Line was a proposed demarcation line between the Second Polish Republic and the Soviet Union, two new states emerging after World War I. Based on a suggestion by Herbert James Paton, it was first proposed in 1919 by Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary, to the Supreme War Council as a diplomatic basis for a future border agreement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union</span> 1939 Soviet Union invasion of Poland

Seventeen days after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, which marked the beginning of the Second World War, the Soviet Union entered the eastern regions of Poland and annexed territories totalling 201,015 square kilometres (77,612 sq mi) with a population of 13,299,000. Inhabitants besides ethnic Poles included Belarusian and Ukrainian major population groups, and also Czechs, Lithuanians, Jews, and other minority groups.

The Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia were carried out in German-occupied Poland by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), with the support of parts of the local Ukrainian population, against the Polish minority in Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, parts of Polesia, and the Lublin region from 1943 to 1945.

Ternopil Oblast, also referred to as Ternopilshchyna or Ternopillia, is an oblast (province) of Ukraine. Its administrative center is Ternopil, through which flows the Seret, a tributary of the Dniester. Population: 1,021,713.

Eastern Borderlands or simply Borderlands 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, 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 Ukrainian Insurgent Army was a Ukrainian nationalist paramilitary and partisan formation founded by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists on 14 October 1942. During World War II, it was engaged in Nazi collaborationism. However, the UPA later launched guerrilla warfare against Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and both the Polish Underground State and Polish Communists. It conducted the massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, which are recognized by Poland as a genocide.

Operation Vistula was the codename for the 1947 forced resettlement of close to 150,000 Ukrainians from the south-eastern provinces of post-war Poland, to the Recovered Territories in the west of the country. The action was carried out by the Soviet-installed Polish communist authorities to remove material support to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army continued its guerrilla activities until 1947 in Subcarpathian and Lublin Voivodeships with no hope for any peaceful resolution; Operation Vistula brought an end to the hostilities.

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The repatriation of Poles in 1955–1959, also known as the second repatriation, to distinguish it from the first repatriation in 1944–1946, was the second wave of forced repatriation of Poles living in the territories annexed by the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II. The widely used term repatriation, promoted by decades of Polish communist propaganda, is a euphemism for acts of expatriation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">1951 Polish–Soviet territorial exchange</span> The largest peaceful territorial exchange in history

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zakerzonia</span>

Zakerzonia is an informal name for the territories of Poland to the west of the Curzon Line which used to have sizeable Ukrainian populations, including significant Lemko, Boyko populations, before the invasion of Poland by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in 1939, and were claimed as ethnically Ukrainian territories by Ukrainian nationalists in the aftermath of World War II. However, before 1939, the areas of Zakerzonia were mostly inhabited by Poles, who constituted about 70% of the population of this area. Ukrainians lived in a minority in Zakerzonia, constituting about 20% of the area's population.

The population exchange between Poland and Soviet Belarus at the end of World War II (1944–1947) was based on an agreement signed on 9 September 1944 by the Byelorussian SSR with the newly-formed Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN). It stipulated the resettlement of ethnic Belarusians from Poland to Belarus and of ethnic Poles and Jews who had Polish citizenship before September 17, 1939 from Belarus to Poland, in accordance with the resolutions of the Yalta and Tehran conferences and the plans about the new Belarus–Poland border. Similar agreements were signed with the Ukrainian SSR and the Lithuanian SSR ; the three documents are commonly known as the Republican Agreements.

The population exchange between Poland and Lithuanian SSR at the end of World War II (1944-1947) was based on an agreement signed on 9 September 1944 by the Lithuanian SSR with the newly-formed Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN). It stipulated the resettlement of ethnic Lithuanians from Poland to Lithuania and of ethnic Poles and Jews who had Polish citizenship before 17 September 1939 from Lithuania to Poland, in accordance with the resolutions of the Yalta and Tehran conferences and the plans about the new Lithuania–Poland border. Similar agreements were signed with the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR ; the three documents are commonly known as the Republican Agreements.

The anti-Soviet resistance by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was a guerrilla war waged by Ukrainian nationalist partisan formations against the Soviet Union in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and southwestern regions of the Byelorussian SSR, during and after World War II. With the Red Army forces successful counteroffensive against the Nazi Germany and their invasion into western Ukraine in July 1944, UPA resisted the Red Army's advancement with full-scale guerrilla war, holding up 200,000 Soviet soldiers, particularly in the countryside, and was supplying intelligence to the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst (SD) security service.

Self-defense Kushch Units (SKU) — Ukrainian self-defense units formed to protect Ukrainian villages, as well as to create a rear for the UPA. They operated in 1942–1946 and were inspected by the district leaders of the separate formation of OUN – OUN(b).

Beresteishchyna is a region in Western Polesie, in what is primarily the modern Brest Region of Belarus. Located along the western Bug.

References

↑ "Переселение белорусов из Польши и Полесская область (1944–1947 гг.)". Archived from the original on 1 September 2021. Retrieved 1 September 2021.
1 2 Yfaat Weiss (2006). "Ethnic Cleansing, Memory and Property". Jüdische Geschichte als allgemeine Geschichte. Dan Diner, Raphael Gross. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. pp. 174–175. ISBN 3-525-36288-9. Archived from the original on 6 July 2021. Retrieved 20 September 2020.
↑ Alexander V. Prusin (2016). Nation-building and Moving People. The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914–1945. Nicholas Doumanis. Oxford University Press. p. 558. ISBN 978-0-19-101775-9. Archived from the original on 3 July 2021. Retrieved 20 September 2020.
1 2 3 Stanisław Ciesielski (1999). Przesiedlenie ludności polskiej z kresów wschodnich do Polski, 1944–1947 [Resettlement of Poles from the Kresy region to Poland, 1944–1947]. Neriton : Instytut Historii PAN, Polish Academy of Sciences. pp. 29, 50, 434. ISBN 83-86842-56-3. Archived from the original on 19 July 2021. Retrieved 20 September 2020.
↑ Dr Hans-Liudger Dienel; Dr Martin Schiefelbusch (2014). Linking Networks: The Formation of Common Standards and Visions for Infrastructure Development. Ashgate Publishing. p. 192. ISBN 978-1-4094-7164-6. Archived from the original on 19 July 2021. Retrieved 20 September 2020.
↑ Bohdan Kordan (Autumn 1997). "Making Borders Stick: Population Transfer and Resettlement in the Trans-Curzon Territories, 1944–1949". Int Migr Rev. 31 (3). International Migration Review: 704–720 preview, with purchase. doi:10.2307/2547293. JSTOR 2547293. PMID 12292959.
↑ Kordan, Bohdan (22 September 1997). "Making Borders Stick: Population Transfer and Resettlement in the Trans-Curzon Territories". The International Migration Review. 31 (4): 707.

External links

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[1] "Переселение белорусов из Польши и Полесская область (1944–1947 гг.)". Archived from the original on 1 September 2021. Retrieved 1 September 2021.

[YW-2] 1 2 Yfaat Weiss (2006). "Ethnic Cleansing, Memory and Property". Jüdische Geschichte als allgemeine Geschichte. Dan Diner, Raphael Gross. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. pp. 174–175. ISBN 3-525-36288-9. Archived from the original on 6 July 2021. Retrieved 20 September 2020.

[AVP-3] Alexander V. Prusin (2016). Nation-building and Moving People. The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914–1945. Nicholas Doumanis. Oxford University Press. p. 558. ISBN 978-0-19-101775-9. Archived from the original on 3 July 2021. Retrieved 20 September 2020.

[SCi-4] 1 2 3 Stanisław Ciesielski (1999). Przesiedlenie ludności polskiej z kresów wschodnich do Polski, 1944–1947 [Resettlement of Poles from the Kresy region to Poland, 1944–1947]. Neriton : Instytut Historii PAN, Polish Academy of Sciences. pp. 29, 50, 434. ISBN 83-86842-56-3. Archived from the original on 19 July 2021. Retrieved 20 September 2020.

[D&S-5] Dr Hans-Liudger Dienel; Dr Martin Schiefelbusch (2014). Linking Networks: The Formation of Common Standards and Visions for Infrastructure Development. Ashgate Publishing. p. 192. ISBN 978-1-4094-7164-6. Archived from the original on 19 July 2021. Retrieved 20 September 2020.

[BK-6] Bohdan Kordan (Autumn 1997). "Making Borders Stick: Population Transfer and Resettlement in the Trans-Curzon Territories, 1944–1949". Int Migr Rev. 31 (3). International Migration Review: 704–720 preview, with purchase. doi:10.2307/2547293. JSTOR 2547293. PMID 12292959.

[7] Kordan, Bohdan (22 September 1997). "Making Borders Stick: Population Transfer and Resettlement in the Trans-Curzon Territories". The International Migration Review. 31 (4): 707.

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