ABSTRACT

When the Wehrmacht attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, Stalin’s optimistic expectations were shattered. One of the purposes of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact had been to fortify the security of the Soviet state. National security was one of the foundation stones of Stalin’s foreign policy. A secret protocol to the pact delimited a boundary between German and Soviet “spheres of interest” running right through Poland, with Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Bessarabia in the Soviet zone. 1 When the Red Army crossed the Polish border, Stalin was elated by the return of the ethnically Ukrainian and White Russian territories, but he was glad to lose the land inhabited mainly by ethnic Poles. In September 1939, he told von Ribbentrop that dividing up the area with a purely Polish population was no wise thing to do. “History had proved that the Polish population strove always for reunification.” 2 Stalin traded his share of ethnic Poland for Lithuania.