Annexation and Sovietization of Western Ukraine (1939–1941)

The partition of Eastern Europe behind the backs of its peoples: the secret protocol established that "in the event of a territorial-political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state, the boundary of the spheres of interest of Germany and the USSR shall run approximately along the line of the rivers Narew, Vistula, and San"^[3]. Half a century later the Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR "recognizes the secret protocols as legally untenable and invalid from the moment of their signing"^[4]. The invasion was covered by Molotov's note to the Polish ambassador Grzybowski (17 September 1939): "the Polish state and its government have in fact ceased to exist"^[5].

The direct armed invasion of Polish territory by the Red Army on September 17, 1939 for the military occupation of the western Ukrainian lands; the seizure was consolidated by "the treaty of the USSR with Germany (September 28, 1939)," which "confirmed the incorporation of the western Ukrainian lands into the USSR"^[6].

The staging of a no-alternative "People's Assembly" under the control of occupation troops to give the seizure legal form: "On October 27 in Lviv, the People's Assembly of Western Ukraine of 1939 adopted the Declaration on the reunification of Western Ukraine with the Ukrainian SSR, and on November 1 the Supreme Soviet of the USSR passed the law admitting Western Ukraine, as part of the Ukrainian SSR, into the USSR"^[1].

The official annexation of the occupied lands: the western Ukrainian lands were incorporated into the USSR under the treaty with Germany of September 28, 1939^[6], and "after the Red Army occupied Bessarabia and Northern Bukovyna at the end of June 1940, on August 2, 1940 the Supreme Soviet of the USSR annexed Northern Bukovyna and the Khotyn, Akkerman, and Izmail districts of Bessarabia to the Ukrainian SSR"^[1].

Mass forced resettlement by quota: "under the resolutions of the Council of People's Commissars of December 5, 1939 and March 2, 1940, subject to administrative resettlement were the employees of the former state institutions, courts, police, army, merchants, Polish settlers, landowners, owners of plants and factories, and their families"; in total "up to 1,250,000 people were removed to remote regions of the USSR"^[2]. The waves were separate: the osadniks were deported under the USSR Sovnarkom resolution of December 5, 1939, no. 2010-558ss - its text remains in the closed Archive of the President of the Russian Federation (fond 93), while the mechanics of the operation are known from the NKVD Instruction approved on December 29, 1939^[7]; the families of officers, policemen and prison guards were deported under the resolution of March 2, 1940, no. 289-127ss^[8].

The neutralization of the politically active stratum through mass arrests: immediately after the "People's Assembly" came "the arrests of leading figures of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, by lists prepared in advance, drawn up in the Soviet consulate"^[9]; "in all, in 1939—1941 the NKVD organs arrested 21,982 Poles, 23,163 Ukrainians and 13,160 Jews"^[9], and those arrested faced execution, prison or the GULAG camps: "in total, during 1939—1941, between 16 and 35 thousand OUN members were shot or imprisoned"^[9].

The transfer of hundreds of thousands of people into special settlements and camps as a system of forced labor: in under two years "up to 1,250,000 people (about 10% of the population) were removed to remote regions of the USSR"^[2] – the deportees were assigned to labor in remote regions with no right to leave.

The sign of the new order goes up within the very first weeks: Soviet troops took Lviv on 22 September 1939^[10], and already in October, in the city center, on the islet in the middle of today's Svobody Avenue, rose the monument to the Stalin Constitution - a huge vertical composition of columns entwined with red banners, on a wooden frame, with five sculptural groups (a Red Army soldier, a worker, a mother with a child, a female student, and an old Hutsul with a boy) and inscriptions in Ukrainian, Polish and Yiddish symbolizing the "friendship of peoples" according to the articles of the Stalin constitution^[11][12]. The sign has named authors: the sculptor Serhii Lytvynenko and the Kyiv artist Mykhailo Dmytrenko, who arrived in Lviv in 1939 in the "landing party" of Soviet artists whose task was the implantation of socialist realism; possibly the authors merely adapted to the site a design produced in Moscow, and it was executed by the sculptors Yevhen Dzyndra and Andrii Koverko^[11]. The monument stood until 30 June 1941 and vanished with the arrival of the Germans^[11].