Kresy

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Development of the Polish borders
Typical landscape view of the Kresy in western Ukraine, with wide grasslands and hills ( Sielec , Ukraine )
Wincenty Pol - the creator of the term "Kresy" in the modern sense
Partitions of Poland

As Kresy [ˈkrɛsɨ] (German borderland ), sometimes also Eastern Poland , the Ruthenian areas that came to the Kingdom of Poland after the collapse of the Kievan Rus in 1240 were designated. After the union with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania , to which a large part of those territories, especially in the north, belonged to the Royal Republic of Poland-Lithuania , from 1569 it was understood to mean the entire eastern parts of the country belonging to the Polish crown, which stretched as far as the Dnepr , which formed the border with the khanate of Crimea . Up until the partitions of Poland , it referred to the eastern border regions of Poland-Lithuania, which at that time were also called Wildes Feld (pln. Dzikie Pola ).

During the period of the Second Polish Republic between 1918 and 1939, the term was used to describe the areas east of the later Curzon Line , which were largely annexed by Poland in the 1920s.

In September 1939, the area fell under Soviet occupation as part of the Hitler-Stalin Pact . The territories within the Soviet Union were reassigned to the respective Soviet republics and have remained part of the - now independent - states of Lithuania , Belarus and Ukraine since the collapse of the Soviet Union .

etymology

Kresy is a Germanism of the Polish language. The Polish word was adopted as a writing standard in the 18th and 19th centuries from the written German language, from the old Middle High German word kres or Kreiz .

history

Poland-Lithuania

Part of the Kresy, then also called Wild Fields (Polish: Dzikie Pola ), had been part of Poland since the early 15th century. With the formation of the Republic of Poland-Lithuania, extensive Ruthenian areas of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were added.

Partitions of Poland

The year 1772 marked the beginning of the Russian and Austrian conquests of eastern Poland, which ended in 1795 with the final partition of Poland . The division was carried out in three steps

  1. In 1772 Russia occupied around 92,000 km² in the east and Austria around 83,000 km² in south-east Poland. At the same time, Prussia occupied territories in western Poland.
  2. In 1793 Russia occupied large areas east of the Druja-Pińsk-Zbrucz line, which covered about 250,000 km². Prussia pushed further north-east, whereas Austria did not participate this time.
  3. In 1795 Russia occupied an area of ​​around 120,000 km² east of the Bug and the Niemirów-Grodno line. Austria and Prussia occupied the remaining areas of Poland in the south and west.

This period of Eastern Poland's history is marked by religious and national persecution, which resulted in several Polish uprisings against Russia ( November uprising , January uprising ). After the uprisings were put down, persecution and repression intensified. The annexation of eastern Poland by Russia was not only a national catastrophe in this respect. The cultural and social development also stagnated and in some cases even fell back to the Russian level. So z. For example, the Russian-occupied eastern Poland was one of the regions in Europe that had been affected by serfdom the longest . It was not abolished until 1864 (for comparison: in the Prussian-occupied part of Poland and in the Duchy of Warsaw it was abolished in 1807). At the beginning of the First World War, Russian troops occupied large areas of the Austrian division from August 1914 to June 1915.

1918 to 1939

The re-establishment of the Polish state, which after the First World War was referred to as the “ Second Republic ” as opposed to the Rzeczpospolita , was a stormy and warlike period in the history of the Kresy. Between November 1918 and March 1921 Poland waged two wars over the region; the Polish-Ukrainian War (1918-1919) and the Polish-Soviet War (1920-1921), which ended with the Peace of Riga . Poland was only able to partially achieve the war goal of recapturing the historic territories lost after 1772.

1939 to 1944

1939 to 1941

Eastern Poland was in September 1939, not by the army but as a result of the signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939 secret protocol of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact from the Red Army occupied after two Soviet army groups marched into eastern Poland on September 17 1939th The new German-Soviet border was defined in the Border and Friendship Treaty on September 28 and lasted until the start of the German enterprise Barbarossa on June 22, 1941.

1941 to 1944

In June 1941 the German troops penetrated several hundred kilometers to the east in a few weeks and thus occupied the Kresy for almost three years. By January 1944, the Soviet Union was able to recapture the areas east of the former Polish eastern border before September 17, 1939 and by July 1944 had reached the border established in the Border and Friendship Treaty of September 28, 1939, which corresponds almost exactly to today's eastern border of Poland .

post war period

After the war, the areas became part of the Ukrainian SSR , Belarusian SSR and Lithuanian SSR and remained within their borders even after their declaration of independence in the early 1990s.

After the end of the war, a minority of around 1.8 million Polish citizens lived in the Kresy. After the end of the war, these Poles were asked to move to the West voluntarily and otherwise had to face forced resettlement. After 1945 they mainly moved to Poland, but mainly to the former eastern territories of the German Empire , mainly to Silesia. However, there is still a Polish minority in the area.

The following important information is missing from this article or section:
The mythization of the Kresy in the Polish culture of remembrance is largely absent.
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See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Kresy  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ^ Samuel Bogumił Linde : Dictionary of the Polish Language , 1807.
  2. ↑ Krzysztof Jasiewicz: Zagłada polskich Kresów: ziemiaństwo polskie na Kresach Północno-Wschodnich Rzeczypospolitej pod okupacją sowiecką 1939-1941. Warsaw 1998, ISBN 83-86857-81-1 .
  3. ↑ Granice i pogranicza, język i historia: materiały międzynarodowej konferencji naukowej , Warszawa, 27-28 maja 1993. Uniwersytet Warszawski, Stanisław Dubisz p. 43, p. 45, p. 121.
  4. ↑ Hain Rebas , 50 years ago and today: Estonia between Germany and the Soviet Union - A historiographical-chronological introduction , in: Robert Bohn, Jürgen Elvert, Hain Rebas, Michael Salewski (eds.): Neutrality and totalitarian aggression. Northern Europe and the great powers in World War II. Steiner, Stuttgart 1991 (= HMRG, supplement 1), p. 32; Joachim Rohlfes , Historical Contemporary Studies: Handbook for Political Education , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1970, p. 548.
  5. ^ Stanisław Ciesielski, Włodzimierz Borodziej: Przesiedlenie ludności polskiej z kresów wschodnich do Polski 1944–1947 . Wydawnictwo Neriton, Warsaw 2000, ISBN 978-83-8684256-8 .
  6. ↑ Thomas Urban : The loss - the expulsion of the Germans and Poles in the 20th century . Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-406-54156-8 , pp. 152-153.
  7. ↑ See also: National history policy, restrictive security and illiberal democracy - the Polish Ostpolitik under the PiS government. In: Poland analyzes. No. 237, May 21, 2019.