Stalin полностью

Soviet terror methods were different, spurring self-destruction of existing social bonds by soliciting anonymous denunciations by aggrieved individuals against their neighbors, a story to be more fully examined below. In the meantime, the occupiers found a cornucopia. “Long trains with Soviet functionaries and their families, mostly from Kiev and Kharkov, began pulling into the station,” remarked one observer in what had been Poland’s territory. “Streets filled with crowds of shabbily dressed and dirty people frantically eyeing already modest-looking store windows. They bought almost everything available to them, especially watches—the most sought-after commodity.” Some Soviet functionaries returned to Kiev with foreign-made cars, provoking volunteerism for service in former Poland. But the Red Army arrived in these regions in torn uniforms and scrounged for food out of obvious hunger, rolling cigarettes with paper picked off the street. When the Poles ridiculed the soldiers for chasing after consumer items even though, according to Soviet propaganda, the USSR enjoyed abundance, the Red Army conscripts shot back that while the Poles had silk stockings and perfumes, the Soviets had tanks, guns, and fighter airplanes. “Frankly,” admitted one Pole, “it was a shrewd point, which often cut the discussion off.”²⁸⁴

Boris Yefimov, the Soviet cartoonist, drew a map of Europe with red arrows showing the Soviet territorial advance westward, with an irate, frightened Neville Chamberlain raising his striped trouser leg to stamp his foot impotently. But the Soviet regime had long trumpeted its policy of “peace,” an ideological pillar, and on September 18, 1939, the day after troops had burst into Poland, Izvestiya had reiterated that the Soviet Union would maintain “a policy of neutrality” in the European war. Two days later, the British and the French, rather than declare war on the USSR for invading Poland, as they had on Germany, requested an “explanation” of Soviet actions. The Soviets remonstrated in public, as they had in private, that the Polish state had “ceased to exist” and that the “vacuum” threatened the USSR, justifying the dispatch of the Red Army. At the same time, the Soviets portrayed their military action as a class and national rescue operation. The Polish state had, in fact, mistreated not just its Jews but also its large Ukrainian and Belorussian minorities. Molotov privately admitted to the Germans that the Soviet regime had heretofore not bothered much about the Ukrainians and Belorussians living in Poland.²⁸⁵ But now Soviet propaganda efficaciously cast the invasion and landgrab as Ukrainian-Belorussian “liberation.”

Censorship precluded public mention of the fact that perhaps 40 percent of the population in the territories seized by the USSR was ethnic Polish, or that hundreds of thousands of ethnic Poles were being displaced, deported, or pressed into forced labor; that at least 30,000 ethnic Ukrainians sought refuge in the German-occupied zone; that some invading Red Army soldiers had deserted by heading to the German zone; and that even some Jews, who mostly tended to flee toward the Soviet zone, preferred a return to their homes under Nazi occupation to a life under Soviet rule.²⁸⁶ What the Soviet populace might have made of such information will never be known. What we can say is that many ordinary Soviet inhabitants perceived justice in the fight against Polish “class and national oppression,” as well as in a rearranged border that reunited “blood brother” Ukrainians and Belorussians, in repudiation of Piłsudski’s “imperialist” Treaty of Riga (1920).²⁸⁷ The Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic doubled in size for the second time (the first had been 1924–26, when it was awarded territories carved from the Russian republic). Ukrainian irredentist dreams were fulfilled. “Everyone approves the seizure of (western) Ukraine and Belorussia,” wrote the regime critic and geochemist Vernadsky in his diary that fall of 1939. “The Stalin-Molotov policy is realistic and, it seems to me, correct, a Russian policy of state.”²⁸⁸