Before long, as we shall see, the occupation by the Red Army of Eastern Poland was to be represented as "the liberation of Western Belorussia and the Western Ukraine" and as a means of saving these areas from the Nazis.
The present-day Soviet assessment of the Soviet-German Pact is that it was a measure that had been forced on Russia which simply had no alternative.
[For example ex-Ambassador Maisky's criticism of British foreign policy in 1939 in his memoirs.]
It is one of the very few points on which Khrushchev has never attacked or criticised Stalin, but has, on the contrary, fully justified his action.
Chapter III THE PARTITION OF POLAND
The coverage in the Soviet press of the German invasion of Poland was almost
unbelievably thin. It looked as though there were a desire to make people think and talk about it as little as possible. An attempt was made to give the impression that this was a small local war, of no particular consequence to the Soviet Union, where life, thanks to the wisdom of Comrade Stalin, was going on normally and peacefully.
Much space was given in the press to a great popular fête at the Dynamo Stadium in
Moscow on the eve of the German invasion of Poland, to another fête at Sokolniki a few days later, and to the International Youth Days which were celebrated in Moscow,
Leningrad and Kiev at the end of the first week of the war (though the question which nations were represented at these Youth Days was left remarkably vague—and no
wonder!).
In reporting the war itself, the Soviet press tried at first to sound as neutral and objective as possible. Both the German and the Polish communiqués were published; but
controversial matters like the "Operation Himmler" at Gleiwitz—where Germans, dressed in Polish uniform, attacked a German wireless station—were carefully avoided.
[In the Soviet post-war History of the war, on the other hand, the greatest prominence is given to this far-reaching Nazi provocation against Poland.]
Hitler's Reichstag speech announcing the invasion of Poland was given under a three-
column heading in Pravda on September 2. The speech was important since, in the course of it, Hitler said: "I can endorse every word that Foreign Commissar Molotov uttered in his Supreme Soviet speech," and proposed the ratification of the Soviet-German Pact. The news that Britain had declared war on Germany was given only a two-
column heading.
Relations with Nazi Germany were what seemed to interest the Soviet Government most.
On September 6, Pravda prominently reported that, in the presence of Ribbentrop, Hitler had received the new Soviet Ambassador, Comrade Shkvartsev and the Soviet Military
Attaché, Comrade Purkayev. "After presenting his credentials, the Soviet Ambassador had a lengthy talk with Hitler."
Events in Britain and France were only very thinly reported, but, significantly perhaps, considerable interest was shown in the American attitude to the war in Europe.
But that "objectivity" in reporting the war in Poland did not last long. Ten days after the German invasion Pravda published its first "survey" of the Polish-German war which, it said, was marked by an extraordinarily rapid advance of the German troops; the absence of any proper fortifications in Western Poland and great German air superiority, as a result of which practically all Polish airfields, most of the Polish air force and most communication centres had been destroyed. The "survey" stressed the great superiority of the German land forces, with their large numbers of tanks and heavy guns, and also
commented on the total lack of "any effective help" from Britain and France. Although, it concluded, a large part of the Polish Army had succeeded in crossing the Vistula, the Polish command was unlikely to continue strong resistance, since it had lost practically its entire military and economic base.
Better still was to come. Three days later, on September 14, a Pravda editorial argued that the Polish Army had practically not fought at all.
Why is this Polish Army not offering the Germans any resistance to speak of? It is because Poland is not a homogeneous country. Only sixty percent of the population are Poles, the rest are Ukrainians, Belorussians and Jews... The eleven million
Ukrainians and Belorussians are living in a state of national oppression... The
administration is Polish, and no other language is recognised. There are practically no non-Polish schools or other cultural establishments. The Polish Constitution does not give non-Poles the right to be taught in their own language. Instead, the Polish Government has been pursuing a policy of forced Polonisation...
The more heroic episodes of the Polish soldiers' resistance to superior German forces—
whether at Hel or Westerplatte or in Warsaw—were not mentioned at all; instead, on
September 14, Pravda reported that "after a tour of inspection of the Front, Hitler had arrived at Lodz at 3 p.m." Reports of German air attacks on railway trains and of "the flight of the Polish Government" were intended to convey the impression that by the middle of September Poland was in a complete state of chaos.
The full significance of the article on the Ukrainians and Belorussians soon became
apparent. On September 17 Molotov made a broadcast in which he declared that two
weeks of war had demonstrated the "internal incapacity" of the Polish State. All industrial centres had been lost; nor could Warsaw be considered any more the capital of the Polish State. No one knew where the Polish Government was. The situation in Poland therefore called for the greatest vigilance on the part of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Government had informed the Polish Ambassador, Mr Grzybowski, that the Red Army had been
ordered to take under its protection the populations of Western Belorussia and the
Western Ukraine.
Grzybowski had, indeed, been informed that day that although it had been neutral "up till now", the Soviet Government could no longer be neutral in the face of reigning chaos in Poland or the fact that "our blood-brothers, the Ukrainians and Belorussians, are being abandoned to their fate..."
And then came the guerre fraîche et joyeuse. In a few days the Red Army occupied vast stretches of country which had constituted the eastern half of Poland. The war
communiqué of September 17 announced that the Red Army had crossed the Polish
frontier all the way from Latvia to Rumania; that, in the north, Molodechno and
Baranovichi had been occupied, and, in the south, Rovno and Dubno. Seven Polish
fighters had been brought down, three Polish bombers had been forced to land, and their crews had been taken prisoner. By September 20 the Red Army had occupied Kovel,
Lwow, Vilno and Grodno. Three Polish divisions had been disarmed, and 68,000 officers and men taken prisoner.
On September 19 a joint Soviet-German communiqué was published saying that the task
of the Soviet and German troops was to "restore peace and order which had been
disturbed by the disintegration [raspad] of the Polish State, and to help the population of Poland to reorganise the conditions of its political existence".
If, during the German invasion of Poland, the Soviet press was extremely reticent in its accounts of what was happening, and carefully refrained from any "straight" reporting, it now embarked on an orgy of rapturous articles and descriptive reports on the enthusiasm with which the Red Army was being welcomed by the people of the Western Ukraine and
Western Belorussia—
Happy Days in the Liberated Villages (report from the Rovno area).