Russian Embassy to South Africa's reply to The Star article published in the “Back in The Day” column on Sept 17, 2024

We took note of an article, published in the “Back in the Day” column of The Star on Sept 17, 2024. The column on historically significant events reports in line with the Western propaganda that on this day in 1939 the USSR “joined Germany’s invasion of Poland attacking its eastern borders.”

This is nothing more than a myth painted by Western propaganda as a proof of an alleged ‘conspiracy between Hitler and Stalin’ – alongside the much-touted Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and the so-called ‘Soviet-German joint parade’ in Brest. As with these two cases, propaganda seeks to de-contextualize the history of the Red Army’s Polish campaign and pin the idea of ‘equal responsibility’ of Nazi Germany and the USSR for unleashing World War II into people’s heads.

The truth is that after Nazi Germany attacked Poland on Sept 1, 1939, starting the World War II, the Soviet Union waited for more than two weeks for London and Paris to send troops to rescue their Polish ally. Only when it became obvious that they wouldn’t and the Wehrmacht could swiftly occupy entire Poland and thus appear in the vicinities of Minsk, the Soviet military command ordered to cross the then Polish border.

Wehrmacht and the Red Army conducted no joint combat actions in Poland, while clashes between Soviet and Polish troops were only isolated incidents.

The USSR didn’t seek to defeat Poland militarily, its purpose was to prevent the occupation of the so-called ‘Eastern Borderlines’ (the territories of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus seized by Poland in 1921) by Wehrmacht.

Liberation of those territories by the Soviet Union was a move to complete the unification of the Belarusian and Ukrainian nations and save them from possible Nazi rule. It was also needed to buy time in the face of the coming aggression from the Third Reich and to provide some cushion by moving the USSR’s border as far westwards as possible.

Otherwise, USSR would have to enter the inevitable war with the Nazis from very disadvantageous strategic positions, while millions of people of different nationalities, including the Jews living near Brest and Grodno, Przemyśl, Lvov and Wilno, would be left to die at the hands of the Nazis and their local accomplices – anti-Semites and radical nationalists.