Soviets with Nazis, camarads at arms. Brzesc-nad-Bugiem, Sep. 22, 1939

"POLAND - The Bastard of Versailles is no more!
Long Live Nazi-Soviet Friendship!"

Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, the principal Soviet signatory of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939.

Soviet and Nazi met to celebrate the victory over Poland.

The Great Patriotic War - as the Russians like to call it - which claimed the lives of millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians, and landed millions of Soviet citizens in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, was greatly facilitated by the August 23, 1939, German-Soviet Pact of Non-Aggression that decisively allied the Nazi Third Reich with the Communist Soviet Union. The Secret Additional Protocol in the Pact was also drawn up for the reorganization of Central Europe.

That September, in violation of their own treaties with Poland, both of these allies invaded and partitioned the Second Polish Republic. Thus began World War II. According to Stalin, the joint aim of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was to "re-establish peace and order" in the territories of the "former Polish state", which had been destroyed by the "collapse of the former Polish state", and to help the Polish people establish new conditions for its political life. Needless to say, that the "collapse of the former Polish state" had been brought about by the very powers which now promised to "re-establish peace and order". On September 28, 1939, the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty established the new borders of the "respective national interests" of Germany and Soviet Union in the "former Polish state" and promised to "assure to the peoples living there a peaceful life in keeping with their national character".

It may be worth adding that in keeping with the terms of the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, the Soviet government also pledged to actively support and did actively support the German war effort against Poland and the West. This support took many forms: the breaking of the British blockade of Germany, the permission to establish German navy bases in the USSR, the allowance for the passage over Soviet territory of raw materials bound for Germany from other nations, and the supplying of goods such as food, cattle, cotton, phosphates, chromium and iron ore, platinum, zinc, rubber, flax, lumber and oil directly to Germany. Each month, for the duration of the Soviet-German alliance, 200-300 Soviet trains carried these goods into the heart of the Third Reich.

Meanwhile, instead of assuring "peace and order" in the "former Polish state", both allies subjected the Polish population to a reign of terror the likes of which had seldom been seen before in the annals of human history. Their mutual aim was to completely suppress the political and sociocultural life of the Polish people forever. But they went even further - their official policies included: outright murder of the intelligentsia and class enemies, extermination through work, resettlement, deportation, enslavement, assimilation, and - in the case of more scientific Germany - the kidnapping and germanization of Polish children and the involuntary sterilization of Polish women.

One of these monstrous measures carried out by the Soviet government was the massive deportation of Polish citizens from the Soviet occupation zone, or the so-called Soviet "sphere of influence", to the barren wastes of Siberia and Arkhangelsk - the Gulag Archipelago - where, as it is described in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's masterful epic, millions of Soviet citizens were dumped after the Bolshevik Revolution. On 1 September, 1939 German Army invaded Poland from the west, then on 17 September, 1939 Red Army invaded Poland from the east. As the German Army front units were closely followed by special SS Einsatzgruppen units charged to massacre prominent and influential polish citizens, so the Red Army units were followed by NKVD units charged to execute polish leadership and to deport into labor camps the remaining polish citizens living in occupied territories.

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