The Red Army’s March into Poland, September 1939

Abstract

At long last, after a seemingly interminable and intolerable hiatus, though the unpalatably brutal facts were patently evident to the world at large and to Poland in particular, the Soviet conspiracy of silence surrounding the 1939 Non-Aggression Treaty with Nazi Germany and its concomitant territorial despoliation has been shattered. At least the taboo, for such it was, has been expunged and the incubus identified, though this has not displaced all the equivocation and carefully crafted obscurantism, much of it politically motivated. Three issues have come to dominate these discussions of Soviet behaviour in 1939. The first concerns the reality of that ‘imperative’ — put even more strongly, an ‘unavoidable imperative’¹ — obliging the Soviet Union to sign with Nazi Germany. The second, still fogged in deliberately pedantic dispute, involves the infamous ‘secret protocol’ and the third, not unconnected, revolves round the justification (or lack of it) for the Red Army’s march into Poland on 17 September 1939.