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Concept
Kresy
Summary
Eastern Borderlands (Kresy Wschodnie) or simply Borderlands (Kresy, ˈkrɛsɨ) was a term coined for the eastern part of the Second Polish Republic during the interwar period (1918–1939). Largely agricultural and extensively multi-ethnic, it amounted to nearly half of the territory of pre-war Poland. Historically situated in the eastern Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, following the 18th-century foreign partitions it was divided between the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and ceded to Poland in 1921 after the Peace of Riga. As a result of the post-World War II border changes, all of the territory was ceded to the USSR, and none of it is in modern Poland.
The Polish plural term Kresy corresponds to the Russian okrainy (окраины), meaning "the border regions". It is also largely co-terminous with the northern areas of the Pale of Settlement, a scheme devised by Catherine the Great to limit Jews from settling in the homogenously Christian Orthodox core of the Russian Empire, such as Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The Pale was established after the Second Partition of Poland and lasted until the 1917 revolution, when the Russian Empire ceased to exist. In the aftermath of the Polish–Soviet War and the Peace of Riga, both the Austrian and Russian sectors of the Kresy were reincorporated into Poland. However, the population already consisted of various religious and ethnic minorities, which exceeded the number of ethnic Poles, for instance Jews in small towns called shtetls and Ukrainians in the region of Volhynia.
Administratively, the Eastern Borderlands territory was composed of Lwów, Nowogródek, Polesie, Stanisławów, Tarnopol, Wilno, Wołyń, and Białystok voivodeships (provinces). Today, all these regions are divided between Western Ukraine, Western Belarus, and south-eastern Lithuania, with the major cities of Lviv, Vilnius, and Grodno no longer in Poland. During the Second Polish Republic, the Eastern Borderlands denoted the lands beyond the Curzon Line proposed after World War I in December 1919 by the British Foreign Office as the eastern border of the re-emerging sovereign Polish Republic, after over a century of partition.
Official source
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