WI: Russia annexes all Ruthenian/Kievan Rus territories from Poland

Histor32

Histor32

It's possible that the soviets could do what ever they wanted, actually the did for the most part take all of the lands of kievian rus.. Plus the Baltic, Crimea, maldovia, and honestly through puppet governments the rest of Eastern Europe. So in reality alot more.

You are only talking some strip of land west and running north south with the river bug

By the time of 1945 most of these lands have been parts of verying empires from Poland and vilno, to Hungary and Russia and Prussia. Question is, who do they give it to? Poland has legit dibs on large swaths
Heck places like lviv were largely Polish.

So All to Ukraine or parts to Belarus as well? Why not Simply just take the parts of poland and make a polish ssr.

On east Prussia.. Again, they could give it to Poland, give it to lithiuania or set it up as prussen ssr. Or absorb it and call it kaliningrad.

Remeber Poland was pushed west as was belarus, Lithuania (samogitia) remained detached from Belarus (Lithuania proper)

The soviets could do whatever they wanted and No one was going to stop them for the most part.
 
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Deleted member 109224

They more or less did annex all the Kievan Rus old lands. Aside from Bialystok and setting the western border on the wieprz and San Rivers, all of which would be sort of marginal, they more or less did annex all the Kievan Rus lands.

7773.jpg
 

David T

A post of mine from last year:

***

ObWI: Stalin gets *more* favorable boundaries with Poland in 1945. See Khrushchev's speech to the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet in March 1944 (greeted, needless to say, with "stormy applause"): "The Ukrainian people will seek to include in the Ukrainian Soviet state such primordial Ukrainian lands as the Kholm [Chelm] region, Hrubeshiv [Hrubieszow], Zamostia [Zamosc], Tomashiv [Tomaszow] [and] Iaroslav [Jaroslav]." S. M. Plokhy, *Yalta: The Price of Peace*, p. 185.
http://books.google.com/books?id=0wOKfjnXdAUC&pg=PT185

Khrushchev had a personal connection here--his wife Nina was a Ukrainian from the Chelm region--but it is hard to see him making claims like this without Stalin's prior approval. The Soviet Ukrainian historian Petrovsky (who was later to be accused of "bourgeois nationalism") quickly produced an article in *Radianska Ukraina* "The Primoridal Ukrainian Lands" to justify the claims--Danylo of Halych had died and been buried in Kholm, Khmelnytsky had claimed the area, the 1897 Russian census showed a Ukrainian majority, etc. http://books.google.com/books?id=IzSEEqjp9vUC&pg=PA48

This was probably just a bargaining ploy, by which the USSR would "generously" concede these areas to Poland in return for the Western Allies (and of course Poland itself...) accepting the Curzon Line, including the loss of Lwow/Lvov/Lviv. But suppose Stalin had decided to follow through with the claim?
 
kasumigenx

kasumigenx

Pesterfield said:
Why did Poland continue to exist instead of being fully partitioned again?
Click to expand...
Because Poland is part of the Entente in WWII.

David T said:
A post of mine from last year:

***

ObWI: Stalin gets *more* favorable boundaries with Poland in 1945. See Khrushchev's speech to the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet in March 1944 (greeted, needless to say, with "stormy applause"): "The Ukrainian people will seek to include in the Ukrainian Soviet state such primordial Ukrainian lands as the Kholm [Chelm] region, Hrubeshiv [Hrubieszow], Zamostia [Zamosc], Tomashiv [Tomaszow] [and] Iaroslav [Jaroslav]." S. M. Plokhy, *Yalta: The Price of Peace*, p. 185.
http://books.google.com/books?id=0wOKfjnXdAUC&pg=PT185

Khrushchev had a personal connection here--his wife Nina was a Ukrainian from the Chelm region--but it is hard to see him making claims like this without Stalin's prior approval. The Soviet Ukrainian historian Petrovsky (who was later to be accused of "bourgeois nationalism") quickly produced an article in *Radianska Ukraina* "The Primoridal Ukrainian Lands" to justify the claims--Danylo of Halych had died and been buried in Kholm, Khmelnytsky had claimed the area, the 1897 Russian census showed a Ukrainian majority, etc. http://books.google.com/books?id=IzSEEqjp9vUC&pg=PA48

This was probably just a bargaining ploy, by which the USSR would "generously" concede these areas to Poland in return for the Western Allies (and of course Poland itself...) accepting the Curzon Line, including the loss of Lwow/Lvov/Lviv. But suppose Stalin had decided to follow through with the claim?
Click to expand...

We can include all of the Carpathian Ruthenia lands/Lemko in the lands annexed to Ukraine.
 

David T

Pesterfield said:
Why did Poland continue to exist instead of being fully partitioned again?
Click to expand...

Partitioned among whom? Nobody wanted to see Germany come out of the war bigger than it had been! If you mean, "why didn't Stalin incorporate all of Poland into the USSR?" that would first of all have entailed a complete break with the Western Allies (the UK and France after all had declared war in 1939 in the first place at least nominally over Poland, and as for the US, as FDR reminded Stalin "I have several million Poles in the United States") that Stalin didn't want in 1945. And in any event annexation of Poland and eastern Europe in general was a bad idea, as Stalin had recognized as early as 1920 (even quarreling with Lenin on that matter) as I note at https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...-all-of-the-warsaw-pact.464098/#post-18636109
 
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David T

It's not likely that Stalin will insist on anything west of the Curzon line, not only because he expected to dominate Poland anyway, but also because that line had considerable propaganda value for Stalin. ("All right, I will 'generously' give Poland back Bialystok, which was part of the USSR from 1939-41, and I won't press for Ukrainian acquisitions west of the Curzon line. But I can't give up anything east of the Curzon line--how could I tell the Belarusian and Ukrainian workers and peasants that Comrade Stalin is less solicitous of their western borders than Lord Curzon was?")

It would also be hard to justify the Soviets getting Bialystok on self-determination grounds. True, the 1931 Polish census finding that the Bialystok Voivodeship was 66.9% Polish and only 16.3% Belarusian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Białystok_Voivodeship_(1919–1939) cannot be taken at face value (the census was accused of undercounting minorities and in particular of counting Catholic Belarusians as Poles). But even the 1897 Imperial Russian census (which cannot be accused of pro-Polish bias) found that Polish speakers in the Bialystok district (of the Grodno gubernia) outnumbered speakers of East Slavic languages. (There were 70,149 Polish speakers, slightly outnumbering 68,398 for Belarusian, Ukrianian and Great Russian speakers combined--53,979 of them Belarusian speakers. There were also 58,565 Yiddish speakers.) http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/ssp/rus_lan_97_uezd_eng.php?reg=353
 
Histor32

Histor32

David T said:
It's not likely that Stalin will insist on anything west of the Curzon line, not only because he expected to dominate Poland anyway, but also because that line had considerable propaganda value for Stalin. ("All right, I will 'generously' give Poland back Bialystok, which was part of the USSR from 1939-41, and I won't press for Ukrainian acquisitions west of the Curzon line. But I can't give up anything east of the Curzon line--how could I tell the Belarusian and Ukrainian workers and peasants that Comrade Stalin is less solicitous of their western borders than Lord Curzon was?")

It would also be hard to justify the Soviets getting Bialystok on self-determination grounds. True, the 1931 Polish census finding that the Bialystok Voivodeship was 66.9% Polish and only 16.3% Belarusian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Białystok_Voivodeship_(1919–1939) cannot be taken at face value (the census was accused of undercounting minorities and in particular of counting Catholic Belarusians as Poles). But even the 1897 Imperial Russian census (which cannot be accused of pro-Polish bias) found that Polish speakers in the Bialystok district (of the Grodno gubernia) outnumbered speakers of East Slavic languages. (There were 70,149 Polish speakers, slightly outnumbering 68,398 for Belarusian, Ukrianian and Great Russian speakers combined--53,979 of them Belarusian speakers. There were also 58,565 Yiddish speakers.) http://www.demoscope.ru/weekly/ssp/rus_lan_97_uezd_eng.php?reg=353
Click to expand...
I'm not denying that.

All I'm saying is comrade Joe could take what he wants... That said why?
Then I'm terms of what the I'm request was.. He basically did. Minus lands West of the big but easy of the other river.

Also as a side note nationality blues rapidly since the populations are historically mixed since commonwealth times. Chrimey you could live in Minsk and still think of yourself as a pole or lithuanian.. Or be in southern Poland be almost anything, the language alone isn't the deciding factor
 
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