page_title: Kresy
hierarchical_section_title: Kresy
context_page_description: Kresy Wschodnie or simply Kresy was a term coined for the eastern part of the Second Polish Republic during the interwar period. 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 annexed by Russia and partly by the Habsburg Monarchy, and ceded back to Poland in 1921 after the Peace of Riga. As a result of the post-World War II border changes, none of the Kresy lands remain in Poland today.
  The Polish plural term Kresy corresponds to the Russian okrainy, a politicized name for non-Russian or non-Orthodox "peripheries" or "borderlands", derived from the same Old East Slavic root as Ukraiina, the name of Ukraine. It is also largely co-terminous with the "Pale of Settlement", a scheme devised by Catherine the Great to limit Jews from settling in 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.
context_section_description: Kresy Wschodnie or simply Kresy ([ˈkrɛsɨ], Borderlands or Eastern Borderlands) 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 annexed by Russia and partly by the Habsburg Monarchy (Galicia), and ceded back to Poland in 1921 after the Peace of Riga. As a result of the post-World War II border changes, none of the Kresy lands remain in Poland today. 
  The Polish plural term Kresy corresponds to the Russian okrainy (окраины), a politicized name for non-Russian or non-Orthodox "peripheries" or "borderlands", derived from the same Old East Slavic root as Ukraiina (Україна), the name of Ukraine. It is also largely co-terminous with the "Pale of Settlement", a scheme devised by Catherine the Great to limit Jews from settling in 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 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 Kresy 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 Kresy denoted the lands beyond the so-called, Curzon Line, proposed after World War I by the British Foreign Office in December 1919 as the eastern border of the re-emerging sovereign Polish Republic after over a century of partitions. In September 1939, after the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany simultaneously invaded Poland under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, all the territories were forcibly incorporated into the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, often by means of terror.
  Soviet territorial annexations during World War II were later ratified by the Allies at the Tehran Conference, the Yalta Conference and at the Potsdam Conference. When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the several parts of Kresy remained within the former Soviet republics as they gained their own independence. Even though the Eastern Borderlands are no longer part of Poland, the provinces are still home to a Polish minority and the memory of "Kresy", as a continuation of their centuries-long nationhood, is maintained among many of them. However, in present-day Poland, the attachment to the "mythic Kresy", including the prewar vision of the regions as a peaceful, idyllic, rural land, has been debunked in Polish political discourse after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
caption: In the 1939 German-Soviet Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact the Kresy (grey) were annexed directly into the Soviet Union. The Soviet gains east of the Curzon line devised in 1919 were confirmed (with minor adjustments in the areas around Białystok and Przemyśl) by the Western Allies at the Tehran conference, the Yalta conference and the Potsdam conference. In 1945 most of Germany's territory east of the Oder–Neisse line (pink) was ceded to what remained of Poland (white), both of which would comprise the newly created People's Republic of Poland