Introduction
Did the Soviet Union Invade Poland on September 17, 1939? Why ask? "We all know" this invasion occurred. "You can look it up!" All authoritative sources agree. This historical event happened.
Here's a recent article in The New York Review of Books (April 30, 2009, p. 17) by Timothy Snyder, Yale University professor, academic expert in this area -- and fanatic anticommunist -- who just has to know that what he writes here is, to put it politely, false:
Because the film (although not the book)* begins with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 rather than the joint German-Soviet invasion and division of Poland in 1939... the Soviet state had just months earlier been an ally of Nazi Germany... (* "Defiance")
"Behind Closed Doors" (PBS series 2009):
"After invading Poland in September 1939, the Nazis and the Soviets divided the country as they had agreed to do in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact…"
Wikipedia article: "Soviet invasion of Poland":
"… on 17 September, the Red Army invaded Poland from the east…"
Every historian I have read, even those who do not conform to Cold War paradigms, state unproblematically that the Soviet Union invaded Poland in September 1939.
But the truth is that the USSR did not invade Poland in September, 1939. Even though the chances are at least 99 to 1 that every history book you can find says that it did. I have yet to find an English-language book that gets this correct. And, of course, the USSR had never been an "ally of Nazi Germany.
I will present a lot of evidence in support of this statement. There is a great deal more evidence to support what I say – much more than I can present here, and no doubt much more that I have not yet even identified or located.
Furthermore, at the time it was widely acknowledged that no such invasion occurred. I'll demonstrate that too.
Probably the truth of this matter was another victim of the post-WW2 Cold War, when a great many falsehoods about Soviet history were invented or popularized. The truth about this and many other questions concerning the history of the first socialist state has simply become "unmentionable in polite company."
