Place:Kresy, Poland

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Eastern Borderlands or simply 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 to Poland in 1921 after the Peace of Riga. As a result of the post-World War II border changes, none of the lands remain in Poland today.

The Polish plural term Kresy corresponds to the Russian okrainy, 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 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, 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 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. At the Dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kresy remained within the former Soviet republics as they gained 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 Eastern Borderlands, as a continuation of their centuries-long nationhood, is maintained among many of them.

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