The Polish commander in chief's order (doc. 6) did not reach most of the KOP units because of faulty radio communication. The regular Polish forces in Lwów surrendered to the Red Army rather than the Germans (doc. 21). Several battles were fought in Podlachia [Polesie] and Volhynia [Wolyń]; the town of Grodno resisted for three days.

The Osadniki [Osadnicy] were military settlers selected from among Polish veterans of the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1920. They were given land in Polish eastern territories gained in 1920—today's western Ukraine and western Belarus—to strengthen the Polish element there and had agricultural, defense, and sometimes administrative obligations. They numbered about 9,000 in 1930; see Janina Stobniak-Smogorzewska, Kresowe Osadnictwo Wojskowe 1920-1945 [Eastern Military Settlement, 1920-1945] (Warsaw, 2003). In fall 1939, most of those taken prisoner when serving in the Polish Army or KOP were placed in Ostashkov POW camp (doc. 24), while others were deported along with their families on 10 February 1940 (see note 224).

The Gruntovoi Uchastok [Dirt-Road Sector] was an administrative, financial, and technical unit of the Military Road Service for the repair and guarding of strategically important dirt roads. Its other function was to organize POW transportation along such roads; see KD1/16, n. 2; KDZ1/16, n. 3.

The enthusiastic greetings offered the Red Army were sometimes organized by its political officers or agents sent ahead of the military units, especially in predominantly Polish areas, but there was a spontaneous welcome by Ukrainians and Belorussians, peasants and young, urban Jews, many of whom had communist sympathies. The intelligentsia (educated people) were mostly ethnic Poles but included assimilated Jews. Most of the merchants were Orthodox Jews.

The Polish government successfully evacuated the gold reserves of the National Bank to Romania, then France, and later Britain, but part of the paper money was seized by the Soviets.

These authorities were the local soviets [councils] and militia set up by Soviet authorities; both included many criminal elements.

These items were in short supply because of the war, and Red Army soldiers bought up what was left.

Peasants were encouraged to loot landowners' estates by Soviet agitators who accompanied the Red Army. “Land reform,” i.e., distribution of confiscated land, was implemented almost immediately, but very soon peasants were burdened with high delivery quotas; Soviet authorities later used failure to meet them to force the peasants into collective farms.

In this part of prewar Poland, there were Polish schools, Ukrainian schools—of which primary schools were the most numerous—and mixed Polish-Ukrainian schools; see Concise Statistical Yearbook of Poland, 1938 (Warsaw, 1938), table 7, p. 310.

Most of the Jewish population of prewar Poland spoke and wrote Yiddish; boys learned Hebrew in Yeshivas to study the Torah.

There were some Ukrainian attacks on Poles. For a balanced view of Polish-Ukrainian relations, see Magocsi, History of Ukraine, pp. 583–598 (includes tables and a map). For a Polish specialist's view, see Skrzypek, The Problem of Eastern Galicia, pp. 44–59 (includes tables and maps).