information:classification, stylistic:tone
Western annexations and deportations, 1939–1941

Lavrentiy Beria, the Chief of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, was responsible for organizing and executing numerous deportations of ethnic minorities during that time.

After the Soviet invasion of Poland following the corresponding German invasion that marked the start of World War II in 1939, the Soviet Union annexed the eastern parts of Poland (known as Kresy in Poland or known as West Belarus and West Ukraine in the USSR as well as in Belarus and Ukraine) of the Second Polish Republic, which then became the western parts of the Belarusian SSR and the Ukrainian SSR. From 1939–1941, 1.45 million people who inhabited the region were deported by the Soviet regime. According to Polish historians, 63.1% of these people were Poles and 7.4% of them were Jews. Previously, it was believed that about 1.0 million Polish citizens died at the hands of the Soviets, but recently, Polish historians, mostly based upon their study of Soviet archives, estimate that about 350,000 people who were deported from 1939–1945 died.

The same policy was implemented in the Baltic republics of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia (see Soviet deportations from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). More than 200,000 people are estimated to have been deported from the Baltic in 1940–1953. In addition, at least 75,000 were sent to the Gulag. 10% of the entire adult Baltic population was deported or sent to labor camps. In 1989, native Latvians represented only 52% of the population of their own country. In Estonia, the figure was 62%. In Lithuania, the situation was better because the migrants sent to that country actually moved to the former area of Eastern Prussia (now Kaliningrad) which, contrary to the original plans, never became part of Lithuania.

Likewise, Romanians from Chernivtsi Oblast and Moldavia had been deported in great numbers which range from 200,000 to 400,000. (See Soviet deportations from Bessarabia.)