[mkotowski]

Quite funny, when I read the title before checking the link, I first thought exactly about Poland voting preferences.

For anyone interested: the difference in voting exists, because the east part of Poland is less developed and more rural in general. I remember that it is so in part because of how the Russian occupation was mostly of “steal as much as we can” variety, especially compared to Germans. It is also one of the reasons that the west side has much denser railway network.

[TremendousJudge]

The territory that today is western poland was part of Germany pre-1939. It wasn't an occupation, it was just that territory of that country. Afaik, most of what was eastern Poland pre-1939 and was occupied by the Russians, nowadays is no longer Polish territory. The boundaries migrated west.

[adrian_b]

Yes indeed.

The Poland of after WWII has a similar area with the Poland of before WWII, but it has moved a lot towards West.

So the winners have been the Russians and the losers have been the Germans.

Poland was lucky because its large territorial losses to the Russian invaders have been somewhat compensated with territories taken from Germany.

The other Western neighbors of Russia have been much less lucky. The larger neighbors (Finland, Czechoslovakia, Romania) have lost large territories stolen by Russia without any compensation, while the smaller neighbors (the 3 lesser Baltic countries) have been incorporated completely in the Soviet Union.

I have written "the 3 lesser Baltic countries" because prior to WWII Finland was counted as the 4th Baltic country, since all 4 countries occupy the Eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, and they all form an enclave between Germanic-speaking people to the West and Slavic-speaking people to the East (the main languages in Finland and Estonia are Uralic, while the main languages in Lithuania and Latvia belong to the Baltic branch of the Indo-European languages).

For example, in the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact from 1939, the Russians have written explicitly their intentions to occupy all the 4 Baltic countries (Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia) and also Romania, and the Germans agreed with this, while the Russians agreed that the countries of Western Europe should belong to Germany.

[thriftwy]

The german territories were given to Poland by USSR, not taken by Poland.

With regards to eastern territories, Poland may reclaim some of those right now if it is insistent :)

[agapon]

Russian troll detected.

[thriftwy]

Seriously though, all of these russophobic eastern european countries are like: "Russia took our lands".

First of all, it was not Russia but USSR who took your lands; second, USSR did not give these lands to Russia (even in the form of RSFSR) but to other russophobic eastern european countries.

You are grown-ups now. Sort it out between yourselves.

[thereddaikon]

Russia is officially the successor state of the USSR. So legally yes, the USSR is Russia in so far as anyone cares for the purposes of assigning blame.

[klausjensen]

The Russian delusions around WW2 are astonishing.

They (USSR was Russian-lead) were literally allied with Nazi-Germany and agreed to split Europe with them. They executed 20000+ Polish people in Katyn alone.

[mkotowski]

Part of it was, yes. But going by the image from the tweet, there are many regions recovered, that belonged to the Second Polish Republic and still contained quite sizeable Polish-speaking population. [0]

[0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GUS_languages1931_Po...

[em-bee]

well, it depends on how far back you look in history. poland was split up between prussia, austria and russia in the 18th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland#/media/File:Rzeczpospol...