Kresy

The Kresy Wschodnie, standing for Eastern Borderlands, or simply Kresy (Borderlands; Polish pronunciation: [ˈkrɛsɨ]), was a historical region of the eastern part of the Second Polish Republic. The term was coined during the interwar period (1918–1939). Largely agricultural and extensively multi-ethnic with a Polish minority, it amounted to nearly half of the territory of interwar Poland. Historically situated in the eastern Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, following the 18th century foreign partitions, it was divided between the Empires of Russia and Austria-Hungary, and ceded to Poland in 1921 after the Treaty of Riga. As a result of the post-World War II border changes, all of the territory was ceded to the Soviet Union, and today the area of Kresy is divided between Western Ukraine, Western Belarus, and south-eastern Lithuania. The region gave rise to the Kresy myth, a collection of nostalgic views about the area. After the fall of Communism in Europe and dissolution of the Soviet Union, a major economic conflict emerged about the real estate lost by Poland with the loss of Kresy. In contemporary studies, the term has been described as colonial and compared to similar other terms such as Russian "okrainy", which in the past was used by Russian imperial authorities to describe its borderlands, which included partitioned Poland.