Agency

The Kresy Case Study

The setting

Kresy Wschodnie — the Eastern Borderlands — was the eastern half of interwar Poland. Roughly 100,000 km², about a quarter of the country. Eight voivodeships spanning what is now western Ukraine, western Belarus, and south-eastern Lithuania. Lwów became Lviv. Wilno became Vilnius.

Poles were a minority in the region — under 20% in many areas — concentrated in cities, landed estates, and military settlements. The population was a mix of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Jews, Lithuanians, Germans, Armenians, and Tatars. The Kresy-Siberia Foundation describes it as "a veritable crucible of cultures, languages and religions" where "Western-Latin and Eastern Russo-Byzantine civilisations interacted and intertwined to a degree which was exceptional in Europe."

Critically for what follows: Kresy was economically underdeveloped. In the 1921 Polish census, Kresy Poles had lower literacy rates than Poles elsewhere in the country. This was "Poland B" — agrarian, rural, and educationally behind. The people who would later outperform everyone were not starting from any kind of elite advantage.

The destruction (1939–1950)

Soviet invasion and deportations

On 17 September 1939, the USSR invaded eastern Poland with 600,000 troops. The NKVD arrived with pre-prepared target lists. Over the next two years, approximately 500,000 Polish nationals were arrested — roughly 1 in 10 adult males.

Four mass deportation waves between February 1940 and June 1941 displaced between 1.0 and 1.45 million people to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Soviet interior. Families were given 30–60 minutes to pack up to 100 kg. They travelled in unheated cattle wagons for weeks. An estimated 350,000 died in deportation and exile between 1939 and 1945.

The targeting was systematic: judges, civil servants, military officers, police, foresters, professors, clergy, refugees who refused Soviet passports — anyone classified as "difficult to convert to communism."

Katyń

In April–May 1940, the NKVD executed approximately 22,000 Polish officers, police, and intellectuals on Stalin's direct orders. This decapitated the Kresy professional class.

Forced resettlement

After the war, the Allies ratified the USSR's annexation of Kresy at Yalta and Potsdam — without consulting the Polish government. Poland was shifted westward. Kresy Poles were resettled into former German territories along the Oder-Neisse line.

By 1950, 2.1 million Poles had been displaced from Kresy. About 1.65 million were resettled in the Western Territories — lands emptied of 7–8 million Germans, where until 1970 there was no treaty guaranteeing the borders would hold.

They were officially called "repatriates." Historian Philipp Ther: "These 'repatriates' did not return to their home country but were forcibly relocated to the former territories of a foreign country."

A Kresy resettler, recorded in Halicka (2015):

"And so it happened that the marshall came: 'Leave' — 'But where should I go?' — 'To Poland.' And I say: 'I am in Poland.' And he says: 'This is not Poland anymore.'"

The study

The definitive research on what happened next is Becker, Grosfeld, Grosjean, Voigtländer, and Zhuravskaya (2020), "Forced Migration and Human Capital: Evidence from Post-WWII Population Transfers", published in the American Economic Review. Editor: Esther Duflo.

Why this setting matters scientifically

Most forced migration studies are confounded by differences in ethnicity, language, or religion between migrants and hosts, or by labour market competition at the destination. The Kresy case eliminates nearly all of these:

  1. Same ethnicity, language, religion — Kresy Poles resettled among other Catholic, Polish-speaking Poles
  2. Empty destination — the Western Territories were equally accessible to all incoming migrants; no native competition
  3. No pre-existing advantage — Kresy Poles were less educated pre-war (1921 census confirms)
  4. Quasi-random border — the Curzon Line was drawn by British diplomats without reference to local conditions

This isolates displacement itself as the causal variable.

The findings

Metric Kresy advantage
Secondary education completion +11.2 percentage points
University graduation +8.8 percentage points
Average years of schooling +1 full year
Income ~10% higher

The effect appears in the first post-war generation and persists through three or more generations — children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren.

The reversal is the point: Kresy Poles were less educated than Central Poland Poles before the war. Today their descendants are the most educated subgroup of all Poles.

Kresy descendants are also less likely to believe material goods determine a successful life, own fewer assets relative to what they can afford, and have stronger aspirations for their children's education.

Alternative explanations ruled out

The researchers systematically tested and rejected every major alternative:

  • Pre-existing selection (already more ambitious) — rejected; Kresy was less educated pre-war
  • Labour market competition — rejected; the effect holds within the same municipalities
  • Differential access to physical capital — rejected; equal access for all migrants
  • Differential fertility — rejected
  • Differential out-migration — rejected
  • War trauma (not displacement per se) — rejected; the effect is specific to displacement
  • Recall bias — rejected; controlled via a dedicated Ancestry Survey

The voluntary-vs-forced gradient

Voluntary migrants also show higher education than non-movers, but less so than forced migrants. The depth of compulsion correlates with the strength of reorientation. People who chose to move did well. People who were forced to move did better.

The Agency interpretation

The Kresy study and the Hungarian surname study converge on the same conclusion from opposite directions.

Hungarian nobles started with everything — wealth, title, land, social position. Communism stripped all of it. They retained elite status anyway. Kresy Poles started with less than average — rural, undereducated, agrarian. Displacement stripped what little they had. Within three generations, they outperformed everyone.

In both cases, material wealth was disrupted or destroyed. In both cases, what survived was embedded in families and could not be directly seized: values, intellectual orientation, aspiration structures, habits of investment.

The durable unit of advantage across generations is not wealth but the cognitive and value structures that produce it. These survive even radical state attempts at destruction.

A Kresy resettler captured the mechanism precisely:

"In Western Territories... people did not attach great importance to material wealth... In a new life situation, the cult of new values emerged, i.e. values that are indestructible, that cannot be lost, and that die with the man — the cult of knowledge, of skills, which can resist cataclysms."

See The Uprootedness Hypothesis for the broader framework this evidence supports.

Sources

Further reading