Soviet liberations and occupations, 1939-1949

Abstract

Soviet territorial change, 1939-1949: By early 1939, the Soviet Union encompassed eleven Union Republics covering one-sixth of the world’s surface, inhabited by 167 million people, the third largest population after those of China and India. In the north it bordered on Finland and the eastern tip of Norway; in the west, on Estonia and Latvia, Poland and Romania; in the south, on Turkey and Iran, Afghanistan and China, Tuva and Mongolia (Soviet satellites since the early 1920s), the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and Japanese-controlled Korea; in the east, the Soviets faced off the Japanese in the middle of the island of Sakhalin and across the small stretch of water separating the northe..