All had fled. Russia needed a warm water port on the Baltic, and, after the long war, the Soviet people deserved to own a little bit of Germany, as it would make them feel like they had won a true victory. The other Allied leaders agreed. So the Baltic coast became his too — although millions of Germans were still there, although Konigsberg Bay does, in fact, freeze in winter — and the Soviet Union had pushed itself as far West as possible.

By 1945, the job of re-ordering the borderland peoples was already half completed. Hitler had already murdered most of the borderland Jews. Occupying Soviet officers had already sent over a million Polish officials, land-owners, and soldiers to Siberia and Central Asia, along with over half a million West Ukrainians and half a million Balts. After the war, the deportations continued, grew, and developed into the largest mass movement of people in recorded history. The Poles remaining in southern Lithuania, Western Belarus and Ukraine — several million of them — were sent to the German lands in Silesia, Pomerania and southern East Prussia. Germans from those territories were then evacuated to western Germany. Balts and West Ukrainians and Moldavians who objected to Soviet rule were moved to Siberia. Germans and Romanians were removed from the Bukovina, freedom-fighters were shipped out of Ruthenia, the eastern province of Czechoslovakia.

During the years that followed, Russian became the language of administration in those territories, and Russian Orthodoxy became the only, barely tolerated, religion. Russian settlers were moved in, wherever population levels had dropped, to take the place of those who had been deported. Soviet historians wrote Poles and Germans out of history books, as if they had never been there at all, and embarked on a program of renaming cities: Konigsberg became Kaliningrad, Wilno became Vilnius, the Polish-Ukrainian city of Lvov became L'viv. Within the cities, streets changed their names, and so did people. Romanians in Moldova became Moldavians, learned to write in Cyrillic, and the Latin alphabet was banned.