Index – Science – The massacre was not a single derailment, but part of Soviet politics

On December 3, 1941, Władysław Sikorski, Prime Minister of the Polish government forced to emigrate, Polish General Władysław Anders and Stanisław Kot, Polish Ambassador to Moscow, visited Stalin. The topic of the discussions was the creation of a Polish army from Polish prisoners of war detained in various camps in the Soviet Union. Sikorski gave Stalin a list of 4,000 names, and when asked where these people were, the following dialogue took place:

Sikorski: These people are here, none of them have returned home.

Stalin: Impossible. They must have escaped.

Anders: Where could they have escaped?

Stalin: Well maybe to Manchuria.

After the Poles pointed out that this was a total impossibility, Stalin came up with the following theory:

Obviously we released them, they just hadn’t arrived yet.

On March 18, 1942, Anders again visited Stalin in search of Polish prisoners, informing him that “to this day our officers detained in Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Osttaskov have not arrived.” However, Stalin calmly said:

He had already issued all the orders, they had to be released. They even say that they are in the land of Francis Joseph, even though there is nobody there. I don’t know where they are. Why would we keep them inside? They may be in camps, in areas occupied by the Germans. They stayed apart.

Stalin’s cynicism knew no bounds. He knew exactly that the wanted Polish prisoners of war had been executed in the spring of 1940, with the consent of the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, Lavrenty and Beria, and were lying in mass graves. He could even order their release, though he didn’t help the dead much anymore.

German units invading the territory of the Soviet Union dug the first mass graves in the Katyn Forest. The Berlin Radio said that day that “a well 28 meters long and 16 meters wide was found with the bodies of 3,000 Polish officers stacked in 12 layers. They came out in full military uniforms, tied some of them and all had a wound bullet to the back of their skulls. “It was not difficult to assemble the image. The grave was located in the Katyń forest. Prisoners of war transported from the Kozelsk camp to Smolensk were supposed to have been executed here. Two days later , from a statement by the Soviet Information Office (TASZSZ), the world also learned Stalin’s position: “The German fascist executioners, in their shameful manufacture, did not hesitate to invent the most unscrupulous and trivial lies to try to cover up your crime. out. “The Wehrmacht committed many crimes in the Soviet territories, but the” Katyn massacre “cannot be blamed. However, the Stalinist lie was a mandatory dogma in the Soviet Union and socialist countries until 1990, but even the Western European public opinion could not know the truth.

The first deportations

On the basis of the Riga peace concluded on March 18, 1921, although the Polish-Soviet border was drawn far east of the Curzon line, approximately one million inhabitants of Polish nationality remained in the Soviet Union. In the first half of the 1920s, the Kremlin apparently made important concessions to the nationalities of the empire. Several autonomous ethnic areas were created and two Polish districts formed. The objective of the Soviet leadership was to spread the communist idea among the Polish population, they tried to educate the local agitators among themselves and with their help to carry out collectivization. However, his plan failed. The Polish population resisted the Bolshevik attempt at indoctrination, violent collectivization and protested against the seizure of their land.

Collectivization already had an ethnic tone. The People’s Homeland Security Committee (NKVD) and the GULAG, which operated the prison camps, carefully recorded the nationalities of the “kulaks” considered anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary. From the western border area of ​​the Soviet Union, mainly Poles and Germans were forced to leave their homes.

The Soviet leadership reacted quickly, and in the spring of 1935 began to clean up the areas inhabited by Poles: first, according to NKVD documents, almost ten thousand Polish peasant families settled in the mining areas of southeastern Ukraine, and then in Kazakhstan. Genrih Jagoda, the leader of the NKVD, ordered the displacement of 15,000 other Polish families in the spring of 1936. During the operation, a total of 69,283 Poles were relocated to Kazakh lands in the fall. The Polish district of Ukraine was abolished.

The NKVD’s “Polish Operation” (1937-1938)

The deportation of Polish peasants opposed to collectivization was only the first step in a series of acts of violence against the Polish population of the Soviet Union. One of the subchapters of Stalin’s Great Terror (1935–1940), the so-called NKVD. His “Polish operation” was specifically directed against the Polish population. A report to Nikita Khrushchev on February 9, 1956 summarized the Stalinist terror. According to this document, between 1935 and 1940, that is, in six years, a total of 1,980,635 people were convicted of “anti-Soviet” acts, of which 688,503 were killed. For 1937 and 1938, there were 1,548,366 convicted and 681,692 death sentences. During the “Polish operation” from August 20, 1937 to August 1, 1938 (September 1, 1938 in Belarus), 139,835 people of Polish nationality were convicted, of whom 111,091 were shot and killed. So we see that while 44 percent of all convicts were executed, that proportion was 77.25 percent for Poles, and 16 percent of those executed in those two years came from Poles. Even taking into account that the “Polish operation” lasted only 13 months, in proportion, the Poles could have represented more than 25 percent of the total number executed in two years during this period.

The so-called NKVD “Polish Operation” No. 00485 issued on August 11, 1937 by the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, Nikolai Yezhov began with his command. The document itself did not mention the Poles, but the attached thirty-page “secret letter” reveals the true target groups of the order. The letter classified Poles classified as spies or anti-systems who had to be captured and executed by NKVD officials into six categories.

The “secret letter” essentially described the entire Polish population living in the Soviet Union as a spy or anti-Soviet element.

1. First, during World War I, former members of the Polish Military Organization (POW) operating in the area of ​​the Tsarist occupation were classified as the most dangerous organization for the Soviet Union. According to the document, these people are embedded everywhere. They can be found in the Polish Communist Party (as a result, almost all LKP members were liquidated and the party itself dissolved in the absence of members), the Polish section of the Communist International and even the NKVD and the Red Army. The former prisoner of war had almost no paper at the time, but the NKVD drew a fantastic network of spies around him.
2. The second category included Polish soldiers captured by the Soviets during the Polish-Bolshevik war of 1920 and still living in the Soviet Union. Their number was estimated at 1,500-3,000. (Later, the terror also spread to the red soldiers who spent too much time in Polish captivity at the time.)
3. The third target group consisted of Poles who fled to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, that is, essentially emigrants who chose Soviet Communism. According to Yezhov, their number could have been more than one hundred thousand.
4. The fourth set includes political emigrants and the calls were exchanged. They were the ones who were exchanged between the two countries between 1923 and 1932 under a Polish-Soviet agreement, mostly Polish political prisoners with Polish Catholic priests and prisoners of war in the Soviet Union. His number was 425.
5. The fifth group, partly overlapping with the fourth, included members of former Polish socialists and other parties who somehow entered or moved into the Soviet Union during the 1921 demarcation.
6. Finally, the residents of the Polish districts (then essentially the Polish Dzerzhinsky district) who were classified as the most active anti-Soviet and nationalist elements. This could apply to anyone.

In the fall of 1937, Yezhov expanded the range of those arrested to include family members of those previously arrested. Most of the women were sentenced to 5-7 years in prison or camp, and children under the age of 15 were placed in Soviet orphanages as orphans.

No. 00485 The command also served as a model in the “fight” against other nationalities, but the number of 111,091 Poles executed was not addressed by victims of any other nationality living in the Soviet Union. Stalin never forgave the Poles, who had lost the war in 1920. From the moment the peace was concluded in Riga, he planned to abolish Poland, and in this he found a true partner in the leaders of Weimar Germany, and then, after 1933, also in Hitler. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939 marked the maturation of this policy. However, the violence against the Poles is not over.

Attack on Poland and new deportations

After Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, he asked the Soviet side to occupy the territories defined for them in the secret clause of the pact. Finally, on September 16, Molotov informed the German ambassador in Moscow that they would also attack the next day.

On September 17, 1939, the Polish Polish envoy presented a list provided by the Soviet government, in which he declared that “the Polish state and its government have in fact ceased to exist.” […] The Soviet government cannot be indifferent. [aziránt]that Ukrainians and Belarusians living in Poland and blood relatives are still vulnerable to the arbitrariness of fate. “The following day, the HCLU issued a similar statement. Their reasoning was habitual cynical: Stalin invoked the protection of Ukrainians and Belarusians, while that tens of thousands of Ukrainians and Belarusians had been deported or killed in the Soviet Union in recent years.

On October 31, Molotov summed up the success of Soviet policy as follows: “A lightning-quick strike, first by the German army and then by the Red Army, was enough to leave nothing of Poland, the native monster of the Treaty Versailles, the persecution of national minorities. Everyone is aware that old Poland cannot be revived in the future. ”

In order for this to happen, they were quickly attended to in Moscow. The newly occupied Polish territories were immediately assimilated into the RSS of Belarus and Ukraine (Vilnius / Vilnius and its environs were handed over to Lithuania and then Sovietized), and its citizens were declared Soviet. So Stalin did not create a buffer zone, he did not create a buffer zone, but simply increased the territory of the Soviet Union. He restored the empire’s borders to Empress Catherine the Great in 1793, after the Polish Second Division.

The Polish army did not act against the Soviet attack. Commander-in-Chief Edward Rydz-Śmigły asked the army to avoid fighting with the Soviets if possible. This is probably what happened, as Soviet People’s Deputy Commissioner for Defense G. Kulik reported to the Soviet political leadership on September 21:

The Polish Army […] With the exception of some cases, it showed no resistance, which was observed only in the case of retreating units under the command of the border guard, the settlers and the headquarters. We captured large numbers of soldiers and officers. […] There is nothing to feed them.

The Soviet Union did not sign the 1929 Geneva International Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Therefore, he did not consider human treatment to be binding on him. With prisoners of war, the so-called was dealt with by the War Detention Directorate, which was subordinate to the NKVD. The rules of procedure for this body were approved by Lavrentyy Beria on September 19 and did not contain a single word about the care of prisoners.

Despite the fact that the Soviet apparatus had difficulties in fighting against the large number of captured Poles, the massive deportation of the population from the newly occupied Polish territories was not abandoned either. Basically they continued the policy that they had started in 1935 against Poles living in the Soviet Union. The area of ​​the new areas occupied on September 17 was about 200 thousand square kilometers, in which approx. 11.5 million people lived. The two largest groups were Ukrainians (4.4 million) and Poles (4.14 million).

Mass deportation prices took place in four waves. In each case, Molotov, president of the Council of People’s Commissioners, gave instructions, and the details of the conduct were regulated by a decree of the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs Beria.

Between February 1940 and June 1941, according to Soviet sources, approximately 320,000 Polish citizens were deported into the empire. There were tens of thousands of women and children among them, but Jews of Polish nationality also could not escape the attention of the NKVD.

According to Western and Polish historians, the NKVD documents found are very incomplete, making the number of 320,000 that can be determined from them extremely low compared to the real one. Roger Moorhouse and Norman Davies also put the number of deportees well above 1-1.5 million. However, historians from the Polish National Remembrance Institute on the subject give between 700,000 and 1 million the number of Polish citizens deported in four waves.

Katyń, Kharkov, Kalinin, Kiev, Minsk

The Beria-led prisoner-of-war case was also waiting to be resolved in the Kremlin. There were two main reasons why the Soviet leadership wanted to get rid of the Polish prisoners. On the one hand, they had difficulties in supplying them with food and, on the other hand, they no longer had to count on Poland in the future, so they were essentially considered almost stateless soldiers of a nonexistent state. And they saw no chance that prisoners could be integrated into the daily life of the Soviet Union. This is also evident in Beria’s proposal for its execution on March 5, 1940:

“The NKVD Soviet POW camps and prisons in the western territories of Ukraine and Belarus now contain a large number of former Polish army officers, former members of the Polish police and espionage, members of parties and refugees, nationalist counter-revolutionary organizations Poles and refugees. They are all cursed enemies of Soviet power, full of hatred for the Soviet system.. Prisoners of war and police even entered the camps. try to participate in counterrevolutionary activities and anti-Soviet agitation. Only for that they are awaiting their release so they can join the fight against the Soviet power“

Beria demanded the death penalty for them and received it. The first point of the decision of the SZK (b) P PB meeting read as follows:

“To instruct the NKVD of the Soviet Union: 1. 14,700 former Polish officers, employees, landowners, police, military spies, gendarmes, settlers, prison guards, prosecutors in prisoner of war camps; 2. and the special punishment of the 11,000 people arrested and imprisoned in western Ukraine and Belarus, members of various counter-revolutionary espionage and diversion organizations, former landowners, manufacturers, former Polish officers, officials and deserters, and the highest sentences, impose a shot on them. “

The proposal was also signed by Stalin, Vorosilov, Mikoyan, Kalinin, and Kaganovich. The massacre was carried out between April 3 and May 16, 1940, in various places. The prisoners were transported from three camps (Kozelsk, Starobelsk, Osttaskov) to the Katyń forest near Smolensk (4,410 people), to the Pyatyhatka farm near Kharkov (3,739 people) and to Medno (6,314 people) near Kalinin (Tver) , where they were shot in the neck. In addition to the Poles, 4,181 Ukrainian prisoners were killed in Kiev and 4,465 Belarusian prisoners in Minsk by NKVD officials.

Utoélet

The deportations and murders ordered by Stalin were kept secret for a long time. An exception is Nikita Khrushchev’s call His “secret speech” in the twentieth. on the last day of their party congress. However, Khrushchev did not elaborate on the ethnic distribution of the victims of the great terror, nor did he discuss Katyń. Until April 13, 1990, the Soviet news agency TASZSZ informed the world in an official statement: “On the basis of all published footage, we can conclude that Beria, Mjerlukov and others are directly responsible for the crimes committed in Katyn’s forest. ” The announcement did not say much, but the confession was a great satisfaction to Polish society, which had always believed that the murders were committed by the Soviets.

On the same day, at a meeting between Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the latter handed hundreds of pages of documents to his Polish counterpart. The next day, Jaruzelski paid his respects to the memory of the victims in the Katyń forest. In October 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin delivered new documents to Polish President Lech Wałęsa. This package already included the infamous resolution of March 5, 1940. These and other archive sources have been published in four volumes in Polish and one in Russian. This marked the beginning of a new chapter in the politics of memory.

Thereafter, the Poles asked the Russians to dig up all the mass graves and erect monuments in their place. Cemeteries were opened to visitors in 2000 in Katyń and Kharkov. And in 2002, after Vladimir Putin’s visit to Poland, a Difficult Affairs Committee for Poland and Russia was created and met for the first time in 2005, consisting of historians, archivists and diplomats. Work stopped unexpectedly when Lech Kaczyński was elected Polish head of state and Justice and Justice came under the government. The Kaczyński brothers were not open to Polish-Russian reconciliation, although other political and economic problems hampered the rapprochement at the time. Furthermore, the Polish government began to insist that the Russians recognize the Katyn massacre as a crime against humanity. The Russians are not yet ready to do so, and in 2005 the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation closed the investigation without charge. And the research material produced so far was not made public, nor could the Poles investigate it.

First, the Polish peasantry that arrived in the Soviet Union after the peace in Riga was evicted from their original residence, crushing the centuries-old peasant world, and then, in the framework of the great terror, they paid special attention to the execution of the Polish residents. and anti-Soviet Poles, but could not swim Poles. And after the outbreak of war, the inhabitants of the newly occupied Polish territories were deported en masse to the interior of the empire and then executed with more than twenty thousand prisoners of war. This was Stalin’s “Polish policy”, the basis for extending the borders of the Soviet empire to the west. Knowledge of the facts makes clear why Polish policy before 1939 correctly refrained from making alliances with the Soviets. When Stalin demanded that the Red Army pass through Polish territory in August 1939, they could rightly fear the occupation and Sovietization that had already taken place before 1939 in the former Polish-inhabited territories that had joined the Soviets and Finally, after September 17, the Soviet era. Also in a newly occupied area.

When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, under British pressure, Stalin agreed to enter into diplomatic relations with the Polish government, emigrating to London. Subsequently, the Polish government and military leadership sought to recruit an army of imprisoned Poles living in the Soviet Union. It was then that the Poles began searching for missing or executed Polish prisoners of war, to which Stalin could only cynically respond by “fleeing”. Finally, the Anders Army was formed out of the surviving Poles, who were evacuated to Palestine through Iran in 1942. Polish soldiers participated in the anti-Hitler coalition struggles, including those who liberated Monte Cassino.

When the Germans discovered mass graves in 1943, and the Sikorski government turned to the International Committee of the Red Cross for a professional inspection of the graves, Stalin severed ties with the Polish government.

In Poland, April 13 is the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Katyn. This time, we remember not only them, but all the Polish victims of Stalinist terror.

The full text of Miklós Mitrovits can be read on the Horizons page of the Institute of Central Europe with references.

(Cover image: Monument to the Polish martyrs martyrs killed in 1940 in the Katyn forest, Russia, in the Katinyi Martyrs Park in Budapest on March 13, 2017. Photo: Csaba Jászai / MTI)