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Soviet repressions of Polish citizens (1939-1946)
Encyclopedia
In the aftermath of the German
and Soviet invasion of Poland
, which took place in September 1939, the territory of Poland
was divided between Nazi Germany
and the Soviet Union
(USSR). Both powers were hostile to Poland's sovereignty, the Polish culture and the Polish people
, aiming at their destruction. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union coordinated their Poland-related policies right until the Operation Barbarossa
, most visibly in the four Gestapo-NKVD Conferences
, where the occupiers discussed plans for dealing with the Polish resistance movement
and future destruction of Poland. There is some controversy as to whether Soviet policies were harsher than those of the Nazis.
The Soviet Union had ceased to recognise the Polish state at the start of the invasion. About 500,000 Poles were arrested and imprisoned before June 1941, including civic officials, military personnel and other "enemies of the people" like the clergy and the Polish educators: about one in ten of all adult males. Nonetheless, there were large groups of pre-war Polish citizens, notably Jewish youth and, to a lesser extent, the Ukrainian peasants, who saw the Soviet invasion as the opportunity to take part in political and social activity outside of their traditional ethnic or cultural environment. Their enthusiasm faded with time, as it became clear that the Soviet repressions were aimed at all groups equally, regardless of their ideological stance.
It is estimated that at least 150,000 Polish citizens died during the Soviet occupation.
with the exception of the area of Wilno, which was transferred to Lithuania
.
On 28 September 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany had changed the secret terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
. The formerly sovereign Lithuania
was moved into the Soviet sphere of influence
and attached to USSR as the brand new Lithuanian SSR
among the Soviet republics
. The demarcation line
across the centre of Poland was shifted to the east, giving Germany more Polish territory. By this new and final arrangement – often described as a fourth partition of Poland, the Soviet Union
secured the lands east of the rivers Pisa
, Narew
, Bug
and San. The area amounted to about 200,000 square kilometres inhabited by 13.5 million formerly Polish citizens.
Initially, the Soviet occupation gained support among some citizens of the Second Polish Republic
who were not ethnically Polish. Some members of the Ukrainian population welcomed the unification with the Soviet Ukraine. The Ukrainians had failed to achieve independence in 1919 when their attempt at self-determination was crushed during the Polish-Soviet and Polish-Ukrainian War
s. Also, there were large groups of pre-war Polish citizens, notably Jewish youth and, to a lesser extent, the Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalists, who saw the Soviet NKVD
presence as an opportunity to start political and social agitation. Their enthusiasm however faded with time as it became clear that the Soviet repressions were aimed at all peoples equally.
. The reign of terror by the NKVD
and other Soviet agencies begun in 1939, as an inherent part of the Sovietization of Kresy
. The first victims of the new order were approximately 250,000 Polish prisoners of war
captured by the USSR during and after the invasion of Poland
(see Polish prisoners in the USSR). As the Soviet Union had not signed international conventions on rules of war, the Polish prisoners were denied legal status. Almost all captured officers were murdered, and a large number of ordinary soldiers sent to the Soviet Gulag
. In one notorious atrocity ordered by Stalin himself, the Soviet secret police systematically assassinated 21,768 Poles into execution pits in a remote area during the Katyn massacre
. Among the 14,471 victims were top Polish Army officers including political leaders, government officials, and intellectuals. Some 4,254 dead bodies were uncovered in mass graves in Katyn Forest by the Nazis in 1943, who then invited an international group of neutral representatives and doctors to examin the corpses and confirm the Soviet guilt. Even though, over 20,000 Polish military personnel and civilians perished in the Katyn massacre, thousands of others would fall victim to NKVD massacres of prisoners
in mid-1941, ahead of the German advance across the Soviet occupation zone
.
In total, the Soviets killed tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war. Many of them, like General Józef Olszyna-Wilczyński
, captured, interrogated and shot on 22 September, were executed already during the 1939 campaign. On 24 September, the Soviets killed forty-two staff and patients of a Polish military hospital in the village of Grabowiec
, near Zamość
. The Soviets also executed all the Polish officers they captured after the Battle of Szack
, on 28 September.
The Soviet authorities regarded service to the prewar Polish state as a "crime against revolution" and "counter-revolutionary activity", and proceeded to arrest large numbers of Polish intelligentsia
, former officials, politicians, civil servants and scientists, intellectuals and the clergy, as well as ordinary people thought to pose a threat to Soviet rule. In the two years between the invasion of Poland and the 1941 attack on USSR by Germany, the Soviets arrested and imprisoned about 500,000 Poles. This was about one in ten of all adult males. The arrested members of the Polish intelligentsia included former prime ministers Leon Kozłowski and Aleksander Prystor
and Stanisław Grabski, Stanisław Głąbiński and the Baczewski
family. Initially aimed primarily at possible political opponents, by January 1940 the NKVD's campaign was also directed against potential allies, including Polish communists and socialists. Those arrested included Władysław Broniewski, Aleksander Wat
, Tadeusz Peiper
, Leopold Lewin
, Anatol Stern
, Teodor Parnicki
, Marian Czuchnowski and many others. The Soviet NKVD executed about 65,000 imprisoned Poles after kangaroo trials.
The number of Poles who died due to Soviet repressions in the period 1939-1941 is estimated at at least 150,000.
s", Polish civil servants, forest workers, university professors, "osadnik
s") to the Gulag
labour camps and exile settlements in remote areas of the Soviet Union
. Altogether roughly a million people were sent to Siberia. According to Norman Davies
, almost half of them were dead by the time the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement
had been signed in 1941.
In 1940 and the first half of 1941, the Soviets deported a total of more than 1,200,000 Poles in four waves of mass deportations. The first major operation took place on February 10, 1940, with more than 220,000 people sent in cattle trains to northern European Russia. The second wave of 13 April 1940, consisted of 320,000 people sent primarily to Kazakhstan
. The third wave of June–July 1940 totaled more than 240,000. The fourth and final wave occurred in June 1941, deporting 300,000. Upon resumption of Polish-Soviet diplomatic relations in 1941, it was determined (based on Soviet information) that more than 760,000 deportees had died – a large part of those dead being children, who had comprised about a third of deportees.
According to the Soviet law, all residents of the annexed area, dubbed by the Soviets as citizens of former Poland, automatically acquired Soviet citizenship. However, actual conferral of citizenship still required individual consent and residents were strongly pressured for such consent. Those refugees who opted out were threatened with repatriation to Nazi controlled territories of Poland.
The Poles and the Soviets re-established diplomatic relations in 1941, following the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement
; but the Soviets broke them off again in 1943 after the Polish government demanded an independent examination of the recently discovered Katyn burial pits. The Soviets then lobbied the Western Allies to recognize the pro-Soviet Polish puppet government of Wanda Wasilewska
in Moscow.
program initiated by the NKVD in which most of the owners of large lots of land were labeled "kulak
s" and dispossessed of their land which was then divided among poorer peasants.
However, the Soviet authorities then started a campaign of forced collectivisation, which largely nullified the earlier gains from the land reform as the peasants generally did not want to join the Kolkhoz
farms, nor to give away their crops for free to fulfill the state-imposed quotas, which undercut nearly everyone's material needs.
While Germans enforced their policies based on racism
, the Soviet administration justified their Stalinist
policies by appealing to the Soviet ideology, which in reality meant the thorough Sovietization
of the area. Immediately after their conquest of eastern Poland, the Soviet authorities started a campaign of sovietization
of the newly acquired areas. No later than several weeks after the last Polish units surrendered, on October 22, 1939, the Soviets organized staged elections
to the Moscow-controlled Supreme Soviet
s (legislative body) of Western Byelorussia and Western Ukraine. The result of the staged voting was to become a legitimization of Soviet annexation of eastern Poland.
Subsequently, all institutions of the dismantled Polish state were being closed down and reopened under the Soviet appointed supervisors. Lviv University
and many other schools were reopened soon but they were restarted anew as Soviet institutions rather than continued their old legacy. Lviv University was reorganized in accordance with the Statute Books for Soviet Higher Schools. The tuition, that along with the institution's Polonophile traditions, kept the university inaccessible to most of the rural Ukrainophone population, was abolished and several new chairs were opened, particularly the chairs of Russian language
and literature
. The chairs of Marxism-Leninism
, Dialectical and Historical Materialism aimed at strengthening of the Soviet ideology were opened as well. Polish literature and language studies ware dissolved by Soviet authorities. Forty-five new faculty members were assigned to it and transferred from other institutions of Soviet Ukraine, mainly the Kharkiv
and Kiev
universities. On January 15, 1940 the Lviv University was reopened and started to teach in accordance with Soviet curricula.
Simultaneously Soviet authorities attempted to remove the traces of Polish history of the area by eliminating much of what had any connection to the Polish state or even Polish culture in general. On December 21, 1939, the Polish currency was withdrawn from circulation without any exchange to the newly introduced rouble, which meant that the entire population of the area lost all of their life savings overnight.
All the media became controlled by Moscow. Soviet authorities implemented a political regime similar to police state
, based on terror. All Polish parties and organizations were disbanded. Only the Communist Party was allowed to exist with organizations subordinated to it.
All organized religions were persecuted. All enterprises were taken over by the state, while agriculture
was made collective
.
was a justification of its dismemberment. Soviet officials openly incited mobs to perform killings and robberies. The death toll of the initial Soviet-inspired terror campaign remains unknown.
later renamed as Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland. In reality, the country remained under military occupation for many years to come, controlled by the Soviet Northern Group of Forces
stationing in Poland until 1956. Some 25,000 Polish underground fighters including 300 top Home Army officers were captured by NKVD units and SMERSH operational groups in the fall of 1944, which was followed by their mass deportations to the gulags. Between 1944 and 1946, thousands of Polish independence fighters actively opposed the new communist regime, attacking country offices of NKVD
, SMERSH
and the Polish communist secret service (UB). The events of late 1940s amounted to a full-scale civil war according to some historians, especially in the eastern and central parts of the country (see: the Cursed soldiers
). According to deposition by Józef Światło and other communist sources, the number of members of the Polish underground, rounded up on the order of Lavrentiy Beria
and deported to Siberia and various camps in the Soviet Union, has reached 50,000 in 1945 alone. Their political leaders were kidnapped
by the Soviet Union, tortured and sent to prison after a staged Trial of the Sixteen
in Moscow
. None survived.
The documents of the era show also that the problem of sexual violence against Polish women
by Soviet servicemen was serious both during and after the advance of Soviet forces across Poland. Joanna Ostrowska and Marcin Zaremba of the Polish Academy of Sciences
estimate that rapes of Polish women reached a mass scale following the Winter Offensive of 1945. Whether the number of victims could have reached or even exceeded 100,000 is only a matter of guessing, considering the traditional taboos among the women incapable of finding "a voice that would have enabled them to talk openly" about their wartime experiences "while preserving their dignity."
To this day the events of those and the following years
are one of the stumbling blocks in Polish-Russian foreign relations. Polish requests for the return of looted property or for an apology for Soviet-era crimes are either ignored or rejected, accompanied by a reminder of the official Russian state version of history: "we freed you from Nazism: be grateful."
Invasion of Poland (1939)
The Invasion of Poland, also known as the September Campaign or 1939 Defensive War in Poland and the Poland Campaign in Germany, was an invasion of Poland by Germany, the Soviet Union, and a small Slovak contingent that marked the start of World War II in Europe...
and Soviet invasion of Poland
Soviet invasion of Poland (1939)
The 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland was a Soviet military operation that started without a formal declaration of war on 17 September 1939, during the early stages of World War II. Sixteen days after Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west, the Soviet Union did so from the east...
, which took place in September 1939, the territory of Poland
Second Polish Republic
The Second Polish Republic, Second Commonwealth of Poland or interwar Poland refers to Poland between the two world wars; a period in Polish history in which Poland was restored as an independent state. Officially known as the Republic of Poland or the Commonwealth of Poland , the Polish state was...
was divided between Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
and the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
(USSR). Both powers were hostile to Poland's sovereignty, the Polish culture and the Polish people
Poles
thumb|right|180px|The state flag of [[Poland]] as used by Polish government and diplomatic authoritiesThe Polish people, or Poles , are a nation indigenous to Poland. They are united by the Polish language, which belongs to the historical Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages of Central Europe...
, aiming at their destruction. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union coordinated their Poland-related policies right until the Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a front., the largest invasion in the history of warfare...
, most visibly in the four Gestapo-NKVD Conferences
Gestapo-NKVD Conferences
The Gestapo–NKVD conferences were a series of meetings organized in late 1939 and early 1940, whose purpose was the mutual cooperation between Nazi Germany and Soviet Union...
, where the occupiers discussed plans for dealing with the Polish resistance movement
Polish resistance movement in World War II
The Polish resistance movement in World War II, with the Home Army at its forefront, was the largest underground resistance in all of Nazi-occupied Europe, covering both German and Soviet zones of occupation. The Polish defence against the Nazi occupation was an important part of the European...
and future destruction of Poland. There is some controversy as to whether Soviet policies were harsher than those of the Nazis.
The Soviet Union had ceased to recognise the Polish state at the start of the invasion. About 500,000 Poles were arrested and imprisoned before June 1941, including civic officials, military personnel and other "enemies of the people" like the clergy and the Polish educators: about one in ten of all adult males. Nonetheless, there were large groups of pre-war Polish citizens, notably Jewish youth and, to a lesser extent, the Ukrainian peasants, who saw the Soviet invasion as the opportunity to take part in political and social activity outside of their traditional ethnic or cultural environment. Their enthusiasm faded with time, as it became clear that the Soviet repressions were aimed at all groups equally, regardless of their ideological stance.
It is estimated that at least 150,000 Polish citizens died during the Soviet occupation.
Aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Poland
By the end of the Polish Defensive War, the Soviet Union took over 52.1% of the territory of Poland (circa 200,000 km²) with over 13,700,000 citizens. Regarding the ethnic composition of these areas: ca. 5.1 million or 38% of the population were Polish by ethnicity (wrote Elżbieta Trela-Mazur), with 37% Ukrainians, 14.5% Belarusians, 8.4% Jews, 0.9% Russians and 0.6% Germans. There were also 336,000 refugees from areas occupied by Germany, most of them Jews (198,000). All Polish territories occupied by USSR were annexed to the Soviet UnionPolish areas annexed by the Soviet Union
Immediately after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, which marked the beginning of World War II, the Soviet Union invaded the eastern regions of the Second Polish Republic, which Poles referred to as the "Kresy," and annexed territories totaling 201,015 km² with a population of 13,299,000...
with the exception of the area of Wilno, which was transferred to Lithuania
Lithuania
Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...
.
On 28 September 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany had changed the secret terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named after the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, was an agreement officially titled the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union and signed in Moscow in the late hours of 23 August 1939...
. The formerly sovereign Lithuania
Lithuania
Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...
was moved into the Soviet sphere of influence
Sphere of influence
In the field of international relations, a sphere of influence is a spatial region or conceptual division over which a state or organization has significant cultural, economic, military or political influence....
and attached to USSR as the brand new Lithuanian SSR
Lithuanian SSR
The Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic , also known as the Lithuanian SSR, was one of the republics that made up the former Soviet Union...
among the Soviet republics
Republics of the Soviet Union
The Republics of the Soviet Union or the Union Republics of the Soviet Union were ethnically-based administrative units that were subordinated directly to the Government of the Soviet Union...
. The demarcation line
Demarcation line
A demarcation line means simply a boundary around a specific area, but is commonly used to denote a temporary geopolitical border, often agreed upon as part of an armistice or ceasefire.See the following examples:...
across the centre of Poland was shifted to the east, giving Germany more Polish territory. By this new and final arrangement – often described as a fourth partition of Poland, the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
secured the lands east of the rivers Pisa
Pisa
Pisa is a city in Tuscany, Central Italy, on the right bank of the mouth of the River Arno on the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Pisa...
, Narew
Narew
The Narew River , in western Belarus and north-eastern Poland, is a left tributary of the Vistula river...
, Bug
Bug River
The Bug River is a left tributary of the Narew river flows from central Ukraine to the west, passing along the Ukraine-Polish and Polish-Belarusian border and into Poland, where it empties into the Narew river near Serock. The part between the lake and the Vistula River is sometimes referred to as...
and San. The area amounted to about 200,000 square kilometres inhabited by 13.5 million formerly Polish citizens.
Initially, the Soviet occupation gained support among some citizens of the Second Polish Republic
Second Polish Republic
The Second Polish Republic, Second Commonwealth of Poland or interwar Poland refers to Poland between the two world wars; a period in Polish history in which Poland was restored as an independent state. Officially known as the Republic of Poland or the Commonwealth of Poland , the Polish state was...
who were not ethnically Polish. Some members of the Ukrainian population welcomed the unification with the Soviet Ukraine. The Ukrainians had failed to achieve independence in 1919 when their attempt at self-determination was crushed during the Polish-Soviet and Polish-Ukrainian War
Polish-Ukrainian War
The Polish–Ukrainian War of 1918 and 1919 was a conflict between the forces of the Second Polish Republic and West Ukrainian People's Republic for the control over Eastern Galicia after the dissolution of Austria-Hungary.-Background:...
s. Also, there were large groups of pre-war Polish citizens, notably Jewish youth and, to a lesser extent, the Ukrainian and Belarusian nationalists, who saw the Soviet NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
presence as an opportunity to start political and social agitation. Their enthusiasm however faded with time as it became clear that the Soviet repressions were aimed at all peoples equally.
The reign of terror
The Soviet Union never officially declared war on Poland, and had ceased to recognise the Polish state at the start of the invasion. The Soviets therefore did not classify Polish military personnel as prisoners of war but as rebels against the new Soviet government in Western Ukraine and the Western ByelorussiaByelorussian SSR
The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic was one of fifteen constituent republics of the Soviet Union. It was one of the four original founding members of the Soviet Union in 1922, together with the Ukrainian SSR, the Transcaucasian SFSR and the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic...
. The reign of terror by the NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
and other Soviet agencies begun in 1939, as an inherent part of the Sovietization of Kresy
Kresy
The Polish term Kresy refers to a land considered by Poles as historical eastern provinces of their country. Today, it makes western Ukraine, western Belarus, as well as eastern Lithuania, with such major cities, as Lviv, Vilnius, and Hrodna. This territory belonged to the Polish-Lithuanian...
. The first victims of the new order were approximately 250,000 Polish prisoners of war
Prisoner of war
A prisoner of war or enemy prisoner of war is a person, whether civilian or combatant, who is held in custody by an enemy power during or immediately after an armed conflict...
captured by the USSR during and after the invasion of Poland
Invasion of Poland (1939)
The Invasion of Poland, also known as the September Campaign or 1939 Defensive War in Poland and the Poland Campaign in Germany, was an invasion of Poland by Germany, the Soviet Union, and a small Slovak contingent that marked the start of World War II in Europe...
(see Polish prisoners in the USSR). As the Soviet Union had not signed international conventions on rules of war, the Polish prisoners were denied legal status. Almost all captured officers were murdered, and a large number of ordinary soldiers sent to the Soviet Gulag
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
. In one notorious atrocity ordered by Stalin himself, the Soviet secret police systematically assassinated 21,768 Poles into execution pits in a remote area during the Katyn massacre
Katyn massacre
The Katyn massacre, also known as the Katyn Forest massacre , was a mass execution of Polish nationals carried out by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs , the Soviet secret police, in April and May 1940. The massacre was prompted by Lavrentiy Beria's proposal to execute all members of...
. Among the 14,471 victims were top Polish Army officers including political leaders, government officials, and intellectuals. Some 4,254 dead bodies were uncovered in mass graves in Katyn Forest by the Nazis in 1943, who then invited an international group of neutral representatives and doctors to examin the corpses and confirm the Soviet guilt. Even though, over 20,000 Polish military personnel and civilians perished in the Katyn massacre, thousands of others would fall victim to NKVD massacres of prisoners
NKVD massacres of prisoners
The NKVD prisoner massacres were a series of mass executions committed by the Soviet NKVD against prisoners in Eastern Europe, primarily Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states, Bessarabia and other parts of the Soviet Union from which the Red Army was withdrawing after the German invasion in 1941...
in mid-1941, ahead of the German advance across the Soviet occupation zone
Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a front., the largest invasion in the history of warfare...
.
In total, the Soviets killed tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war. Many of them, like General Józef Olszyna-Wilczyński
Józef Olszyna-Wilczynski
Józef Konstanty Olszyna-Wilczyński was a Polish general and one of the high-ranking commanders of the Polish Army. A veteran of World War I, Polish-Ukrainian War and the Polish-Bolshevik War, he was murdered by the Soviets during the Polish Defensive War of 1939.-Early life:Józef Wilczyński was...
, captured, interrogated and shot on 22 September, were executed already during the 1939 campaign. On 24 September, the Soviets killed forty-two staff and patients of a Polish military hospital in the village of Grabowiec
Grabowiec, Zamosc County
Grabowiec is a village in Zamość County, Lublin Voivodeship, in eastern Poland. It is the seat of the gmina called Gmina Grabowiec. It lies approximately north-east of Zamość and south-east of the regional capital Lublin....
, near Zamość
Zamosc
Zamość ukr. Замостя is a town in southeastern Poland with 66,633 inhabitants , situated in the south-western part of Lublin Voivodeship , about from Lublin, from Warsaw and from the border with Ukraine...
. The Soviets also executed all the Polish officers they captured after the Battle of Szack
Battle of Szack
Battle of Szack was one of the major battles between the Polish Army and the Red Army fought in 1939 in the beginning the Second World War.- Eve of the Battle :...
, on 28 September.
The Soviet authorities regarded service to the prewar Polish state as a "crime against revolution" and "counter-revolutionary activity", and proceeded to arrest large numbers of Polish intelligentsia
Intelligentsia
The intelligentsia is a social class of people engaged in complex, mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture, encompassing intellectuals and social groups close to them...
, former officials, politicians, civil servants and scientists, intellectuals and the clergy, as well as ordinary people thought to pose a threat to Soviet rule. In the two years between the invasion of Poland and the 1941 attack on USSR by Germany, the Soviets arrested and imprisoned about 500,000 Poles. This was about one in ten of all adult males. The arrested members of the Polish intelligentsia included former prime ministers Leon Kozłowski and Aleksander Prystor
Aleksander Prystor
Aleksander Błażej Prystor was a Polish politician, soldier and activist who served as Prime Minister of Poland from 1931 to 1933.He was a member of the Combat Organization of the Polish Socialist Party and in 1908 took part in the Bezdany raid....
and Stanisław Grabski, Stanisław Głąbiński and the Baczewski
Baczewski
Baczewski is a name of a Polish szlachta family, founders of the J. A. Baczewski vodka company. The factory, dating back to late 18th century, was based in Lwów and until 1939 was one of two most popular Polish export goods...
family. Initially aimed primarily at possible political opponents, by January 1940 the NKVD's campaign was also directed against potential allies, including Polish communists and socialists. Those arrested included Władysław Broniewski, Aleksander Wat
Aleksander Wat
Aleksander Wat, was a Polish poet, writer and art theoretician, one of the precursors of Polish futurism movement in early 1920s....
, Tadeusz Peiper
Tadeusz Peiper
Tadeusz Peiper was a Polish poet, art critic, theoretician of literature and one of the precursors of the avant-garde movement in Polish poetry. Born to a Jewish family, Peiper converted to Catholicism as a young man and spent several years in Spain...
, Leopold Lewin
Leopold Lewin
Leopold Lewin was a Polish poet, journalist and translator. He graduated the Warsaw University in 1931. In the years 1939-1944 on emigration in USSR...
, Anatol Stern
Anatol Stern
Anatol Stern was a Polish poet, writer and art critic. Born October 24, 1899 to an assimilated family of Jewish ancestry, Stern studied at the Polish Studies Faculty of the University of Wilno but did not graduate...
, Teodor Parnicki
Teodor Parnicki
Teodor Parnicki was a Polish writer, notable for his historical novels. He is especially renowned for works related to the early medieval Middle East, the late Roman and the Byzantine empires....
, Marian Czuchnowski and many others. The Soviet NKVD executed about 65,000 imprisoned Poles after kangaroo trials.
The number of Poles who died due to Soviet repressions in the period 1939-1941 is estimated at at least 150,000.
Mass deportations to the East
Approximately 100,000 Polish citizens were arrested during the two years of Soviet occupation. The prisons soon got severely overcrowded, with all detainees accused of anti-Soviet activities. The NKVD had to open dozens of ad-hoc prison sites in almost all towns of the region. The wave of arrests and mock convictions contributed to forced resettlement of large categories of people ("kulakKulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
s", Polish civil servants, forest workers, university professors, "osadnik
Osadnik
Osadniks was the Polish loanword used in Soviet Union for veterans of the Polish Army that were given land in the Kresy territory ceded to Poland by Polish-Soviet Riga Peace Treaty of 1921 .-Colonization process:Shortly before the battle of Warsaw on August 7, 1920, the Premier of Poland,...
s") to the Gulag
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
labour camps and exile settlements in remote areas of the Soviet Union
Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union
Forced settlements in the Soviet Union took several forms. Though the most notorious was the Gulag labor camp system of penal labor, resettling of entire categories of population was another method of political repression implemented by the Soviet Union. At the same time, involuntary settlement...
. Altogether roughly a million people were sent to Siberia. According to Norman Davies
Norman Davies
Professor Ivor Norman Richard Davies FBA, FRHistS is a leading English historian of Welsh descent, noted for his publications on the history of Europe, Poland, and the United Kingdom.- Academic career :...
, almost half of them were dead by the time the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement
Sikorski-Mayski Agreement
The Sikorski–Mayski Agreement was a treaty between the Soviet Union and Poland signed in London on 30 July 1941. Its name was coined after the two most notable signatories: Polish Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski and Soviet Ambassador to the United Kingdom Ivan Mayski.- Details :After signing...
had been signed in 1941.
In 1940 and the first half of 1941, the Soviets deported a total of more than 1,200,000 Poles in four waves of mass deportations. The first major operation took place on February 10, 1940, with more than 220,000 people sent in cattle trains to northern European Russia. The second wave of 13 April 1940, consisted of 320,000 people sent primarily to Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the ninth largest country in the world, it is also the world's largest landlocked country; its territory of is greater than Western Europe...
. The third wave of June–July 1940 totaled more than 240,000. The fourth and final wave occurred in June 1941, deporting 300,000. Upon resumption of Polish-Soviet diplomatic relations in 1941, it was determined (based on Soviet information) that more than 760,000 deportees had died – a large part of those dead being children, who had comprised about a third of deportees.
According to the Soviet law, all residents of the annexed area, dubbed by the Soviets as citizens of former Poland, automatically acquired Soviet citizenship. However, actual conferral of citizenship still required individual consent and residents were strongly pressured for such consent. Those refugees who opted out were threatened with repatriation to Nazi controlled territories of Poland.
The Poles and the Soviets re-established diplomatic relations in 1941, following the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement
Sikorski-Mayski Agreement
The Sikorski–Mayski Agreement was a treaty between the Soviet Union and Poland signed in London on 30 July 1941. Its name was coined after the two most notable signatories: Polish Prime Minister Władysław Sikorski and Soviet Ambassador to the United Kingdom Ivan Mayski.- Details :After signing...
; but the Soviets broke them off again in 1943 after the Polish government demanded an independent examination of the recently discovered Katyn burial pits. The Soviets then lobbied the Western Allies to recognize the pro-Soviet Polish puppet government of Wanda Wasilewska
Wanda Wasilewska
Wanda Wasilewska was a Polish and Soviet novelist and communist political activist who played an important role in the creation of a Polish division of the Soviet Red Army during World War II and the formation of the Polish People's Republic....
in Moscow.
Land reform and collectivisation
The Red Army had originally sown confusion among the locals by claiming that they were arriving to save Poland from the Nazis. Their advance surprised Polish communities and their leaders, who had not been advised how to respond to a Bolshevik invasion. Polish and Jewish citizens may at first have preferred a Soviet regime to a German one, but the Soviets soon proved as hostile and destructive towards the Polish citizens and their existence as the Nazis. They began confiscating, nationalising and redistributing all private and state-owned Polish property. Red Army troops requisitioned food and other goods. The Soviet base of support was strengthened temporarily by a land reformLand reform
[Image:Jakarta farmers protest23.jpg|300px|thumb|right|Farmers protesting for Land Reform in Indonesia]Land reform involves the changing of laws, regulations or customs regarding land ownership. Land reform may consist of a government-initiated or government-backed property redistribution,...
program initiated by the NKVD in which most of the owners of large lots of land were labeled "kulak
Kulak
Kulaks were a category of relatively affluent peasants in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union...
s" and dispossessed of their land which was then divided among poorer peasants.
However, the Soviet authorities then started a campaign of forced collectivisation, which largely nullified the earlier gains from the land reform as the peasants generally did not want to join the Kolkhoz
Kolkhoz
A kolkhoz , plural kolkhozy, was a form of collective farming in the Soviet Union that existed along with state farms . The word is a contraction of коллекти́вное хозя́йство, or "collective farm", while sovkhoz is a contraction of советское хозяйство...
farms, nor to give away their crops for free to fulfill the state-imposed quotas, which undercut nearly everyone's material needs.
Dismantling of Polish governmental and social institutions
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
, the Soviet administration justified their Stalinist
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
policies by appealing to the Soviet ideology, which in reality meant the thorough Sovietization
Sovietization
Sovietization is term that may be used with two distinct meanings:*the adoption of a political system based on the model of soviets .*the adoption of a way of life and mentality modelled after the Soviet Union....
of the area. Immediately after their conquest of eastern Poland, the Soviet authorities started a campaign of sovietization
Sovietization
Sovietization is term that may be used with two distinct meanings:*the adoption of a political system based on the model of soviets .*the adoption of a way of life and mentality modelled after the Soviet Union....
of the newly acquired areas. No later than several weeks after the last Polish units surrendered, on October 22, 1939, the Soviets organized staged elections
Elections to the People's Assemblies of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus
Elections to the People's Assemblies of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, which took place on October 22, 1939, were an attempt to legitimate territorial gains of the Soviet Union, at the expense of the Second Polish Republic...
to the Moscow-controlled Supreme Soviet
Supreme Soviet
The Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union was the Supreme Soviet in the Soviet Union and the only one with the power to pass constitutional amendments...
s (legislative body) of Western Byelorussia and Western Ukraine. The result of the staged voting was to become a legitimization of Soviet annexation of eastern Poland.
Subsequently, all institutions of the dismantled Polish state were being closed down and reopened under the Soviet appointed supervisors. Lviv University
Lviv University
The Lviv University or officially the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv is the oldest continuously operating university in Ukraine...
and many other schools were reopened soon but they were restarted anew as Soviet institutions rather than continued their old legacy. Lviv University was reorganized in accordance with the Statute Books for Soviet Higher Schools. The tuition, that along with the institution's Polonophile traditions, kept the university inaccessible to most of the rural Ukrainophone population, was abolished and several new chairs were opened, particularly the chairs of Russian language
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
and literature
Russian literature
Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia or its émigrés, and to the Russian-language literature of several independent nations once a part of what was historically Russia or the Soviet Union...
. The chairs of Marxism-Leninism
Marxism-Leninism
Marxism–Leninism is a communist ideology, officially based upon the theories of Marxism and Vladimir Lenin, that promotes the development and creation of a international communist society through the leadership of a vanguard party over a revolutionary socialist state that represents a dictatorship...
, Dialectical and Historical Materialism aimed at strengthening of the Soviet ideology were opened as well. Polish literature and language studies ware dissolved by Soviet authorities. Forty-five new faculty members were assigned to it and transferred from other institutions of Soviet Ukraine, mainly the Kharkiv
Kharkiv University
The University of Kharkiv or officially the Vasyl Karazin Kharkiv National University is one of the major universities in Ukraine, and earlier in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union...
and Kiev
Kiev University
Taras Shevchenko University or officially the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv , colloquially known in Ukrainian as KNU is located in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. It is the third oldest university in Ukraine after the University of Lviv and Kharkiv University. Currently, its structure...
universities. On January 15, 1940 the Lviv University was reopened and started to teach in accordance with Soviet curricula.
Simultaneously Soviet authorities attempted to remove the traces of Polish history of the area by eliminating much of what had any connection to the Polish state or even Polish culture in general. On December 21, 1939, the Polish currency was withdrawn from circulation without any exchange to the newly introduced rouble, which meant that the entire population of the area lost all of their life savings overnight.
All the media became controlled by Moscow. Soviet authorities implemented a political regime similar to police state
Police state
A police state is one in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic and political life of the population...
, based on terror. All Polish parties and organizations were disbanded. Only the Communist Party was allowed to exist with organizations subordinated to it.
All organized religions were persecuted. All enterprises were taken over by the state, while agriculture
Agriculture
Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...
was made collective
Collective farming
Collective farming and communal farming are types of agricultural production in which the holdings of several farmers are run as a joint enterprise...
.
Exploitation of ethnic tensions
In addition, the Soviets exploited past ethnic tension between Poles and other ethnic groups living in Poland, inciting and encouraging violence against Poles calling the minorities to "rectify the wrongs they had suffered during twenty years of Polish rule". Pre-war Poland was portrayed as a capitalist state based on exploitation of the working people and ethnic minorities. Soviet propaganda claimed that unfair treatment of non-Poles by the Second Polish RepublicSecond Polish Republic
The Second Polish Republic, Second Commonwealth of Poland or interwar Poland refers to Poland between the two world wars; a period in Polish history in which Poland was restored as an independent state. Officially known as the Republic of Poland or the Commonwealth of Poland , the Polish state was...
was a justification of its dismemberment. Soviet officials openly incited mobs to perform killings and robberies. The death toll of the initial Soviet-inspired terror campaign remains unknown.
Restoration of Polish sovereignty
As soon as the forces of Nazi Germany were pushed westward in 1945, the Poland's formal sovereignty was re-established by the Soviet-formed provisional governmentPolish Committee of National Liberation
The Polish Committee of National Liberation , also known as the Lublin Committee, was a provisional government of Poland, officially proclaimed 21 July 1944 in Chełm under the direction of State National Council in opposition to the Polish government in exile...
later renamed as Provisional Government of the Republic of Poland. In reality, the country remained under military occupation for many years to come, controlled by the Soviet Northern Group of Forces
Northern Group of Forces
The Northern Group of Forces was the military formation of the Soviet Army stationed in Poland from the end of Second World War in 1945 until 1993 when they were withdrawn in the aftermath of the fall of Soviet Union...
stationing in Poland until 1956. Some 25,000 Polish underground fighters including 300 top Home Army officers were captured by NKVD units and SMERSH operational groups in the fall of 1944, which was followed by their mass deportations to the gulags. Between 1944 and 1946, thousands of Polish independence fighters actively opposed the new communist regime, attacking country offices of NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
, SMERSH
SMERSH
SMERSH was the counter-intelligence agency in the Red Army formed in late 1942 or even earlier, but officially founded on April 14, 1943. The name SMERSH was coined by Joseph Stalin...
and the Polish communist secret service (UB). The events of late 1940s amounted to a full-scale civil war according to some historians, especially in the eastern and central parts of the country (see: the Cursed soldiers
Cursed soldiers
The cursed soldiers is a name applied to a variety of Polish resistance movements formed in the later stages of World War II and afterwards. Created by some members of the Polish Secret State, these clandestine organizations continued their armed struggle against the Stalinist government of Poland...
). According to deposition by Józef Światło and other communist sources, the number of members of the Polish underground, rounded up on the order of Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian Soviet politician and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus under Joseph Stalin during World War II, and Deputy Premier in the postwar years ....
and deported to Siberia and various camps in the Soviet Union, has reached 50,000 in 1945 alone. Their political leaders were kidnapped
Kidnapping
In criminal law, kidnapping is the taking away or transportation of a person against that person's will, usually to hold the person in false imprisonment, a confinement without legal authority...
by the Soviet Union, tortured and sent to prison after a staged Trial of the Sixteen
Trial of the Sixteen
The Trial of the Sixteen was a staged trial of 16 leaders of the Polish Underground State held by the Soviet Union in Moscow in 1945.-History:Some accounts say approaches were made in February with others saying March 1945...
in Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
. None survived.
The documents of the era show also that the problem of sexual violence against Polish women
Rape during the liberation of Poland
The subject of rape during the liberation of Poland was practically absent from the Polish historiography until the dissolution of the Soviet Union, although the documents of the era show that the problem was serious both during and after the advance of Soviet forces across Poland against Nazi...
by Soviet servicemen was serious both during and after the advance of Soviet forces across Poland. Joanna Ostrowska and Marcin Zaremba of the Polish Academy of Sciences
Polish Academy of Sciences
The Polish Academy of Sciences, headquartered in Warsaw, is one of two Polish institutions having the nature of an academy of sciences.-History:...
estimate that rapes of Polish women reached a mass scale following the Winter Offensive of 1945. Whether the number of victims could have reached or even exceeded 100,000 is only a matter of guessing, considering the traditional taboos among the women incapable of finding "a voice that would have enabled them to talk openly" about their wartime experiences "while preserving their dignity."
To this day the events of those and the following years
History of Poland (1945–1989)
The history of Poland from 1945 to 1989 spans the period of Soviet Communist dominance imposed after the end of World War II over the People's Republic of Poland...
are one of the stumbling blocks in Polish-Russian foreign relations. Polish requests for the return of looted property or for an apology for Soviet-era crimes are either ignored or rejected, accompanied by a reminder of the official Russian state version of history: "we freed you from Nazism: be grateful."
See also
- Polish areas annexed by the Soviet UnionPolish areas annexed by the Soviet UnionImmediately after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, which marked the beginning of World War II, the Soviet Union invaded the eastern regions of the Second Polish Republic, which Poles referred to as the "Kresy," and annexed territories totaling 201,015 km² with a population of 13,299,000...
- Polish minority in the Soviet UnionPolish minority in the Soviet UnionThe Polish minority in the Soviet Union refers to people of Polish descent who resided in the Soviet Union before its dissolution, and might remain in post-Soviet, sovereign countries as their significant minorities.-1917–1920:...
- Repatriation of PolesRepatriation of PolesRepatriation of Poles can refer to:*Repatriation of Poles *Repatriation of Poles...
- Czortkow UprisingCzortków UprisingThe Czortków Uprising was a failed attempt by anti-Soviet Poles, most of them teenagers from local high schools, to storm the local Red Army barracks and a prison, in order to release Polish soldiers kept there. It occurred during the night of January 21–22, 1940, in the Soviet-occupied...
- Battle of KurylowkaBattle of KurylówkaThe Battle of Kuryłówka, fought between the Polish anti-communist resistance organization, National Military Alliance and the Soviet Union's NKVD units, took place on May 7, 1945 in the village of Kuryłówka, southeastern Poland. The battle ended in a victory for the underground Polish...
- Attack on the NKVD Camp in RembertówAttack on the NKVD Camp in RembertówOn May 21, 1945, a unit of the Home Army , led by Colonel Edward Wasilewski, attacked a Soviet NKVD camp located in Rembertów on the eastern outskirts of Warsaw. The Russians incarcerated there many hundreds of Polish citizens; members of the Home Army and underground fighters, whom they were...
- Raids on communist prisons in Poland (1944–1946)