Russian Genocide of Poles
No One Commemorates These Victims
No One Fights for Their Graves
Eighty-nine years ago, on August 11, 1937, People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs Nikolai Yezhov signed NKVD Order No. 00485. This marked the beginning of the so-called “Polish Operation”. In the course of this operation, the Bolsheviks murdered at least 111,000 Poles living in the Soviet Union in under 15 months. According to many historians, the number of those murdered may reach as high as 200,000, writes Gazeta Polska.
The NKVD’s Polish Operation
According to various estimates, after the end of the Polish-Bolshevik War and the signing of the Treaty of Riga in March 1921, the Polish minority in the Soviet Union may have numbered between 1.5 and 2 million people.
To the Soviet Politburo, and above all to Joseph Stalin himself, all of them were suspect by definition. This was compounded by the still-fresh trauma of the Bolshevik defeat at the Battle of Warsaw. Also, perhaps by Stalin’s own resentment—his dilettantism and overreaching ambitions as political commissar of the Southwestern Front, had contributed significantly to that Bolshevik defeat.
The vindictive Georgian surely never forgot his humiliating retreat from outside Lviv [Lwów]. In Soviet propaganda, Poles—and interwar Poland itself—were portrayed as a fascist and criminal nation. In his outstanding book on the “Polish Operation,” titled The Forgotten Genocide, Nikolai Ivanov writes that in Soviet Russia, the conceptual pairing of “Pole” with “fascist” became fixed for decades.
For most of our compatriots living in the Soviet Union, the foundation of their identity was the Catholic religion and their native language. For the Bolsheviks, this was precisely the marker of who was to be persecuted—and ultimately murdered.
.
“I Spit on Your Religion”
As early as the beginning of the 1920s, the crackdown targeted Polish priests. Archbishop Jan Cieplak had served as administrator of the Archdiocese of Mogilev, located in Bolshevik Russia, since 1919. Arrested in 1920, he refused to sign a declaration of obedience to the civil authorities in matters concerning religion. He was imprisoned again along with 14 other clergymen. All were charged with seeking to overthrow the worker-peasant government.
From March 21–25, 1923, a show trial was held in Moscow—a spectacle of hatred. Prosecutor Nikolai Krylenko shouted at the defendants:
I spit on your religion, as I do on all others—Orthodox, Jewish, Mohammedan, Lutheran, and all the rest that exist. Within the Soviet republic, no faith holds political or civil rights, because every Church is a factor threatening the government of workers and peasants.
Archbishop Jan Cieplak and Father Konstanty Budkiewicz were sentenced to death “for incitement to rebellion through superstition.” After a year of harsh imprisonment, Archbishop Cieplak regained his freedom under pressure from world public opinion and intervention by the Holy See and the Polish government.
Father Budkiewicz was not so fortunate. According to an account by the American Jesuit Father Walsh, he had obtained a promise from the Cheka that he would be given last rites before his death. On the day the sentence was to be carried out, he called the Cheka repeatedly, without success. Each time he was told to wait. At 10:00 p.m. someone called him back—he heard drunken singing, laughter, and shouting. Father Budkiewicz was murdered with a shot to the back of the head. Between 1918 and 1939, at least 470 Catholic priests were subjected to repression across the USSR—213 were sentenced to death, and 130 were sentenced to exile.
“Like a Saddle on a Cow”
Still in the 1920s, Poles, like other minorities in the USSR, were subjected to an experiment. Two special autonomous districts were created in Ukraine and Belarus—the Dzerzhinsky District and the Marchlewsk District. In theory, within these districts Poles were granted a degree of freedom and allowed to preserve their language and education. In practice, the goal was to raise a new “Soviet man,” ready to carry the flame of revolution into “the Poland of the lords.”
But Poles resisted Sovietization. In 1928, Zofia Dzierżyńska wrote: “The Polish village (…) is, in social and political terms, more backward than others. The still-dominant, though weakening, influence of the clergy, religious fanaticism, and the national unity still prevailing in some villages (…)—all of this hinders the progress of socialist construction (…).”
As Comrade Stalin reportedly used to say, communism suits the Poles the way a saddle suits a cow. After several years of an experiment that, according to its architects, failed to produce the expected results—among other things, in the area of collectivization—the districts were dissolved, and repression fell upon the recalcitrant Poles. Deportations, imprisonment, and murder followed. In 1936, Soviet authorities carried out a deportation of Poles, removing around 60,000–70,000 people from the Ukrainian SSR to Kazakhstan. All of this was a prelude to what would happen in 1937.
Order No. 00485
Signed on August 11, 1937 by Yezhov and previously approved by Stalin, Order No. 00485 was, in essence, a decision to completely exterminate the Poles living in the Soviet Union. Its nature and the manner of its execution bear all the hallmarks of genocide. The sole crime of our compatriots was being Polish—and for that, they had to die. Point one reads:
Beginning August 20, 1937, launch a broad operation leading to the full liquidation of local units of the POW [Polish Military Organization] and, above all, its sabotage-espionage and insurgent cadres in industry, transport, state farms, and collective farms.
The entire operation is to be completed within 3 months, i.e., by November 20, 1937.” The pretext for launching the arrests and murders was, for the Soviet security services, the supposed existence—spanning nearly the entire Soviet Union—of the Polish Military Organization. According to the Soviet propaganda, these agents were allegedly carrying out a range of sabotage activities, from proverbially pouring sand into machinery and poisoning food, to preparing terrorist attacks on representatives of Soviet power.
That the POW, founded back during World War I by Józef Piłsudski, had ceased to exist more than a decade earlier was, of course, of no consequence whatsoever.
The order signed by Yezhov also specified which groups of Poles were to be arrested first and how detainees were to be treated. Point 5 states:
“All those arrested, depending on the degree of guilt established in the course of investigation, are divided into two categories:
a) the first category, subject to execution by shooting, comprising the espionage, sabotage, wrecking, and insurgent cadres of Polish intelligence;
b) the second category, comprising the less active among them, subject to imprisonment in prisons and camps with sentences of 5 to 10 years.”
A Socially Dangerous Child
Four days later, on August 15, Yezhov signed another criminal order. This time it concerned the wives and children of “the enemies of the people.” Collective responsibility was applied without the slightest hesitation.
“Investigative proceedings are to be initiated against every arrested woman and every socially dangerous child from the age of 15 […]. Wives of traitors to the homeland are to be sentenced, depending on how socially dangerous they are deemed to be, to a minimum of 5–8 years in a camp. Socially dangerous children of those convicted, depending on age, degree of danger, and potential for reform, are to be imprisoned in camps, NKVD labor colonies, or children’s homes under special regime […].”
A Spiral of Terror
Three weeks after issuing the genocidal order, Yezhov informed Stalin that 23,000 “Polish spies” had been uncovered. On the cover page of this report, Stalin wrote: “Very good! Keep digging up and cleaning out this Polish-spy filth. You are destroying it in the interest of the Soviet Union.” Suggestions from the Soviet leader could hardly go unanswered.
Hence, the “Polish Operation,” originally meant to last three months, did not end until nearly 15 months later. To streamline the extermination of Poles, the Soviet secret police introduced what became known as the “album procedure” for carrying out killings. Under this system, the personal details of the accused, along with descriptions of their alleged offenses, were entered into special albums. And such albums were subsequently sent to the headquarters, where Yezhov, together with Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, personally signed the death sentences.
So, even by “Soviet standards,” this was an utterly lawless procedure. As the spiral of terror grew ever larger, the executioners in the Kremlin were unable to sign off on the albums in time, or signed them wholesale without even reading their contents. Confessions were extracted through horrific torture, beatings, threats against immediate family, and intimidation.
Under torture, people confessed to the most absurd acts, simultaneously naming accomplices, who were then arrested in turn, naming still more—and so the spiral of terror kept turning. At a certain point, simply bearing a Polish-sounding surname was enough to land someone in an NKVD torture chamber. And Stalin’s zealous executioners went looking for further victims in… telephone directories. An unverified denunciation from a neighbor was enough to land someone in prison.
As researchers have calculated, a Pole in the USSR during this period was 40 times more likely to be put to death than any other citizen of the “Soviet paradise.”
A Bloody Toll
According to NKVD data, between August 15, 1937 and November 15, 1938, 139,835 people of Polish nationality were arrested and subsequently sentenced across the USSR. Out of this number 111,091 were sentenced to death and 28,744 were sentenced to forced-labor camps. But if we add the victims of other Soviet actions against Poles, the total number of victims may reach 200,000. Helena Trybel, whose father was murdered and who, along with her entire family, was deported to Yakutia, told Nikolai Ivanov:
“Being Polish in the Soviet Union in 1938 was more or less the same as being Jewish in the Third Reich.”
Author: Piotr Dmitrowicz
For the Polish language original please see:
