Soviet persecution of Poles during World War II

The Soviet persecution of Poles during World War II refers to the mass murder and deportations of Poles in territories occupied by the Soviet Union during World War II.Telegrams sent by Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, German ambassador to the Soviet Union, from Moscow to the German Foreign Office: No. 317  of 10 September 1939, No. 371  of 16 September 1939, No. 372  of 17 September 1939. The Avalon Project, Yale Law School. Retrieved 14 November 2006.

Overview

Following the invasion of Poland, Poland was divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany occupied western Poland, while the Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland until late June 1941, when the Axis powers invaded the Soviet Union. By June 1941, the Soviet Union had already arrested 500,000 Poles. At least 150,000 Poles were killed by the Soviets on Polish soil throughout WWII.

Soviet-occupied Poland (1939‒41)

The Soviet Union occupied 52.1% of pre-war Poland (c. 200,000 km2), with over 13,700,000 citizens.. Also in: Trela-Mazur 1997, Wrocławskie Studia Wschodnie, Wrocław. Among minority citizens, 37% were Ukrainians, 14.5% Belarusians, 8.4% Jews, 0.9% Russians and 0.6% Germans. Joseph Stalin's occupation of eastern Poland is said to be motivated by his baseless perception that pre-war Poland was a "crime against revolution [...] counter-revolutionary activity". 

Katyn massacre

On March 5, 1940, Lavrentiy Beria asked Joseph Stalin to order the killing of 25,700 Polish "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries" in the Soviet-occupied zone. Six members of the Soviet Politburo – Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Mikhail Kalinin – approved the killing. American historian Gerhard Weinberg said that the Soviets killed the captured Poles as they considered them the "avowed enemies of Soviet authority". Weinberg further noted:



Between April and May 1940, around 22,000 Poles were executed by the Soviets in the Katyn forest (now in Smolensk, Russia). 



  The victims were mainly captured Polish soldiers, police, doctors, teachers, scientists, engineers and journalists. They were executed as part of the Soviet campaign to prevent Poland from having a functional society again. Before that, 111,091 persons associated with Poland had already been killed by the Soviets during the Stalinist purges between August 25, 1937 and November 15, 1938.McLoughlin, Barry, and McDermott, Kevin (eds). Stalin's Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union. Palgrave Macmillan, December 2002. , p. 164

Genocide question

Over the past decades, it has been debated whether the Katyn massacre could be seen as a genocide. Many Polish academics, including historian Adam Basak,See Adam Basak, Katyń: Problem odpowiedziałności karnej sprawców w świetle Norymbergi, in 21 Studia na Faszyzmem i Zbrodniami Hitlerowskimi 325, 325–60 (Karol Jonca ed., 1998). jurist Cezary Mik,See Cezary Mik, Lech Aleksander Kaczyński (18.6.1949-10.4.2010), 1/2 Kwartalnik Prawa Publicznego 5, 10 (2010) (describing the life as well as public and academic work of the late Lech Kaczyński, President of Poland, who, while heading a Polish delegation for the celebrations of the seventieth anniversary of the Katyn Massacre, died along with the ninety-five people accompanying him on April 10, 2010 in a plane crash in Smolensk). Karolina Kosińska,Karolina Kosińska, Zbrodnia ludobójstwa w prawie międzynarodowym 34 (2009). and prosecutor Małgorzata Kuźniar-Plota,See Małgorzata Kuźniar-Plota, Kwalifikacja prawna Zbrodni Katyńskiej—Wybrane zagadnienia, in Zbrodnia Katyńska: W kRęgu Prawdy i Kłamstwa 46 (Sławomir Kalbarczyk ed., 2010). who investigated the massacre, believed that the Katyn massacre qualified as a genocide.

Historian Adam Basak noted:

Jurist Cezary Mik called the massacre "genocidal murder of the Polish elite in Katyn and other places", while Karolina Kosińska said:

More importantly, prosecutor Małgorzata Kuźniar-Plota, who investigated the massacre, ruled that:


Mass deportation

Between February 10, 1940 and June 1941, as many as 1,200,000 Poles were deported to mainland Russia. 


  The deportation happened while Polish and Jewish property across the occupied zone was taken over by the Soviets. Represje 1939-41 Aresztowani na Kresach Wschodnich  (Repressions 1939–41. Arrested on the Eastern Borderlands.) Ośrodek Karta. Retrieved 15 November 2006. Polish Jews made up 30% of the Poles deported to Siberia, Jan Tomasz Gross, Revolution from Abroad (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 196–98. The three major Soviet deportations (1940–1941) encompassed varying numbers of Jews, along with some Ukrainians and Byelorussians. The ethnic distribution for all deportations has been estimated at 52 percent Poles, 30 percent Jews (while the Jews made up 10 percent of the total population), and 18 percent others. making them statistically the most targeted group among the deportees.


The Soviets conducted the deportation in four waves. 

  Foreword by Dr. Tomasz Piesakowski 1998  reprint with excerpts by Waldemar Wajszczuk. Book review with excerpts by Derek Crowe.
  The first wave of deportation in February 1940 saw 220,000 Poles sent to northern European Russia. The second wave of deportation in April 1940 saw as many as 330,000 Poles sent to Soviet-occupied Kazakhstan. The third and fourth wave saw as many as 400,000 and 200,000 Poles sent to forced settlements across the Soviet Union.

Destruction of Polish society

In both the Nazi- and Soviet-occupied zone, the oppression of Poles was motivated by anti-Polish racism (also called anti-PolonismThaddeus C. Radzilowski, Anti-Polonism  or Polonophobia), which predated the Soviet Union.Myroslav Shkandrij, Russia and Ukraine: literature and the discourse of empire from Napoleonic to postcolonial times, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 2001, 354 pages.  Page 69. In the Soviet-occupied zone, Russian culture was also imposed on the Poles by reorganizing Polish universities in line with the Statute Books for Soviet Higher Schools, and prioritizing Russian studies while suppressing Polish studies. Traces of Polish history were systematically erased by the Soviets. All Polish parties and organizations were dissolved, while the Polish currency was made invalid, causing the whole population to lose their life savings overnight.

NKVD prisoner massacres


Before Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Soviets were holding hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in NKVD prisons across their occupied Eastern European territories, many of whom were Polish.  Right after the invasion began, the NKVD was ordered to kill or evacuate 140,000 prisoners from Soviet-occupied eastern Poland. 

Two-thirds of the said prisoners were killed by the NKVD. Among the prisoners killed, at least 9,800 were reportedly executed in prisons and 1,443 executed during evacuation. Geographically, 20,000–30,000 of them died in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland, and 9,000 in the Ukrainian SSR, which had just gone through the Holodomor 








  and Great Purge-related massacres in the 1930s. Rather than releasing their prisoners as they hurriedly retreated during the first week of the war, the Soviet secret police killed most of them. In the first week of the invasion, the NKVD prisoner executions totaled some 10,000 in western Ukraine and more than 9,000 in Vinnytsia, eastward toward Kyiv. Comparable numbers of prisoners were executed in eastern Poland, Byelorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The Soviet areas had already sustained hundreds of thousands of executions during the 1937–1938 Great Purge.Valery Vasiliev, Yuriy Shapoval, "Stages of «Great Terror»: The Vinnytsia Tragedy", Zerkalo Nedeli, No. 31 (406), August 17–23, 2002, (in Russian , in Ukrainian  ) They were targeted for mass murder over their Polish or Ukrainian identity.

Medical students who came across the victim bodies of one of such massacres in Lviv described the scene:"Lviv museum recounts Soviet massacres" , Natalia A. Feduschak. CDVR. 2010. Retrieved 6 feb 2017

Historian Yury Boshyk wrote:

Formation of Soviet puppet state in Poland

After Nazi Germany was defeated, the Soviet Union set up a puppet state in Poland,The Great Globe Itself: A Preface to World Affairs By William Bullitt, Francis P. Sempa   subjecting Poland to communist totalitarianism until 1989, Lappin, Shalom (2006), ‘How Class Disappeared from Western Politics’, Dissent, Vol. 51, No. 1, pp. 73-78.



 Kirsch, Adam (2024), On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, W.W. Norton and Company, New York and London.
  while Soviet troops did not leave Poland until 1993.  

  The puppet state's founding came with the arrest of 25,000 Polish Home Army soldiers, who were deported to Gulags in mainland Russia. As many as 100,000 Polish women were also raped by Soviet soldiers right after the war.

Polish resistance

Armed resistance 

Some anti-communist Poles took up arms against the Soviets. The establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944-1949 By Norman Naimark   However, the armed resistance failed due to the lack of foreign support. Tens of thousands of them were deported to Gulags in mainland Russia, with a few to no confirmed survivors. Among them consisted of 6,000 Poles who had been jailed in Borowicze (now Borovichi, Russia) and 6,300 in Stalinogorsk (now Novomoskovsk, Russia).

The exact number is unknown as nobody has access to all of the Soviet documents. Most Polish deportees were jailed in Gulags in Workutstroj, Pieczorłag and Uchtiżemłag, located in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in northwestern Russia.

Civil disobedience

Throughout the Cold War, the Poles resisted the Soviet puppet regime peacefully. Instances of peaceful Polish resistance included the June 1956 Poznań protests (c. 100 killed and 600 wounded), "Z perspektywy historyka i w świetle dokumentów…" – interview with dr Łukasz Jastrząb March 1968 protests, December 1970 protests (44 killed, 1,000+ wounded and 3,000+ arrested), June 1976 protests,The origins of democratization in Poland By Michael H. Bernhard, page 45 1971 Łódź strikes, 1980 Lublin strikes,Warsaw Voice, Solidarity 1980-81 1981 warning strike, The biggest strike in history of Poland, J. Polonus 

 Kalendarium 1980–1981, Jaroslaw Szarek  1981 Polish hunger demonstrations, "Anger Over Food Spreads in Poland".  By James M. Markham, The New York Times
 The Polish Revolution By Timothy Garton Ash, p. 191
  1982 demonstrations in Poland  Encyclopedia of Solidarity – Lubin Crime. Article written by Lukasz Kaminski, historian of Wroclaw University. Encyklopedia-solidarnosci.pl. Retrieved on August 31, 2011.
 Rzeczpospolita daily, KAZIMIERZ GROBLEWSKI "Winni sa niewinni" . Rzeczpospolita.pl (December 13, 2001). Retrieved on August 31, 2011.
 Poland under Martial Law, by Roman Stefanowski, Blinken Open Society Archives
 August 1982 demonstration, Portal of the Polish Press Agency. 11listopada1918.pl. Retrieved on August 31, 2011. and 1988 Polish strikes, Turning the tables? by Andy Zebrowski “The second massive wave of strikes this year has shaken the Polish regime to such an extent that it doesn't know which way to turn”
 Pushing back the curtain. BBC News, Poland 1984 - 1988
 Second August, by Andrzej Grajewski which contributed to the fall of the puppet regime in 1989.

Denial

Since the fall of communism, individuals on the political left have occasionally denied the Soviet persecution of Poles during WWII – including the Katyn massacre.

Examples

Poland

In December 2019, members of the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) said that "the Soviets liberated Poland from German occupation". The party was a successor to the communist party that ruled Poland between 1947 and 1989. 

The said members were criticized for "falsifying Polish history" and "promoting a [communist] totalitarian system". British historian Norman Davies also commented that the Red Army soldiers did not know what freedom was but fought for their leaders to "bring all conquered countries under Bolshevik dictatorship".

Czechia

In December 2024, the Czech Constitutional Court rejected an appeal from Josef Skála, a former Communist Party deputy leader, who had previously been convicted for denying that the Soviets committed the Katyn massacre. The Court stated in its ruling,

Conspiracy theories

Though the Soviets were fully responsible for the Soviet persecution of Poles, many antisemites spread conspiracy theories that Jews coordinated the Soviet persecution of Poles. 

For instance, the Naliboki massacre, where 127‒128 

  Poles were killed by Soviet partisans in Naliboki in Nazi-occupied Poland, has been wrongfully blamed on Jews by antisemites. The allegations of Jewish guilt have been disproven repeatedly, particularly by Poland's official Institute of National Remembrance. The conspiracy theory is seen by mainstream historians as a form of Holocaust distortion.

Related pages

 Holodomor
 Soviet deportation of Greeks
 Soviet deportation of Koreans
 Soviet deportations of Chechens and Ingush
 Soviet deportations from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina

Footnotes

References

Category:Racism in Europe
Category:Genocide
Category:Communism
Category:20th century in Poland
Category:Soviet crimes against humanity