Freedom, bitterness, stagnation
The Soviet Union, attacked by Hitler’s coalition, became an area of real migration of peoples from the summer of 1941. Millions of refugees and evacuees moved chaotically from west to east and from north to south, including hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens… An interview about the turning point that took place in the summer of 1941 and the situation of those who partially regained their freedom but had to risk their lives in return with Prof. Albin Głowacki, one of the leading experts on the history of Poles and Polish citizens in the Soviet Union.
Post-January Uprising exiles from Lithuania: what do the Siberian archives say about them?
Viktor Bilotas: Between 2016 and 2018, the Lithuanian Cultural Council funded the “Lithuanian Siberia” project. Through visits to the archives of Tobolsk, Tomsk, and Krasnoyarsk, its participants acquired approximately 3,000 copies of documents relating primarily to exiles from the Augustów, Vilnius, and Kaunas Governorates.
The shortest route to Poland? Repatriation of Polish citizens from the USSR in 1945–1946
Grzegorz Hryciuk: The Polish deportees who arrived from the USSR were condemned for decades to a kind of selective memory. These remained their personal trauma, which they could only share with their loved ones, who had experienced the same fate as them.
The dramatic fate of Zygmunt Sierakowski
Mariusz Kulik: Through his actions, Zygmunt Sierakowski put the good of the general public and his homeland above his own. His participation in the January Uprising shows the dramatic fate of many Poles serving in the Russian army at that time. Many of them abandoned promising careers and stability, choosing an uncertain future and, often, poverty.
Poles in Siberia in the Soviet reality of the 1920s and 1930s
Sergiusz Leonczyk: After the end of the Polish-Bolshevik War, on 18 March 1921, a peace treaty between Poland, Russia and Ukraine was signed in Riga. Among the provisions of this treaty were points concerning the repatriation of the Polish population from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus to independent Poland. This repatriation officially lasted from 1921 to June 1924, but the last repatriates arrived in Poland as late as 1925. Unfortunately, not everyone was able to exercise their right to repatriation to their historical homeland.
In Thought, in Word, on Screen: Iranian Interest in the Fate of Polish Refugees
Ivonna Nowicka The fate of Polish Sybiraks has inspired a remarkable range of cultural works in Iran: documentary films, a stage play, a feature film, and even a television series viewed by millions. From where did the profound level of interest in this subject...
In memory of the wandering exiles of the Borderland. On the eightieth anniversary of the Repatriation Agreement
Wojciech Marciniak: Eighty years on from the end of the Second World War we ought to sustain the remembrance processes for our compatriots who arrived from the USSR as well as for those who aided them in enduring until the final chapter of their exiled-wanderings, also supporting them when resettling again in Poland.
Polish Siberiada: Geography, Myths, and Meaning
Karina Gaibulina: Although Poles did not initiate the colonial conquest of Siberia, the Caucasus or Central Asia, they nevertheless participated in the process of subjugating other nations and states.
Twenty Years of Penal Labor for Escape
Jerzy Rohoziński: On the night of 18 April 1952, the Soviet authorities deported more than five thousand ethnic Poles from the Byelorussian SSR to southern Kazakhstan, condemning them to forced labor on the cotton fields of the Pakhta-Aral state farm.