Borovichi – Crime and Remembrance. Home Army Soldiers in NKVD-MVD Camp No. 270

Ewa Ziółkowska

Almost exactly 80 years after the deportation of Polish soldiers, in the early morning hours of December 8, 2024, local residents discovered that the memorial complex dedicated to the victims of Camp No. 270 in Jogola had been vandalized and desecrated. The same fate befell Polish memorials at two other cemeteries in Ustye and Bobrovik.

Let us recall: in 1943 and 1944, while the eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic were engulfed in military operations, Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) soldiers and officers were systematically disarmed and arrested – sometimes immediately after conducting joint operations with the Red Army against the Germans. One such example was the Soviet dismantling of Lieutenant Antoni Burzyński’s “Kmicic” unit near Lake Naroch. This pattern occurred across the Vilnius region, Volhynia, the Lviv area, and the Lublin province. Treated as criminals, AK soldiers – including participants in Operation Tempest – were transported in large numbers to labour camps in the vicinity of Ryazan, Kaluga, Vorkuta, Ostashkov, and many other locations. Some were sent to Borovichi – a city halfway between Moscow and St. Petersburg – which became known in Polish history as the seat of NKVD-MVD Camp No. 270 Administration.

“The Fight Against Reaction”

In July 1944, after the Red Army crossed the so-called Curzon Line and entered the Lublin region, the NKVD, in cooperation with the security services of the Soviet-installed Polish Committee of National Liberation (PKWN), launched a campaign to dismantle the structures of the Polish Underground State. A fierce crackdown began – including a heavy propaganda offensive. Posters appeared on city walls declaring: “AK – the spit-covered dwarf of reaction”, or “Beware of AK and NSZ spies”. Under slogans such as “Fighting Reaction”, brutal pacifications of villages were carried out, along with looting and rape. As part of “cleansing the rear of the front of hostile elements” and “eliminating the anti-Soviet underground”, mass arrests were conducted – targeting both commanding officers and rank-and-file Home Army soldiers who had remained faithful to their oath and continued fighting the German occupiers. By the end of September 1944, the number of detainees had reached tens of thousands. They were held, among other places, in former Nazi torture chambers at Lublin Castle and in the Majdanek concentration camp. These acts left no doubt about the nature of the new regime. Many of those imprisoned – without trial or sentence – were crammed into cattle cars and deported deep into the Soviet Union.

The Borovichi Camp

The largest group – nearly five thousand individuals (4,893 according to Soviet sources), mostly rank-and-file Home Army soldiers classified as “enemies of the people’s government” – were deported in November 1944, primarily from Sokołów Podlaski, Lublin, and Przemyśl. They were sent to a labour camp in the Borovichi region of Novgorod Oblast. This was one of the largest and harshest camps in the northwestern part of the USSR. The site had originally been established during World War I to house prisoners of war from the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman armies. Between 1920 and 1921, nearly four hundred Polish soldiers captured during the Polish–Soviet War were held there. Later, the camp was repurposed to imprison Soviet citizens – victims of the Great Terror – many of whom were executed following sentences handed down by NKVD “special troikas”. In 1939, the site was transformed into a Corrective Labor Camp (ITL) for political prisoners working on the construction of the Mstinskaya Hydroelectric Plant (Mstinstroy). Then, in July 1942, it became a frontline transit camp for German soldiers and their allies. In late July 1944, it was converted into a permanent prisoner-of-war camp. From November onward, Poles became the largest inmate group. Arriving in several transports, they were placed in five subcamps: No. 1 – Ustye; No. 3 – Borovichi-Bobrovik (the so-called “urban camp); No. 5 – Jogla; No. 16 – Opochno; No. 18 – Shibotovo.

The largest of these, located near the village of Jogla (Opetschensky District), was:

…fenced off and heavily guarded. The entire camp area was enclosed with two rows of barbed wire and six watchtowers placed at the corners and between them. The camp infrastructure included a number of facilities, such as semi-dugout barracks built into the ground (for prisoners and POWs), a camp kitchen, bathhouse, storerooms, workshops, a punishment cell, and a guardhouse at the camp entrance. The technical condition of all buildings was deplorable – they were built crudely and carelessly…

The Borovichi Book, Vol. V, p. 46

It was in Borovichi, in November and December, that the majority of deported Home Army soldiers were held. After completing quarantine, in mid-February 1945, many were sent to forced labour, primarily to the “Krasny Keramik” industrial plant in Borovichi or to Subcamp No. 1 in Ustye – the most gruelling of all, known as the “mine-shaft camp”, where prisoners were tasked with digging vertical mine shafts. Less than two months later, following the outbreak of dysentery and severe diarrhoea, many inmates were transferred back to the subcamp in Jogla, which by then served as a “health ward”. The sick were also housed in the Orthodox Monastery of the Holy Spirit, where one building functioned as Special Hospital No. 3810.

One prisoner from Subcamp No. 3 recalled:

When I was in the urban camp in Borovichi, a dysentery outbreak occurred – many people died. I fell ill too. I tried to fight it. I gave part of my soup and bread ration to those who went to work, and they gave me garlic in exchange. I also charred pieces of bread to make a kind of charcoal tea. That’s how I managed to stop the diarrhoea. Next to me lay a teacher – he couldn’t resist eating his full ration of soup and bread, which only made the illness worse. He died”.

The Borovichi Book, Vol. V, p. 63

Diseases, exhausting labour, malnutrition, a harsh climate, lack of warm clothing, inadequate medical care, and no contact with loved ones back home led to both physical and psychological destruction. Many prisoners did not survive. According to records kept by the NKVD, between November 1944 and July 1946, 617 Poles died in Camp No. 270 – a mortality rate of 12.6%. They were usually buried in mass graves near the subcamps, several to a grave, without clothing or undergarments.

Those who did survive were released in February and March 1946. In July 1945, Subcamp No. 17 was established in the Kovyanka settlement on the outskirts of Borovichi. The camp was designated for Poles awaiting repatriation – though only some were actually released. More than 800 detainees, mostly officers, were transferred to Camp No. 531 near Sverdlovsk. They were not allowed to return to Poland until November 1947. That same year, two more transports of Poles arrived in Borovichi: 467 people from the NKVD filtration camp in Kutaisi, Georgia, and 421 from a POW camp near Ryazan. In total, 5,795 Polish citizens passed through Camp No. 270 in Borovichi, including nine children who were born there; a total of 651 individuals lost their lives.

The Borovichi Community

In the postwar period, former inmates of the Borovichi camp sought to maintain contact with one another. When it finally became possible, they gave their efforts an official framework by establishing the Borovichi Community (Środowisko Borowiczan) as part of the Polish Union of Siberian Deportees (Związek Sybiraków). They chose the motto: “In remembrance… as a warning…” Forty-one years after their return to Poland, the first gathering of former Borovichi prisoners took place near Łódź in September 1987. The official founding meeting of the Borovichi Community occurred five years later, on September 14–15, 1992, in Kazimierz Dolny. From the outset, it was a highly active and dynamic community with an impressive record of achievements. Thanks to the tireless energy and passion of its long-time president, Roman W. Bara (1926–2015), himself a former prisoner of Borovichi, the community conducted extensive work both in Poland and abroad. One of its main goals was to commemorate the burial sites of those who had died in captivity.

In 1992, in the name of remembrance, the former inmates concluded an agreement with the Russian side to facilitate such memorialization. Between 1993 and 2012, the community organized a number of international seminars and academic conferences aimed at addressing historical gaps and promoting greater awareness of these events. The first of these, the International Seminar of Repressed Prisoners: Home Army Soldiers in NKVD Camp No. 270 in Borovichi, was held on-site in Borovichi on August 3–7, 1993. In May 2003, a scientific conference took place in Lublin, attended by guests from Novgorod and Borovichi, which was followed by particularly solemn anniversary commemorations held from June 21–24, 2004, in Borovichi and Veliky Novgorod. These events were jointly organized by the Borovichi Community, the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in St. Petersburg, and the Novgorod Regional Administration, in collaboration with the regional archives.

A highlight of the program was the Polish–Russian academic conference titled In remembrance… as a warning… The 60th Anniversary of the Internment of Home Army Soldiers of the Polish Underground State in NKVD Camp No. 270 in Borovichi. Subsequent conferences were held in Borovichi, Koszalin, and again in Borovichi. The final large-scale academic event, the NKVD-MVD Camp No. 270 in Borovichi, took place in May 2012 in Szymbark, in the Kashubia region. Numerous popular history sessions were also organized, often targeted at school-aged youth. These events were frequently accompanied by exhibitions, including at the Museum of Independence in Warsaw and in Borovichi itself. The Borovichi Community also engaged in prolific publishing efforts, most notably compiling five extensive volumes of The Borovichi Book (Księga Borowiczan). It maintained close cooperation with academic institutions, local governments, and major Polish memory institutions, including the KARTA Center, the Institute of National Remembrance, and the Office for Veterans and Repressed Persons, among others. The community also contributed to the creation of a 2005 documentary titled The Case of Roman Bara (Sprawa Romana Bara), directed by Yuriy Burtsev. The memory of Borovichi endures through subsequent generations. Annual commemorative events are still held, including the ceremonies marking the 80th anniversary of the deportations, which took place in Lublin on October 17–18, 2024.

Memorials in Poland

A major part of the community’s work focused on commemorating fellow prisoners who had died in the Borovichi and Sverdlovsk regions. Memorial plaques were installed in cities such as Biała Podlaska, Sokołów Podlaski, Sopot, Przemyśl, Krasnystaw, Koszalin, Kraków, and at Lublin Castle. In Lublin, the Borovichi Community has a namesake square (Skwer Borowiczan), where, in autumn 2004, a monument titled In remembrance. As a warning was unveiled and consecrated. In Warsaw, in addition to plaques in the Church of St. Andrew the Apostle, a boulder-shaped memorial – Borovichi–Sverdlovsk – was erected in Sybiracy Square (Skwer Sybiraków). In 2005, the Monument to the Fallen and Murdered in the East was supplemented with a rail tie bearing the inscription “Borovichi”, and in Siedlce there is a street named after the Borovichi prisoners (ulica Borowiczan).

Cemeteries in the Borovichi Region

The burial sites of Poles who died in the NKVD-MVD Camp No. 270 complex became known in part thanks to documentation submitted in 1994 to the Polish Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites (Rada Ochrony Pamięci Walk i Męczeństwa, ROPWiM). This extensive material, prepared by the Russian Military Archive Commission (which conducted archival searches from 1992 to 1997), contains approximately 4,000 names of Poles who were sent to Soviet labour camps in 1944 and later. The documentation was published in ROPWiM’s bulletin Past and Memory (Przeszłość i Pamięć). Due to the brutal precision of the Soviet repressive system, each prisoner’s file typically includes the formal act establishing the cemetery, a schematic map with legend, individual grave layouts and numbering, and a list of those buried at each site. Three successive issues of Past and Memory featured cemetery documentation from Special Hospital No. 3810 in the village of Khoromy; Subcamp No. 18 in Shibotovo (No. 2(7)/1998); Subcamp No. 1 near the village of Ustye (No. 3(8)/1998); and Subcamps No. 5 in Jogla, and No. 3 in Borovichi (No. 4(9)/1998). These volumes include burial lists of Polish nationals, cemetery blueprints, and inspection protocols dating from 1946 to 1967. Based on this documentation and archival materials made available by the authorities in Veliky Novgorod, it became possible to precisely identify the burial locations of Polish prisoners.

Memorial Markers at Burial Sites

On August 5, 1993, the International Memorial to the Victims of Repression and the Second World War was officially opened on a slope above the Msta River on the edge of the village of Jogla, at the site of one of the mass graves of victims executed in Borovichi and of the cemetery for prisoners of war and internees from NKVD Camp No. 270. Thanks to the initiative of the Borovichi Community and with financial support from the Polish Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites (ROPWiM), Polish memorials were placed alongside Russian, German, Finnish, and Hungarian ones in the Borovichi area. In the cleaned-up section of the cemetery where Poles were buried, a stone was erected bearing the inscription (in Polish): “To the soldiers of the Home Army / From comrades and families / Jogla, August 1993”, along with a tall wooden cross. At the foot of the cross, a niche was created to hold an urn containing lists of the deceased. Chaplain Fr. Józef Kubalewski from Sopot and Fr. Krzysztof Pożarski from St. Petersburg consecrated the site. At the same time, a metal plaque was created in memory of “5,200 Home Army soldiers imprisoned between 1944 and 1947…” and was entrusted to the nearby Church of the Tikhvin Icon of the Mother of God.

The cemetery was granted the official designation of a Burial Site of Victims of Political Repression. This was only the beginning. In August 2002, to mark the anniversary of the founding of the Borovichi Community, the monument in Jogla was enhanced with a flat, black granite slab featuring the Polish eagle and a bilingual inscription: “In memory of the Poles / soldiers of the Home Army / imprisoned between 1944 and 1947 / who died in NKVD-MVD Camp No. 270 / and are buried in this cemetery / Compatriots, 2002”. Identical plaques were installed at the cemeteries in Borovichi-Bobrovik and in Ustye, where a tall metal cross was also erected. The culmination of these efforts came in 2004, when six commemorative stones were placed along the path leading to the monument in Jogla. Each bore the name of one of the subcamps – Jogla, Opoczno, Ustye, Hospital No. 3810, Bobrovik, and Shibotovo – symbolizing the path the prisoners had endured and illustrating the scale and complexity of the Borovichi camp system. Together, these memorials made the Jogla cemetery the central site of remembrance for all Polish victims of NKVD Camp No. 270. It is worth noting that at the time the plans to memorialize Polish gravesites met with understanding and goodwill from the authorities of Novgorod Oblast and the town of Borovichi, who provided substantial support for the realization of these projects.

However, efforts to commemorate Poles who died in Hospital No. 3810 – buried in a cemetery near the village of Khoromy – were unsuccessful. Due to the position of the Orthodox Church, both locally and at the level of the Novgorod eparchy, it was not possible to place a memorial plaque on the façade of the monastery. In Khoromy itself, only memorials to Hungarian and Finnish prisoners exist; no Polish marker was ever installed. In central Borovichi, the local museum of the town and district created a small exhibition dedicated to Poles imprisoned in Camp No. 270. On the 70th anniversary of the deportation, the Borovichi Community, in cooperation with ROPWiM and others, launched an initiative to install plaques listing the names of Polish prisoners who had died in the Borovichi area. In 2016, at the request of the Polish side, a local stonemason completed 54 black granite tablets. However, an agreement to install them at the cemetery was never reached. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that – considering the presence of Polish memorials – Camp No. 270 remains one of the very few Soviet camp complexes in Russia to have been almost fully commemorated.

Memory and Desecration

For three decades, on the occasion of Polish All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, as well as during the Russian civil commemoration – the Day of Remembrance for Victims of PoliticalRepression (observed on October 30 by opposition groups) – cemeteries of Home Army soldiers in the Borovichi region were regularly visited by representatives of the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland and the Polish Institute in St. Petersburg, as well as by members of the local Polish diaspora from Novgorod. On several occasions, representatives of the Polish Embassy in Moscow also paid tribute to the victims of the camp.

Then, almost exactly 80 years after the deportation of Polish soldiers, in the early morning hours of December 8, 2024, local residents discovered that the entire memorial complex dedicated to the victims of Camp No. 270 had been desecrated and destroyed. In Jogla, under the cover of night and likely with the use of heavy machinery, the tall metal cross, the granite memorial slab, and the six stones bearing the names of subcamps were ripped out, smashed, and removed. The Polish-language inscription on the main stone – “To the soldiers of the Home Army” – was partially chiselled away. The memorial to German POWs was also demolished. A similar fate befell Polish commemorations at two other cemeteries in Ustye and Bobrovik. The destruction was brought to public attention by members of the Novgorod branch of “Memorial”, a Russian historical and human rights organization. Although the vandalism occurred amid a broader wave of similar acts across Russia, the scale of the destruction was particularly shocking, especially since it came just days after media reports about the closure of the Polish Consulate General in St. Petersburg, ordered by Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Polish Embassy in Moscow issued a formal protest note, and Ambassador Krzysztof Krajewski sent a letter to Metropolitan Anton, head of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate. Both appeals were ignored. Who carried out the attack? Who ordered it? At what level was the decision made? These questions remain unanswered.

Ewa Ziółkowska is the author of numerous publications on Polish heritage and the fate of Poles in the countries of the former USSR, including Petersburg po polsku (Petersburg in Polish, Warsaw 2011). From 1996 to 2003, she served as editor-in-chief of the Past and Memory bulletin published by the Polish Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites. From 2012 to 2018, she was Vice President of the Board of the Aid to Poles in the East Foundation. Between 2018 and 2022, she served as Director of the Polish Institute in St. Petersburg.

Translated by Sylwia Szarejko.