Dariusz Węgrzyn
In 1944-1945, a total of approximately 35,000 Poles were repressed in the entire eastern territories taken from the Second Polish Republic. These figures are highly approximate and there are also estimates of 10,000 more. Given the lack of detailed research into the scale of the deportations, it is safe to say that we are operating with de facto data from 20 years ago.
At times, historians are confronted with the necessity of drawing conclusions or formulating summaries. This is precisely the case here, where the aim is to estimate, even approximately, the number of Poles deported to Soviet labour camps from the Eastern Borderlands annexed by the USSR. Inevitably, texts of this nature tend to lack vivid narratives or illustrative examples, with statistical data accounting for the majority of the content. As such, they may not lend themselves easily to engaging reading; nevertheless, the writing of such summary studies is a clear necessity.
Liberation or enslavement
In January 1944, the Red Army crossed the pre-war Polish–Soviet border and began to enter the Eastern Borderlands. On the 12th of January, in Sarny – the first major town captured in the region – a “spontaneous” demonstration was held by local civilians to welcome the “liberators.” Under the watchful eyes of the NKVD, expressions of joy were orchestrated to celebrate the residents’ new status as citizens of the Soviet Union. For Joseph Stalin, it was a foregone conclusion that the territories east of the Curzon Line would come to form part of the Soviet empire. Anyone who expressed opposition to this outcome was to be neutralised, and larger groups of Polish inhabitants were to be resettled westwards, within the new borders of Poland. It was well understood that members of the Polish armed underground were not willing to accept such a state of affairs. As early as the 25th of January 1944, Bogdan Kobulov, deputy to Lavrentiy Beria, issued a directive instructing Soviet security forces to register, monitor, and ultimately arrest members of the Polish underground movement and individuals associated with the structures of the Polish Underground State. Some of those detained were to be deported to Soviet camps in the East.
Soviet ‘brotherhood of arms’: arrests, internment and forced conscription
The area where the Soviets began to most vigorously implement these orders was in the Vilnius and Nowogródek regions, from June 1944 onwards, which together formed the Home Army District led by Colonel Aleksander Krzyżanowski, “Wilk”. During the Operation “Ostra Brama”, in July 1944, the soldiers of the Home Army, fighting alongside the Red Army, participated in the expulsion of the German occupiers from Vilnius. On the 13th of July, in the liberated city, Polish white-and-red flags began to flutter. However, this “brotherhood of arms” was to be a short-lived one. By the 17th of July, Commander “Wilk” was invited to talks with General Ivan Chernyakhovsky, commander of the 3rd Belorussian Front. He was arrested, along with the officer cadre of the Home Army in the town of Bogusze. “Wilk’s” subordinates, stationed around the Rudnicka Forest, were surrounded by NKVD forces. The soldiers were captured and disarmed. Only a few partisans managed to break through to the west, while others continued the fight against the new occupation in the forests of Vilnius. By the 20th of July 1944, NKVD forces operating behind the 3rd Belorussian Front in the Vilnius region, under the command of General Ivan Serov, Deputy People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs of the USSR, had detained nearly 8,000 individuals. From this number, approximately 4,400 Home Army soldiers were transferred to so-called collection points. Four hundred and forty of them were later directed to the Polish Army under General Zygmunt Berling. The officer cadre, comprising just over one hundred individuals, was isolated and sent to prisoner-of-war camp number 178–454 in Ryazan on the 1st of September 1944. A smaller group of officers was sent to camp number 41 in Ostashkov, several months later being transferred to camp number 64 in Morshansk. The Home Army officers from the Vilnius region were therefore sent to prisoner-of-war camps directly managed by the Soviet Main Directorate of Prisoners of War and Internment (NKVD/MVD). Meanwhile, non-commissioned officers and soldiers – around 4,000 individuals – were gathered in the camp at Medininkai [Miedniki Królewskie]. In August, they were transferred to Kaluga, where they formed the 361st Reserve Infantry Regiment of the 31st Reserve Infantry Division of the Red Army. However, this experiment failed, as in Kaluga, with Home Army soldiers overwhelmingly refusing to take the military oath. Ultimately, the majority of them were sent to do forestry work in the Moscow Oblast. They were never to return to Vilnius. From January 1946, the operation to send them back to Poland was begun, a country whose borders had already been redrawn, and to which the Eastern Borderlands no longer belonged. Alongside the internment of Home Army soldiers in the region, arrests also took place. Those detained, following investigations, were typically charged with crimes against the Soviet Union. They were then tried, either by military tribunals or by the NKVD Special Collegium.
Disappearing prisoners
Their sentences were usually imprisonment, which would be served in corrective labour camps, part of the vast “Gulag Archipelago”. They were accused of “treason against the Soviet state”, “belonging to the criminal organisation Home Army”, or “espionage”. The sentences handed down under Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code were harsh: most commonly, 10 to 25 years in a labour camp with the loss of civil rights for five years. A characteristic feature of these cases was that convicts “disappeared” into the vast mass of the Soviet prison population and were simply erased from the statistics, making it exceedingly difficult to estimate the total number of Poles deported to Soviet Russia. It is believed that the Soviet authorities issued several dozen death sentences and several hundred sentences of hard labour in the camps, mainly for Home Army soldiers. According to data from the NKVD’s convoy units, 29 convoys were sent to Gulag camps from the north-eastern lands of the Second Republic of Poland in 1945, comprising a total of 8,700 convicted individuals. However, information is lacking on what percentage of this group were Poles, as well as what proportion consisted of “political“ versus “common“ criminals.
Evidence? What for?
Soviet investigative bodies often failed to gather sufficient evidence to charge the detained individuals. In such cases, the formula of internment was applied. Those deprived of liberty under this category were not required to be formally accused of specific crimes. In the case of the Eastern Borderlands, this generally applied to individuals who had been identified as belonging to the independence underground, but for whom the details of their “hostile, anti-Soviet activities“ were unestablished. The operation carried out in the summer of 1944 did not mark the end of the process of civilians being deprived of their freedom in the Vilnius region. By the 20th of February 1945, Soviet statistics recorded over 26,000 detentions. It is known that between February and April 1945, approximately 7,400–7,600 people were deported to labour camps. They were sent to NKVD filtration camps: Camp No. 283 in Stalinogorsk (2,500 people), Camp No. 240 in the Donbas (a transport of 2,500 Poles from Vilnius prison), Camp No. 0321 in Yelshanka (2,200 camp inmates), and Camp No. 140 in Kalinin (a transport of 400 individuals). Those interned in the camps were subjected to a process known as “filtration“, whereby a quasi-investigation aimed at determining potential evidence of guilt against the Soviet state, was carried out.
The sending of detainees from the Vilnius region to such camps appeared logical according to Soviet regulations, which treated them as citizens of the USSR, suspected of “improper conduct“ during the Nazi occupation of these territories and of holding negative attitudes towards the Moscow authorities. In the areas of so-called Western Belarus, the Soviets detained around 13,000 Poles simultaneously. Polish historians estimate that between 1944 and 1947, the Soviets killed approximately 3,000 individuals in the Lithuanian and Belarusian SSRs. Concurrently, around 25,000–27,000 Poles were interned or arrested, with no fewer than 11,000 of them being deported to the East. In response to the new international situation and the ongoing repression, a mass registration of Poles from the Vilnius region for relocation to Poland within its new borders began in early 1945. It is estimated that between 1945 and 1946, 171,000 to 197,000 people left the Vilnius region. Joseph Stalin sought to remove from this culturally significant area those individuals who he had no illusions of ever becoming “homo sovieticus“. The Eastern Borderlands were to have a “clean slate“, be integrated into Soviet Russia, with Vilnius ceasing once and for all to play the role of a key region for Poland and Polish identity.
In Volhynia and Galicia
In the southern part of the Eastern Borderlands, Operation Tempest [“Burza“] was also launched. On the 15th of January 1944, the Home Army command ordered the initiation of an operation in Volhynia. Around 6,000 to 7,000 individuals were mobilised, who were to form the core of the 27th Infantry Division of the Home Army, commanded by Colonel Jan Wojciech “Oliwa“ Kiwerski. The Home Army units in Volhynia began liberating various towns, and reports of these actions were radioed to London, which caused no end of irritation to the Soviet side. Fighting side by side with the Soviets, Polish soldiers of the Home Army participated in battles against German forces around Kowel. During an attempt to break out from encirclement, the 27th Infantry Division of the Home Army suffered heavy losses, and some of the partisans were scattered. The commander of the division, Kiwerski “Oliwa“, was killed in April 1944 under circumstances that to this day, remain unclear. A month later, the surviving remnants of the unit, under orders from command, began their retreat westward towards the Lublin region. At the same time, the “Burza“ operation had also gotten underway in Eastern Galicia. In March 1944, Home Army units engaged in fighting around Tarnopol and Stanisławów. In July, approximately 3,000 Polish Home Army soldiers participated in the battle for Lviv. Attempts by the commanders of this formation to reach an understanding with the Soviets ended in their arrest, including that of Colonel Władysław Filipkowski, the commander of the Lviv Region. They were subsequently sent to a labour camp in Kharkiv and Camp No. 178–454 in Ryazan. Similarly, people of Lviv were consistently treated as citizens of the USSR – thus, when arrested and later convicted, they would be sent to the GULAG system. Despite the signing of a repatriation agreement between the PKWN (Polish Committee of National Liberation) and the Ukrainian SSR authorities on the 9th of September 1944, the Polish population in Lviv was reluctant to abandon their beloved city. The Soviets sought to enforce this agreement by way of repressive measures. The signal for the attack came from Beria’s directive No. 524, issued on the 20th of December 1944, calling for the “arrest of the white Polish underground and reactionary Polish elements“. This was supplemented by a further directive from Kobulov, issued on the 11th of January 1945, aimed at “interrupting the hostile activities of Polish nationalists who obstruct the resettlement of Poles“. The result was a series of arrests carried out in the city and the Lviv region, particularly in January 1945. According to Soviet data from the 15th of January 1945, a total of 5,800 people were arrested. Jerzy Węgierski estimates this number to be higher, reaching as high as 8,000, 65% of whom were Polish. Some individuals from this group were deported on the 4th of February 1945 to Camp No. 0310 in Krasnodon, located in the Donbas region.
How many were deported?
Reliable data on the actions of arrests, internments, and deportations of the Polish population from the Eastern Borderlands remain scarce. To a large extent, estimates are still based on the findings of historians from the early 21st century. According to these calculations, under the early stages of Soviet rule – from the spring of 1944 until the beginning of 1945 – the NKVD arrested at least 7,000–10,000 Poles in the areas of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia. Professor Grzegorz Motyka cites data regarding Operation “Sejm“, carried out by the NKVD in Western Ukraine between 1945 and 1946, aimed at destroying the Polish underground. In total, around 4,000 individuals were arrested there, having been accused by the Soviets of association with the Polish resistance movement, with the largest number – over a thousand – in the Lviv region, and nearly 600 in Volhynia. Across all of the eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic, approximately 35,000 Poles were repressed. These figures are rough estimates, with some projections suggesting as many as 10,000 more individuals. Taking into account the lack of detailed research regarding the scale of deportations from these territories, it can be stated with some confidcnce that we are still operating with data that are, in fact, almost 20 years old. The deportations to the “inhuman land“ did not cease with the Red Army’s crossing of the Curzon Line and the new post-Yalta Polish-Soviet border. These deportations took on a different form and were based on distinct legal bases, as Soviet oprichniki (Stalin’s enforcers) operated in Poland what amounted to an allied state which had been forcibly brought under the communist system.
Dariusz Węgrzyn (PhD) – Silesian Freedom and Solidarity Center.
Translated by Sylwia Szarejko
The intertitles were given by the editors.