There was a time when large numbers of Poles in the Soviet Union lost their lives simply because of their origin and surname. One of the elements of the “Great Terror”, unleashed by Stalin in 1937-1938, was the so-called “Polish Operation”, in which NKVD officers murdered at least 111,000 Poles on suspicion of espionage. The beginning of the “operation” was order number 00485, issued on 11 August 1937 by Nikolai Yezhov, People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs.
“The Polish Operation”, which was one of the greatest genocidal crimes in the history of 20th-century Europe, also took its cruel toll in Siberia. Poles there were accused of conducting anti-Soviet propaganda and creating a secret Siberian Centre of the “Polish Military Organisation” – which, of course, did not exist – as well as other equally absurd activities. In less than two years, 96% of all Poles arrested in the Irkutsk region were murdered, and 94% in Novosibirsk! The NKVD began arresting Poles from the Siberian village of Belostok in mid-1937. The first few were shot on 5 November, and seventeen more on 8 January of the following year.
On the night of 11-12 February, another 64 men were arrested. A total of 88 people were taken from their homes. Almost all of them were executed on 14 May. Only one was sentenced to 10 years in a gulag. In Vershina, the arrests began on 16 November 1937. The NKVD arrested a total of 29 men and one woman. The leader of the non-existent “Siberian PMO Centre” was allegedly the Irkutsk parish priest Rev. Antoni Żukowski. Sergei Mironov, head of the NKVD of Western Siberia, instructed his subordinate chiefs: “[e]ach of you must find a suitable place to carry out the execution and another to bury the bodies. If it is in a forest, the turf must be cut in advance and then laid on the same spot so that its location is not discovered and it does not become an object of religious fanaticism for various kinds of counter-revolutionaries and priests.”
For more about the NKVD’s “Polish operation” visit the website prepared by the Józef Mieroszewski Centre for Dialogue: http://operacja-polska.pl/nke
Photo: Pivovarikha memorial site near Irkutsk, source: Virtual Museum of the Gulag