80 yrs ago: Soviet Union initiates genocide of Polish people
Exactly 80 years ago, on August 11th 1937, head of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, Nikolai Jezov, ordered his forces to "completely destroy Polish spy networks", beginning an operation that claimed over 100,000 Polish lives, amounting to genocide.
Ostensibly designed to crack down on anti-Soviet espionage, Jezov's "order no. 00485" represented, in fact, the first attempt by the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, to wipe out a whole social group, because of its nationality. It also created a template for future brutal suppression of other nationalities, with Jezov ordering his charges to proceed "along the lines of order no. 00485".
Stalin's decision was motivated by the failure to create Polish enclaves in the Soviet Union, which could then be used as a weapon against Poland itself. The experiment failed as Polish farmers stubbornly opposed collectivisation, while the whole diaspora was also devoutly Catholic.
Realising this, Stalin decided to exterminate them. On the back of a ferocious press campaign against "fascist spies", "saboteurs" and "troublemakers", the Soviet secret police targeted 143,000 Polish people. According to the Russian Memorial association, 139,000 were indicted, with 111,091 of those - almost a fifth of the whole Polish diaspora - executed.
Overall, 80% of the targeted Polish people were killed, with the rest sent to prisons and labour camps, mainly in Kazakhstan. Most of those who were forced to work soon died of exhaustion, hunger and diseases.
Among the casualties, the biggest group were famers, although the crackdown also targeted, for example, Polish communists, whom Stalin distrusted. According to various estimates, between 3,000 and 5,000 of them were executed.
"The mass murder of the Polish people at the hands of the Soviet authorities in 1937-38 represents one of the largest genocides in the history of our nation", Professor Wojciech Materski, a historian and political scientist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, assessed.
"While an estimated 150,000 Polish people were killed by the Soviet forces between 1939 and 1945, the NKVD's "Polish operation" of 1937 -38, as it was euphemistically called, cost almost as many lives, 140,000 in total", professor Materski said.
"It was, in fact, a systematic mass murder of the Polish people. A classic genocide, where being Polish was a sufficient reason to die", the historian concluded. (PAP)
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