Soviet mass deportations of Polish people launched 77 years ago
Deportations to the Soviet Union of the families of 22,000 Polish POWs executed by the Soviets in 1940 in western Russia's Katyn Forest and nearby sites began in the night from April 12 to 13, 1940.
The POWs, mainly army officers, policemen and intelligentsia, were killed by the Soviet NKVD security service upon orders by Soviet strongman Josef Stalin (see: NOTE). The deportations of their families began simultaneously with the executions, which continued through May of that year.
The first mass deportation of Polish citizens to northern Soviet Union and western Siberia began on February 10, 1940 and encompassed 140,000 people. The Soviet Union, which occupied part of pre-war Poland's territory at the time, organised four deportations up to June 1941. According to Soviet NKVD data, a total of 330,000-340,000 people were deported, while Polish National Institute of Remembrance (IPN) claims that 220,000 - 400,000 were displaced in July of 1940 alone and set the overall count of deportees at somewhere between 800,000 and over 1 million. Also accounts concerning deportees that perished remain highly discrepant as Soviets estimate them at 0,7 percent of all subjected to exile, Polish side puts it at ap. 10 ten percent.
A former deportee from Bialystok, northeastern Poland, described the deportations as follows:
"The house was surrounded by individuals who looked like thugs, Polish communists from the local proletariat, and NKVD functionaries entered the building. After taking down the people's personal data - nationality was important here, they feared to take Germans - the supervisor of the deportation read out a decision banishing a given individual to resettlement. (...) The people were given an hour, and sometimes only 30 or 15 minutes to pack, no consideration was made for the bedridden, or children whose mothers wanted to leave them with family or friends, women in advanced pregnancy or elderly people. All were taken despite their tears, anguish, and assurances by doctors that they stood no chance of surviving the journey. (...).
Most of the deportees were taken to Kazakhstan, where they were decimated by slave labour, diseases and starvation. Soviet deportations were planned to exterminate of elite of the Polish people, to break up the nation's social structure and to give workforce to the Soviet empire.
The Katyn Forest executions and the deportations followed the Soviet Union's September 17, 1939 attack on Poland in keeping with its August 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact with Nazi Germany, which invaded Poland on September 1.
The Documentation Centre for Deportation, Expulsion and Displacement has recorded about 700 accounts by deportation and expulsion victims. The centre's mission is to preserve the memory of the tragic events and to connect witnesses to history with the new generations of Polish citizens.
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NOTE: The Katyn Massacre was a series of mass executions of Polish POWs, mainly military officers and policemen, carried out by the Soviet security agency NKVD in April and May 1940. The killings took place at several locations but the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest in western Russia, where some of the mass graves of the victims were first discovered.
The massacre was initiated by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria as part of an attempt by the Soviets to wipe out Poland's leaders after the Soviet Union's invasion of Poland in September 1939. The victim count is estimated at 22,000. The executions took place in Katyn Forest, the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons, and elsewhere. About 8,000 of the victims were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland; another 6,000 were police officers, the rest were Polish intellectuals, deemed by the Soviets to be intelligence agents and saboteurs.
In 1943 the government of Nazi Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in Katyn Forest. When the London-based Polish government-in-exile asked for an investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross, Stalin promptly severed diplomatic relations with the London-based cabinet. The Soviets claimed that the killings had been carried out by the Nazis in 1941 and denied responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when it officially acknowledged and condemned the perpetration of the massacre by the NKVD.
Soviet responsibility for the Katyn killings was confirmed by an investigation conducted by the office of the Prosecutors General of the Soviet Union (1990-1991) and the Russian Federation (1991-2004), however Russia refused to classify them as a war crime or genocide.
In November 2010, the Russian State Duma passed a declaration blaming Stalin and other Soviet officials for having personally ordained the massacre. (PAP)
