The outbreak of World War II marked the end of a certain era for Poland and Poles. In the areas occupied and annexed by the USSR, the citizens of the Republic of Poland were subjected to brutal repressions organized by the Stalinist apparatus of terror. It was targeted at the physical elimination of the Polish elite and members of the nascent underground. The long-term goal of the USSR policy was the Depolonization of the Eastern Borderlands and the Sovietization of the population. The way to achieve this goal was deportations of Poles to Siberia. During the Second World War, the Soviets decided to launch four deportations. The last, fourth deportations took place in May-June 1941.
The history of Siberian deportations is long …
The first deportations of Poles to Siberia were organized after the expansion of the Grand Duchy of Moscow to the east, which began in the mid-16th century. The first Polish exiles were prisoners of war taken during the wars of Stephen Báthory with Ivan IV the Terrible. Others were captured during the Commonwealth’s wars with Moscow at the beginning of the 17th century. Poles thus shared the fate of prisoners of other nationalities, such as Swedes or Tatars.
Later, the exiles were participants of the Bar Confederation (1767–1772) and the Kościuszko Uprising (1794). The tsarist authorities treated deportations primarily as a method of political struggle against the organizers of “Polish revolts” against the tsarist regime. After the fall of the November Uprising, the number of insurgents exiled to Siberia is estimated at around 1,500.
The greatest number of Polish exiles to Siberia during Tsarist Russia was after the fall of the January Uprising (1863–1864). Their number is estimated at around 40,000 people. Further mass deportations took place after the revolution of 1905. Until the outbreak of World War I, the total number of Polish exiles did not exceed 100,000 people.
Soviet deportations 1939-1941
The deportations deep into the Soviet Union during the Second World War had a completely different character. Their purpose was not to temper political opponents, but to destroy the most valuable individuals in the Polish nation. Currently, it is assumed that in total about 800,000 were exiled during this period. However, these are only estimations as Polish scientists still do not have access to the complete archival material in the inaccessible Russian archives. It is significant that the NKVD documentation, which was decided to be available to historians, brings the number of 320,000 people, however, none of the serious researchers considers this data reliable.
The first Polish citizens, nearly 55 thousand refugees from central and western Poland were deported t in October 1939. They were sent to the eastern regions of the Belarusian and Ukrainian SSR, as part of the so-called “Unloading borderland towns”. The shifts of the “refugees”, as the NKVD terminology referred to the Polish refugee population, included mainly Jews. In historiography, successive deportations are noted as the first, second, third and fourth operation. They lasted with breaks from February 1940 to June 1941. Each had its own specificity. Some of the deported Poles in winter were plagued by severe frosts, reaching minus 40 degrees Celsius, and the others by the terrible heat in summer. In the first deportation, Poles accounted for 70% of all victims. The next operation included mostly women and children (80% of all transport). The third one can be called “Jewish” because the vast majority were Jews (about 80%).
What do we know about the fourth deportation and its specificity?
On May 14, 1941, the Central Committee of the VKP (b) and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR adopted Resolution No. 1299-526ss on the arrest and deportation of subsequent groups of “enemies of the people”. On its basis, Lavrentiy Beria issued on May 21, 1941, an order “on the expulsion of socially alien elements from the Baltic republics, Western Ukraine, Western Belarus and Moldova”. The planned deportation this time targeted the intelligentsia and families as well as people related to the previously deported groups of the population.
On June 20, 1941, the deportations were already at their final stage. Their completion was planned for the end of June. A day later, the German-Soviet war broke out. The June deportations hit the Bialystok, Grodno and Vilnius regions particularly hard. The exiles ended up in Krasnoyarsk Krai, Altai (Katunia and Bija basin), Novosibirsk Oblast and Kazakhstan. It is difficult to estimate the number of people deported during the last deportation: researchers say there could have been between 31,000 and 52,000. The duration of their deportation was then determined at 20 years.
In the first days of the war, many railway transport cars were attacked from the air by the German air force. Hundreds of thousands of displaced persons died in the burning wagons. This was the fate of about 150 deportees from Grodno who died in a bombed transport near Stołpce. According to the reports of the NKVD Convoy Forces, about 10 to 13% of the exiles died as a result of the bombing, and about 15% were injured. The positive side of the war of the Third Reich with the Soviet Union was the fact that many transport cars got stuck on the bombed railway lines near Minsk and were abandoned by the guards. For thousands of Polish prisoners, the clash of totalitarianism allowed them to return home.
The Sikorski-Majski pact turned out to be a salvation for the rest, opening the gates of labor camps and prisons.