Killed for Being Poles: Horrors of the “Polish Operation” conducted by the NKVD in 1937-1938, by Nikołaj Iwanow
(For professors, college and high-school students, and interested adults) Stalin’s “Polish Operation” carried out by the NKVD (Soviet Secret Police) was the first genocide committed against the Polish nation, which claimed the lives of approximately 200,000 Poles, all of whom were citizens of the USSR.
Published in Polish and English text together, Professor Iwanow’s 12 chapters are remarkably illustrated and packed with little-known facts that Polish, Polish-American, and other readers will find highly interesting, compelling, and sobering. The professor is a Russian historian and during Soviet times, he was a member of a dissident group of young Russians who made an appeal to the 1st Convention of the Solidarity movement in 1980. In 1984, after being harassed and persecuted by the Soviet KGB, he settled in Poland and began collaborating with the Fighting Solidarity movement and Radio Free Europe.
The paragraphs that follow are the Introduction to Professor Iwanow’s extraordinary album.
“The 20th Century was probably the cruelest period in the history of mankind. The two world wars brought death to over 60 million people but a bloody imprint on the history of that century was also left by numerous mass killings. The Holocaust, in which 6 million people were killed, mostly Jews, in death factories set up by the national socialists in Germany, has become the most notorious crime against humankind of all time. The Armenian genocide, which took place in the Ottoman Empire from 1914 to 1915 during World War I, was as brutal as the one committed by the German Third Reich. The population of Armenia exiled from its homeland and brutally murdered decreased as a result by almost half. In the seventies, 20 to 25 percent of the three million people of Cambodia were killed in the bloody fields of Pol Pot. Ukraine still demands that the great famine, the Holodomor, deliberately imposed by the communist regime from 1932 to 1934, during which three to five million people died of starvation, be recognized by international institutions as genocide. Enumeration of these crimes committed in the name of communism, fascism, and other atrocious ideologies could go on and on.
In view of that horror, how can we describe what happened to the Poles living in the Soviet Union during the interwar period? Almost 200,000 Poles, i.e., 15 to 20 percent of the Polish population in the USSR, were murdered by the officers of the barbarous Stalinist system during the “Polish Operation” and other mass repressions. Nearly half the men in their prime died, in most cases falsely accused, just because they were Poles. The aim of that crime was to terrorize Soviet society and reinforce the foundations of the USSR system.
How could the world remain silent about such a gruesome crime? And how could the Polish state not react either, even though the main reason why Poles were sentenced to death was their loyalty to their homeland. How could such mass killings be left unmentioned for almost half a century? And why only now, after eighty years, has the Polish state finally recalled the crime in which ten times more Poles were killed than in Katyn, and as many Poles as the catastrophic Warsaw Uprising?
No words can depict more accurately what happened to the Polish nation in the interwar period than those of Helena Trybel, a Pole, a dedicated Catholic, and mother of Yuriy Yekhanurov, the then Prime Minister of Ukraine. She is one of the last persons alive who witnessed the “catastrophe of the Soviet Poles”, named by her the “Polish holocaust.”
As she said: “being a Pole in the Soviet Union in 1937 was just like being a Jew in the Third Reich.” In 1938, her father was accused of espionage for the Second Polish Republic. His sentence could not be anything other than death. The whole family was deported, however, not to “warm” Kazakhstan but to frosty Yakutia, where winter temperatures usually fell to minus 50 degrees Celsius.
At that time, the words “Pole” and the “enemy of the people” were like synonyms for an average loyal citizen of the Soviet Union. The primitive intolerance of Poles and Polishness spread across Stalin’s state and continued until the summer of 1941, when Poles suddenly became useful to Stalin once again.
The scale on which Stalin’s Great Terror struck Poles was unprecedented, even when compared to what other nations experienced in the USSR. It was a national genocide. In 1937, Poles made up only 0.064 percent of the Soviet Union’s population, but as much as 15 percent of the Great Terror’s victims. They have become a part of the Soviet Union’s history as the “first nation punished”. The atmosphere that prevailed during the turmoil of the Great Terror in the country ruled by Stalin could be described as nothing else than ‘zoological Polonophobia’”.
