POLICE HOLOCAUST IN ZSRS
Author Tomasz Sommer
Only after 75 years is the cruel fact about the destiny of Poles under communist-Russian regulation in the 1930s revealed. Our compatriots have been second-class citizens there since 1932, as did later Jews in the German 3rd Reich. And then, in 1937, the decision of the authorities and unfortunately with the support of a large part of the society were sentenced to destruction.
Antoni Milewski, manager of the glassworks in Huta pod Radodyśl on the Żytommierz Region presently owned by Ukraine, was 37 in 1937 and seemed to be at the tallness of his professional career. He lived peacefully convinced that by entrusting him with specified a advanced and crucial position, the russian authorities trusted him with full assurance – even though he showed civilian courage respective times and stood up for his compatriots, whom the communists wanted to close the local church at all costs.
So he was amazed erstwhile an NKVD operating division appeared in his mill in August 1937. The officer in charge told him he was under arrest. A akin destiny was met by respective twelve another Polish employees of the factory. The men were packed in a specially substituted truck and drove to the Rytomierz.
– Only 1 of the men has returned from this group of arrested,” says Fr Aleksander Milewski, the grandson of the manager of the factory.
– He brought his grandfather’s penciled letter of farewell, a fewer words, to be removed from the newspaper. They sounded as follows: “Do not believe that I am guilty of anything.” Earlier in the area, information was dissolved that in the course of the investigation the grandpa admitted that he was conducting counter-revolutionary activity, meaning that he was "enemy of the people". For many years my grandma and my father lived with the mark of belonging to the Polish family.
Fortunately, the authorities did not decision them and someway made it to the outbreak of planet War II. However, they were witnesses of further persecution of Poles who were moved to Donetsk and Ukrainians from Poltavszczyzna were settled in their place, ending with Fr Milewski.
WEEKS ON CAMCHATKA
Although they felt a dense anti-Polish atmosphere in the russian Union, they could not even guess that they shared their fates with hundreds of thousands of compatriots spread throughout the USSR. Within 13 months more than 200 1000 people were arrested from the authoritative census of January 1937, 635 1000 people of the Polish diaspora. Almost 150 1000 were closed only due to the fact that they were Poles. Most of them were tortured and then brutally murdered. If you take russian data seriously, it means that genocide affected almost 1 in 3 Poles in the USSR. In fact, there were more than a million of our people there.
However, under the influence of expanding terror, they stopped admitting their origin. So we can estimation that during the 13 months of the cruel hekatomba, all 5th Pole was struck. due to the fact that the focus of power was primarily men – young and in the age force – as a consequence the Polish community was swept from the face of the earth. For years, Polish survivors became second-class citizens.
Our countrymen had blocked promotion paths due to their origins until the 1970s.
– I remember any time after the war I went to school for the first time and as this kid from the bilingual home said something in Polish – he says “NCz!” Stefan Kuriata of Dobysza pod Żytomierz, a village that was named Marchlewski before the war and was the capital of 1 of 2 Polish areas in the russian Union. - My teacher made a large fuss.
She besides reported to my father. And my father reacted completely to me at the time. He told me: “If you say anything in Polish again in school, I will kill you due to the fact that I like you to die by my hand.” I never spoke Polish again in school – it ends. Kuriata started admitting to its Polishness only in the 1980s. Now he leads a tiny chamber of Poles from the area of Żytomierz in Dobysz, which he arranged in his own home.
PART OF THE large TERROR
Genocide in Poles was part of the large Terror, with which communists with Joseph Stalin decided to get free of all their opponents so that no 1 would endanger russian power. Officially, the planet learned about the large Terrorism from the alleged Nikita Khrushchev report, issued in 1956 at the 20th Convention of the Communist organization of the russian Union. However, Khrushchev did not uncover the full truth, for he had his hands to the elbows in his blood.
He allowed the large panic to be mitologized and presented as a conflict of factions inside the apparatus of power.
It was her representatives – organization bureaucrats, checkers and Red Army officers – that were to be the main victims of the massacre. This state of cognition has been common for years to come. The breakthrough only brought the work of Robert Conquest “Great Terror. Stalinian Purges of the 1930s” from 1968.
Author (inspired, among others, by Grigorij Kostiuk's earlier publication "Stalinist regulation in the Ukraine:
A survey of the Decade of Mass panic (1929-1939)’, The Institute for the survey of the USSR, Munich 1960) put in it thesis that the purges among communists were only an episode of the orgy of murders launched by Stalin. Only 20 years later, erstwhile russian power began to wobble and the previously closed archives of secret services were opened, this thesis was full confirmed.
It turned out that the large panic was an administrative operation conducted from the top through the Ministry of Interior – NKWD – with the engagement of the local organization apparatus, courts and prosecutors. And in fact, it mainly afraid the various "enemies of the people", primarily causing problems for peasants, murdered on the basis of the order 00447, and Poles and to a much lesser degree another nationalities, which were murdered on the basis of the "Polish" order 00485.
If you compare the number of victims of individual murderous operations, it turns out that the alleged Polish operation was the second part of the large panic in terms of the number of victims.
NATIONS CONCESSED AND ‘NINE’
“The communists did not actually contact only Jews and Lithuanians. And the Germans, in turn, left in peace where they lived most, i.e. in Powłoż. The Poles pursued everywhere – says Nikita Petrov from the Russian "Memorial", 1 of the most celebrated historians in Stalinism, author of the best political biography of Mikołaj Jeżow, head of the NKVD from 1936 to 1938. The Moscow Conference of July 1937 resembled the celebrated conference in Wannsee, in Podberlin, on 20 January 1942, during which method details of the extermination of Jews were established. Only that the Wannsee conference is widely known and was immortalized in many books, documentaries and at least 1 feature in the star cast – shown on TVP a fewer months ago. Only experts know about the genocide conference in Moscow.
Immediately after returning to their regions, in the full summertime of 1937, the heads of the NKVD, having already had appropriate guidelines and orders, proceeded to their bloody work. The killing of peasants and another “enemies of the people” began officially on 30 July 1937, and Poles on 11 August, although the order concerning them was most likely created at the same time as the order concerning “Kułacka operation”.
In addition to Poles, persecution besides affected another nationalities. However, no of them afraid even on a scale akin to what affected Poles. For example, about 50,000 people were killed in the German operation. Only that officially and unofficially the Germans were in the USSR almost twice as many as Poles (as quoted in the January 1937 census, 1.151.602) It follows that Poles may have been victims of russian genocide with 8 times as likely as Germany.
In this situation, it seems appropriate to separate “Polish operation” from another “national operations” and to recognise that genocide in Poles was the second largest, separate and peculiar part of the large Terror.
REMEMBER OF FAITH
Information on genocide in Poles in the USSR penetrated the Polish emigration historical environment, although there were very fewer direct relations. The Polish operation was conducted in a secret way, and almost all its victims were killed.
Nevertheless, texts about the tragedy of Poles in the USSR appeared in the emigration press, which on the basis of various sources described the fact rather thoroughly (e.g. Zdzisław Jagodziński's texts: "Poles in Russia" in the London "Polish Journal" of February 2, 1956, "Which figures tell the fact about Poles in the USSR?" in the London "White Eagle" of October 10 and 17, 1963 and others).
In the 1960s – as part of preparations for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, in KC PZPR – it was decided to exposure the contribution of Poles. peculiar employees of the Party's past Department were posted from Warsaw to Moscow, Kiev and Leningrad, where thousands of polls of Poles taking a definite part in the Bolshevik Revolution were examined in the organization archives.
Of the 4,000 surveyed, over 3,000, 80 percent were murdered from 1937 to 1938. This information has been classified for understandable reasons.
In 1974, the first author appeared, who aptly interpreted the incoming information. Marcin Wyziembło (real name Józef Lewandowski) in the text “Losy Poles...” in the “Historical Zeszytki” (No. 30/1974, p. 16-23) wrote the following: “But I have evidence that... there was a planned action of extermination of Poles. It was confirmed by the russian Pole in 1956, recommended to organize the Polish People's Army, Gen. Popławski. Defending yourself – in the atmosphere of the 20th exit, before October! – before the charge of representing Polish interests, At the officers' meetings, Polławski argued "that the deficiency of natural teeth, both in him and in Rokossowski, is proof of the Polishness of both of them" (both Popławski and Rokossowski sat between 1937 and 1941. It is actual that Rokossowski was arrested in Tuchaczewski's case, but besides his Polishness contributed to this due to the fact that Stalin, erstwhile issuing the arrest warrant, was expected to say: "And you pro etowo krasawczika-polaczka did not build up!"
In respective another texts, Wy cold-Lewandowski actually deduced what happened to Poles in the russian Union from 1937 to 1938.
After 1989, papers about “Polish operation” began to appear. In 1993, the revisionist historical diary “Karta” published the key order of 00485 received from Nikita Petrov, which sentenced Poles to destruction.
The editors of “Carts” even planned to make a collection of relationships and monographs of “Polish operations”. For any reason, however, they gave up the idea. “The Polish authorities seemed uninterested in the matter,” says Dr. Piotr Romanov, who lived in Moscow, who was head of Russian state archives in the early 1990s.
– There was a time of disclosure at the time and everything could be opened. Although local Poles reported specified a possibility, no 1 came and examined the case. In the meantime, pointing to the peculiar destiny of Poles in the USSR, it was possible to strengthen the rewind activities concerning Polish property. Nothing like that happened, and with powerful pre-revolutionary property, we have virtually recovered nothing. Russian authorities besides like to overlook the subject of killing Poles with silence. For understandable reasons, it is more convenient for them to talk about "national operations", not getting besides detailed – Romanov concludes.
It must have been almost 20 years before the first 2 publications were published, which describe the destiny of Poles in the USSR. The first of them was a collection of papers published in May 2010 by the author of this text entitled “The genocide of Poles – papers from the headquarters”. The second is simply a comprehensive collection of papers from the “Polish operation” conducted in Ukraine, released as a consequence of cooperation between Polish and Ukrainian IPN in August 2010. However, further years must pass in order for the fact about the tragedy of Poles in the USSR to scope first the consciousness of historians and then the general public...
Documents, sources, quotations:
“The top Time!” http://ntime.com/pronounced/holokaust-polakow-w-zsrs/
