Tadeusz M. PIOTROWSKI
Professor of Sociology,
University of New Hampshire
at Manchester
• • •
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
• • •
Additional illustrations
to Part I and captions
may be viewed in
Photo Album I
• • • |
|
|
Prof. Piotrowski is the author of: Vengeance of the Swallows [1995], Poland's Holocaust [1998], Genocide and Rescue in Wolyn [2000]
and The Polish Deportees of World War II [2004]
www.mcfarlandpub.com
Part I
The Great Patriotic War - as the Russians like to call
it - which claimed the lives of millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians,
and landed millions of Soviet citizens in the concentration camps of
Nazi Germany, was greatly facilitated by the August 23, 1939, German-Soviet
Pact of Non-Aggression that decisively allied the Nazi Third Reich with
the Communist Soviet Union.
The Secret Additional Protocol in the Pact was also drawn
up for the reorganization of Central Europe.
That September, in violation of their own treaties with
Poland, both of these allies invaded and partitioned the Second Polish
Republic. Thus began World War II.
According to Stalin, the joint aim of the Soviet Union
and Nazi Germany was to "re-establish peace and order" in the territories
of the "former Polish state", which had been destroyed by the "collapse
of the former Polish state", and to help the Polish people establish
new conditions for its political life. Needless to say, that the "collapse
of the former Polish state" had been brought about by the very powers
which now promised to "re-establish peace and order". On September 28,
1939, the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty established the
new borders of the "respective national interests" of Germany and Soviet
Union in the "former Polish state" and promised to "assure to the peoples
living there a peaceful life in keeping with their national character".
It may be worth adding that in keeping with the terms of
the German-Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, the Soviet government
also pledged to actively support and did actively support the German war
effort against Poland and the West. This support took many forms: the
breaking of the British blockade of Germany, the permission to establish
German navy bases in the USSR, the allowance for the passage over Soviet
territory of raw materials bound for Germany from other nations, and the
supplying of goods such as food, cattle, cotton, phosphates, chromium
and iron ore, platinum, zinc, rubber, flax, lumber and oil directly to
Germany. Each month, for the duration of the Soviet-German alliance,
200-300 Soviet trains carried these goods into the heart of the Third
Reich.
Meanwhile, instead of assuring "peace and order" in the
"former Polish state", both allies subjected the Polish population to
a reign of terror the likes of which had seldom been seen before in
the annals of human history. Their mutual aim was to completely suppress
the political and sociocultural life of the Polish people forever. But
they went even further - their official policies included: outright
murder of the intelligentsia and class enemies, extermination through
work, resettlement, deportation, enslavement, assimilation, and - in
the case of more scientific Germany - the kidnapping and germanization
of Polish children and the involuntary sterilization of Polish women.
One of these monstrous measures carried out by the Soviet
government was the massive deportation of Polish citizens from the Soviet
occupation zone, or the so-called Soviet "sphere of influence", to the
barren wastes of Siberia and Arkhangelsk - the Gulag Archipelago - where, as it is described in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's masterful epic,
millions of Soviet citizens were dumped after the Bolshevik Revolution.
In the 1930s several hundred thousand Poles were deported from
Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belorussia to the interior of the Soviet Union.
Just before the outbreak of World War II, in 1937 and
1938, 143 810 Poles living in the Soviet Union were officially charged
with one thing or another as a part of Stalin's war on national minorities
- they were the first to be targeted on purely ethnic grounds. Of these
139 835 were sentenced administratively, that is, without following
the usual legal procedures. All told, 111 091 of them were executed.
Poles accounted for about 40 percent of the victims of the Stalinist
purges aimed at national minorities. Such abysmal numbers are absolutely
staggering to the normal, healthy mind. And every one of these "numbers"
had a first and last name and a life - such as it was - before his or
her dislocation or "liquidation". But a greater tragedy was yet to follow
- during the 1939-41 Soviet occupation of Poland and in the postwar
years.
It is a well documented fact that after the Soviet "liberation"
of Poland, that is, after the second Soviet occupation of Poland, which
began in January 1944, 40 000 Poles were interned and an additional
50 000 - half of whom members of the anti-Nazi Polish Underground -
wound up in northern Russia as well. This same, tragic fate befell all
the other captive nations in the Soviet Bloc. A much greater number
of Soviet citizens, including a vast number of returning Soviet prisoners
of war and repatriated civilian population, shared that same fate after
that victorious, Great Patriotic War.
The War, which Stalin himself had helped set in motion!
|
