The Red Army conquered around seventy-seven thousand square miles and thirteen million or so inhabitants of the former Polish state. The Soviets immediately sifted the population for “enemies.” They went after the army and all the “Pans”—or the beloruchki (literally those with white hands, that is, people who did not work)—such as landowners, bureaucrats, and priests.5
An estimated 130,000 officers and men of the Polish army came under Soviet jurisdiction, but there may have been even twice that many prisoners.6 Marshal Grigory Kulik, in charge of the invading Soviet forces, wanted to release at least the Ukrainians and Byelorussians, but Stalin disagreed. Security Chief Beria set up ten camps that could hold ten thousand prisoners each. Approximately forty-three hundred were kept in a camp at Kozel’sk; these were the mostly better educated members of the elite. Another camp held six thousand policemen and yet another four thousand, primarily senior officers and members of the educated elite.7
On March 5, 1940, a decision was finally taken about what should happen to them. Beria told the Politburo there were 14,700 officers, landowners, and policemen, as well as 11,000 “counterrevolutionary” landowners, allegedly “spies and saboteurs… hardened… enemies of Soviet power.” They were given a troika “hearing,” meaning their files would be briefly reviewed. Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov, and Mikoyan signed the death warrants. Then executioners went to work: one of them shot a daily quota of 250 for twenty-eight nights. The bodies were buried in out-of-the-way places, but in 1943 the invading Germans discovered some in the forest at Katyn.8
Soviet occupation authorities “cleansed” western Ukraine and western Byelorussia of all those labeled anti-Soviet elements. The fate of the five million or so Poles living in these areas was dreadful. Ukrainians and Byelorussians resented Poles for their dominant position after the First World War, and the Soviets, far from restraining them, encouraged people to find ways to humiliate and kill. Ethnic hatreds ran wild and a bloodbath ensued. Mixed villages erupted into bouts of frenzy when urged on by the Soviets, who wanted to break the hold of the “rulers” (the Poles).
By early 1940 the repressive system had moved into high gear. The Soviets drew up a list of fourteen different categories of people to classify, screen, segregate, and eliminate. Having learned their sociological approach to dealing with various population “elements” at home, the NKVD set the policy of who was to be deported. One of these lists from Wilno (Vilnius) in 1940 revealed that all the “enemy” types targeted for decades inside the Soviet Union were now dealt with in a matter of weeks. The economic and social elite would be killed or deported and the area made ready for Soviet-style Communism.9
Sweeps and arrests in Poland were carried out by quota. There were three waves of deportations during February, April, and June, with more planned. The number of Poles affected ranged between 760,000 and 1.25 million and higher.10 There are problems with all such statistics, but no disagreement on the scale of the operation. Moreover, in addition to those deported, tens of thousands more were tried and given long prison terms. Whole families were sent to the deep interior of the Soviet Union, often with little more than the clothes on their backs. The men were then sorted out and sent to concentration camps, with their families left to fend for themselves. Even by the summer of 1941, when the invading Nazis drove out the Soviets, an estimated one-quarter of the deportees and concentration camp prisoners were likely already dead. The total number of Polish nationals who died in exile during this brief period has never been established, but estimates go into the hundreds of thousands.11
Probably 30 percent of the deported were Jews, the largest nationality among the Poles to be exiled. One historian suggests as many as a hundred thousand died in the process.12 Nevertheless, during the years of Soviet occupation of Poland the stereotype of “Jewish Bolsheviks” intensified more than ever.13 Some Jews initially had welcomed the Soviets, but that was not true of many who were businessmen, landowners, members of the professions, intellectuals, or activists in Jewish organizations. And while Jews were substantially represented in the Communist Party in regions like Galicia, it would be incorrect to conclude that they identified with Bolshevism in any great number.
The impact of being deported to Siberia was put this way by one Polish survivor:
I can describe this in a few words: it was murder of babies and children, banditry, theft of other people’s property, the death penalty without sentencing or guilt. One lacks words to speak about the horror of this thing, and who has not lived through it could never believe what happened. Having removed from Polish territories to Siberia those whom they found uncomfortable, the Bolshevik Communists announced at meetings: “This is how we annihilate the enemies of Soviet power. We will use the sieve until we retrieve all bourgeois and kulaks, not only here, but in the entire world.” “You will never see again those that we have taken away from you.”14
Polish Communists hoped for politically inspired behavior from the Red Army but were disappointed: “We waited for them to ask how was life under capitalism and to tell us what it was like in Russia. But all they wanted was to buy a watch. I noticed that they were preoccupied with worldly goods, and we were waiting for ideals.”15
Nikita Khrushchev was sent off with the Red Army supposedly to protect “fellow Slavs” in western Ukraine, but in fact he was there to expropriate, collectivize—in short to Sovietize the area. To achieve their goals, they used administrative and police methods, selective appointments, and rigged elections. Heavy-handed methods were the norm. The puppet regime sent off the following expression of gratitude to Stalin: “From the kingdom of darkness and boundless suffering which the nation of Western Ukraine bore for six hundred long years, we find ourselves in the fairy land of true happiness of the people, and of true freedom.”16 This “true freedom” would have seemed like a cruel joke to the hundreds of thousands who were deported or locked away in the prisons and camps.
Khrushchev appeared in the propaganda film Liberation in a festive mood in which good was shown to have triumphed over evil. What he really had on his mind was to destroy the slightest signs of opposition. Thus, when he met leaders of the NKVD in a village near Lvov shortly after Poland’s defeat, he cursed them for being lazy: “You call this work? You haven’t carried out a single execution.” They made up for lost time soon enough. When not executing, they were arresting people. Khrushchev said his aim was “to strengthen the Soviet state and clear the road for the building of socialism on Marxist-Leninist principles.”17
Khrushchev embodied the hypocrisy of Soviet Communism and took pride in Sovietizing the area, even when it meant killing scores of people. He looked back on this work in Ukraine as if he had brought freedom to the people, when what they had to endure was the full range of Soviet terror. When he wrote his memoirs, by which time it was fashionable to reject Stalin, he remained an unapologetic apostle of Lenin:
It was gratifying for me to see that the working class, peasantry, and laboring intelligentsia were beginning to understand Marxist-Leninist teachings and that they all wanted to build their future on that foundation.
At the same time we were still continuing arrests. It was our view that these arrests served to strengthen the Soviet state and clear the road for the building of Socialism on Marxist-Leninist principles; but our bourgeois enemies had their own interpretation of the arrests, which they tried to use to discredit us throughout Poland. Despite all the efforts of the Polish rulers to distort our Leninist doctrine and to intimidate the people, Lenin’s ideas were alive and thriving in the Western Ukraine.18
Khrushchev recalled that many Jews did not want to register for a passport in the Soviet zone, but preferred (and were allowed) to transfer to the German zone. “They wanted to go home. Maybe they had relatives in Poland. Maybe they just wanted to go back to their birthplaces. They must have known how the Germans were dealing with Jews.”19 In fact the Soviets offered these Jews a cruel choice. They could either take Soviet nationality and remain or be
“repatriated” to the German zone. However, any who opted to return to their homes were deported to distant Kazakhstan.20
Sovietization in Byelorussia used similar methods. The Poles and the native population, including the Jews, all suffered. By early 1940, according to the recollection of one survivor, the business sections of cities looked more like cemeteries: “stores closed, street lights unlit, people afraid to walk at night…. Breadlines appeared.” Soon people were ordered to obtain passports and register with the Soviet police. The better-off, such as those who owned a larger house or business, were banished from the city. Then the arrests and deportations started, as cities searched out the “politically incompatible,” the “ideologically unfit,” and “socially dangerous elements”—to be sent off to the countryside to work at hard labor. Farmers who owned more than one horse or cow were classified as kulaks and deported. The Jewish population, survivors said, suffered most of all:
From cities, they were expelled to towns and villages where they knew no one and were treated as “displaced persons” by local authorities…. Of course, this was better than the ghetto under Hitler, but the comparison was still unknown there, and the exile meant catastrophe and broken lives for many. People were forced to leave their homes without notice, to abandon all things they possessed, and to go nobody knew where. The humiliation and social discrimination that they were subjected to were horrifying…. During nights loud with cries of horror and despair, the peaceful inhabitants were filled with fear of, and disgust for, the authority which waited for darkness to break into private homes, and which treated victims like cattle.21
The treatment of the Byelorussians was such that most wanted nothing to do with the Soviet system. Although the peasants were still allowed to sell goods to the cities, and collectivization was not introduced everywhere, they could see what was coming. One of them recalled:
When I ask myself why it is that in a very short time there remained no advocates of the Soviet system and—except for an entirely isolated group of men who were like a small island in the sea—no one who would not like a return to the prewar era, my answer is clear. Not because the prewar order [under Poland] was so good that we desired no change. Not because we could not live through a cold and hungry winter…. The true reason is that no one was any longer master in his own home. Somebody had put a gag in our mouth, and spoken in our name. Somebody had intruded upon our life, and begun to boss us, and to push us around at his own will. 22
Khrushchev, encasing himself in Communist mythology, said that the Ukrainians and Byelorussians “joyfully celebrated the victory of Soviet power.” There was a local version of the story that cast blame on the Jews.
The people of Ukraine and Byelorussia, for example, had long held alleged grievances against Jews. They were apparently convinced, as were some in Poland, that their Jewish neighbors enthusiastically supported the Soviet occupation. The evidence here shows that the Jews’ reception of Soviet “liberation” was at best mixed; there was nothing like a unified response and certainly no hearty welcome, as some claimed. The myth of Jewish cooperation with the Communists turned deadly after June 1941. When the Soviets were driven out by the Nazis, the alleged Jewish-Communist collaboration became a convenient excuse for locals to carry out brutal pogroms against Jews in many parts of Eastern Europe.
Soviet rule in eastern Poland lasted only from September 1939 to June 1941, when the Russians were forced out by the invading Nazis. In this relatively short time, however, the depredations were particularly severe.
Kazimiera Studzmska wrote down her impressions of the Soviet impact on her hometown of Luck: “The city, neat and pretty before the war, now assumed an eerie appearance: dirty streets full of mud, lawns walked over and covered with mud, lawn fences and small trees lining the streets all broken down. Display windows, unkempt and covered with dust and cobwebs, were decorated with portraits of Soviet rulers. Store billboards were mostly ripped off, with empty spaces left where they were once attached. All this made an impression of a dying city.”23
As the German forces approached, Soviet troops and police hastily retreated. Moscow sent orders on June 23, 1941, that no prisoners were to be evacuated, and the Chekists compiled lists of “unreliable elements.” The Communists were merciless. They bayoneted people to death and tossed hand grenades into cells. Their inhumanity showed no limits. In Luck, for example, after the prison was hit by a German bomb, the Soviets prevented escapes. On the morning of June 22 or 23 they informed prisoners that those charged with political offenses had their cases closed and could leave, but when prisoners lined up outside, they were cut down by machine-gun fire from a tank. They were told: “Those still alive get up!” Around 370 stood up; they were forced to bury the victims, after which they were executed as well. Estimates of those massacred at Luck range from fifteen hundred to four thousand. All the prisoners, including women and children in Dubno’s three-story prison, were executed. That was also the pattern across the entire region. The death toll remains unknown, but one reliable account of NKVD murders during the evacuations of prisons in western Ukraine and western Byelorussia in June-July 1941 puts the figure at around a hundred thousand.24
On August 31, Moscow ordered the deportation of all Ukrainians of German ancestry. Some 392,000 “ethnic Germans” were vulnerable. The secret police had the males arrested as “anti-Soviet elements” and deported, and the women were supposed to follow. Insofar as the Soviets had the time for a scorched-earth policy as they retreated before the Nazi advance, they carried out wholesale destruction without regard to how the people were going to cope or even survive.25
The brief Soviet occupation of the eastern parts of former Poland was a horrific page in history. We should not lose sight of what happened there even though the German occupation to come was going to be even worse.
SOVIET OCCUPATION OF THE BALTIC STATES AND MORE
Under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, the Soviets declared the Baltic States to be in their sphere of influence.26 They worked out treaties of “mutual assistance” with Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In late September and early October, Molotov was empowered to propose that they permit Soviet troops to enter and remain stationed on their territories. In his speech on October 31, 1939, Molotov disingenuously stressed that these treaties would not infringe on the independence of these countries.
Finland was offered such a friendship treaty on October 14 and 23 but, instead of accepting, put up spirited resistance to the invasion of the Red Army.27 The Soviets attacked with what turned out to be undue confidence on November 30. The Winter War carried on until March the following year. Although the Red Army partly succeeded in the end, its victory was hard won. Molotov reported to the Central Committee that 52,000 Soviet soldiers were killed out of a total of 233,000 casualties.28 In fact the number of Soviets killed may have been greater, but Khrushchev no doubt exaggerated when he said the Soviets lost a million lives.29
The Winter War with Finland revealed to the world and particularly to Hitler that the Red Army had glaring weaknesses in both leadership and armaments. It was Stalin’s idea to take Finland to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Germans, who would have been able to threaten Leningrad. However, he and the Soviet military underestimated the determination of the Finns. What made the humiliation worse was the knowledge, according to Khrushchev, that “the Germans were watching with undisguised glee as we took a drubbing.” In his view, the flawed effort “encouraged our enemies’ conviction that the Soviet Union was a colossus with feet of clay.”30
It was true that the USSR could boast a rise in the gross national product of 5 to 6 percent in the period 1928–40. That rate of growth, which Western economists have determined after correcting for the exaggerations of the Soviet statistics, was impressive even by international standards.31 In the 1930s the Soviets made enormous gains in the production of the weapons of war—aircraft, tanks, artillery pieces, rifles, and so on.32 The quality of these weapons
, particularly tanks, was sometimes far superior to that of the German ones. At the end of the 1930s, Stalin showered still more money on the military. Between January 1939 and the German invasion, he created IIIinfantry divisions and added three million men and scores of specialized divisions.33
But if the Red Army could barely handle Finland, how was it ever going to deal with a massive attack of the kind Germany could mount? Stalin was obviously responsible for many of the military problems, as the purge of the officer corps had eliminated thousands of capable and experienced men.
He demanded to know why the war was going so badly. He accused Commissar of Defense Voroshilov, who found the courage to roar back at him: “You have yourself to blame for all this! You’re the one who annihilated the Old Guard of the army; you had our best generals killed!” When Stalin disputed this allegation—which was perfectly accurate—Voroshilov smashed a platter of roast pig on the table. Khrushchev, who witnessed this spectacle, said he never saw anything like it. Finland could not hold out forever, of course, and duly sued for peace. Voroshilov lost his position and was no doubt lucky at that.34
Ordinary Soviet citizens were kept in the dark about the weaknesses of the Red Army. They had no idea that their vaunted armed forces had suffered a moral defeat and held on to the illusion that the country was well prepared.
The rapid German advance that drove the British from the continent and then defeated France in June 1940 came as a shock to the Communists. As soon as it looked like Germany was going to do well there, the Soviets decided to take steps in their own sphere of influence to even the balance. On June 14 they made new demands on Lithuania, followed two days later by similar ones on Latvia and Estonia. The curious justification for these moves was the kidnapping of some Soviet soldiers and Lithuanians who had been helping them get established. Similar trumped-up allegations were leveled at Latvia and Estonia. All these countries were left no choice but to agree that Soviet troops would be allowed free entry, which is to say, the Red Army would occupy them all.35
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