First deportation from the eastern lands

On the night of 9 to 10 February 1940, in frosts reaching 40 degrees, sleighs pulled up to houses in the villages and settlements of the occupied Kresy. Operational groups of the NKVD, supported by the militia, the army and local activists, woke sleeping families, searched their homes, read out a decree on “resettlement” and gave them between a dozen or so minutes and two hours to pack. Trains of freight wagons waited at the railway stations. This was how the first of four mass deportations of Polish citizens from the lands seized by the Soviet Union began. It covered the families of military and civilian settlers and forest service employees: according to NKVD documents, nearly 140,000 people, most of them women, children and the elderly, were taken to the taiga of northern European Russia, the Urals and Siberia.

Who was deported

After the aggression of 17 September 1939 and the annexation of the eastern lands of the Republic, the Soviet authorities treated the inhabitants of the Kresy as their own citizens, and some of them as enemies. First in line were those they regarded as the pillar of the Polish presence in the countryside. Military settlers were soldiers, mostly volunteers and veterans of the Polish-Soviet War, who under laws of December 1920 received land in the Kresy, often from former Russian state estates. Military settlement (PL) was seen as a reward for service and a way of strengthening the Polishness of the borderland, while Soviet propaganda portrayed the settlers as “kulaks” and oppressors of the local peasants. Alongside them were deported civilian settlers who after 1918 had bought land from parcelled estates, and foresters of the forest protection service. The latter knew the terrain and could handle weapons, so the NKVD saw in them a possible base for a future partisan movement.

Nationality was not decisive here. The lists also included Ukrainian and Belarusian foresters and peasants who had bought parcelled land. According to NKVD data cited by Polish historians, Poles made up about 82 per cent of those deported, Ukrainians about 9 and Belarusians 8 per cent. Some studies give different proportions, for example 70 per cent Poles, and also list lower officials and railwaymen among those deported. The first deportation included almost no town dwellers. Whole families were taken, infants and the elderly included: according to Soviet figures almost 58,000 of the deportees were under 16.

The decision

The NKVD had been compiling lists of “hostile elements” since the first weeks of the occupation. On 2 December 1939 the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, Lavrentiy Beria, wrote to Joseph Stalin that all settler families from the western regions of the Ukrainian and Belarusian SSRs should be resettled without delay. On 4 December the proposal was approved by the Politburo of the party, and on 5 December the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR adopted a resolution on the resettlement of the settlers. In the second half of December, at the request of the authorities of both republics, forest service employees with their families were added. On 29 December the Soviet government approved the NKVD instruction on the procedure of resettlement and the regulations of the special settlements, the special villages in which the deportees were to live and work under the supervision of NKVD commandant’s offices. Name-by-name lists were to be ready by 5 January 1940.

According to Daniel Boćkowski of the University of Białystok, the operation had originally been planned for January. The trains that carried soldiers to the Finnish front were to be used to transport the people, and for technical reasons the date was postponed. The operation in western Belarus was led by the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs of the Byelorussian SSR, Lavrentiy Tsanava (PL), in western Ukraine by his Ukrainian counterpart, Ivan Serov, and the whole was overseen by Beria’s deputy, Vsevolod Merkulov. The territory was divided into operational districts of 250 to 300 families each, supervised by district troikas. According to researchers, more than 52,000 people took part in the operation: NKVD officers, soldiers, militiamen and local party activists. A total of 150,375 people were designated for deportation, 99,065 of them from “Western Ukraine” and 51,310 from “Western Belarus”.

The night of 10 February

Families were entitled to take clothing, bedding, dishes, a month’s food, small tools and money, but the instructions applied mainly on paper. Much depended on the officer in command of the group: some let people pack trunks and advised taking warm things for the children, others drove people out of the house as they stood. One woman deported to Siberia recalled years later: “With the NKVD man’s revolver at his head, my father signed a document saying that we would be resettled elsewhere of our own good and free will. […] It was Saturday and Mother had only just put the bread in the oven… so we did not even have that for the journey.” An officer took the father’s ham, saying that “over there they have plenty of everything”, but told him to take a saw and an axe. The family dog, which was straining at its chain, was shot.

The operation was meant to last a single day. Frost that according to documents ranged from 37 to 42 degrees, snowdrifts and breakdowns of equipment meant that the loading of the wagons dragged on until 13 February. The sick and those caught while trying to flee were brought later. The farms left behind were taken over by the state. Propaganda announced that the settlers’ land would go to landless peasants, but, as Boćkowski notes, the authorities kept most of the property for themselves and set up kolkhozes on the best land.

The road north

According to historians from Wrocław, the deportees were sent in about a hundred transports. A freight wagon with barred windows usually carried about 50 people, sometimes more. The fittings were plank beds, an iron stove and a hole in the floor in place of a toilet. Regulations provided for a daily hot meal, bread and the care of a medical orderly for everyone, but most of the deportees had to survive on what they had taken from home. The wife of a non-commissioned officer from Grodno described how at night hair and clothes froze to the walls of the wagon, how for three days no water was given, and how the guards beat those who tried to scoop up snow through the window. Her transport reached a settlement in the Taishet (PL) district of the Irkutsk Oblast (PL) on 4 March. The journey often lasted several weeks. Those who died on the way were above all small children and old people. How many there were is not known, because the NKVD kept no precise record of deaths in transports and historians have only estimates.

In the special settlements

The deportees, called in NKVD documents “special settlers-colonists”, were placed in 115 special settlements in 21 republics, territories and oblasts, mainly where hands were needed for felling timber. According to an NKVD tally from the first months of exile, the largest number, about 41,500, went to the Arkhangelsk Oblast (PL). Several thousand people each were settled in the Krasnoyarsk Krai, the Sverdlovsk Oblast (PL), the Komi ASSR (PL) and the Irkutsk Oblast, and smaller groups in the Molotov, Vologda, Omsk and Novosibirsk oblasts, in the Altai Krai and even in Kazakhstan. Most worked in enterprises of the People’s Commissariat of the Timber Industry, others on the railways and in non-ferrous metallurgy plants.

The settlements, usually barracks built in the taiga, resembled labour camps. Families lived crowded together on shared plank beds, in filth, among lice and bedbugs. Everyone between 16 and 60 had to work, in practice younger children too, for a dozen or so hours a day. The quotas were high, and the bread ration depended on what percentage of the quota a person had met. The exiles repeated a Soviet saying: “kto nie rabotajet, tot nie kuszajet”, he who does not work, does not eat. Leaving the settlement without the commandant’s permission was a crime. Cold, hunger, exhaustion and disease took their toll. According to an NKVD tally found in a Moscow archive, 6,432 settlers died in 1940, 4.6 per cent of the total, and 2,120 children were born. The Russian historian Aleksandr Gurianov (PL) of Memorial calculated that by July 1941 10,864 of them had died. These are official figures and researchers consider them incomplete. The February group, deported in winter to the far north to the heaviest work, suffered the greatest losses of the four deportations.

How many people were deported

The surviving NKVD documents give slightly different figures. According to Boćkowski’s calculations, 26,760 families, that is 139,794 people, were loaded into the wagons. The literature also gives 139,500, 139,590 and 139,068, and tallies from 1940 give 138,534 and 135,524. Researchers usually round them to 140,000–141,000. Older Polish historiography, based on the accounts of the exiles and on wartime estimates, assumed that 200,000–250,000 people were deported in February. Most historians, including researchers of the Institute of National Remembrance, now accept the order of magnitude given in the NKVD documents. Some authors and the Siberian exiles’ communities, however, believe that these documents do not cover everyone. The NKVD counted only those taken away in railway transports, and family members brought later or exiled by other routes do not appear in these tallies. The dispute over the numbers concerns all four deportations, which according to NKVD data covered about 320,000–340,000 people in total, and according to estimates of the Union of Siberian Exiles (PL) many times more.

What it brought

The Soviet authorities judged the February operation to have been very efficient, and its pattern, a night raid, a few dozen minutes to pack and freight wagons, was repeated three more times. In March 1940 preparations began for the next operation, aimed at the families of prisoners of war and of the arrested, which was carried out in April. The aim of all of them was to remove from the Kresy people who might stand in the way of Sovietisation, to break up the Polish community and to supply the Soviet economy with free labour. Military settlement, in which the authorities saw the most patriotic part of the Polish countryside, practically ceased to exist in the Kresy: the deportations covered nearly 80 per cent of settler families.

For the exiles who survived the first year and a half, the German-Soviet war proved a chance. After the Sikorski-Mayski agreement of 30 July 1941, Polish citizens were covered by an “amnesty” and could leave the special settlements. According to the NKVD, on 1 August 1941 more than 132,000 settlers and foresters were still in them. Many of them set off south, to the Polish army being formed by Gen. Władysław Anders. Others stayed in the USSR until the end of the war, and some never returned. The anniversary of 10 February is commemorated every year by the Siberian exiles (PL) and by the Museum of Siberian Memory (PL) in Białystok.