Fourth deportation from the eastern lands

On the night of 21 to 22 May 1941, operational groups of the NKVD and of the People’s Commissariat for State Security, separated from it in February, began another mass deportation in the western oblasts of the Ukrainian SSR, on the former Polish south-eastern lands. They took from their homes the families of members of the Ukrainian and Polish underground, of people in hiding, of the arrested and of the convicted. It was the beginning of the fourth and last of the great deportations of Polish citizens of 1940–1941. Unlike the previous three, it was not a single operation but a series of waves, which over a month covered successive regions: from Lwów and Volhynia through the Wilno region to the Białystok and Grodno regions. It was interrupted only by the German attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June, when some of the trains with exiles had not yet left.

A year after the previous deportations

Between June 1940 and May 1941 there were no mass deportations in the eastern lands. The three earlier ones, the February one, which covered military settlers and the forest service, the April one, which struck the families of prisoners of war and of the arrested, and the June one, in which mainly refugees from German-occupied Poland were deported, had removed from the Kresy whole groups regarded by the authorities as hostile. They did not, however, end the resistance. In western Ukraine the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists operated underground, and the Polish resistance, despite successive waves of arrests, still existed in Lwów, in Wilno and in the Białystok region. All this time the Soviet authorities kept arresting people and compiling files on the “anti-Soviet element”, and those they could not seize they pursued through their families.

At the same time German-Soviet relations were visibly cooling. As early as December 1940 Hitler had ordered preparations for an attack on the USSR, and in the spring of 1941 Wehrmacht divisions were gathering at the new border. Soviet propaganda, and some of the literature after it, explained the May–June deportations as a need to clear the border strip before the war. The categories of those deported, the lists prepared for months and the fact that women, children and the elderly were taken, however, indicate that it was a continuation of the policy of 1940: the permanent removal from the seized lands of people in whom the authorities saw potential opponents.

The decision of 14 May

The basis of the operation was the top-secret resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR no. 1299-526 of 14 May 1941. It provided for the arrest and exile for twenty years of “members of the families of participants in counter-revolutionary Ukrainian and Polish organisations”, as well as the families of those who were hiding from the authorities or had been sentenced to death. According to studies, the men, the “heads of families”, were to be placed in labour camps, and their relatives sent into exile as “ssylno-poselentsy” to remote regions of the USSR, without trial and without individual charges. According to the findings of the IPN, a week later, on 21 May 1941, the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, Lavrentiy Beria, issued an order on the resettlement of the “socially alien element” not only from Western Ukraine but also from Western Belarus, the Baltic republics and Moldavia. These decisions were taken at the will of Joseph Stalin, and their execution rested with the NKVD and the NKGB, headed by Vsevolod Merkulov.

The list of categories to be deported was long. Polish studies name representatives of the intelligentsia, refugees who still remained on the spot, manufacturers and merchants, railwaymen, skilled workers and craftsmen, the families of Polish Army officers murdered a year earlier at Katyn and other sites of the crime, the families of policemen, officials and people arrested by the NKVD in the second year of the occupation, as well as wealthier peasants and people suspected of “counter-revolutionary” activity.

22 May: Western Ukraine

The first wave covered the oblasts created from the prewar voivodeships of Lwów, Stanisławów, Tarnopol and Volhynia. People were woken at night, their homes were searched and they were given several dozen minutes, sometimes two hours, to pack, and then they were taken to railway stations. According to NKVD documents cited by the historian Alexander Statiev, 11,329 people were deported from Western Ukraine on 22 May. The overwhelming majority were Ukrainians, families of OUN activists and supporters, but those deported also included Poles, relatives of members of the Polish underground and people who were hiding from the NKVD. Also belonging to the Ukrainian SSR since the summer of 1940 were the Chernivtsi and Izmail oblasts, created from lands taken from Romania after the Soviet ultimatum, where the deportations were carried out in June together with the Moldavian SSR.

Successive waves

The May operation in Ukraine was followed by others. On the night of 12 to 13 June the NKVD and NKGB struck in the Moldavian SSR and in the oblasts created from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. On the night of 13 to 14 June a simultaneous deportation began from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, incorporated into the USSR in August 1940. It also covered Wilno and the Wilno region, which the Soviet Union had handed to Lithuania in October 1939 and which, after the occupation of Lithuania, it incorporated into the Lithuanian SSR. Polish officials, officers, policemen, landowners and activists, their families, and war refugees from central and western Poland were deported from there, and trains were formed, among other places, at Nowa Wilejka.

The last wave came on the night of 19 to 20 June. It covered the lands incorporated into the Byelorussian SSR: the Białystok region, the Grodno region, the eastern Wilno region, the Nowogródek region and Polesie. According to the IPN more than 22,000 people were deported from here, and Soviet data cited in Russian literature speak of 22,353 people. The blow fell on the intelligentsia, railwaymen, the families of the arrested, settlers who had earlier avoided deportation, and refugees. Among them were Poles, Belarusians and Jews. In the whole fourth deportation, according to estimates cited by Anna Pyżewska of the Museum of Siberian Memory (PL), from several to a dozen or so thousand Jews were deported, including prewar residents of Białystok and its surroundings.

How to count the fourth deportation

Because the operation proceeded in waves in different republics, historians date it differently and count it differently. The announcement of the IPN headquarters dates its beginning to the night of 21 to 22 May and its end to 22 June 1941. The IPN historians Magdalena Dzienis-Todorczuk and Marcin Markiewicz, writing from the perspective of the Białystok region, state that the fourth deportation “began on 20 June 1941, on the eve of the outbreak of the German-Soviet war”. In the Baltic states, by contrast, it is above all the night of 13 to 14 June that is remembered. All these dates concern the same operation, carried out in successive republics at different times.

The differences in figures come from whether one counts only the Polish lands of before 1939 or the whole operation from the Baltic to the Black Sea. For the whole operation, including the Baltic states and Moldavia, Polish studies based on NKVD documents give more than 85,000 people, and Dzienis-Todorczuk and Markiewicz about 90,000. Polish citizens alone, according to the IPN announcement, may have numbered from 31,000 to 52,000. Polish estimates from wartime and the postwar years, made without access to Soviet archives, spoke of 200,000–300,000 people. Aleksandr Gurianov of the Memorial Society, relying on documents of the NKVD convoy troops and of the Gulag, put the total number of Polish citizens deported in the four deportations at 320,000–340,000, with the reservation that the material is incomplete and allows only an estimate.

Under the bombs

The exiles of 1941 were assigned twenty years in their place of exile and the obligation to report regularly to the NKVD commandant’s office. Transports were directed above all to Kazakhstan, to the Altai and Krasnoyarsk krais and to the Novosibirsk Oblast, and the men separated from their families to the camps of the Gulag. People travelled in barred freight wagons, several dozen to a wagon, with a hole in the floor in place of a latrine, in the June heat, often for several weeks.

When Germany attacked the USSR on 22 June, many trains from the Białystok and Grodno regions were only just setting off or were still standing at the stations. German aircraft bombed railway junctions and transports without distinguishing whom they carried. At Stolbtsy, according to findings cited by the dzieje.pl website, about 150 deportees from Grodno died in a bombed train. Losses in the transports that came under the bombs may, by various estimates, have reached from ten to a dozen or so per cent of those carried. It happened that NKVD convoy troops abandoned the trains or released on their own authority transports that had got stuck in Minsk and its surroundings. Many of the deportees regained their freedom in this way, and some of them later reached the Polish army being formed in the USSR.

The end of the deportations

The German offensive interrupted the fourth deportation and ended the period of mass deportations from the Polish lands under Soviet occupation. In less than a year and a half the Soviet Union deported from them, according to NKVD documents, about 320,000–340,000 Polish citizens, not counting the arrested, prisoners of war and those conscripted into the Red Army. Estimates of the Polish government-in-exile spoke of as many as a million deported, and the Union of Siberian Exiles gives 1.35 million. The dispute over the scale continues, because victims are defined differently and Soviet documents are incomplete.

For some of those deported in May and June 1941, above all for the Jews, exile paradoxically proved a rescue from what came from the west. Their relatives who had stayed at home found themselves a few days later under German occupation, and many of them perished in the Holocaust. The war found them in exile, and after a few weeks came the change in Moscow’s policy towards the government of Gen. Władysław Sikorski, which opened to some of the exiles the road to the Polish army and to the Middle East. Most, however, remained in Kazakhstan and Siberia for many years, and many never returned.