Polish Operation of the NKVD
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The largest of the NKVD national operations during the Great Purge, launched by NKVD Order No. 00485 signed by Nikolai Yezhov on August 11, 1937. It targeted the Polish minority and anyone with Polish connections in the USSR as 'spies' and 'saboteurs' of the Polish Military Organization (POW), using the simplified 'album procedure' for mass extrajudicial sentencing. Of approximately 139,835 convicted, 111,091 were shot (44.9% of all victims of the national operations), making it a campaign of ethnic cleansing that some historians have classified as genocidal; it served as the template for subsequent operations against Latvians, Finns, Estonians, Greeks, and other diaspora nationalities.
Related historical events
Sources
- Wikipedia (EN) overview of the operation, death toll of 111,091 shot out of 139,835 convicted, role as model for subsequent national operations
- Wikipedia (EN) text of Order No. 00485, album procedure, categories targeted
- Wikipedia (RU) Russian-language article with detailed archival statistics and historical context
- sciencespo.fr Nicolas Werth (2010), Sciences Po Mass Violence and Resistance Research Network: detailed scholarly analysis of the national operations, Polish Operation as the model for subsequent ethnic operations