Polish Operation of the NKVD

Order No. 00485: Wording and Reach

The operation rested on top-secret NKVD Order No. 00485, titled 'On the liquidation of the Polish diversionist and espionage groups and POW units.' It was approved by the Politburo on 9 August 1937 and signed by People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Nikolai Yezhov on 11 August, together with a thirty-page secret letter on the alleged activity of Polish intelligence. The letter confirmed that 'the Poles should be completely destroyed'; A. O. Postel of the Moscow NKVD administration later explained that although the order did not contain the words 'all Poles', that was exactly how its executors read it. On Yezhov's first report Stalin wrote: 'Dig up and purge this Polish espionage mud in the future as well.'

The order named for arrest former members of the Polish Military Organization, prisoners of war of the 1920 war who had remained in the USSR, immigrants and political exiles, former members of the Polish Socialist Party and other non-communist Polish parties, 'anti-Soviet and nationalistic elements' from districts with a Polish community, Soviet citizens who had had contact with Polish consular or other representatives, and 'clerical elements' with any connection to Poland; inhabitants of Polish districts in the border regions were covered as well. Nicolas Werth notes that local NKVD officials were encouraged to add 'specific groups' of their own, and in Kharkov the arrest list was extended to NKVD foreign-department officers who had handled 'Polish affairs' and to informants specializing in them. Arrests were to begin on 20 August 1937 and to be completed in three months, but the operation ran until November 1938.

The Album Procedure and Its Executors

Order No. 00485 fixed no quotas, only categories to arrest. Local dvoikas, a two-man commission of the NKVD chief and the procurator, sorted each case into the first category (death) or the second (camp), recording only a few lines per case. These abstracts were collected into 'albums' and sent to Moscow, where Yezhov and Procurator General Vyshinsky lacked time to countersign individual records: senior officials skimmed the albums and ratified 99 per cent of the sentences, while Yezhov or Vyshinsky signed only the final page. When more than a hundred thousand cases piled up in Moscow by July 1938, the Politburo abolished the album procedure on 15 September 1938 and gave regional 'special troikas' authority to decide without central confirmation; over 105,000 people were sentenced in the following two months. The Politburo stopped the national operations on 17 November 1938.

Victims and Ethnic Composition

Central NKVD statistics record more than 335,000 people sentenced across the national operations. About 140,000 of them fell under the Polish Operation, and 111,000 of those, or 79 per cent, were executed. The operation accounted for 41.7 per cent of those sentenced and 44.9 per cent of those executed in all the national operations.

The composition of those convicted shows that 'Polish' and 'Pole' were not the same category. Among the 36,768 people sentenced by the special troikas between September and November 1938, Poles and Soviet citizens of Polish origin made up 55 per cent, Belarusians 15 per cent, Ukrainians 13 per cent, Russians 9 per cent and Jews 4 per cent. The figures cited by Russian Wikipedia for the same period list 20,147 Poles, 5,215 Belarusians, 4,991 Ukrainians, 3,235 Russians, 1,122 Jews and 490 Germans. In Belorussia, Soviet citizens of Polish origin were only 43 per cent of those arrested in the Polish Operation through September 1938; 47.3 per cent of those arrested there were actually Belarusian Catholics, and across the USSR 13.4 per cent of the arrested were ethnic Ukrainians and 8.8 per cent ethnic Russians. In Leningrad the NKVD worked from local telephone books and arrested almost 7,000 citizens with Polish-sounding names, the vast majority of whom were executed within ten days of arrest.

Geographically, about 40 per cent of victims came from Soviet Ukraine and 17 per cent from Soviet Byelorussia, the rest from western Siberia, Kazakhstan, the southern Urals, the northern Caucasus and the Far East; Werth notes that in those regions local officials filled the 'national lines' with deportees and social outcasts who had little connection to Poland. Poles and Soviet citizens of Polish origin are estimated at about 70 per cent of those convicted under Order No. 00485, roughly 98,000 people, while Okhotin and Roginski put the total number of Poles and Polish-origin citizens arrested and convicted during the Great Terror at approximately 120,000. Russian Wikipedia gives 143,810 arrests, 139,835 convictions, 111,091 death sentences and 25,967 camp terms of ten years.

Execution and Selection

Order No. 00485 provided no trial procedure, only the division between execution and imprisonment, and instructions issued after the order forbade informing the condemned or their relatives of the death sentence. Executions were carried out in secret, and those who transported bodies or dug and filled the pits had to sign a pledge of secrecy. Selection by the sound of a surname, as in Leningrad, shows that the operation was aimed at a population rather than at proven individual guilt.

The Families

Almost all those shot were men, most of them with families. Their wives and children were handled under Order No. 00486, signed by Yezhov on 15 August 1937. Women were generally sentenced to deportation to Kazakhstan for terms averaging five to ten years, and orphaned children with no relatives willing to take them were placed in orphanages to be raised as Soviet citizens with no knowledge of their origins. Property was confiscated, and the parents and in-laws of the executed were left without means of support. Michal Jasinski estimated that, taking family losses into account, the number of Polish victims in 1937-1938 rises to roughly 200,000 to 250,000.

Historiography and Memory

The scale of the losses has made the legal characterization of the operation a subject of argument. Michael Ellman holds that the national operations may qualify as genocide under the UN Convention. Karol Karski argues that the Soviet actions against Poles are genocide under international law. Terry Martin calls the national operations ethnic cleansing and 'ethnic terror' and judges the singling out of diaspora nationalities as having 'verged on the genocidal'; Timothy Snyder calls the Polish Operation genocidal, pointing to Polish fathers shot, Polish mothers sent to Kazakhstan and Polish children left in orphanages where they would lose their Polish identity. Norman Naimark called Stalin's policy towards Poles in the 1930s genocidal but did not consider the whole Great Purge genocidal.

Other scholars stress different causes. According to Olle Sundstrom and Andrej Kotljarchuk, most researchers, among them Nicolas Werth, Michael Mann and Hiroaki Kuromiya, focus on the security dilemma of the border areas and the fear that borderland minorities would prove disloyal in the event of invasion, rather than on ethnicity as such.

The documentary record of the operation remained secret for over half a century. Russian human rights organization Memorial uncovered the secret operational orders only in 1992, after which memorial books listing victims were published. On 14 July 2009 the Polish Sejm adopted a resolution honouring Poles repressed by the NKVD in 1937-1939 and thanking Memorial and Russian and Ukrainian historians for preserving the memory of these crimes.