On Thursday, 8 December, a monument commemorating the victims of the NKVD’s Polish Operation of 1937-1938 was unveiled by government and local officials in Sokoły (Podlachia). 

The ceremony started with a Holy Mass held in the town’s Minor Basilica. The service was followed by a scientific meeting devoted to the issue of the forgotten ethnic cleansing of Polish residents of the USSR preceding WWII. 

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“Thanks to the Prime Minister’s support […] we unveiled the first monument […] dedicated to the victims of the ‘anti-Polish operation’ of the NKVD from 1937-38, in which over 100,000 people were murdered. […] It is time to restore the memory of these victims,” – wrote the State Secretary in the Chancellery of Prime Minister Adam Andruszkiewicz on his Twitter page. 

“The Polish operation of the NKVD is one of the greatest genocidal crimes of the 20th century. Despite this, many Poles have never heard about it,” – stressed Ewa Kurlenda from the Piękno Życia Foundation, which coordinated the event. 

“If we do not make sure that such events are cultivated in our awareness as Polish citizens, this tradition and this memory will, unfortunately, fade away”, – Ms Kurlenda added, as quoted by Radio Maryja. 

In his book The defeat of the Evil Empire, the outstanding historian from the Jagiellonian University of Kraków Andrzej Nowak refers to the Polish Operation as “one of the greatest crimes perpetrated by the USSR”.

Following order 00485, a series of massacres started targeting the Polish minority residing in the USSR from mid-August 1937 until November 1938. Based on this directive, 111,091 people have been sentenced to death, according to the NKVD’s data. 

In September 1937, Stalin wrote to Nikolai Yezhov to “liquidate this of Polish spies filth for the good of the Soviet Union.” As a result, 97% of the people murdered by the NKVD in the years 1937-1938 were ethnic Poles. 

Harvard University Professor Terry Martin conducted a study showing that during this ethnic purge, a man with Polish nationality residing in the USSR was 31 times more likely to be shot than a representative of any other nationality.

Back in May 2020, Prof. Nowak told the undersigned during an interview that “Poles were systematically murdered in the USSR precisely because they were Polish, in the same way, Jews were exterminated by the Germans during WWII – because of their ethnicity”.

As a result of all the anti-Polish operations conducted by Stalin, about 200,000 people were killed, which is ten times more than the number of victims of the Katyn massacres… In other words, more than one in two Polish adult men living in the USSR was murdered by Soviet authorities between 1937 and 1938.

Image: Do Rzeczy

Author: Sébastien Meuwissen