Most Poles have heard about the Katyn massacre. This mass murder, ordered by Stalin led nearly 22,000 Polish officers to be shot in the back of the head in the spring of 1940. 

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Yet, another much larger massacre committed by the Soviets is often forgotten or not known, namely the so-called “Polish Operation” of the NKVD. 

In his book “The defeat of the Evil Empire”, the outstanding historian from the Jagiellonian University of Krakow 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 NKDD’s own data. 

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

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 ethnic group.

Back in 2020, prof. Nowak told the undersigned that “Poles were systematically murdered in the USSR precisely because they were Polish, in the same way that Jews were exterminated by the Germans during the Second World War – because of their ethnicity.”

“In total, more than 200,000 people died in just over a year. It is ten times more than the number of victims of the Katyn massacres! More than one in two Polish adult men living in the USSR was killed between 1937 and 1938,” – Andrzej Nowak added. 

The Polish historian also underlined that national socialism is unanimously considered as bad, and of course, rightly so. He also drew attention to the fact that a considerable part of the public opinion in Western Europe refuses to acknowledge the fact that communism is just as bad and has proven even more deadly.

Image: YouTube (TV Republika/Screenshot)

Author: Sébastien Meuwissen