The ‘Polish Operation’ of the NKVD: The Climax of the Terror Against the Polish Minority in the Soviet Union

Abstract

Between summer 1937 and autumn 1938, the time of the ‘Great Terror’, numerous so-called ‘National Operations’ targeting ethnic minorities were carried out in the USSR. The largest was the ‘Polish Operation’. Starting in August 1937 and ending in October 1938, NKVD units arrested over 150,000 people, 111,000 of whom were soon shot. The ‘Polish Operation’ marked the zenith of the persecution of Poles in the Soviet Union, which had begun in the early 1930s when the party leadership embarked on systematic mass terror against the Polish minority. Between 1930 and 1936 Stalin ordered the Belorussian and Ukrainian Soviet Republics to be purged of Poles, resulting in thousands of deaths and many more deportations. It is estimated that Polish losses in the Ukrainian SSR were about 30 per cent, while in the Belorussian SSR, where some 300,000 persons declared themselves as Poles in the 1920s, the Polish minority was almost completely annihilated or deported. The available sources clearly imply that it was ethnic-defined terror and that the ‘Polish Operation’ was merely a peak in the persecution.