After Soviet forces invaded and conquered half of pre-war Poland in autumn 1939, tens of thousands were arrested and deported eastwards. The total number involved is not known, and estimates vary from 350,000 (NKVD figures) to 1.2 million.
Some were sent to work in the Gulag; others were notoriously executed at Katyn, Tver and Kharkiv (in east Ukraine). Countless others were despatched as families in four great waves of deportation. The Map of Memory includes almost thirty sites linked to this mass expulsion of Polish citizens. A few are linked to central Russia, the Urals and Siberia: the majority are located in the North, the modern-day Arkhangelsk Region and Komi Republic.
The wider context
Before turning to the commemorative sites and burial grounds included in the Map of Memory, it is important to stress two aspects of the wider context.
One, there were many ethnic Poles in Russia.
During the so-called “Polish Operation” of the Great Terror, 143,810 people were arrested; 111,071 were shot and 28,344 were sent to the camps. (There are monuments to Soviet Poles who were shot during the Terror at various commemorative sites in Russia: Sandarmokh in Karelia and Levashovo outside St Petersburg are two.) That devastating experience was preceded and to some extent overlapped with a wave of deportation from 1935 onwards of ethnic Poles from the western frontier areas of the USSR. They were resettled in towns and villages throughout the Arkhangelsk Region.
Two, Poles were a large minority in the part of Poland occupied by the USSR in 1939.
After 1945 and to this day, those areas remain part of Ukraine, Belarus (and Lithuania). Of the 13.7 million inhabitants of pre-war (eastern) Poland, over five million (38%) were ethnic Poles, 37% Ukrainians, 14.5% Belorussians, 8.4% Jews and 0.9% Russians. By late 1939 there were also 336,000 refugees from German-occupied Poland, most of whom (198,000) were Jewish.
On the website and in this text, therefore, the reference is consistently to “Polish citizens” – to distinguish the victims and survivors of the years from 1939 to 1944, on the one hand, from Soviet citizens of Polish ethnicity and, on the other, to include citizens of whatever ethnicity from pre-war Poland.
Waves of deportation, 1940-1941
In December 1939, the Soviet authorities took a decision “to deport the Polish population en masse” from the occupied territories, wrote the specialist researcher Anna Dembowska. She continued:
“In 1940-1941 there were four major operations to deport people from the occupied territories. This forced resettlement also pursued an economic goal. The deported Poles were sent mainly to the North of Russia (the Arkhangelsk and Vologda Regions, and the Komi Republic), to Siberia and to Kazakhstan, to regions, in other words, where climatic conditions caused difficulties with the labour force.
“The first mass deportation was carried out on the night of 9-10 February 1940. The NKVD had drawn up lists: those who had fought in the Polish-Soviet war of 1920; refugees from the part of Poland occupied by the Third Reich; the intelligentsia, public figures, the military and policemen, as well as foresters and postal workers. Entire families were deported. In the space of a single night almost 140,000 people were arrested. Crammed together in railway waggons in inhuman conditions, it sometimes took them weeks to reach their destination.
“This first, major operation was followed by three more: on 13 April and 29 June 1940 and, also, in May-June 1941. In total about 570,000 Polish citizens were deported from those parts of Poland occupied by the Red Army and were imprisoned or interned in the USSR. Some sources assert that Soviet acts of political repression after 17 September 1939 directly affected one million Poles.”
In a short note in a local Russian journal, Dembowska described the fate of 60,000 Polish citizens deported to 138 special settlements in the Arkhangelsk Region. Those arrested on 9-10 February 1940 [e.g., Rossokhi special settlement] and expelled eastwards mainly came from rural areas and did not correspond to the types listed by the NKVD; in June that year the deportees were mainly from towns and cities and for the most part Jewish. In both cases, entire families were deported, including children and old people. In the special settlements they were supervised by the district NKVD commandant and could not leave without his permission. Adults and children from the age of 14 were all put to work, mainly in the timber industry. “As confirmed by NKVD reports and the memoirs of deportees, no provision was made for their living and working conditions. They were accommodated in “ancient, leaky barracks, sometimes even at their place of work”.
Graveyards and commemorative sites on the Map of Memory
The Map of Memory lists many special settlements in Northwest Russia (15 in the Arkhangelsk Region, eight in the Komi Republic) and several elsewhere – in central Russia, the Urals and Siberia (3) – in which deported Polish citizens lived and died.
This website, therefore, covers a tenth of the settlements mentioned by Anna Dembowska and indicated on Alexander Guryanov’s map in her note on “Poles in the Arkhangelsk Region” (2011). One hundred special settlements absorbed the first wave of deportees in spring 1940, she writes; 30 special settlements took in “refugees” in June and July that year. For comparison we may quote research in the Krasnoyarsk Region which lists a total of 15,000 deportees in 48 special settlements and a further 1,500 “refugees” from Poland in nine settlements.
To judge by the examples included here, these families from eastern Poland were moved in almost all cases to existing special settlements, set up and previously populated by “dekulakised” peasant families from all over the USSR. A handful, it seems, were newly created in 1939 and 1940 to receive Polish deportees: the Korgova NE ss (c)** and the Pinega home NE for the elderly and sick (c)* (both in the Arkhangelsk Region), Nizhny Lyamamoz NE ss (c)* in the Komi Republic, the Refty NE ss in the Sverdlovsk Region (Urals) and one of those in Kostroma (Poldnevitsa ss (c) ).
Between 2009 and 2013 monuments and memorials were erected on all but two (Churga, Ulskoe) of the burial sites in the Arkhangelsk Region. On only two sites – Rochegda and Kargovino – were memorials erected earlier, in both cases in 1996. In almost all cases these refer to the Polish victims of the site: Kargovino village (c)*, Korgova NE ss (c)**, Kresty ss*, Nyanda ss, Churga NE ss graveyard, Pinega home NE for the elderly and sick (c)*, Pinega settlement, Privodino settlement*, Rossokhi ss*, Slobodchikovo village*, Syuzma UI ss (c), Ulskoe NE ss (c)*, Veryuzhskoe lake NE ss (c)*, Vityunino, Yozhma NE (c)*, Zharovaya NE (c)*. No less than seven of these 16 settlements no longer exist [NE]; Syuzma is uninhabited [UI]. Fourteen were used for appropriate purposes (excursions, etc) and ceremonial events were held, occasionally, at eight although six were no longer existent or inhabited; none were protected at the local or Regional level.
In the Komi Republic six of the nine settlements no longer exist (those that survive are in bold type): Chesel ss*, N. Glushitsa ss*, N. Lyamomoz ss (c)*, Noshul village [C], Rabog ss*, Stary Vukhtym ss, V. Glushitsa ss*, Vetka ss., Vokvad ss [C]*. Four burial sites contain memorials recalling all the deported victims buried there, not just Polish citizens: Noshul, Rabog, Vetka and Vokvad.
Polish citizens and soldiers in the camps
Rochegda is a burial site of the short-lived Kuloilag camp (1937-1942), whose 30,000 prisoners it was said were mostly Polish by the time it closed.
VORKUTA Rudnik settlement* Prisoners burial ground
Troeruchitsa – a burial ground of POWs who died in the Ostashkovo camp complex.
The extermination of the Polish elite
The two notorious sites where members of the Polish elite were executed and buried in Russia (a third site was near Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine) were in the Tver and Smolensk Regions. Like the special settlements to which tens of thousands of families and indivduals were deported, they had also been used previously for the same purpose, execution and burial during the Great Terror and before.
Since 2016 when the Russian version of the Map of Memory was launched both have suffered from official interference, although the Katyn Memorial Complex was then a nationally protected commemorative site. (See Background notes for sites below and two posts on the Dmitriev Affair website: On another front (part one); On another front (part two)).
*
TVER REGION
TVER regional NKVD headquarters {C}* Execution site [69-01], 1935-1953
Mednoe, burials of the executed [69-04], 1930s-1940s
*
SMOLENSK REGION
Katyn Memorial Complex {C}** Execution & Burial site [67-01], late 1920s to early 1940s
JC, January 2025