"Incorrigible enemies of Soviet power" : Polish citizens in the Soviet Union, 1939-1942, in the light of Soviet documents and Polish witness' testimonies

Between February 1940 and June 1941, in four major deportations Soviet authorities moved Polish citizens to work-colonies in the Soviet interior and detained others in various prisons and camps. Based on war-time information, works on the deportations published in the West during the decades of communist rule in Eastern Europe and since reported figures of over 1.5 million deportees, of whom as many as half reportedly died in the USSR. These works held a prevailing view that Soviet intentions towards the deported Poles were genocidal. Recent work with Soviet archival materials has led Polish and Russian historians to revise the number of deportees to 320,000. This substantial reduction has received a mitigated response in the work of Western commentators. A review of published archival materials and of accounts left by witnesses demonstrates that both sets of sources are indispensable to an analysis of the deportations. It also shows that Soviet policies directed against the deportees were not genocidal in their intent and adds a dimension, that of the perpetrators, to the limited conceptualization afforded to the subject thus far. The study shows that under the control of the NKVD the deportations were economic and political components of internal Soviet policy in 1939-1942 and suggests that the Soviet infrastructure was incapable of supplying the resources necessary to fulfill plans set by Moscow. Moreover, the Soviet documentation offers a glimpse into the perpetrators' planning and execution of massive population displacement, thus taking the deportations outside of the realm of conjecture and placing them more firmly within the grasp of historical understanding