In July 1940, speaking to the Lithuanian minister of foreign affairs, Molotov laid out the strategy of using war to make Communist revolution. He explained that the USSR would provide Germany with material aid but “just enough to prevent it from accepting peace proposals.” The gamble was that in due course the “hungering masses in the warring nations” would grow weary of war and rebel. Then the USSR would show up with “fresh forces, well prepared, and on the territory of Western Europe.” There would follow “a decisive battle between the proletariat and the rotting bourgeoisie.” Stalin had put forward these ideas many times. Molotov quoted no less an authority than Lenin and said that “a second world war will allow us to take power in the whole of Europe.”16
The Soviets were content to give Hitler the green light for an assault on Poland because they saw ways of capitalizing on it. German forces invaded Poland on September 1, and as expected, Britain and France issued an ultimatum that two days later led them to declare war on Germany.17 The Kremlin had wanted to coordinate with Berlin regarding plans for the attack on Poland, but given the shocking speed of the German advance, it had no time. Poland was already in the throes of defeat on September 17 when the Red Army ignobly invaded from the east.
Stalin relished finally getting into Poland, for the initial Bolshevik crusade to bring revolution to Berlin, Paris, and beyond had ended at the gates of Warsaw in August 1920. At that time Polish forces had stopped and encircled the Red Army, taken more than 100,000 prisoners, and begun driving out the invaders until an armistice was reached in October. Poland celebrated the great battle as the “Miracle on the Vistula,” but now in 1939 the Red Army was back. Poland, Stalin said in early September, had “enslaved” Ukrainians, Byelorussians, and other Slavs, and when it fell, the world would have “one less bourgeois fascist state. Would it be so bad,” he asked his cronies rhetorically, “if we, through the destruction of Poland, extended the socialist system to new territories and nations?”18
RED ATROCITIES IN POLAND AND THE BALTIC STATES
The Soviet occupation of eastern Poland lasted eighteen months before the Nazis overran it on their way to Moscow. In that short time, the Communists assaulted the very foundations of the country. The new Polish republic of 1918 had incorporated western Ukraine and western Byelorussia, which became known as the eastern borderlands. The Soviets took it back and linked the lands respectively to the Ukrainian and Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republics. Almost as soon as they arrived, they began “cleansing” operations to arrest and deport those who were deemed enemies. The NKVD fanned the hatred that locals already harbored against the Poles. High on the hit list were landowners, those involved in administration, government, business, the military, police, and the church, all of them swept up as “hostile or socially dangerous elements” of the kind that the Soviet police had terrorized inside the USSR.19
NKVD boss Lavrenti Beria worked closely with Stalin on all these matters. There were three deportations, in February, April, and June 1940. The operations were meticulously organized. In February, for example, one hundred trains took away the equivalent of a large city’s population in a matter of hours. Boxcars were packed with starving and uprooted people, and the voyages into the vast Soviet interior ran on for weeks.20 The total numbers of those deported or killed remains subject to dispute, though there is no doubt about the Soviet terror. Recent studies suggest that four large deportation waves, as well as smaller individual ones, carried away between 309,000 and 327,000 Poles; the number arrested is now put at between 110,000 and 130,000. In addition, an estimated 25,000 died in captivity and 30,000 were executed.21 Some were eventually allowed to return, but how many died in the process remains in dispute.
A recent Russian account substantiates the conclusion that wherever Soviet occupation forces went, the former Polish administration, army officers, and intellectuals “ceased to exist.”22 The occupation forces set out to make the area as “Red” as the Bolsheviks had made the Soviet Union after 1917 by eliminating or removing the social and political elite and crushing opposition.23
Many Jews fled east away from the Nazis, and the Soviets also deported many. For all their harrowing experiences, flight to the USSR offered a better chance of survival than remaining in eastern Poland, which Germany took over in June 1941.
The Red Army captured 230,000 or so prisoners of war from Poland and mistreated many before shipping them to camps inside the Soviet Union. Although some were soon released, particularly those resident in eastern Poland, none of the officers were freed.24
Newly released documents show that decisions on the fate of these men were taken by Stalin and Beria. The two met in late February 1940 and put together a March 5 Politburo resolution to execute most of the 14,765 Polish officers and other notables held in POW camps.25 Written in Stalin’s hand across that document is his “za” (“in favor”) followed by his penciled initials. The other signatories were K. Voroshilov, A. Mikoyan, and V. Molotov. Also to be killed were 7,300 people called members of the “bourgeois” elite, like priests, landowners, lawyers, and factory owners. The implementation was recorded in mind-numbing detail, down to the petty rewards given the killers, the numbers they shot per night, and the camp commander’s final “accounting of how the prisoners’ labor reduced the expense of their upkeep.”26
The decision to execute may have followed Nikita Khrushchev and Beria’s proposal of March 2 to clear the western frontier of the Soviet Union of the inhabitants of an 875-yard-wide zone along the entire border and to pick up the families of “repressed people.”27 In any case, Stalin ordered the mass executions three days later.28
This chapter in Red terror came to light because advancing Germans found 4,000 or so bodies in mass graves in the Katyń forest and announced it in mid-April 1943. The Nazis used this and countless other examples of Soviet atrocities to make anti-Bolshevik propaganda. The Soviets denied everything and covered up the crime for nearly a half century. In response to official questions in 1959, the then head of the KGB, Alexander Shelepin, reported to Nikita Khrushchev that in total 21,857 “persons were shot” in various camps of “former bourgeois Poland.” Khrushchev wanted all the documents destroyed to continue the cover-up, but that advice was not followed.29
The truth finally emerged on October 14, 1992, when, after the demise of the USSR, and in President Boris Yeltsin’s name, the key documents were presented to the Polish government. The Katyń graves are held up today as a symbol of the larger mass murders. The operation against the Polish officers was consistent with how the Soviets treated their own people. An NKVD defector, who was involved, said later that the murder of the Poles was “a typical operation… considered entirely routine and unremarkable.”30
In the meantime German forces took Norway in April 1940, tore through the Low Countries and France in May, and won both in six weeks with apparent ease. Those victories began to undermine Stalin’s conviction that a long-drawn-out war would wear down the capitalists. He decided to move on June 14, when the Germans entered Paris. Molotov extended his “warmest congratulations” to the German ambassador in Moscow and also said that the Soviet Union would soon occupy the Baltic states. Indeed, the Soviets immediately issued an ultimatum to Lithuania and two days later to Latvia and Estonia. Moscow demanded that Red Army troops be given “free passage,” and they soon took the key centers.31