.png)
ThePolish population transfers in 1944–1946 from the eastern half of prewarPoland (also known as the expulsions of Poles from theKresymacroregion),[1] were theforced migrations ofPoles toward the end and in the aftermath ofWorld War II. These were the result of aSoviet Union policy that had been ratified by the mainAllies of World War II. Similarly, the Soviet Union had enforced policies between 1939 and 1941 which targeted and expelled ethnic Poles residing in the Soviet zone of occupation following the Nazi-Sovietinvasion of Poland. The second wave of expulsions resulted from the retaking of Poland from theWehrmacht by theRed Army. The USSR took overterritory for its western republics.
The postwar population transfers were part of an official Soviet policy that affected more than one million Polish citizens, who were removed in stages from thePolish areas annexed by the Soviet Union. After the war, following Soviet demands laid out during theTehran Conference of 1943, Kresy was formally incorporated into the Ukrainian, Belarusian and Lithuanianrepublics of the Soviet Union. This was agreed at thePotsdam Conference of Allies in 1945, to which thePolish government-in-exile was not invited.[2]
The ethnicdisplacement of Poles (and alsoof ethnic Germans) was agreed between the Allied leadersWinston Churchill of the United Kingdom,Franklin D. Roosevelt of the U.S., andJoseph Stalin of the USSR, during the conferences at Tehran and Yalta. The Polish transfers were among the largest of severalpost-war expulsions inCentral andEastern Europe, which displaced a total of about 20 million people.
According to official data, during the state-controlled expulsion between 1945 and 1946, roughly 1,167,000 Poles left the westernmost republics of the Soviet Union, less than 50% of those who registered for population transfer. Another majorethnic Polish transfer took place after Stalin's death, in 1955–1959.[3]
The process is variously known asexpulsion,[1]deportation,[4][5]depatriation,[6][7][8] orrepatriation,[9] depending on the context and the source. The termrepatriation, used officially in both thePolish People's Republic and the USSR, was a deliberate distortion,[10][11] as deported peoples were leaving their homeland rather than returning to it.[6] It is also sometimes referred to as the 'first repatriation' action, in contrast with the 'second repatriation' of 1955–1959. In a wider context, it is sometimes described as a culmination of a process of de-Polonization of these areas during and after the world war.[12] The process was planned and carried out by thecommunist regimes of theUSSR and ofpost-war Poland. Many of the deported Poles were settled inhistorical eastern Germany; after 1945, these were referred to as the "Recovered Territories" of the Polish People's Republic.
The history of ethnic Polish settlement in what is now Ukraine and Belarus dates to 1030–31. More Poles migrated to this area after theUnion of Lublin in 1569, when most of the territory became part of the newly establishedPolish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.[citation needed] From 1657 to 1793, some 80 Roman Catholic churches and monasteries were built inVolhynia alone. The expansion of Catholicism inLemkivshchyna,Chełm Land,Podlaskie,Brześć land,Galicia, Volhynia andRight bank Ukraine was accompanied by the process of gradualPolonization of the eastern lands. Social and ethnic conflicts arose regarding the differences in religious practices between theRoman Catholic and theEastern Orthodox adherents during theUnion of Brest in 1595-96, when the Metropolitan of Kyiv-Halych broke relations with the Eastern Orthodox Church and accepted the authority of the Roman Catholic Pope and Vatican.[13]
Thepartitions of Poland, toward the end of the 18th century, resulted in the expulsions of ethnic Poles from their homes in the east for the first time in the history of the nation. Some 80,000 Poles were escorted toSiberia by the Russian imperial army in 1864 in the single largest deportation action undertaken within theRussian Partition.[14] "Books were burned; churches destroyed; priests murdered;" wroteNorman Davies.[15] Meanwhile, Ukrainians were officially considered "part of theRussian people".[16][17]
TheRussian Revolution of 1917 and theRussian Civil War of 1917-1922 brought an end to the Russian Empire.[18] According to Ukrainian sources from theCold War period, during theBolshevik revolution of 1917 the Polish population ofKyiv was 42,800.[19] In July 1917, when relations between theUkrainian People's Republic (UNR) andRussia became strained, the Polish Democratic Council of Kyiv supported the Ukrainian side in its conflict withPetrograd. Throughout the existence of UNR (1917–21), there was a separate ministry for Polish affairs, headed byMieczysław Mickiewicz; it was set up by the Ukrainian side in November 1917. In that entire period, some 1,300 Polish-language schools were operating in Galicia, with 1,800 teachers and 84,000 students. In the region ofPodolia in 1917, there were 290 Polish schools.
Beginning in 1920, the Bolshevik and nationalist terror campaigns of the new war triggered the flight of Poles and Jews from Soviet Russia to newly sovereign Poland. In 1922 Bolshevik RussianRed Army, with their Bolshevik allies in Ukraine overwhelmed the government of theUkrainian People's Republic, including the annexed Ukrainian territories into theSoviet Union. In that year, 120,000 Poles stranded in the east were expelled to the west and theSecond Polish Republic.[20] The Soviet census of 1926 recorded ethnic Poles as being of Russian or Ukrainian ethnicity, reducing their apparent numbers in Ukraine.[21]: 7
In the autumn of 1935, Stalin ordered a new wave of mass deportations of Poles from the western republics of the Soviet Union. This was also the time of his purges of different classes of people, many of whom were killed. Poles were expelled from the border regions to resettle the area with ethnic Russians and Ukrainians, but Stalin had them deported to the far reaches of Siberia and Central Asia. In 1935 alone 1,500 families were deported to Siberia from Soviet Ukraine. In 1936, 5,000 Polish families were deported toKazakhstan. The deportations were accompanied by the gradual elimination of Polish cultural institutions. Polish-language newspapers were closed, as were Polish-language classes throughout Ukraine.
Soon after the wave of deportations, the Soviet NKVD orchestrated thePolish Operation. The Polish population in the USSR had officially dropped by 165,000 in that period according to the official Soviet census of 1937–38; Polish population in the Ukrainian SSR decreased by about 30%.[22][23]
Amidst several border conflicts, Poland re-emerged as a sovereign state in 1918 followingPartitions of Poland. ThePolish-Ukrainian alliance was unsuccessful, and thePolish-Soviet war continued until theTreaty of Riga was signed in 1921. The Soviet Union did not officially exist before 31 December 1922.[24] The disputed territories were split in Riga between theSecond Polish Republic and the Soviet Union representingUkrainian SSR (part of theSoviet Union after 1923). In the following few years inKresy, the lands assigned to sovereign Poland, some 8,265 Polish farmers were resettled with help from the government.[25] The overall number of settlers in the east was negligible as compared to the region's long-term residents. For instance in theVolhynian Voivodeship (1,437,569 inhabitants in 1921), the number of settlers did not exceed 15,000 people (3,128 refugees fromBolshevist Russia, roughly 7,000 members of local administration, and 2,600military settlers).[25] Approximately 4 percent of the newly arrived settlers lived on land granted to them. The majority either rented their land to local farmers, or moved to the cities.[25][26]
Tensions between theUkrainian minority in Poland and the Polish government escalated. On 12 July 1930, activists of theOrganization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), helped by theUVO, began the so-calledsabotage action, during which Polish estates were burned, and roads, rail lines and telephone connections were destroyed. The OUN used terrorism and sabotage in order to force the Polish government into actions that would cause a loss of support for the more moderate Ukrainian politicians ready to negotiate with the Polish state.[27] OUN directed its violence not only against the Poles but also against Jews and other Ukrainians who wished for a peaceful resolution to the Polish–Ukrainian conflict.[28]
The 1939Soviet invasion of Poland during World War II was subsequently accompanied by the Soviets forcibly deporting hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens to distant parts of the Soviet Union: Siberia and Central Asia. Five years later, for the first time, the Supreme Soviet formally acknowledged that the Polish nationals expelled after the Soviet invasion were not Soviet citizens, but foreign subjects. Two decrees were signed on 22 June and 16 August 1944 to facilitate the release of Polish nationals from captivity.[29]
After the secretMolotov–Ribbentrop pact in 1939 between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Germanyinvaded Western Poland. Two weeks later, theSoviet Union invaded eastern Poland. As a result, Poland was divided between the Germans and the Soviets (seePolish areas annexed by the Soviet Union). With the annexation of theKresy in 1939, modern-day Western Ukraine was annexed toSoviet Ukraine, and Western Belarus toSoviet Belorussia, respectively. Spreading terror throughout the region, theSoviet secret police (NKVD) accompanying the Red Army murderedPolish prisoners of war.[30][31] From 1939 to 1941 the Soviets also forcibly deported specific social groups deemed "untrustworthy" to forced labor facilities in Kazakhstan and Siberia. Many children, elderly and sick died during these journeys, in cargo trains, which lasted weeks.[32] Whereas thePolish government-in-exile put the number of deported Polish citizens at 1,500,000[33] and some Polish estimates reach 1,600,000 to 1,800,000 persons, historians[who?] consider these evaluations as exaggerated.[34] Alexander Guryanov calculated that 309,000 up to 312,000 Poles were deported from February 1940 to June 1941.[34] According to N.S. Lebedeva the deportations involved about 250,000 persons.[35] The most conservative Polish counts based on Soviet documents and published by theMain Commission to Investigate Crimes Against the Polish Nation in 1997 amounted to a grand total of 320,000 persons deported.[36] SociologistTadeusz Piotrowski argues that various other smaller deportations, prisoners of war and political prisoners should be added for a grand total of 400,000 to 500,000 deported.[36]
By 1944, the population of ethnic Poles in Western Ukraine was 1,182,100. ThePolish government in exile in London affirmed its position of retaining the 1939 borders.Nikita Khrushchev, however, approached Stalin personally to keep the territories gained through the illegal and secret Molotov–Ribbentrop pact under continued Soviet occupation.
The residents of the Western Ukraine and Byelorussia, as well as those of the Wilno district, which had been annexed to the Soviet Union under the Ribentrop-Molotov pact of 23 August and 28 September 1939, had all been under German occupation for between two and half to three years, and were finally annexed to the Soviet Union in 1944. The speedy exodus of Poles from these regions was meant to erase their Polish past and to confirm the fact that the regions were indeed part of the Soviet Union.[29]
The document regarding the resettlement of Poles from the Ukrainian and Belorussian SSRs to Poland was signed 9 September 1944 inLublin by Khrushchev and the head of thePolish Committee of National LiberationEdward Osóbka-Morawski (the corresponding document with the Lithuanian SSR was signed on 22 September). The document specified who was eligible for the resettlement (it primarily applied to all Poles and Jews who were citizens of theSecond Polish Republic before 17 September 1939, and their families), what property they could take with them, and what aid they would receive from the corresponding governments. The resettlement was divided into two phases: first, the eligible citizens were registered as wishing to be resettled; second, their request was to be reviewed and approved by the corresponding governments. About 750,000 Poles and Jews from the western regions of Ukraine were deported, as well as about 200,000 each from western Belarus and from Lithuanian SSR each. The deportations continued until 1 August 1946.
Toward the end ofWorld War II, tensions between thePolish AK and Ukrainians escalated into theMassacres of Poles in Volhynia, led by the nationalist Ukrainian groups including theOrganization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and theUkrainian Insurgent Army. Although the Soviet government was trying to eradicate these organizations, it did little to support the Polish minority; and instead encouraged population transfer. The haste at which repatriation was done was such that the Polish leaderBolesław Bierut was forced to intercede and approach Stalin to slow down the deportation, as the post-war Polish government was overwhelmed by the sudden great number of refugees needing aid.[citation needed]
The Soviet "population exchanges" of 1944-1946 ostensibly concerned [in the legal sense, nominal] citizens of prewar Poland, but in fact Poles and Jews were sent west, whereas Ukrainians had to stay inSoviet Ukraine. The real criterion was one of ethnicity, not citizenship. The [exclusively] ethnic criterion was applied to everyone in Volhynia, Ukrainians forced to stay despite their prewar Polish citizenship, Poles and Jews forced to leave despite their ancient traditions in the region. Jewish survivors ofthe Holocaust and Polishsurvivors of the ethnic cleansing were generally willing to depart. The history of Volhynia, as an ancient multi-confessional society, had come to an end.
The Poles in southernKresy (now Western Ukraine) were given the option of resettlement inSiberia or Poland, and most chose Poland.[21]: 24
The Polish government-in-exile in London directed their organizations (seePolish Secret State) inLwów and other major centers in Eastern Poland to sit fast and not evacuate, promising that during peaceful discussions they would be able to keep Lwów within Poland. In response, Khrushchev introduced a different approach to dealing with thisPolish problem. Until this time, Polish children could be educated in Polish, according to the curriculum ofpre-war Poland. Overnight this allowance was discontinued, and all Polish schools were required to teach the Soviet Ukrainian curriculum, with classes to be held only in Ukrainian and Russian. All males were told to prepare for mobilization into labor brigades within theRed Army. These actions were introduced specifically to encourage Polish emigration from Ukraine to Poland.[citation needed]
In January 1945, theNKVD arrested 772 Poles in Lviv (where, according to Soviet sources, on 1 October 1944, Poles represented 66.75% of population),[38] among them 14 professors, 6 doctors, 2 engineers, 3 artists, and 5 Catholic priests. The Polish community was outraged about the arrests. ThePolish underground press in Lviv characterized these acts as attempts to hasten the deportation of Poles from their city. Those arrested were released after they signed papers agreeing to emigrate to Poland. It is difficult to establish the exact number of Poles expelled from Lviv, but it was estimated as between 100,000 and 140,000.[citation needed]
In contrast to actions in the Ukrainian SSR, the communist officials in theByelorussian SSR did not actively support deportation of Poles. Belarusian officials made it difficult for Polish activists to communicate withtuteishians – people who were undecided as to whether they considered themselves Polish or Belarusian.[1]: 141 Much of the rural population, who usually had no official identity documents, were denied the "right" of repatriation on the basis that they did not have documents stating they were Polish citizens.[1] In what was described as a "fight for the people", Polish officials attempted to get as many people repatriated as possible, whereas the Belarusian officials tried to retain them, particularly the peasants, while deporting most of the Polishintelligentsia. It is estimated that about 150,000 to 250,000 people were deported from Belarus. Similar numbers were registered as Poles but forced by the Belarusian officials to remain in Belarus or were outright denied registration as Poles.
In response, Poland followed a similar process in regards to the Belarusian population of the territory of theBiałystok Voivodeship, which was partially retained by Poland after World War II. It sought to retain some of the Belarusian people.[1]: 141
The resettlement of ethnic Poles from Lithuania saw numerous delays. Local Polish clergy were active in agitating against leaving, and the underground press called those who had registered for repatriationtraitors. Many ethnic Poles hoped that a post-war Peace Conference would assign theVilnius region to Poland. After these hopes vanished, the number of people wanting to leave gradually increased, and they signed papers for thePeople's Republic of PolandState Repatriation Office representatives.
The Lithuanian communist party was dominated by a nationalist faction[citation needed] which supported the removal of the Polish intelligentsia, particularly from the highly contestedVilnius region.[39] The city ofVilnius was considered a historical capital of Lithuania; however, in the early 20th century its population was around 40% Polish, 30% Jewish and 20% Russian and Belarusian, with only about 2–3% self-declared Lithuanians.[citation needed] The government considered the rural Polish population important to the agricultural economy, and believed those people would be relatively amenable to assimilation policies (Lithuanization).[1]: 141 [39]
But the government encouraged expulsion of Poles from Vilnius, and facilitated it. The result was a rapiddepolonization and Lithuanization of the city[39] (80% of the local Polish population left Vilnius[40]). Furthermore, the Lithuanian ideology of "Ethnographic Lithuania" declared that many people who identified as Polish were in fact "polonized Lithuanians". The rural population was denied the right to leave Lithuania, due to their lack of official pre-war documentation showing Polish citizenship.[1]: 141 [39] Contrary to the government's agreement with Poland, many individuals were threatened with either arrest or having to settle outstanding debts if they chose repatriation. Soviet authorities persecuted individuals connected to the Polish resistance (Armia Krajowa andPolish Underground State). In the end, about 50% of the 400,000 people registered for relocation were allowed to leave. Political scientist Dovilė Budrytė estimated that about 150,000 people left for Poland.[41]
Takie postrzeganie "zagranicznych Polaków" potwierdza chociażby tzw. pierwsza kampania powrotowa (zwana niesłusznie repatriacją), którą komuniści zainicjowali niemal od razu po zakończeniu II wojny światowej.
{{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)