Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

For Stalin, humiliated so badly in 1920, Poles were the prime target. In dealing with them Stalin had Hitler’s full cooperation. Both sides thought the Polish state “an abortion of the Versailles treaty”; both planned to reduce the Polish population to a subservient minority. Hitler, unlike Stalin, had singled out the Polish Jews for extermination, but his “Aktion A-B” to reduce the Polish intelligentsia and military to insignificance was halfhearted compared with Stalin and Beria’s policy. Some 400,000 inhabitants of pre-1939 Poland—Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, and some Belorussians—were deported east to camps and hard labor in three major operations during spring 1940.⁴⁰ One in six died in their first year of exile.⁴¹ The deportees, however, were luckier than those Poles detained in camps in western Russia.

The Katyn Massacres

THE KATYN MASSACRES, in which 22,000 Polish officers, policemen, and civil servants were murdered by the NKVD, are probably the most notorious and senseless of Stalin’s crimes. Ezhov probably shot more ethnic Poles in 1937 and 1938, but they were Soviet citizens. The Katyn murders show lack of foresight: the USSR would be held internationally accountable. Even if Poland was wiped off the map, did Stalin really believe, like Hitler, that he could do such a thing and suffer no consequences at all?

The documentation suggests that the decision to kill the Poles was taken at leisure—four months after the surrender—and repented in haste—when the Soviet authorities found they could not cover up their waste of a valuable resource for the coming war against Hitler. ⁴² The surrender of Polish army units which had neither been captured by the Germans nor broken through to neutral Romania had not been planned for, and the prisoners of war were handed over by Voroshilov to Beria’s NKVD, which knew how to set up prison camps. The military had no food for the prisoners and wanted to let go at least those who were ethnically Belorussian or Ukrainian, but Lev Mekhlis, now Stalin’s political commissar in the army, had objected. The only prisoners repatriated by the Soviets were German soldiers captured by the Poles.

Beria set up eight camps in western Russia and put one of his secretaries, Piotr Karpovich Soprunenko, in charge. Soprunenko had been for ten years an army machine gunner, ideal for what the NKVD had in mind for the Poles. Camps were set up at Kozelsk in the monastery of Optina wilderness, at Starobelsk in a former nunnery, at Ostashkov in the St. Nil wilderness monastery on Lake Seliger, at Putivl in the Safronii monastery, in an old TB asylum and an orphanage. Here prisoners starved and froze in pigstys and derelict sheds. So many died that Mekhlis decided to release those who were ethnically or politically unobjectionable, and 43,000 who came from German-occupied Poland were handed over to the Nazis. Another 25,000 NCOs and soldiers were marched off as forced labor to build highways in the Carpathian mountains near the new border with the German Reich and 11,000 went to the Ukrainian mines. Only the Jews could count themselves lucky; they had from the Soviets what Hitler would deny them, a chance to live.

Senior Polish officers, although robbed of their watches by Red Army officers, were at first treated gingerly; Beria ordered those above the rank of lieutenant colonel to be given separate bunks and adequate nutrition and to be addressed politely. Privileges were accorded to those to be sent back to German-occupied Poland lest they speak badly of the Soviet regime. All were assured that their detention was temporary. The Polish officer contingent was very heterogeneous as it included recently mobilized journalists, academics, artists, doctors, judges, and priests— Poland’s professionals and intellectuals—as well as its military caste. There were also a few women, notably Janina Lewandowska, the Polish aviator.

In Lithuania 3,000 more Polish officers had been interned; the NKVD went there to collect them. By December 1939 the camps had been infiltrated by NKVD informers planted among or recruited from the prisoners, but their reports of Polish intransigence angered Beria. The NKVD was unused to prisoners who knew their rights and international conventions. Polish officers wrote letters pointing out that either Poland was at war with the USSR, in which case they were POWs, or it was not, in which case they were illegally detained. Their wives and mothers, either still living in eastern Poland or exiled to Kazakhstan and Siberia, flooded the NKVD and Stalin’s secretariat with inquiries about their missing menfolk. There were 135,000 Polish deportees, mostly women and children, who were tolerably treated: each family was allowed to take half a ton of possessions into Siberian exile.