WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
On February 10, 1940, Stalin launched the first of four mass deportations of Poles from eastern Poland, which had been occupied by the Red Army and annexed by the USSR under a secret protocol of the Stalin-Hitler pact. In all, some 1.5 million Poles were deported by the summer of 1941 and scattered among 15 million deportees in Stalin’s concentration camps.
During the night, NKVD agents, working from lists identifying opponents as “enemies of the people” and “socially unadapted elements” broke into houses and rounded up suspects and their families. Before dawn, some 220,000 Poles had been loaded on freight cars, locked in and deported to Archangel and Pechora in the northernmost part of the USSR.
Stalin had already arrested and liquidated individual members of the bourgeoisie and all working class political leaders. The mass deportations were aimed at uprooting and atomizing mass resistance in the working and middle class to the bureaucratic regime.
The conditions during transfer for deportees were nothing short of barbaric. Forty to 60 people were packed into freight cars meant to accommodate 25. They were forced to remain there for the three to six week period it took to reach their destinations. The only sanitation was a hole cut in the floor. Every two to three days, bread would be put into the cars. Only one or two buckets of water were made available in every 36 hours. Temperatures fell to as low as -40 Fahrenheit. It is estimated that 20,000 Poles perished from starvation and cold during transit.
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