Nikolai Malishevsky: Polish Captivity: How Tens of Thousands of Russians Have Been Destroyed
The problem of the mass death of Red Army soldiers who were captured during the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1920 has not been studied for a long time. After 1945, she was completely ignored for politically motivated reasons - the Polish People's Republic was an ally of the USSR.The change of state in Poland in 1989 and the perestroika in the USSR created the conditions when historians were finally able to address the problem of the death of captured Red Army soldiers in Poland in 1919-1920. 3 November 1990, the first and last president of the USSR M.Gorbachev, issued a decree instructing the USSR Academy of Sciences, the USSR Prosecutor’s Office, the USSR Ministry of Defense, the USSR State Security Committee "together with other departments and organizations to conduct research on 1 on April 1991 archival materials concerning events and facts from stories Soviet-Polish bilateral relations, which resulted in damage to the Soviet side. "
According to the information of the Honored Lawyer of the Russian Federation, Chairman of the Security Committee of the State Duma of the Russian Federation V. Ilyukhin (at that time - Head of the Department for the Supervision of the Implementation of Laws on State Security of the USSR General Prosecutor’s Office, member of the board of the Prosecutor General’s Office and The work was carried out under the leadership of the head of the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, V.M. Relevant materials were stored in the building of the Central Committee of the CPSU on the Old Square. However, after the August events of 1991, they all allegedly "disappeared", and further work in this direction was discontinued. According to the testimony of A.N. Kolesnik, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Falin restored the list of names of the Red Army soldiers who died in the Polish concentration camps from the 1988 of the year, but, according to V.M. Falin, after "rebels broke in 1991 of the year in August" "the lists he compiled, all the volumes, are gone. And the employee who worked on their compilation was killed.
Nevertheless, the problem of the death of prisoners of war has already attracted the attention of historians, politicians, journalists and government officials of the Russian Federation and other republics of the former Soviet Union. The fact that this happened at the time of the removal of secrecy from the tragedy of Katyn, Medny, Starobelsk and other places of execution of Poles, "gave this natural step of domestic researchers an appearance of counter-propaganda action, or" anti-Katyn ".
Facts and materials that appeared in the press became, according to a number of researchers and scientists, evidence that the Polish military authorities, violating international legal acts regulating the conditions of prisoners of war, caused enormous moral and material damage to the Russian side, which has yet to be assessed. In this regard, the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation addressed in the 1998 year to the relevant state authorities of the Republic of Poland with a request to initiate a criminal case on the fact of the death of 83.500 prisoners of Red Army in 1919-1921.
In response to this appeal, the Prosecutor General of Poland and Justice Minister Hanna Suhotskaya stated categorically that "... investigations into the case of the alleged extermination of captured Bolsheviks in the 1919-1920 war, which the Prosecutor General of Russia requires from Poland will be". The refusal of H. Sukhotskaya justified by the fact that Polish historians "reliably established" the death of 16-18 thousands of prisoners of war due to "general post-war conditions", the existence of "death camps" and "extermination" in Poland is out of the question. special actions aimed at the extermination of prisoners, was not carried out. " In order to "finally close" the question of the death of the Red Army soldiers, the Polish Prosecutor General’s Office proposed the creation of a joint Polish-Russian group of scientists to "... examine the archives, study all the documents on this case and prepare the corresponding publication."
Thus, the Polish side qualified the request of the Russian side as unlawful and refused to accept it, although the fact of the mass death of Soviet prisoners of war in Polish camps was recognized by the General Prosecutor’s Office of Poland. In November 2000, on the eve of the visit of Russian Foreign Minister I.S. Ivanov to Warsaw, the Polish media mentioned among the suggested topics of the Polish-Russian negotiations was the problem of the death of POWs of the Red Army updated by the publication of Kemerovo Governor A.Tuleev in Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
In the same year, a Russian commission was established to investigate the fate of the Red Army soldiers who were taken prisoner by the Polish forces in 1920, with the participation of representatives of the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the FSB and the archival service of the Russian Federation. In the 2004 year, on the basis of a bilateral agreement from 4, December 2000, the first joint attempt was made by historians of the two countries to find the truth based on a detailed study of the archives, first of all Polish, as the events took place mainly on Polish territory.
The result of the joint work was the publication of a voluminous Polish-Russian collection of documents and materials "The Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity in 1919-1922.", Allowing to understand the circumstances of the death of the Red Army. The review of the collection was prepared by the astronomer Alexey Pamyatnykh - the holder of the Polish Cross of Merit (awarded by President of Poland B. Komorowski to 4.04.2011 for "special services for spreading the truth about Katyn").
Currently, Polish historians are trying to present a collection of documents and materials "Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity in 1919-1922." as a kind of "indulgence" for Poland on the issue of the deaths of tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war in Polish concentration camps. It is alleged that "the agreement reached by researchers on the number of Red Army soldiers who died in Polish captivity ... closes the possibility of political speculations on the topic, the problem goes into the category of purely historical ...".
However, this is not true. To say that the agreement of the Russian and Polish compilers of the collection “regarding the number of Red Army men who died in the Polish camps from epidemics, famine and harsh conditions of detention” has been achieved somewhat prematurely.
First, the opinions of researchers from the two countries diverged seriously in several aspects, as a result of which the results were published in a general collection, but with different prefaces in Poland and Russia. 13 February 2006, after a telephone conversation between historian S.E. Strygin, coordinator of the Truth about Katyn international project, with one of the compilers of the collection, Russian historian N.Ye. Eliseyeva, revealed that "during the work on the collection in the Polish archives, significantly more official documents about extrajudicial executions of Polish Red Army prisoners of war by Polish military personnel. However, only three of them were directly included in the collection itself. The second ones are currently stored in the Russian State Military Archive. During the preparation of the publication, very serious contradictions arose in the position of the Polish and Russian sides. (According to the figurative expression of N.Ye. Eliseevoy "... it came to hand-to-hand"). the disagreements were not resolved and we had to make two fundamentally different prefaces to the collection - from the Russian and from the Polish side, which is a unique fact for such joint publications. "
Secondly, there are large discrepancies between the Polish members of the compilation group and the Russian historian GF Matveev on the number of prisoners of the Red Army. According to Matveyev’s calculations, the fate of no less than 9-11 of thousands of prisoners who did not die in the camps, but did not return to Russia, remained unclear. In general, Matveyev actually pointed out the uncertainty of the fate of about 50 thousands of people due to: the Polish historians underestimated the number of prisoners of the Red Army, and with it the number of dead prisoners; discrepancies in data from Polish and Russian documents; the cases of execution by Polish military Red Army prisoners on the spot, without sending them to prison camps; incompleteness of the Polish account of the death of prisoners of war; Doubtful data from Polish documents of the time of the war.
Thirdly, the second volume of documents and materials on the problem of the death of prisoners of Polish concentration camps, which was to be released shortly after the first one, has not yet been published. And "the one that was published, is forgotten in the General Directorate of State Archives and the Federal Archival Agency of Russia. And no one is in a hurry to get these documents from the shelf."
Fourthly, according to some Russian researchers, “despite the fact that the collection of“ Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity in 1919-1922 ”was compiled with the prevailing opinion of Polish historians, most of its documents and materials testify to such purposeful wild barbarism and inhuman attitude Soviet prisoners of war, that there is no question of the transition of this problem to the “purely historical level”! Moreover, the documents in the collection irrefutably show that in relation to prisoners of war the Soviet x Red, primarily ethnic Russian and Jewish, Polish authorities pursued a policy of extermination by hunger and cold, and the rod bullet ", ie "testify to such purposeful wild barbarism and inhuman treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, that this should be qualified as war crimes, murders and cruel treatment of prisoners of war with elements of genocide."
Fifth, in spite of the Soviet-Polish research conducted and publications available on the subject, the state of the documentary base on this issue is still such that any accurate data on the number of dead Red Army men are simply not available. (I don’t want to believe that the Polish side also “lost them,” as was done with the documents about the Katyn events allegedly obtained from the Russian archives in the 1992 year, after publications appeared that these materials were made in years. ” adjustment "fake).
Thesis situation with the death of the Red Army is as follows. As a result of the war launched by Poland in 1919 against Soviet Russia, the Polish army captured over 150 thousand Red Army soldiers. In total, in combination with political prisoners and interned civilians, more than 200 thousands of Red Army soldiers, civilians, White Guards, anti-Bolshevik and nationalist (Ukrainian and Belarusian) militia turned out to be in Polish captivity and concentration camps.
In Polish captivity in 1919-1922. the Red Army were destroyed in the following main ways: 1) Mass killings and executions. Basically, prior to imprisonment in concentration camps, they were: a) destroyed out of court, leaving the wounded on the battlefield without providing medical assistance and creating disastrous conditions of transportation to places of detention; b) executed by sentences of various courts and tribunals; c) shot while suppressing insubordination.
2) By creating intolerable conditions. Mainly in the concentration camps themselves with the help of: a) bullying and beatings, b) hunger and exhaustion, c) cold and illness.
The second Rzeczpospolita created a huge "archipelago" of dozens of concentration camps, stations, prisons and serf casemates. It is spread over the territory of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania, and included not only dozens of concentration camps, including the openly called in the European press "death camps", and the so-called. internment camps, in which the Polish authorities used mainly concentration camps built by the Germans and Austrians during the First World War, such as Stshalkovo, Shiptyurno, Lancut, Tuchol, but also prisons, sorting stations, concentration centers and various military facilities like Modlin and Brest Fortress, where there were four concentration camps at once.
Islands and islands of the archipelago were located, including, in the Polish Belarusian, Ukrainian and Lithuanian cities and towns, and were called: Pikulitsa, Korosten, Zhytomyr, Aleksandrov, Lukov, Ostrov-Lomzhinsky, Rombertov, Zdunska Volya, Torun, Dorosk, Plotsk, Radom, Przemysl, Lviv, Fridrihovka, Zvyagel, Dabie, Deblin, Petroc Wadowice, Bialystok, Baranovichi, Molodechino, Wilna, Pinsk, Ruzhany, Bobruisk, Grodno, Luninets, Vaukavysk, Minsk, Pulawy, Powązki, Rivne, Stryi, Kovel ... This should also include the so-called. work teams that worked in the district and in the surrounding landowners, formed from prisoners, among which at times mortality exceeded 75%. The most deadly for prisoners were concentration camps located in Poland - Strzalkovo and Tuchol.
At the beginning of 1920, the Polish authorities tried to divert the world's attention from the mass death of Soviet prisoners of war due to inhuman treatment, switching attention to the maintenance of Polish prisoners of war in Soviet captivity. However, the comparison turned out to be very beneficial for the Soviet side. Despite much more difficult conditions - civil war, foreign intervention, devastation, famine, mass epidemics, lack of funds - Polish prisoners of war in Russia were in much more comfortable conditions for survival. In addition, their content was supervised by relatives of high-ranking Bolsheviks-Poles like F. Dzerzhinsky.
Today, the Polish side recognizes the fact of the mass death of prisoners of Polish concentration camps. However, it seeks to minimize the figure reflecting the real number of those killed in captivity. This is carried out, among other things, with the help of a meaningful substitution.
First, the number of Red Army prisoners taken prisoner is significantly underestimated in order to reduce the total number of dead. Secondly, when calculating the dead prisoners, we are talking only about the dead during their imprisonment. Thus, about 40% of prisoners of war who died before being sent to concentration camps - directly on the battlefield or during transportation to concentration camps (and from them back to their homeland) are not counted. Thirdly, we are talking only about the death of the Red Army, thanks to which the White Guards who died in captivity, fighters of anti-Bolshevik and nationalist formations and members of their families, as well as political prisoners and interned civilians (supporters of the Soviet government and refugees from the East) are beyond attention.
In general, Polish captivity and internment took the lives of more than 50 thousands of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian prisoners: about 10-12 thousand. Red Army men died before being sent to concentration camps, about 40-44 thousand. In places of detention (approximately 30-32 thousand. Red Army soldiers plus 10-12 thousand civilians and fighters of anti-Bolshevik and nationalist formations).
The death of tens of thousands of Russian prisoners and the death of Poles in Katyn are two different problems that are not related to each other (except that in both cases we are talking about the death of people). The mass death of Soviet prisoners of war is not a taboo in modern Poland. They simply try to submit it so as not to discredit the Polish side.
In Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, the topic of Katyn has been massively propagandized since the late Soviet times, and almost nothing is known about the deaths of tens of thousands of compatriots in Polish concentration camps. Today, the main, common problem of the research of Katyn and "anti-Katyn" is that Russian historians are looking for the truth, and Polish - for the benefit of their country.
Since silencing the problems is clearly not conducive to solving them, I would like to encourage not only historians and Russian-speaking astronomers who were awarded Polish crosses "for Katyn", but also lawyers from Poland and Russia to conduct a joint full and objective investigation into the fate of the "disappeared" in Polish the captivity of tens of thousands of Red Army men. Undoubtedly, the Polish side has the full right to investigate all the circumstances of the death of its fellow citizens in Katyn. But her eastern neighbors have exactly the same right to investigate the circumstances of the death of Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity. And to compile, more precisely, the restoration of the 1990s that already existed at the beginning. lists of those who died in the Polish concentration camps compatriots. You can start this process by resuming the work of a joint commission of scientists, which formally was not dissolved by anyone. Moreover, including in it, in addition to Russian and Polish historians and lawyers, representatives of the Belarusian and Ukrainian sides. The proposals of the Russian bloggers to introduce the official commemoration date of the Red Army soldiers killed in Polish captivity in 1919-1922 and the Kemerovo Governor Aman Tuleyev also deserve close attention, for the creation of the Russian Institute of National Remembrance, which will investigate crimes committed, including foreign land, against Soviet and Russian citizens.
- Nikolai Malishevsky, Ph.D. (Political Science), historian, political scientist, publicist
- http://www.regnum.ru
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