Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (19 page)

The “Polish Military Organization” provided a rationale for the scapegoating of Poles for Soviet policy failures. After the signing of the German-Polish nonaggression declaration in January 1934, Poles were blamed not only for the famine but also for the worsening of the Soviet international position. That month Balytskyi blamed the “Polish Military Organization” for the continuation of Ukrainian nationalism. In March 1934 in Soviet Ukraine, some 10,800 Soviet citizens of Polish or German nationality were arrested. In 1935, as the level of NKVD activity decreased in the Soviet Union as a whole, it continued to increase in Soviet Ukraine, with special attention to Soviet Poles. In February and March 1935, some 41,650 Poles, Germans, and kulaks were resettled from western to eastern Ukraine. Between June and September 1936, some 69,283 people, for the most part Soviet Poles, were deported from Ukraine to Kazakhstan. Polish diplomats were confused by these developments. Poland was pursuing a policy of equal distance between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany: nonaggression agreements with both, alliances with neither.
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The “Polish Military Organization,” conjured up during the famine in 1933, was sustained as pure bureaucratic fantasy in Soviet Ukraine, then adapted to justify a national terror of Poles throughout the Soviet Union. Stalin gave a first cue in December 1934, asking that the Pole Jerzy Sosnowski be removed from the NKVD. Sosnowski, long before a member of the Polish Military Organization, had been turned by the Cheka and had worked productively for the Soviets for more than a decade. In part because the Soviet state police had been founded by a Polish communist, Feliks Dzierżyński, many of its most prominent officers were Poles, often people recruited in those early days. Yezhov, the NKVD chief, seems to have been threatened by these veteran Polish officers; he was certainly obsessed with Poles generally. Inclined to believe in intricate plots orchestrated by foreign intelligence agencies, he gave pride of place to Poland because Poles, in his view, “know everything.” The investigation of Sosnowski, who was arrested in December 1936, might have brought the historical Polish Military Organization to Yezhov’s attention.
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Yezhov followed Balytskyi’s anti-Polish campaign in Soviet Ukraine, and then reconceptualized it. As the show trials began in Moscow in 1936, Yezhov drew his subordinate Balytskyi into a trap. While prominent communists confessed in Moscow, Balytskyi was reporting from Kiev that the “Polish Military Organization” had been re-created in Soviet Ukraine. No doubt he simply wished to claim attention and resources for himself and his local apparatus at a time of security panic. Yet now, in a turn of events that must have surprised Balytskyi, Yezhov declared that the “Polish Military Organization” was an even
greater
danger than Balytskyi claimed. It was a matter not for the regional NKVD in Kiev but for the central NKVD in Moscow. Balytskyi, who had invented the plot of the “Polish Military Organization,” now lost control of the story. Soon a confession was extracted from the Polish communist Tomasz Dąbal, who claimed to have directed the “Polish Military Organization” in the entire Soviet Union.
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Thanks to Yezhov’s initiative, the “Polish Military Organization” lost any residue of its historical and regional origins, and became simply a threat to the Soviet Union as such. On 16 January 1937 Yezhov presented his theory of a grand Polish conspiracy to Stalin, and then with Stalin’s approval to a plenum of the central committee. In March Yezhov purged the NKVD of Polish officers. Although Balytskyi was not Polish but Ukrainian by nationality, he now found himself in a very awkward position. If the “Polish Military Organization” had been so important, asked Yezhov, why had Balytskyi not been more vigilant? Thus Balytskyi, who had summoned up the specter of the “Polish Military Organization” in the first place, became a victim of his own creation. He yielded his Ukrainian position in May to his former deputy, Izrail Leplevskii—the NKVD officer who carried out the kulak operation in Soviet Ukraine with such vigor. On 7 July Balytskyi was arrested on charges of espionage for Poland; a week later his name was removed from the stadium where Dynamo Kiev played its soccer matches—to be replaced by Yezhov’s. Balytskyi was executed that November.
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In June 1937, when Yezhov introduced the imaginary “Center of Centers” to explain the kulak action and the continuing show trials, he also announced the threat of the equally unreal “Polish Military Organization.” The two, supposedly, were connected. Like the justification for the kulak action, the justification for the Polish action permitted the rewriting of the entirety of Soviet history, so that responsibility for all policy problems could be placed upon enemies, and those enemies clearly defined. In Yezhov’s account, the “Polish Military Organization” had been active in the Soviet Union from the beginning, and had penetrated not only the communist party but the Red Army and the NKVD. It had been invisible (went Yezhov’s argument) precisely because it was so important; it had agents in high places who were able to mask themselves and their works.
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On 11 August 1937, Yezhov issued Order 00485, mandating that the NKVD carry out the “total liquidation of the networks of spies of the Polish Military Organization.” Though issued shortly after the beginning of the kulak operation, Order 00485 notably radicalized the Terror. Unlike Order 00447, which targeted familiar categories of enemies definable at least theoretically by class, Order 00485 seemed to treat a national group as an enemy of the state. To be sure, the kulak order also specified criminals, and was applied to nationalists and political enemies of various kinds. But there was at least a faltering aureole of class analysis. Kulaks as a group could at least be described in Marxist terms. The enmity of the nations of the Soviet Union toward the Soviet project was something else. It looked like an abandonment of the basic socialist premise of the fraternity of peoples.
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Soviet influence in the world, in these years of the Popular Front, depended upon an image of toleration. Moscow’s major claim to moral superiority, in a Europe where fascism and National Socialism were on the rise, and for American southerners journeying from a land of racial discrimination and lynchings of blacks, was as a multicultural state with affirmative action. In the popular Soviet film
Circus
of 1936, for example, the heroine was an American performer who, having given birth to a black child, finds refuge from racism in the Soviet Union.
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Internationalism was not hypocrisy, and ethnic killing was a shock to the Soviet system. The NKVD was composed of many nationalities, and represented a kind of internationalism. When the show trials began in 1936, the heights of the NKVD were dominated by men whose own origins were within the Soviet national minorities, Jews above all. About forty percent of high-ranking NKVD officers had Jewish nationality recorded in their identity documents, as did more than half of the NKVD generals. In the climate of the day, Jews had perhaps more reason than others to resist policies of ethnic destruction. Perhaps to counter the internationalist (or self-preservation) instinct of his officers, Yezhov sent out a special circular assuring them that their task was to punish espionage rather than ethnicity: “On the Fascist-Insurgent, Sabotage, Defeatist, and Terrorist Activity of the Polish Intelligence Service in the USSR.” Its thirty pages expanded upon the theory that Yezhov had already shared with the central committee and with Stalin: that the Polish Military Organization was connected to other espionage “centers” and had penetrated every key Soviet institution.
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Even if the idea of a deep Polish penetration of Soviet institutions persuaded Yezhov and Stalin, it could not serve as the evidentiary basis for individual arrests. There simply was nothing resembling a vast Polish plot in the Soviet Union. NKVD officers had too few leads to follow. Even with a great deal of ingenuity, connections between the Polish state and events in the Soviet Union would be hard to document. The two most obvious groups of Polish citizens, diplomats and communists, were clearly inadequate for a mass killing action. The heyday of Polish espionage in the Soviet Union was long past, and the NKVD knew what there was to be known about what the Poles had tried to do in the late 1920s and early 1930s. To be sure, Polish diplomats still tried to gather intelligence. But they were protected by diplomatic immunity, not very numerous, and under constant surveillance already. For the most part, they knew better by 1937 than to contact Soviet citizens and thereby endanger their lives—this was a time when they themselves were furnished with instructions on how to behave when arrested. Yezhov told Stalin that Polish political émigrés were major “suppliers of spies and provocateur elements in the USSR.” Leading Polish communists were often already in the Soviet Union, and sometimes already dead. Some sixty-nine of the hundred members of the central committee of the Polish party were executed in the USSR. Most of the rest were behind bars in Poland, and so were unavailable for execution. And in any case, these numbers were far too small.
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Precisely because there was no Polish plot, NKVD officers had little choice but to persecute Soviet Poles and other Soviet citizens associated with Poland, Polish culture, or Roman Catholicism. The Polish ethnic character of the operation quickly prevailed in practice, as perhaps it was bound to from the beginning. Yezhov’s letter authorized the arrest of nationalist elements, and of “Polish Military Organization” members
who had yet to be discovered
. These categories were so vague that NKVD officers could apply them to almost anyone of Polish ethnicity or with some connection to Poland. NKVD officers who wished to show the appropriate zeal in carrying out the operation would have to be rather vague about the charges against individual people. Balytskyi’s previous actions against Poles had created a pool of suspects sufficient for a few purges, but this was far from enough. Local NKVD officers would have to take the initiative—not in looking up the card files, as in the kulak operation, but in creating a new paper trail to follow. One Moscow NKVD chief understood the gist of the order: his organization should “destroy the Poles entirely.” His officers looked for Polish names in the telephone book.
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Soviet citizens would have to “unmask” themselves as Polish agents. Because the groups and scenarios of the ostensible Polish plot had to be generated from nothing, torture played an important role in the interrogations. In addition to the traditional conveyer method and the standing method, many Soviet Poles were subjected to a form of collective torture called the “conference method.” Once a large number of Polish suspects had been gathered in a single place, such as the basement of a public building in a town or village of Soviet Ukraine or Soviet Belarus, a policeman would torture one of them in full view of the others. Once the victim had confessed, the others would be urged to spare themselves the same sufferings by confessing as well. If they wanted to avoid pain and injury, they would have to implicate not only themselves but others. In this situation, each person had an incentive to confess as quickly as possible: it was obvious that everyone would be implicated eventually anyway, and a quick confession might at least spare the body. In this way, testimony that implicated an entire group could be assembled very quickly.
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The legal procedures were somewhat different than in the kulak operation, but no less scanty. In the Polish operation, the investigating officer would compose a brief report for each of the prisoners, describing the supposed crime—usually sabotage, terrorism, or espionage—and recommending one of two sentences, death or the Gulag. Every ten days he would submit all of his reports to the regional NKVD chief and a prosecutor. Unlike the troikas of the kulak operation, this two-person commission (a “dvoika”) could not sentence the prisoners by itself, but had to ask for approval from higher authorities. It assembled the reports into an album, noted its recommended sentence for each case, and sent them on to Moscow. In principle, the albums were then reviewed by a central dvoika: Yezhov as the commissar for state security and Andrei Vyshynskii as state prosecutor. In fact, Yezhov and Vyshynskii merely initialed the albums after a hasty review by their subordinates. On a single day, they might finalize two thousand death sentences. The “album method” gave the appearance of a formal review by the highest Soviet authorities. In reality, the fate of each victim was decided by the investigating officer and then more or less automatically confirmed.
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Biographies became death sentences, as attachment to Polish culture or Roman Catholicism became evidence of participation in international espionage. People were sentenced for the most apparently minor of offenses: ten years in the Gulag for owning a rosary, death for not producing enough sugar. Details of everyday life were enough to generate a report, an album entry, a signature, a verdict, a gunshot, a corpse. After twenty days, or two cycles of albums, Yezhov reported to Stalin that 23,216 arrests had already been made in the Polish operation. Stalin expressed his delight: “Very good! Keep on digging up and cleaning out this Polish filth. Eliminate it in the interests of the Soviet Union.”
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In the early stages of the Polish operation, many of the arrests were made in Leningrad, where the NKVD had large offices and where thousands of Poles lived within easy reach. The city had been a traditional place of settlement of Poles since the days of the Russian Empire.