Prisoners of the Polish-Bolshevik War

According to various sources, in the years 1919-1920, between 26,000 and 35,000 prisoners of war (soldiers of the Polish Army, but also of allied formations - the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic, the units of General Stanisław Bułak-Bałachowicz and other anti-Bolshevik units) were taken prisoner by the Russians. Also taken prisoner by the Soviets were 8,000-10,000 soldiers of the 5th Polish Rifle Division (the so-called Siberian Division), who ended up there as a result of fighting in Siberia in 1919, or after the capitulation of this formation in January 1920 near Krasnoyarsk.

The attitude to Polish prisoners of war was not unequivocal. The Bolsheviks, within the framework of proletarian-feudal dogma, treated prisoners and wounded close to class, i.e. rank-and-file soldiers, generally of working-class and peasant origin, quite gently. Officers were in a much worse situation - as representatives of the ruling classes, they could most often not count on humanity, let alone the rules under the Geneva Conventions. In this context, it is important to remember the attitude of lower-level commanders to aggressive Bolshevik propaganda, which, by force of momentum, reproducing slogans from the struggles against white counter-revolution, also called for a ruthless crackdown on 'whites'. This revolutionary overtone was conveyed by the orders of the Red Army command, including Lev Trotsky, which, prior to the decisive stage of the war against 'your Poland', ordered the gentle treatment of enemy prisoners and wounded - but precisely with regard to privates only. It is another matter that the Bolshevik commanders, for the most part, tended to relate humanely to Polish POWs-officers. However, in view of the demoralisation in the ranks of the Red Army, crimes against Polish servicemen, including privates, and civilians were not uncommon. In this field, the 'moles' of Semyon Budyonny's 'Konarmia' and Gaia Dimitrievich Gaia's cavalry corps were particularly notorious.

Some examples of their 'exploits' from the summer of 1920.

During the offensive in Ukraine, Budyonny's sub-commanders burnt down a hospital with 600 wounded soldiers and medical personnel in Berdyczów. On 29 May, several companies of the 50th Borderland Rifle Regiment fell into their hands near Medovka and Novo-Zivotov. The Poles, having run out of ammunition, defended themselves with bayonets and rifle butts. The Cossacks spared no one. The slaughter was later described in his "Diaries" by the writer and then divisional commissar Isaac Babel.

A few days later, the same fate befell the soldiers of another company of this regiment in the village of Bystrzyk. The 30 surrendering soldiers were chopped up with sabres. In July 1920, Budionny's Cossacks murdered officers from the crew of the armoured train "Dowbor-Muśnicki", which surrendered near Fastów after running out of ammunition. Death was avoided by those who did not admit to being officers. On 17 August 1920, Captain Bolesław Zajączkowski's battalion defending itself in Zadwórz near Lwów was felled.

Horrific atrocities marked the route of Gaj Khan's cavalry corps in northern Mazovia. On 4 August, in Ostrołęka, they slaughtered the cavalrymen of Col. Bolesław Roja. On 18-19 August, in captured Płock, their victims included the wounded in the local hospital and an unspecified number of volunteers who had taken part in the defence of the city. In Szydłów near Mława, they massacred seven officers and 92 privates from four companies of the 49th Infantry Regiment with sabres and shovels. 201 participants in this crime, who were later captured by the Polish army, were shot. One of their comrades, who during the massacre enabled a Polish officer to escape, saved his life. Massacres also occurred near the village of Leman on the border with East Prussia, where the Russians cut up 55 soldiers with sabres, and near Chorzele, where 74 prisoners of war were killed after the battle.

In total, it is estimated that some 1,000 POWs were murdered by the units of the 3rd Gaia Corps, and the list of their crimes is augmented by numerous rapes and murders of civilians.

In general, Polish prisoners of war were held in poor conditions. The regime and conditions in the prisoner-of-war camps were no different from those in the NKVD forced labour camps - from the living conditions, to the limited supplies of clothing and footwear, to the clumsy indoctrination. This was due to the pragmatics of the system, but also to the poor economic situation in Soviet Russia. The chance for a larger ration and rations was employment inside and outside the camps. Thus prisoners of war worked in factories, mines, agriculture and logging. Documented data shows that between 1920 and 1921, 1,022 people died in Soviet captivity, and about 100 were executed for escaping from the camp and for other reasons. In turn, according to estimates by the Polish Delegation to the Mixed Commission for Repatriation, some 35% of Polish prisoners of war died of disease in Soviet camps. Contemporary estimates, on the other hand, suggest that the mortality rate of Polish POWs in Soviet camps and during repatriation was several percent higher, at around 20,000 people out of 51,000 Polish POWs in Soviet captivity.

We should add that the Soviets persistently tried to conscript Polish prisoners of war into the Red Army between 1918 and 1921. Few were tempted. According to data from the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPRP, from mid-September to 1 February1921, 186 prisoners of war joined the Polish Red troops. Moreover, in 1920, the Soviet command wanted to form a "Polish Red Army" on the basis of Polish prisoners of war and civilians, but the plans came to nothing, as, although the formation was created on 14 August by an order from Red Army Commander Sergei Kamenev, the recruitment campaign failed.

Until the beginning of the war, Soviet prisoners of war were held in camps in Strzałków, Dąbie, Pikulice and Wadowice, which had been taken over from the partitioners. In 1919, some 7,000 prisoners of war were held there. However, it was only a year later, after the battles of Warsaw and Nieman, that tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war were taken into Polish captivity. It is estimated that in the autumn of 1920 there were 80-85,000 prisoners of war in the above-mentioned camps, as well as in camps No. 7 in Tuchola and Twierdza Brzeska. A large proportion of them were recruited into the White Guard troops of General Boris Peremykin, the Belorussian Bulak-Balakhovichs and the Ukrainian army of Symon Petlura.

Overcrowding in the camps, disastrous sanitary conditions, epidemics of typhus, dysentery, cholera and Spanish flu, led to a high mortality rate - at 17-20% - especially at the turn of 1920/1921. It is estimated that 16-17,000 Soviet POWs died in Polish captivity - 8,000 in Strzalkow, 2,000 in Tuchola and 6-8,000 in other camps. We should add that some contemporary Russian historians now raise this figure to 18-20 thousand victims. From the most recent source data, it appears that the Polish authorities, despite their limited capabilities, successfully fought outbreaks of epidemics in the POW camps. An example is the work of epidemiologist Professor Feliks Przesmycki, who dealt with the cholera epidemic raging in the Strzałków camp in six weeks.

Let us add that at the end of Gorbachev's perestroika and on the eve of the collapse of the USSR, at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, this issue was instrumentally taken up by the Soviet and then Russian authorities, as a weapon to counterbalance Polish efforts to unravel the history of the Katyn massacre and the responsibility of the Stalinist regime for it (or as a response to alleged future, and so far unrealised, Polish claims in this matter).

Intriguing as it is, Poland has legitimately strong arguments in this case, which concern not only the exchange of prisoners of war, but also Polish repatriates from the First World War. Let us quote the extensive account of Professor Roman Dyboski - a prisoner of war of the 5th Polish Rifle Division (the so-called Siberian Division), and in late 1921 and early 1922 an employee of the Polish Delegation to the Mixed Repatriation Commission and the Repatriation and Re-evacuation Delegation operating in Moscow.

"On the basis of the experience gathered in this work, I have to say first of all that the lion's share of those complaints of despairing and embittered repatriates, which rang out in the country at rallies, in the press and in the Sejm Chamber, should have been addressed to the Soviet authorities. Their unheard-of clumsiness and unquestionable ill-will piled obstacles before the Polish repatriation organisations at every turn, of which only one can have a proper idea who himself had been harnessed for some time to the truly Sisyphean work of the Delegation. In the creation of these icebergs, which continually blocked the path of our repatriation ship in the murky waters of the Russian ocean, a major part was played by our greatest enemies: the Polish Communists in Russia. These people were playing - and, as I write this, are still playing - for the last stake in their lives: if they had not succeeded, by paralysing the repatriation campaign, in upsetting relations between Poland and Russia and, at the same time, in embittering the exile masses against Poland as the culprit of their suffering, there would have been no career for them in Russia, just as there is no ground under their feet in Poland. They, too, chiefly sitting in positions of responsibility in the gubernial evacuation offices ("Gub-Ewakach") across Russia and Siberia, worked to systematically obstruct the return to the country of individuals of value, and just as systematically clogged the eszelons with an element diseased, not only physically but also morally, infected with the venom of hatred of Poland, and demoralised by the typically Soviet, complete disruption of the mental link between gainful employment and social welfare. They sent us, instead of the long-awaited Poles, clouds of bolshevik Russian peasants from the Grodno region, swarms of Jews and hosts of masked Soviet agitators. They were responsible for such typical episodes as the one that took place under the windows of the carriage of the Polish ladies from Irkutsk, who had obtained a considerable allowance of food and clothing from the Delegation and distributed it as evenly as possible among the most needy people in their exile, both Belarusians and Poles; The Byelorussians, on the other hand, rallying round the train, made speeches to the effect that, thank God, they were still in a free country, where it was up to them to control the distribution of the government benefits due to them, and that they would not allow themselves to be harmed by the Polish bourgeoisie.

Indeed, an astonishing example of this hypnosis of the masses by platitudes, which is the most astonishing and at the same time the most constant symptom in what is now the least free of all countries in the world. Not for nothing is the official abbreviation of the name of the Republic: R.S.F.S.R. ("Rossiyskaya Sovetskaya Sovetskaya Federatsivnaya Sovetskaya Republika") jokingly translated with the words: "Riedkij słuczaj fienomienalnawo sumasszestvja rasy" ("a rare case of phenomenal madness of the entire tribe"). As a result of the disruption of rail traffic in Russia and the terrible, largely deliberate pandering of the evacuation authorities, the strongest wave of eszelons began to flow towards Moscow at the worst and most difficult time, no longer in summer, but in late autumn and winter. When I left Moscow in January 1921, there were about 150 of them. 1921, there were some 150 on their way from all parts of Russia and Siberia. The eshelons, fuelled only by organised theft of timber, pushed forward only by the deposit of widow's money for million-dollar bribes to railwaymen, fed almost completely (contrary to the treaty obligation) by the Soviet authorities on the way, stopped for weeks at a time at stations, dragged themselves for a month, two months and more from the depths of Russia and Siberia to Moscow, and got there with the last breath, devastated of all supplies, swamped by the sick, with corpses on all brakes. People, often having passed through sacramental typhus on the way, languished after recovering from exhaustion - like Kwaśnica, a soldier of the 5th Division from Siberia, on the fifth Krasnoyarsk prisoner-of-war eszelon, already dead in Moscow itself. There were examples, like the Turkestan eszelon, which travelled two months from Tashkent to Moscow, then stood for a month in Moscow, and then travelled another month from Moscow to the border, four months in total. Like the fifth prisoner-of-war eszelon and the Krasnoyarsk sanitary train, which both stood for three weeks each ready to leave at Krasnoyarsk station, and then two more at Omsk. Like the fourth prisoner of war from Krasnoyarsk, already known throughout Poland, which stood in Orsha for sixteen days, ate dogs and sold out of its coats, except for two per wagon. In addition to these shameful examples for Soviet Russia, at the time I am writing this, there is also the dreadful Kazan escort, which, according to a newspaper report of 22 March 1921, took a whole three months to cover a distance of 1,633 kilometres, and in which 1,948 people out of 1,299 died en route, i.e. two-thirds of the total number of travellers! And from a colleague from the 5th Division, who was returning in the fifth Krasnoyarsk division, I received a letter from the isolation camp in Dęblin, from which I quote the following eloquent paragraph: "We reached the border in great poverty, it was really a miracle, already without bread and fats. We still found the only broad beans we could buy in Orsha, and so, eating this and working along the way to clear the stations of snow, we barely, barely made it. I was so tired and drained of strength that I didn't want to do anything after arriving in Dęblin. In truth, I couldn't walk, and there was no way of thinking - I was like having a newborn baby in front of me. Now it's even worse in Russia: T. came here: he was travelling with the railwaymen, he said there was no way about the sixth transport, he managed to leave on false documents. One box of black flour in Krasnoyarsk costs three million roubles: that was in December; how much it must cost now, and how much in Moscow! On the way we met from Smolensk whole to strings of dead people - terrible things! No one was burying the corpses, they were thrown straight out of the vago ns, and people, dogs and pigs were walking all over them".

Perturbations over prisoners of war began with the cessation of hostilities. On 6 September 1920, the Republic of Poland and Soviet Russia concluded an agreement in Berlin on the exchange of prisoners of war. Its terms were spelt out in the Treaty of Riga: the repatriation agreement, the implementation of which was supervised by the Commissions for the Exchange of Prisoners of War, Refugees, Hostages and Exiles, provided for the gradual release of those included in the exchange. Its timetable was adapted to the logistical possibilities and the huge mass of persons subject to release and repatriation. It is estimated that some 35,000 prisoners of war returned to Poland. Let us add that this was not without difficulties, as in the spring of 1921 the Soviet side began to sabotage the agreement on the exchange of prisoners of war. Under it, 24,000 Soviet prisoners of war were sent to Soviet Russia.

Major exchanges of prisoners of war took place after the conclusion of the Riga peace in March 1921. In the course of these, by the autumn of 1921, 26,000 were returned to Poland, and over 65,000 POWs were transferred to the Russian Federative Soviet Socialist Republic. Prisoners of war were exchanged at the border post in Stolptsy and at Kojdanow station on the Minsk-Baranovichi railway line, as well as at Zdolbunow station on the Rivne-Szepietowka railway line.

There are many indications that the defeat of 1920 became an obsession for Stalin - after all, the obvious culprit behind it. Evidence of this is the crackdown - as part of the Great Purge - on the Red Army's command and officer corps in 1937. Probably not coincidentally, many Soviet prisoners of war from 1920 were also its victims. It is also a convincing thesis that it resulted in Stalin's downright pathological hatred/obsession with Poles and Polishness, which he satisfied in a bloody crackdown on Soviet Poles as part of the NKVD's Polish operation in 1937-1938, as well as the Katyn Massacre of 1940. The answer is hidden by still largely inaccessible documents from the archives of the central bodies of the Soviet authorities and security services.