Polish captivity: how tens of thousands of Russians were destroyed

The problem of the mass death of Red Army soldiers captured during the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1920 has not been studied for a long time. After 1945, it was completely hushed up for politically motivated reasons - the Polish People's Republic was an ally of the USSR.

The change of the political system in Poland in 1989 and 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. On November 3, 1990, the first and last President of the USSR M. Gorbachev issued an order entrusting 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, carry out research work until April 1, 1991 to identify archival materials relating to events and facts from the history of Soviet-Polish bilateral relations, as a result of which damage was caused 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 (at that time - Head of the Department for Supervision of the Execution of Laws on State Security of the USSR General Prosecutor's Office, Member of the Collegium of the Prosecutor General's Office and Senior Assistant to the Prosecutor General of the USSR), this work was carried out under the guidance of the head International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU. The relevant materials were stored in the building of the Central Committee of the CPSU on Staraya Square. However, after the August events of 1991 they all allegedly "disappeared", and further work in this direction was terminated. According to the doctor of historical sciences A.N. Kolesnik, Falin restored the lists of names of Red Army soldiers who died in Polish concentration camps since 1988, but, according to V.M. Falin, after “rebels” broke into his office in August 1991, the lists he had collected, all volumes, disappeared. 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 statesmen of the Russian Federation and other republics of the former. The fact that this happened at the moment when the veil of secrecy was removed from the tragedy of Katyn, Medny, Starobelsk and other places of execution of Poles “gave this natural step of domestic researchers the appearance of a counter-propaganda action, or, as it began to be called, “anti-Katyn”.

The facts and materials that appeared in the press became, according to a number of researchers and scientists, evidence that the Polish military authorities, in violation of international legal acts regulating the conditions for the detention of prisoners of war, caused the Russian side huge moral and material damage, which has yet to be assessed. In this regard, the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation applied in 1998 to the relevant state bodies of the Republic of Poland with a request to initiate a criminal case on the fact the deaths of 83,500 captured Red Army soldiers in 1919-1921

In response to this appeal, the Prosecutor General and Minister of Justice, Hanna Suchocka, categorically stated that “... there will be no investigation into the case of the alleged extermination of captured Bolsheviks in the war of 1919-1920, which the Prosecutor General of Russia demands from Poland. ". Kh. Suhotskaya justified the refusal by the fact that Polish historians “reliably established” the death of 16-18 thousand prisoners of war due to “general post-war conditions”, the existence of “death camps” and “extermination” in Poland is out of the question, since “no special actions aimed at the extermination of prisoners were not carried out. In order to "finally close" the issue of the death of the Red Army soldiers, the Prosecutor General's Office of Poland proposed the creation of a joint Polish-Russian group of scientists to "... examine the archives, study all the documents on this case and prepare an appropriate publication."

Thus, the Polish side qualified the request of the Russian side as unlawful and refused to accept it, although the very fact of the mass death of Soviet prisoners of war in Polish camps was recognized. In November 2000, on the eve of a visit to the Russian Foreign Minister I.S. Ivanov, the Polish media, among the proposed topics of the Polish-Russian negotiations, also named the problem of the death of prisoners of war of the Red Army, updated thanks to the publications of the Kemerovo governor A. Tuleeva in Nezavisimaya Gazeta.

In the same year, a Russian commission was created to investigate the fate of the Red Army soldiers taken prisoner by the Polish in 1920, with the participation of representatives of the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the FSB and the archival service. In 2004, on the basis of a bilateral agreement of December 4, 2000, the first joint attempt was made by historians of the two countries to find the truth on the basis of a detailed study of archives - primarily Polish, since 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 “Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity in 1919-1922”, which makes it possible to clarify the circumstances of the death of the Red Army soldiers. The collection was reviewed by an astronomer Alexey Pamyatnykh- Knight of the Polish Cross of Merit (awarded on April 4, 2011 by the President of Poland B. Komorowski "for special merits in 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. It is argued that "the agreement reached by researchers regarding the number of Red Army soldiers who died in Polish captivity ... closes the possibility of political speculation on the topic, the problem becomes purely historical ...".

However this is not true. It is somewhat premature to say that the agreement of the Russian and Polish compilers of the collection “regarding the number of Red Army soldiers who died in Polish camps from epidemics, hunger and harsh conditions of detention” was reached.

First of all, on a number of aspects, the opinions of the researchers of the two countries seriously diverged, as a result of which the results were published in a common collection, but with different prefaces in . On February 13, 2006, after a telephone conversation between the coordinator of the international project "The Truth about Katyn" historian S.E. Strygin with one of the compilers of the collection, the Russian historian N.E. Eliseeva, it turned out that “in the course of work on the collection, significantly more official documents about extrajudicial executions Polish military personnel of Soviet Red Army prisoners of war. However, only three of them. Copies were made of the rest of the revealed documents about the executions, which are currently stored in the Russian State Military Archive. During the preparation of the publication, very serious contradictions arose in the positions of the Polish and Russian sides. (According to the figurative expression of N.E. Eliseeva « ...it came to hand-to-hand"). Ultimately, these disagreements could not be eliminated and had to be done 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, between the Polish members of the group of compilers of the collection and the Russian historian G.F. Matveev remained large differences on the issue of the number of prisoners of the Red Army. According to Matveev's calculations, the fate of at least 9-11 thousand prisoners remained unclear, who did not die in the camps, but did not return to. In general, Matveev actually pointed to the uncertainty of the fate of about 50 thousand people due to the underestimation by Polish historians of the number of captured Red Army soldiers, and at the same time the number of dead prisoners; discrepancies in data from Polish and Russian documents; cases of execution by the Polish military of captured Red Army soldiers on the spot, without sending them to prisoner of war camps; the incompleteness of the Polish record of the death of prisoners of war; doubtfulness of data from Polish documents during the war.

Thirdly, the second volume of documents and materials on the problem of the death of prisoners of Polish concentration camps, which was supposed to be published shortly after the first one, has not been published so far. And “the one that was published lies forgotten in the Main Directorate and the Federal Archival Agency of Russia. And no one is in a hurry to get these documents off the shelf.”

Fourth, according to some Russian researchers, “despite the fact that the collection “Red Army men in Polish captivity in 1919-1922” compiled under the dominant opinion of Polish historians, most of its documents and materials testify to such a purposeful wild barbarism and inhuman treatment to the Soviet prisoners of war that the transition of this problem to the "class of purely historical" is out of the question! Moreover, the documents placed in the collection irrefutably testify that in relation to prisoners of war of the Soviet Red Army, primarily ethnic Russians and, the Polish authorities pursued a policy extermination by hunger and cold, rod and bullet”, i.e. “testify to such purposeful wild barbarism and inhuman treatment of Soviet prisoners of war that this should be qualified as war crimes, killings and ill-treatment of prisoners of war with elements of genocide.

Fifth, despite the Soviet-Polish study and the publications available on the subject, the state of the documentary base on this issue is still such that there are simply no exact data on the number of dead Red Army soldiers. (I don’t want to believe that the Polish side also “lost” them, as was done with documents about the Katyn events allegedly obtained from Russian archives in 1992, after publications appeared that these materials were made in the years “ perestroika" fakes).

Thesis situation with the death of the Red Army is as follows. As a result of the war started in 1919 against Soviet Russia, the Polish army captured over 150 thousand Red Army soldiers. In total, together with political prisoners and interned civilians, in Polish captivity and concentration camps turned out to be more than 200 thousand Red Army soldiers, civilians, White Guards, fighters of anti-Bolshevik and nationalist (Ukrainian and Belarusian) formations. In Polish captivity in 1919-1922. Red Army soldiers were destroyed in the following main ways:

How many died and why

From the first to the last battles of the Soviet-Polish war, the parties took prisoners. The question of their number is still debatable today. An imperfect accounting system, its neglect during the war, abuses and errors contribute to a wide range of estimates of the number of prisoners of war (from 110 thousand according to Polish estimates to more than 200 thousand according to Russian authors). The most famous researcher of this issue in Russia, Professor of Moscow State University G. F. Matveev, as a result of many years of studying the available data, came to the conclusion that the Polish army captured about 157 thousand Red Army soldiers. By September 1922, more than 78 thousand people returned to their homeland. Controversy is raised by the question of the number of those who died in captivity. Polish historians believe - 16-18 thousand out of 110 thousand (16% of all prisoners), G. F. Matveev - 25-28 thousand (16-18%), taking into account the known facts of accounting errors. The remaining prisoners were released by the Poles or liberated by the Red Army during the war, fled (up to 7 thousand) or joined anti-Soviet formations (about 20 thousand).

Prisoners taken in the Battle of Warsaw

The Polish government considered the death rate of prisoners within 7% to be normal. This estimate does not cause sharp disputes - 5-7% of the prisoners inevitably died at that time due to diseases, wounds received in battle and other natural causes. Accordingly, the mortality rate of 16-18% is recognized as high, due to difficult conditions of detention (Polish historians, for example, Z. Karpus, do not question this). Part of the prisoners died during transportation and at distribution stations, which, like some camps, were completely unprepared to receive a large number of prisoners. Food difficulties in Poland, the poor condition of the camp premises (which made it difficult to maintain normal sanitary conditions), lack of clothing, medicines, rough and sometimes cruel treatment of prisoners also played their role.

In 1922, the Poles returned to Russia half of the 157 thousand prisoners

Most of the dead are the result of diseases: typhus, dysentery, influenza, and even cholera. During outbreaks of epidemics, 30-60% of patients died. The Polish government and the Sejm were forced to respond to these incidents and, although not always in a timely manner, improve the situation in the camps in Strzalkovo, Tucholi, Brest-Litovsk and others, distinguished by unsanitary conditions, cruelty and negligence of commandants.

Soviet prisoners of war

The camp in the Brest Fortress was closed, as it turned out to be impossible to keep prisoners there in normal conditions. Captain Wagner and lieutenant Malinovsky were arrested and brought to justice, who beat and shot captured Latvians and Russians in the Strzalkovo camp and increased the death rate by their crimes.

Were the Polish POW camps in 1919 similar to those of the Nazis?

Additional medical staff, humanitarian aid from international charitable organizations were sent to the camps, and in 1920 the food situation improved. The camps were visited by inspectors from the Polish government and the League of Nations, who promoted change.

"Anti-Katyn"

The story of prisoners of war adds to the tragedy that it was and remains the subject of political bargaining and propaganda material. During the heyday of the socialist community, the USSR was silent about it, and Polish politicians did not remember the Katyn massacres. When they remembered, they were opposed by captured Red Army soldiers. Moskovsky Komsomolets (January 27, 99), Nezavisimaya Gazeta (April 10, 2007), Stringer News Agency (April 12, 2011) and many other media have repeatedly written about Polish camps as Nazi death camps. Poland allegedly destroyed up to 90 and even 100 thousand Russians there, and therefore Russia should not, and it “suffices to apologize to the Poles” for Katyn.

Camp Tuchol

These texts, based on statistical balancing act and hardly representative collections of examples of Poles' cruelty to prisoners, push the reader to think about Poland, standing on a par with Nazi Germany, deliberately exterminating Russians, and today denying the crimes. In this field, the indisputably outstanding professional and undoubted Doctor of Historical Sciences V. Medinsky, whose credo: history is the servant of politics, is especially noticeable.

Medinsky hinted that the Poles killed in 1919-22. 100 thousand Russians

In the article “Where did 100 thousand captured Red Army soldiers disappear?” (Komsomolskaya Pravda, 11/10/2014) he accused Polish historians of underestimating the number of dead prisoners and stated that 100 thousand people "remained in the Polish land." The Bolsheviks in the early 1920s were more modest, talking about 60 thousand. Medinsky also called analogies with events that took place 20 years later “inevitable”. Poles also add fuel to the fire of accusations, for example, Polish Foreign Minister Grzegorz Schetyna, who insisted in 2015 that the monument to the dead Red Army soldiers in Krakow should not have inscriptions that the Poles shot prisoners, and it is preferable to focus on other causes of death.

Prisoners and guards in Bobruisk, 1919

Despite the availability of the results of serious scientific research on the issue of Polish captivity, Medinsky has many supporters in the public field. For example, on March 17, 2016, Literaturnaya Gazeta ended an article about the Red Army soldiers captured by the Poles with a rhetorical assertion that the terrible picture of captivity in Poland did not fundamentally differ from the camps of Nazi Germany.

For comparison

different. Compared to the Nazis, Poles seem to be vegetarians. In the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, which really purposefully destroyed people, not 16-18%, but 60-62% of Soviet prisoners died (data from German historians Ubershar Gerd R., Wolfram V.). There were no representatives of the Red Cross, parcels and letters from home, the German court did not prosecute Dr. Mengele or the commandant of Auschwitz R. Höss, and camp inspectors proposed measures far from being aimed at improving the maintenance of prisoners. The situation of the Red Army in Poland in 1919-1922. It was often very difficult, and often as a result of criminal acts, and even more often inaction, but the comparison with German concentration camps is unfair.

In 1920, more than 4 million cases of typhoid fever were registered in the RSFSR

The Polish government, which opened the country to international organizations, was interested in preserving before them and their own public opinion the image of a civilized government, containing prisoners of war in humane conditions. It didn't always work out. Regarding the main cause of high mortality - epidemics - it is worth noting that in Poland itself at that time tens of thousands of people were ill with typhus, many died due to lack of medicines and weakness. Against the backdrop of general devastation and epidemics among their own population, the last thing the authorities thought about was providing Soviet prisoners with medicines. There were no antibiotics, and without them, the mortality rate from the same typhus can reach 60%. At the same time, Polish doctors became infected and died, saving prisoners. In September-October 1919, 2 doctors, 1 medical student and 1 orderly died in Brest-Litovsk.

Bobruisk, 1919

Typhus also raged in Russia - in January 1922, Izvestia of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee reported that in 1920 more than 3 million cases of typhus and more than 1 million relapsing were registered. Epidemics raged before - only in the winter of 1915-1916, according to German historians (for example, R. Nachtigal), they claimed up to 400 thousand lives of prisoners taken by the Russian Empire on the fronts of the First World War (16% of the total). No one calls this tragedy a genocide. As well as the high mortality rate of captured Germans in the USSR during World War II and in 1946-47, when it reached 25% or more in the event of epidemics (in total, according to the NKVD, before 1955, 14.9% died in captivity of the USSR prisoners).

The death of 25–28 thousand Soviet prisoners of war (16–18%) has a complex of reasons, both objective (epidemics, difficulties with medicines and food) and subjective (unsanitary conditions, cruelty and Russophobia of individual camp commanders and, in general, the negligent attitude of the Polish government to the lives of the Red Army). But this cannot be called a planned extermination initiated by the top leadership of the Polish state. G. F. Matveev states that the prisoners of war not only suffered, and not in all camps. They could meet religious needs, learn to read, thousands of them worked in agriculture and in private institutions, they could read newspapers, receive packages, organize camp creative events, attend buffets, and after the conclusion of peace, even organize communist camp cells (hardly like to the Nazi concentration camps). Witnesses wrote that many prisoners in their own way are glad to be in captivity, since they no longer need to fight. The history of Polish captivity is ambiguous, it is much more complicated than Katyn, Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Most importantly: in 1919-1922. there was no extermination program, but the fruits of terrible wars and the devastation, hatred and death they brought.

Fundraising began in Russia to erect a monument to the Red Army soldiers who died in Polish concentration camps. The Russian Military Historical Society is engaged in collecting money, which published the following message on its website:

“More than 1,200 Red Army prisoners of war who died in concentration camps during the Soviet-Polish war of 1919-1921 in the vicinity of Krakow were buried at the military burial site of the Krakow City Memorial Cemetery. The names of most of them are unknown. To bring back the memory of them is our duty to the descendants.”

According to historian Nikolai Malishevsky, a scandal erupted in Poland after that. The Polish side is outraged: it sees this as an attempt by Russia to "distort history" and "divert attention from Katyn." The stupidity and wretchedness of such reasoning is obvious, because in fact the Poles remained true to their "best traditions" - to portray themselves as an "eternal victim" on the part of either Russian or German aggressors, while completely ignoring their own crimes. And they really have something to hide!

Let us cite an article on this subject by the same Nikolai Malishevsky, who knows the history of the Polish Gulag very well. I think that the Poles have absolutely nothing to object to the facts given in this material ...

The Red Army soldiers ended up near Warsaw not as a result of an attack on Europe, as Polish propagandists lie, but as a result of a counterattack by the Red Army. This counterattack was a response to the attempt of the Polish blitzkrieg in the spring of 1920 with the aim of securing Vilna, Kyiv, Minsk, Smolensk and (if possible) Moscow, where Pilsudski dreamed of inscribed on the walls of the Kremlin with his own hand: “It is forbidden to speak Russian!”

Unfortunately, in the countries of the former USSR, the topic of mass deaths in Polish concentration camps of tens of thousands of Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Baltic states, Jews, and Germans has not yet been adequately covered.

As a result of the war started by Poland against Soviet Russia, the Poles captured over 150,000 Red Army soldiers. In total, together with political prisoners and internees in Polish captivity and concentration camps, there were more than 200 thousand Red Army soldiers, civilians, White Guards, fighters of anti-Bolshevik and nationalist (Ukrainian and Belarusian) formations ...

Planned genocide

The military GULAG of the second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is more than a dozen concentration camps, prisons, sorting stations, concentration points and various military facilities like the Brest Fortress (there were four camps here) and Modlin. Strshalkovo (in western Poland between Poznan and Warsaw), Pikulice (in the south, near Przemysl), Dombe (near Krakow), Wadowice (in southern Poland), Tuchole, Shiptyurno, Bialystok, Baranovichi, Molodechino, Vilna, Pinsk, Bobruisk ...

And also - Grodno, Minsk, Pulawy, Powazki, Lancut, Kovel, Stry (in the western part of Ukraine), Shchelkovo ... Tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers found themselves in Polish captivity after the Soviet-Polish war of 1919-1920 found a terrible, painful death here .

The attitude of the Polish side towards them was very clearly expressed by the commandant of the camp in Brest, who declared in 1919: “You Bolsheviks wanted to take our lands away from us – well, I will give you land. I have no right to kill you, but I will feed you in such a way that you will die yourself. The words did not match the deeds. According to the memoirs of one of those who arrived from Polish captivity in March 1920, “For 13 days we did not receive bread, on the 14th day, it was at the end of August, we received about 4 pounds of bread, but very rotten, moldy ... The patients were not treated, and they were dying by the dozens ...”.

From a report on a visit to the camps in Brest-Litovsk by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in the presence of a doctor of the French military mission in October 1919:

“From the guardrooms, as well as from the former stables in which the prisoners of war are housed, a sickening smell emanates. Prisoners chilly huddle around a makeshift stove, where several logs are burning - the only way to heat. At night, hiding from the first cold weather, they fit in close rows in groups of 300 people in poorly lit and poorly ventilated barracks, on boards, without mattresses and blankets. Most of the prisoners are dressed in rags... Complaints. They are the same and boil down to the following: we are starving, we are freezing, when will we be released? ...Findings. This summer, due to overcrowding of premises unsuitable for habitation; joint close living of healthy prisoners of war and infectious patients, many of whom immediately died; malnutrition, as evidenced by numerous cases of malnutrition; edema, hunger during the three months of stay in Brest - the camp in Brest-Litovsk was a real necropolis ... Two severe epidemics devastated this camp in August and September - dysentery and typhus. The consequences were aggravated by the close cohabitation of the sick and the healthy, the lack of medical care, food and clothing ... The record of mortality was set in early August, when 180 people died of dysentery in one day ... Between July 27 and September 4, t .e. in 34 days, 770 Ukrainian prisoners of war and internees died in the Brest camp. It should be recalled that the number of prisoners imprisoned in the fortress in August gradually reached, if there is no mistake, 10,000 people, and on October 10 it was 3861 people.

Later, “due to unsuitable conditions,” the camp in the Brest Fortress was closed. However, in other camps the situation was often even worse. In particular, a member of the Commission of the League of Nations, Professor Thorvald Madsen, who visited the "ordinary" Polish camp for Red Army prisoners in Wadowice at the end of November 1920, called it "one of the most terrible things he had seen in his life." In this camp, as the former prisoner Kozerovsky recalled, the prisoners were "beaten around the clock." An eyewitness recalls: “Long rods were always at the ready ... two soldiers caught in a neighboring village were spotted in my presence ... Suspicious people were often transferred to a special penal hut, almost no one left from there. They fed once a day with a decoction of dried vegetables and a kilogram of bread for 8 people. There were cases when starving Red Army soldiers ate carrion, garbage and even hay. In the Shchelkovo camp, prisoners of war are forced to carry their own feces instead of horses. They carry plows and harrows" ( WUA RF.F.0384.Op.8.D.18921.P.210.L.54-59).

Conditions were not the best in transfers and in prisons, where political prisoners were also kept. The head of the distribution station in Pulawy, Major Khlebovsky, very eloquently described the situation of the Red Army men: "Unbearable prisoners, in order to spread unrest and enzymes in Poland, constantly eat potato peelings from the dunghill." In just 6 months of the autumn-winter period of 1920-1921, 900 prisoners of war out of 1,100 died in Pulawy. The deputy head of the medical service of the front, Major Hackbeil, most eloquently said about what the Polish concentration camp was like at the assembly station in the Belarusian Molodechno: “The prison camp at the collection station for prisoners was a real torture chamber. No one took care of these unfortunates, therefore it is not surprising that a person unwashed, undressed, poorly fed and placed in inappropriate conditions as a result of infection was doomed only to death. In Bobruisk “There were up to 1600 captured Red Army soldiers(as well as sentenced to death Belarusian peasants of the Bobruisk district. - Auth.), most of them completely naked»...

According to the testimony of a Soviet writer, an employee of the Cheka in the 1920s, Nikolai Ravich, who was arrested by the Poles in 1919 and visited the prisons of Minsk, Grodno, Powazki and the Dombe camp, the cells were so crowded that only the lucky ones slept on bunk beds. In the Minsk prison, there were lice everywhere in the cell, and the cold was especially felt, since outer clothing was taken away. “In addition to an eighth of bread (50 grams), hot water was relied on in the morning and evening, at 12 o’clock the same water seasoned with flour and salt.” Transit point in Powazki "was crammed with Russian prisoners of war, most of whom were cripples with artificial arms and legs." The German revolution, Ravich writes, freed them from the camps and they spontaneously went through Poland to their homeland. But in Poland they were detained by special barriers and driven to camps, and some to forced labor.

The Poles themselves were horrified

Most of the Polish concentration camps were built in a very short period of time, some were built by the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. For the long-term maintenance of prisoners, they were completely unsuitable. For example, the camp in Dombe near Krakow was a whole city with numerous streets and squares. Instead of houses, there are barracks with loose wooden walls, many without wooden floors. All this is surrounded by rows of barbed wire. Conditions for keeping prisoners in winter: “Most without shoes are completely barefoot... There are almost no beds and bunks... There is no straw or hay at all. They sleep on the ground or boards. There are very few blankets." From a letter from the chairman of the Russian-Ukrainian delegation at the peace talks with Poland, Adolf Ioffe, to the chairman of the Polish delegation, Jan Dombsky, dated January 9, 1921: “In Domba, most of the prisoners are barefoot, and in the camp at the headquarters of the 18th division, most do not have any clothes.”

The situation in Bialystok is evidenced by the letters of a military physician and the head of the sanitary department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, General Zdzislaw Gordynsky-Yuchnovich, preserved in the Central Military Archive. In December 1919, in desperation, he reported to the head physician of the Polish Army about his visit to the marshalling yard in Bialystok:

“I visited the prison camp in Bialystok and now, under the first impression, I dared to turn to Mr. General as the chief doctor of the Polish troops with a description of the terrible picture that appears before the eyes of everyone who enters the camp ... Again, the same criminal neglect of one's duties all the bodies operating in the camp have brought disgrace on our name, on the Polish army, just as it happened in Brest-Litovsk... An unimaginable filth and disorder reigns in the camp. There are heaps of human waste at the doors of the barracks, which are trampled and carried throughout the camp by thousands of feet. The sick are so weak that they are unable to walk to the latrines. Those, in turn, are in such a state that it is impossible to approach the seats, since the entire floor is covered with a thick layer of human feces. The barracks are overcrowded, among the healthy there are a lot of sick people. According to my information, among the 1,400 prisoners there are no healthy people at all. Covered in rags, they cling to each other, trying to keep warm. A stench reigns, emanating from patients with dysentery and gangrene, legs swollen from hunger. Two especially seriously ill patients lay in their own feces, flowing from torn trousers. They did not have the strength to move to a dry place. What a terrible picture."

Andrey Matskevich, a former prisoner of the Polish camp in Bialystok, later recalled that a prisoner who was lucky received a day "a small portion of black bread weighing about ½ pound (200 gr.), One shard of soup, more like slop, and boiling water."

The concentration camp in Strzalkowo, located between Poznan and Warsaw, was considered the most terrible. It appeared at the turn of 1914-1915 as a German camp for prisoners from the fronts of the First World War on the border between Germany and the Russian Empire - near the road connecting the two border areas - Strzalkovo from the Prussian side and Sluptsy from the Russian side. After the end of the First World War, it was decided to liquidate the camp. However, instead, he moved from the Germans to the Poles and began to be used as a concentration camp for prisoners of war of the Red Army. As soon as the camp became Polish (since May 12, 1919), the death rate of prisoners of war in it increased more than 16 times during the year. On July 11, 1919, by order of the Ministry of Defense of the Commonwealth, it was given the name "prisoner of war camp No. 1 near Strzałkowo" (Obóz Jeniecki Nr 1 pod Strzałkowem).

After the conclusion of the Riga Peace Treaty, the concentration camp in Strshalkovo was also used to hold internees, including Russian White Guards, servicemen of the so-called Ukrainian People's Army and the formations of the Belarusian "father" - ataman Stanislav Bulak-Bulakhovich. What happened in this concentration camp is evidenced not only by documents, but also by publications of the then press.

In particular, the "New Courier" of January 4, 1921 described in a then sensational article the shocking fate of a detachment of several hundred Latvians. These soldiers, led by commanders, deserted from the Red Army and crossed over to the Polish side in order to return to their homeland in this way. They were received very cordially by the Polish military. Before they were sent to the camp, they were given a certificate that they voluntarily went over to the side of the Poles. Looting began already on the way to the camp. All clothes were removed from the Latvians, with the exception of underwear. And those who managed to hide at least part of their belongings were taken away in Strzalkovo. They were left in rags, without shoes. But this is a trifle compared to the systematic abuse they were subjected to in the concentration camp. It all started with 50 blows with barbed wire whips, while the Latvians were told that they were Jewish mercenaries and would not leave the camp alive. More than 10 people died from blood poisoning. After that, the prisoners were left without food for three days, forbidding them to go out for water on pain of death. Two were shot for no reason. Most likely, the threat would have been carried out, and not a single Latvian would have left the camp alive, if his superiors - Captain Wagner and Lieutenant Malinovsky - had not been arrested and brought to justice by the commission of inquiry.

During the investigation, among other things, it turned out that walking around the camp, accompanied by corporals with wire whips and beating prisoners, was Malinovsky's favorite pastime. If the beaten groaned or asked for mercy, he was shot. For the murder of a prisoner, Malinovsky encouraged sentries with 3 cigarettes and 25 Polish marks. The Polish authorities tried to quickly hush up the scandal and the case ...

In November 1919, the military authorities reported to the commission of the Polish Sejm that the largest Polish prison camp No. 1 in Strzalkowo was "very well equipped." In fact, at that time the roofs of the camp barracks were full of holes, and they were not equipped with bunks. It was probably believed that for the Bolsheviks this was good. Red Cross spokeswoman Stefania Sempolovska wrote from the camp: "The communist barracks are so overcrowded that the suffocated prisoners were unable to lie down and stood propping each other up." The situation in Strzalkovo did not change in October 1920 either: “Clothes and shoes are very scarce, most go barefoot ... There are no beds - they sleep on straw ... Due to lack of food, prisoners busy peeling potatoes stealthily eat them raw.”

The report of the Russian-Ukrainian delegation states: “Keeping prisoners in their underwear, the Poles treated them not as people of equal race, but as slaves. The beating of prisoners was practiced at every turn ... ". Eyewitnesses say: “Every day, those arrested are driven out into the street and instead of walking they are driven on a run, ordering them to fall into the mud ... If a prisoner refuses to fall or, having fallen, cannot get up, exhausted, he is beaten with butts.”

Polish Russophobes spared neither Reds nor Whites

As the largest of the camps, Strzalkovo was designed for 25,000 prisoners. In reality, the number of prisoners sometimes exceeded 37 thousand. The numbers changed rapidly as people died like flies in the cold. Russian and Polish compilers of the collection "Red Army men in Polish captivity in 1919-1922. Sat. documents and materials" claim that "in Strzalkovo in 1919-1920. about 8 thousand prisoners died. At the same time, the committee of the RCP(b), operating underground in the Strzalkovo camp, in its report to the Soviet Commission on Prisoners of War in April 1921, stated that: “In the last epidemic of typhus and dysentery, 300 people each died. per day ... the serial number of the list of the buried has exceeded the 12th thousand ... ". Such a statement about the huge mortality in Strzalkovo is not the only one.

Despite claims by Polish historians that the situation in Polish concentration camps improved once again by 1921, the documents show otherwise. The minutes of the meeting of the Mixed (Polish-Russian-Ukrainian) Repatriation Commission dated July 28, 1921 noted that in Strzalkow “The command, as if in retaliation, after the first arrival of our delegation, sharply intensified its repressions ... Red Army soldiers are beaten and tortured for any reason and without reason ... the beatings have taken the form of an epidemic.” In November 1921, when, according to Polish historians, “the situation in the camps had radically improved,” employees of the RUD described the living quarters for prisoners in Strzalkow as follows: “Most of the barracks are underground, damp, dark, cold, with broken windows, broken floors and thin roofs. Openings in the roofs allow you to freely admire the starry sky. Those who fit in them get wet and chill day and night ... There is no lighting.

The fact that the Polish authorities did not consider the “Russian Bolshevik prisoners” as people is also evidenced by the following fact: in the largest Polish prisoner of war camp in Strzalkovo, for 3 (three) years they could not resolve the issue of sending natural needs to prisoners of war at night. There were no toilets in the barracks, and the camp administration, on pain of execution, forbade leaving the barracks after 6 pm. Therefore, the prisoners "were forced to send natural needs to the pots, from which you then have to eat."

The second largest Polish concentration camp, located in the area of ​​​​the city of Tuchola (Tucheln, Tuchola, Tucholi, Tuchola, Tuchola, Tuchol), can rightfully challenge Strzalkovo for the title of the most terrible. Or at least the most disastrous for humans. It was built by the Germans during World War I, in 1914. Initially, the camp held mainly Russians, later Romanian, French, English and Italian prisoners of war joined them. Since 1919, the camp began to be used by the Poles to concentrate soldiers and commanders of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian formations and civilians who sympathized with the Soviet regime. In December 1920, Natalia Kreutz-Velezhinskaya, a representative of the Polish Red Cross Society, wrote: “The camp in Tukholi is the so-called. dugouts, which are entered by stairs going down. On both sides there are bunks on which the prisoners sleep. There are no senniks, straw, blankets. No heat due to irregular fuel supply. Lack of linen, clothing in all departments. Most tragic are the conditions of the new arrivals, who are transported in unheated wagons, without proper clothing, cold, hungry and tired... After such a journey, many of them are sent to the hospital, while the weaker ones die.”

From a letter from a White Guard: “... The internees are placed in barracks and dugouts. Those are completely unsuitable for winter time. The barracks are made of thick corrugated iron, covered on the inside with thin wooden panels, which have burst in many places. The door and, to some extent, the windows are fitted very badly, it is desperately blowing out of them... The internees are not even given bedding under the pretext of "malnutrition of the horses." We are thinking about the coming winter with extreme anxiety.”(Letter from Tucholi, October 22, 1921).

The State Archive of the Russian Federation contains the memoirs of Lieutenant Kalikin, who passed through the concentration camp in Tukholi. The lieutenant, who was lucky enough to survive, writes: “Even in Thorn, all sorts of horrors were told about Tuchol, but the reality surpassed all expectations. Imagine a sandy plain not far from the river, fenced with two rows of barbed wire, inside which dilapidated dugouts are located in regular rows. Not a tree, not a blade of grass anywhere, only sand. Not far from the main gate are corrugated iron barracks. When you pass them at night, there is some strange, soul-crushing sound, as if someone is quietly sobbing. During the day, from the sun in the barracks, it is unbearably hot, at night it is cold ... When our army was interned, the Polish Minister Sapieha was asked what would happen to it. “She will be treated as the honor and dignity of Poland require,” he answered proudly. Was Tuchol really necessary for this "honor"? So, we arrived in Tuchol and settled in iron barracks. The cold came, and the stoves were not heated for lack of firewood. A year later, 50% of the women and 40% of the men who were here fell ill, mainly with tuberculosis. Many of them have died. Most of my acquaintances died, and there were also those who hanged themselves.”

Red Army soldier Valuev, said that at the end of August 1920 he was with other prisoners: “We were sent to the Tukholi camp. There lay the wounded, not bandaged for whole weeks, their wounds wormed. Many of the wounded died, 30-35 people were buried every day. The wounded were lying in cold barracks without food and medicine.

In frosty November 1920, the Tuchol hospital resembled a death conveyor: “Hospital buildings are huge barracks, in most cases made of iron, like hangars. All the buildings are dilapidated and damaged, there are holes in the walls through which you can stick your hand ... The cold is usually terrible. They say that during the night frosts, the walls are covered with ice. The patients lie on terrible beds ... All on dirty mattresses without bedding, only ¼ has some blankets, all covered with dirty rags or a blanket made of paper.

Commissioner of the Russian Red Cross Society Stefania Sempolovskaya about the November (1920) inspection in Tuchol: “The patients lie on terrible beds, without bed linen, only a fourth of them have blankets. The wounded complain of the terrible cold, which not only interferes with the healing of wounds, but, according to doctors, increases the pain of healing. Sanitary personnel complain about the complete absence of dressings, cotton wool and bandages. I saw bandages drying in the forest. Typhus and dysentery are widespread in the camp, which has penetrated to the prisoners working in the district. The number of patients in the camp is so great that one of the barracks in the communist department has been turned into an infirmary. On November 16, more than seventy patients were lying there. A significant part of the earth."

Mortality from wounds, illnesses and frostbite was such that, according to the conclusion of the American representatives, in 5-6 months no one should have remained in the camp at all. Stefania Sempolovskaya, a representative of the Russian Red Cross Society, assessed the death rate among prisoners in a similar way: "... Tuchola: The death rate in the camp is so high that, according to the calculations made by me with one of the officers, with the mortality that was in October (1920), the entire camp would have died out in 4-5 months."

The emigrant Russian press, published in Poland and, to put it mildly, not sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, directly wrote about Tucholi as a "death camp" for the Red Army. In particular, the emigrant newspaper Svoboda, published in Warsaw and completely dependent on the Polish authorities, reported in October 1921 that at that time a total of 22 thousand people had died in the Tuchol camp. A similar figure of the dead is also given by the head of the II department of the General Staff of the Polish Army (military intelligence and counterintelligence), Lieutenant Colonel Ignacy Matushevsky.

In his report dated February 1, 1922, to the office of the Minister of War of Poland, General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, Ignacy Matuszewski states: “From the materials at the disposal of the II Department ... it should be concluded that these facts of escapes from the camps are not limited only to Strzalkovo, but also occur in all other camps, both for communists and for white internees. These escapes are caused by the conditions in which the communists and the internees find themselves (lack of fuel, linen and clothing, poor food, and long waiting times to leave for Russia). The camp in Tukholi, which the internees call the "death camp" became especially famous (about 22,000 captured Red Army soldiers died in this camp).

Analyzing the content of the document signed by Matushevsky, Russian researchers, first of all, emphasize that it “was not a personal message from a private individual, but an official response to the order of the Minister of War of Poland No. 65/22 dated January 12, 1922, with a categorical instruction to the head of the II Department of the General Staff: “... provide an explanation under what conditions 33 communists escaped from the camp prisoners of Strzalkovo and who is responsible for this. Such orders are usually given to the special services when it is required to establish the true picture of what happened with absolute certainty. It was no coincidence that the Minister instructed Matuszewski to investigate the circumstances of the Communists' escape from Strzalkovo. The Chief of the II Department of the General Staff in 1920-1923 was the most informed person in Poland on the question of the real state of affairs in the prisoner-of-war and internee camps. The officers of the II Division subordinated to him were engaged not only in “sorting” the arriving prisoners of war, but also controlled the political situation in the camps. Matushevsky was simply obliged to know the real state of affairs in the camp in Tukholi due to his official position.

Therefore, there can be no doubt that long before writing his letter of February 1, 1922, Matushevsky had exhaustive, documented and verified information about the death of 22,000 captured Red Army soldiers in the Tukholi camp. Otherwise, one would have to be politically suicidal in order to inform the leadership of the country, on one's own initiative, of unverified facts of such a level, especially on a problem that is at the center of a high-profile diplomatic scandal! Indeed, at that time passions had not yet cooled down in Poland after the famous note of the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR Georgy Chicherin dated September 9, 1921, in which he in the harshest terms accused the Polish authorities of the death of 60,000 Soviet prisoners of war.

In addition to Matushevsky's report, the reports of the Russian émigré press about the huge number of deaths in Tukholi are actually confirmed by the reports of the hospital services. In particular, regarding “A clear picture of the death of Russian prisoners of war can be seen from the Tukholi “death camp”, which had official statistics, but even then only during certain periods of the prisoners’ stay there. According to this, although not complete, statistics, from the moment the infirmary was opened in February 1921 (and the winter months of 1920-1921 were the most difficult for prisoners of war) and until May 11 of the same year, there were 6491 epidemic diseases in the camp, and 17294 non-epidemic ones. – 23785 diseases. The number of prisoners in the camp during this period did not exceed 10-11 thousand, so more than half of the prisoners there had been ill with epidemic diseases, while each of the prisoners had to be ill at least twice in 3 months. Officially, 2561 deaths were registered during this period, i.e. in 3 months, at least 25% of the total number of prisoners of war died.

About mortality in Tukholi in the worst months of 1920/1921 (November, December, January and February), according to Russian researchers, “We can only guess. It must be assumed that it was no less than 2,000 people a month. When assessing mortality in Tucholi, it must also be remembered that the representative of the Polish Red Cross Society, Kreutz-Velezhinsky, in her report on visiting the camp in December 1920, noted that: “Most tragic are the conditions of the new arrivals, who are transported in unheated wagons, without proper clothing, cold, hungry and tired... After such a journey, many of them are sent to the hospital, and the weaker ones die.” Mortality in such echelons reached 40%. Those who died in trains, although they were considered sent to the camp and were buried in camp burial grounds, were not officially recorded anywhere in the general camp statistics. Their number could only be taken into account by officers of the II department, who supervised the reception and "sorting" of prisoners of war. Also, apparently, the mortality of newly arrived prisoners of war who died in quarantine was not reflected in the final camp reporting.

In this context, of particular interest is not only the above-cited testimony of the head of the II Department of the Polish General Staff Matuszewski about deaths in a concentration camp, but also the memories of local residents of Tucholi. According to them, back in the 1930s, there were many plots here, "on which the earth collapsed underfoot, and human remains protruded from it"…

... The military GULAG of the second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth existed for a relatively short time - about three years. But during this time he managed to destroy tens of thousands of human lives. The Polish side still recognizes the death of "16-18 thousand". According to Russian and Ukrainian scientists, researchers and politicians, in reality this figure could be about five times higher...

Nikolai Malishevsky, "Eye of the Planet"

In this regard, finding out the losses in captivity of one or another side of the Soviet-Polish war can arm the parties with new arguments in the international political dialogue.

In addition to the captured Red Army soldiers, there were two more groups of Russian prisoners in the Polish camps. These were soldiers of the old Russian army who, at the end of the First World War, tried to return to Russia from German and Austrian prison camps, as well as interned soldiers of the white army of General Bredov. The situation of these groups was also appalling; due to theft in the kitchen, the prisoners were forced to switch to "pasture", which they "got hold of" from the local population or in neighboring gardens; did not receive firewood for heating and cooking. The leadership of the white army provided these prisoners with little financial support, which partially alleviated their situation. Assistance from Western states was blocked by the Polish authorities.

According to the memoirs of Zimmerman, who was Bredov’s adjutant: “In the Ministry of War, almost exclusively“ Pilsudchiks ”were sitting, who treated us with undisguised malice. They hated the old Russia, but in us they saw the remnants of this Russia.

At the same time, many captured Red Army soldiers, for various reasons, went over to the Polish side.

Up to 25 thousand prisoners joined the White Guard, Cossack and Ukrainian detachments, which fought together with the Poles against the Red Army. So, on the Polish side, the detachments of General Stanislav Bulak-Balakhovich, General Boris Peremykin, the Cossack brigades of Yesauls Vadim Yakovlev and Alexander Salnikov, the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic fought. Even after the conclusion of the Soviet-Polish truce, these units continued to fight independently until they were pushed back to the territory of Poland and interned there.

Polish researchers estimate the total number of captured Red Army soldiers at 80,000-110,000 people, of which the death of 16 thousand people is documented.

Soviet and Russian sources give estimates of 157-165 thousand Soviet prisoners of war and up to 80 thousand of their dead.

In the fundamental study "Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity in 1919-1922", prepared by the Federal Archival Agency of Russia, the Russian State Military Archive, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History and the Polish General Directorate of State Archives on the basis of a bilateral agreement from On December 4, 2000, a convergence of Russian and Polish estimates was achieved regarding the number of Red Army soldiers who died in Polish camps - those who died from epidemics, hunger and difficult conditions of detention.

Subsequently, Matveev increased his estimate to 25 - 28 thousand, that is, up to 18%. In the book “Polish Captivity: Red Army Soldiers Captured by the Poles in 1919-1921,” the historian also criticized the methodology for evaluating his Polish colleagues.

Matveev's latest assessment has not been criticized by professional Russian historians and can be considered the main one in modern Russian historiography (as of 2017).

How many Soviet prisoners of war died is still not known for certain. There are, however, various estimates based on the number of Soviet prisoners of war who returned from Polish captivity - they were 75 thousand 699 people. At the same time, this figure does not include those prisoners who, after liberation, wished to remain in Poland, as well as those who went over to the Polish side and participated in the war as part of the Polish and allied units (up to 25 thousand prisoners went over to the side of the Poles).

In diplomatic correspondence between the missions of the RSFSR and the Republic of Poland, significantly higher numbers of Russian prisoners of war were indicated, including those who died:

From the note of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR to the Charge d'Affaires Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Polish Republic T. Fillipovich on the situation and death of prisoners of war in Polish camps

"" The responsibility of the Polish Government remains entirely the indescribable horrors that are still happening with impunity in places like the Strzalkowo camp. It suffices to point out that.

within two years, out of 130,000 Russian prisoners of war in Poland, 60,000 died ""

And according to the calculations of the military historian M. V. Filimoshin, the number of Red Army soldiers who died and died in Polish captivity is 82,500 people.

A. Kolpakov determines the number of those killed in Polish captivity at 89,851 people.

It should be noted that the Spanish flu pandemic that raged on the planet in those years played a big role in the death of prisoners of war, from which 50 to 100 million people died, including about 3 million people in Russia itself.

Captured Red Army soldiers appeared after the first combat clash between the Polish Army and the Red Army in February 1919 on the Lithuanian-Belarusian territory. Immediately after the appearance in the Polish camps of the first groups of captured Red Army soldiers there - due to the great overcrowding and unsanitary conditions of detention - epidemics of infectious diseases broke out: cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis, relapsing, typhus and typhoid fever, rubella, as well as raging at that time on the planet Spanish women. Thousands of people died in Polish camps due to diseases, as well as wounds, hunger and frost.

On September 9, 1920, the report of officer Vdovishevsky to one of the departments of the High Command of the Polish Army says:

The command of the 3rd Army issued a secret order to subordinate units on the use of reprisals against newly taken prisoners as retribution for the murders and torture of our prisoners.

Allegedly, there is evidence (A. Veleveisky in the Gazeta Vyborchiy, February 23, 1994) about the order of the future prime minister, and then general, Sikorsky, to shoot 199 prisoners of war without trial or investigation. General Piasecki ordered not to take Russian soldiers prisoner, but to destroy those who surrendered.

The described excesses happened in August 1920, which was victorious for the Poles, when the Polish Army went on the offensive to the east. According to the Polish version, on August 22, 1920, the commander of the 5th Polish Army, General Władysław Sikorski, warned the Russian soldiers of the 3rd Cavalry Corps that anyone caught robbing or violence against the civilian population would be shot on the spot. On August 24, 200 Red Army soldiers of the 3rd Cavalry Corps were shot near Mlava, which, as it was proved, destroyed a company from the 49th Infantry Regiment, captured by the Russians two days earlier.

According to another version, we are talking about the order of the commander of the 5th Polish Army, Vladislav Sikorsky, given at 10 am on August 22, 1920, not to take prisoners from the Red Army column breaking out of the encirclement, especially the Kuban Cossacks, arguing that Cavalrymen of Guy's 3rd cavalry corps, during a breakthrough into East Prussia, allegedly hacked 150 Polish prisoners with sabers. The order was in effect for several days. [ ]

Particularly difficult was the fate of the captured Red Army soldiers who ended up in Polish prisoner of war camps. Communists, Jews (who, however, were often released after appeals from Jewish deputies of local and voivodship sejmiks, if they were not communists) or suspected of belonging to them, captured German Red Army soldiers were generally shot on the spot. Ordinary prisoners often became victims of the arbitrariness of the Polish military authorities. Robbery and abuse of captive women were widespread. For example, the administration of the Strzalkovo camp, in which the Petliurists were interned, involved the latter in the protection of "Bolshevik prisoners", placing them in a privileged position and giving them the opportunity to mock Russian prisoners of war.

In mid-May 1919, the Ministry of Military Affairs of Poland distributed detailed instructions for prisoner-of-war camps, which were subsequently refined and finalized several times. It spelled out in detail the rights and obligations of prisoners, the diet and nutritional standards. It was supposed to use the camps built by the Germans and Austrians during the First World War as stationary camps. In particular, the largest camp in Strzalkow was designed for 25 thousand people.

Poland was interested in the image of its country, therefore, in the document of the military department dated April 9, 1920, it was indicated that it was necessary

“to be aware of the measure of responsibility of the military authorities to their own public opinion, as well as to the international forum, which immediately picks up any fact that can belittle the dignity of our young state ... Evil must be decisively eradicated. The army must first of all guard the honor of the state, observing military legal instructions, as well as treating unarmed prisoners with tact and culture.

However, in reality, such detailed and humane rules for keeping prisoners of war were not respected, the conditions in the camps were very difficult. The situation was aggravated by the epidemics that raged in Poland during that period of war and devastation. In the first half of 1919, 122,000 cases of typhus were registered in Poland, including about 10,000 deaths; from July 1919 to July 1920, about 40,000 cases of the disease were recorded in the Polish army. Prisoner of war camps did not escape infection with infectious diseases, and often were their centers and potential breeding grounds. The documents mention typhus, dysentery, Spanish influenza (a type of influenza), typhoid fever, cholera, smallpox, scabies, diphtheria, scarlet fever, meningitis, malaria, venereal diseases, tuberculosis.

The situation in the POW camps was the subject of parliamentary inquiries in Poland's first parliament; As a result of this criticism, the government and military authorities took appropriate action, and at the beginning of 1920 the situation there improved somewhat.

At the turn of 1920-1921. in the camps for captured Red Army soldiers, supplies and sanitary conditions again deteriorated sharply. Practically no medical assistance was provided to prisoners of war; hundreds of prisoners died every day from hunger, infectious diseases, frostbite.

The prisoners were placed in camps, mainly on a national basis. At the same time, according to the instructions of the II department of the Ministry of Military Affairs of Poland on the procedure for sorting and classifying Bolshevik prisoners of war dated September 3, 1920, “Bolshevik Russian prisoners of war” and Jews were in the most difficult situation. The prisoners were executed by the verdicts of various courts and tribunals, they were shot extrajudicially and during the suppression of insubordination.

By 1920, decisive steps taken by the Ministry of Military Affairs and the High Command of the Polish Army, combined with inspections and strict control, led to a significant improvement in the supply of food and clothing for prisoners of war, to a decrease in abuses by the camp administration. In many reports on the inspection of camps and work teams in the summer and autumn of 1920, the good food of the prisoners was noted, although in some camps the prisoners were still starving. An important role was played by the help of allied military missions (for example, the United States supplied a large amount of linen and clothes), as well as by the Red Cross and other public organizations - especially the American Christian Youth Association (YMCA). These efforts sharply intensified after the end of hostilities in connection with the possibility of an exchange of prisoners of war.

In September 1920, in Berlin, an agreement was signed between the organizations of the Polish and Russian Red Cross to provide assistance to prisoners of war on their territory of the other side. This work was led by prominent human rights activists: in Poland by Stefania Sempolowska and in Soviet Russia by Ekaterina Peshkova. According to the repatriation agreement signed on February 24, 1921 between the RSFSR and the Ukrainian SSR, on the one hand, and Poland, on the other, 75,699 Red Army soldiers returned to Russia in March-November 1921, according to the certificates of the mobilization department of the Headquarters of the Red Army.

On March 23, 1921, the Treaty of Riga was signed, ending the Soviet-Polish war of 1919-1921. In paragraph 2 of Article X of this treaty, the signatories waived claims for “misconduct against the rules binding on prisoners of war, civilian internees and citizens of the opposing side in general”, thereby “settling” the issue of keeping Soviet prisoners of war in Polish camps.

In Soviet times, the fate of the Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity was not studied for a long period, and after 1945 it was hushed up for politically motivated reasons, since the Polish People's Republic was an ally of the USSR. Only in recent decades has Russia regained interest in this issue. Deputy Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation N. N. Spassky, in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, accused Poland of “the death of tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers who died in 1920-1921. in Polish concentration camps".

In 2004, the Federal Archival Agency of Russia, the Russian State Military Archive, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of Socio-Economic History and the Polish General Directorate of State Archives, on the basis of a bilateral agreement dated December 4, 2000, made the first joint attempt by historians of the two countries to find the truth on the basis of a detailed study of archives - primarily Polish, since the events took place mainly on Polish territory. For the first time, researchers have reached agreement on the number of Red Army soldiers who died in Polish camps from epidemics, starvation and harsh conditions of detention.

However, on a number of aspects, the opinions of the researchers of the two countries differed, as a result of which the results were published in a common collection, but with different prefaces in Poland and Russia. The preface to the Polish edition was written by Waldemar Rezmer and Zbigniew Karpus from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, and to the Russian edition by Gennady Matveev from.

Polish historians estimated the number of Red Army prisoners of war at 80-85 thousand, and Russian - at 157 thousand. Polish historians estimated the number of deaths in the camps at 16-17 thousand, Russian historians at 18-20 thousand. and Russian documents, on the incompleteness of the Polish record of the death of prisoners of war, and in his later works increased the estimate of the number of dead to 25 - 28 thousand people

G. F. Matveev points out that Polish historians underestimate the number of captured Red Army soldiers, and at the same time the number of dead prisoners, the doubtfulness of data from Polish documents during the war: “The complexity of the problem lies in the fact that currently available Polish documents do not contain much any systematic information about the number of Red Army soldiers who fell into Polish captivity.

This researcher also indicates cases of execution by the Polish military of captured Red Army soldiers on the spot, without sending them to prisoner of war camps, which Polish historians do not deny either. Russian researcher T. Simonova writes that Z. Karpus determined the number of dead Red Army prisoners in Tukholi on the basis of the cemetery lists and death certificates compiled by the camp priest, while the priest could not read the funeral service for the Communists, and the graves of the dead, according to eyewitnesses, were fraternal .

Unlike information about the situation of Soviet and Ukrainian prisoners in Poland, information about captured Poles in Russia is extremely scarce and is limited to the end of the war and the period of repatriation, however, some rare documents have survived.

Open sources speak of 33 camps in Russia and Ukraine. As of September 11, 1920, according to data received by the Polish Section from 25 camps, 13 thousand people were kept in them. The names of the Tula and Ivanovo camps, camps near Vyatka, Krasnoyarsk, Yaroslavl, Ivanovo-Voznesensky, Orel, Zvenigorod, Kozhukhov, Kostroma, Nizhny Novgorod appear, camps are mentioned in Mtsensk, in the village of Sergeevo, Oryol province. The prisoners were subjected to forced labor. In particular, Polish prisoners worked on the Murmansk railway. As of December 1, 1920, the Main Directorate of Public Works and Duties of the NKVD had a plan for the distribution of work for 62,000 prisoners.

This number included not only Polish prisoners, but also prisoners of the civil war, as well as 1,200 Balakhovichites who were in the Smolensk camp.

Even the exact number of prisoners of war of the Polish-Soviet war is difficult to name, since along with them the Poles of the Polish Legion, who fought under the leadership of Count Sollogub on the side of the Entente, and the Poles of the 5th division of the Polish riflemen, who fought under the command of Colonel V. Chuma, were kept in the camps on Kolchak's side.

In the spring of 1920, the Soviet-Polish war began, which served as a pretext for new repressions against the Poles in Siberia. The arrests of Polish soldiers began, which swept through almost all the major cities of Siberia: Omsk, Novonikolaevsk, Krasnoyarsk, Tomsk. The Chekists made the following accusations against the captured Poles: service in the Polish legion and robbery of civilians, participation in a “counter-revolutionary organization”, anti-Soviet agitation, belonging to “Polish citizenship”, etc.

The punishment was imprisonment in a concentration camp or forced labor for a period of 6 months to 15 years. The organs of the Cheka on the railway acted with particular cruelty. The so-called "Regional transport emergency commissions for the fight against counter-revolution" by their decisions in Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk sentenced Polish soldiers to death. As a rule, after a few days the sentence was carried out.

In 1921, after the signing of a peace treaty between Soviet Russia and Poland, the Polish delegation for repatriation demanded a judicial investigation in connection with the executions of Polish prisoners of war by the Cheka in Krasnoyarsk.

In Irkutsk, on the orders of the governor, a group of Polish citizens was shot in July 1921, the same thing happened in Novonikolaevsk, where on May 8, 1921, two Poles were shot.

From the soldiers of the 5th division of Polish riflemen who capitulated in Siberia in January 1920, who did not want to join the Red Army, the Yenisei Workers' Brigade was formed. In total, there were about 8 thousand captured Poles in the Krasnoyarsk camp. The food rations for prisoners of war were insufficient. At first, the prisoners received half a pound of bread, horsemeat and fish. The guards, which consisted of "internationalists" (Germans, Latvians and Hungarians), robbed them, so that they were left almost in tatters. Hundreds of prisoners became victims of a typhus epidemic. The situation of the prisoners who were in Tomsk on forced labor was difficult, sometimes they could not walk from hunger.

In general, a contemporary and to some extent a participant in those events, Professor of the Jagiellonian University Roman Dybossky estimates the losses of the Polish division in killed, tortured, dead at 1.5 thousand people.

The Soviet authorities attached great importance to cultural, educational and political educational work among the prisoners. It was assumed that through such work among the rank and file (officers were considered counter-revolutionaries) it would be possible to develop their "class" consciousness and turn them into supporters of the Soviet regime. Such work was done mainly by Poles-communists. However, there is reason to believe that this work was not successful in the Krasnoyarsk camp. In 1921, out of more than 7 thousand prisoners, only 61 people joined the communist cells.

In general, the conditions of detention of Polish prisoners in Russia were much better than the conditions in which Russian and Ukrainian prisoners were kept in Poland. A certain merit in this belonged to the Polish Section at the PUR of the Red Army, whose work was expanding. In Russia, the vast majority of Polish prisoners were regarded as "brothers in class" and no reprisals were carried out against them. If there were individual excesses in relation to the prisoners, then the command sought to stop them and punish the perpetrators.

According to M. Meltyukhov, there were about 60 thousand Polish prisoners in Soviet Russia, including internees and hostages. Of these, 27,598 people returned to Poland, about 2,000 remained in the RSFSR. The fate of the remaining 32 thousand people is unclear.

According to other sources, in 1919-1920, 41-42 thousand Polish prisoners of war were taken (1500-2000 - in 1919, 19 682 (ZF) and 12 139 (South-West Front) in 1920; up to 8 thousand were the V division in Krasnoyarsk ). In total, from March 1921 to July 1922, 34,839 Polish prisoners of war were repatriated, and about 3 thousand more expressed a desire to remain in the RSFSR. Thus, the loss amounted to about 3-4 thousand prisoners of war. Of these, about 2,000 were documented as having died in captivity.

According to the data of Doctor of Historical Sciences V. Masyarzh from Siberia to Poland during the repatriation of 1921-1922. about 27 thousand Poles left.

The number of repatriates includes not only the Poles captured during the Soviet-Polish war of 1919-1921. According to the report of the Organizational Directorate of the Red Army on losses and trophies for 1920, the number of captured Poles on the Western Front as of November 14, 1920 amounted to 177 officers and 11,840 soldiers, that is, a total of 12,017 people. To this number should be added the Poles who were captured on the Southwestern Front, where over a thousand Poles were taken prisoner near Rovno during the breakthrough of the First Cavalry Army in early July alone, and according to the front’s operational report of July 27, only in the Dubno- Brodsky, 2 thousand prisoners were captured. In addition, if we add here the interned units of Colonel V. Chuma, who fought on the side of Kolchak's army in Siberia (over 10 thousand), then the total number of Polish prisoners of war and internees is 30 thousand people

1919-1921.

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Reasons for the new interest in the topic

"Non-Bolshevik Russians"

In addition to the captured Red Army soldiers, there were two more groups of Russian prisoners in the Polish camps. These were soldiers of the old Russian army, who, at the end of the First World War, tried to return to Russia from German and Austrian prisoner of war camps, as well as interned soldiers of the White Army of General Bredov. The situation of these groups was also appalling; due to theft in the kitchen, the prisoners were forced to switch to "pasture", which they "got hold of" from the local population or in neighboring gardens; did not receive firewood for heating and cooking. The leadership of the white army provided these prisoners with little financial support, which partially alleviated their situation. Assistance from Western states was blocked by the Polish authorities.

According to the memoirs of Zimmerman, who was Bredov’s adjutant: “In the Ministry of War, almost exclusively“ Pilsudchiks ”were sitting, who treated us with undisguised malice. They hated the old Russia, but in us they saw the remnants of this Russia.

At the same time, many captured Red Army soldiers, for various reasons, went over to the Polish side.

Up to 25 thousand prisoners joined the White Guard, Cossack and Ukrainian detachments, which fought together with the Poles against the Red Army. So, on the Polish side, the detachments of General Stanislav Bulak-Balakhovich, General Boris Peremykin, the Cossack brigades of Yesauls Vadim Yakovlev and Alexander Salnikov, the army of the Ukrainian People's Republic fought. Even after the conclusion of the Soviet-Polish truce, these units continued to fight independently until they were pushed back to the territory of Poland and interned there.

Mortality estimates in the camps

Polish researchers estimate the total number of captured Red Army soldiers at 80,000-110,000 people, of which the death of 16 thousand people is documented.

Soviet and Russian sources give estimates of 157-165 thousand Soviet prisoners of war and up to 80 thousand of their dead.

In the fundamental study "Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity in 1919-1922", prepared by the Federal Archival Agency of Russia, the Russian State Military Archive, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History and the Polish General Directorate of State Archives on the basis of a bilateral agreement from On December 4, 2000, a convergence of Russian and Polish estimates was achieved regarding the number of Red Army soldiers who died in Polish camps - those who died from epidemics, hunger and difficult conditions of detention.

Subsequently, Matveev increased his estimate to 25 - 28 thousand, that is, up to 18%. In the book “Polish Captivity: Red Army Soldiers Captured by the Poles in 1919-1921,” the historian also subjected to extensive criticism the methodology for evaluating his Polish colleagues.

Matveev's latest assessment has not been criticized by professional Russian historians and can be considered the main one in modern Russian historiography (as of 2017).

How many Soviet prisoners of war died is still not known for certain. There are, however, various estimates based on the number of Soviet prisoners of war who returned from Polish captivity - they were 75 thousand 699 people. At the same time, this figure does not include those prisoners who, after liberation, wished to remain in Poland, as well as those who went over to the Polish side and participated in the war as part of the Polish and allied units (up to 25 thousand prisoners went over to the side of the Poles).

In diplomatic correspondence between the missions of the RSFSR and the Republic of Poland, significantly higher numbers of Russian prisoners of war were indicated, including those who died:

From the note of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the RSFSR to the Charge d'Affaires Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Polish Republic T. Fillipovich on the situation and death of prisoners of war in Polish camps(September 9, 1921).

"" The responsibility of the Polish Government remains entirely the indescribable horrors that are still happening with impunity in places like the Strzalkowo camp. It suffices to point out that within two years, out of 130,000 Russian prisoners of war in Poland, 60,000 died "" .

And according to the calculations of the military historian M. V. Filimoshin, the number of Red Army soldiers who died and died in Polish captivity is 82,500 people.

A. Kolpakov determines the number of those killed in Polish captivity at 89,851 people.

It should be noted that the Spanish flu pandemic that raged on the planet in those years played a big role in the death of prisoners of war, from which 50 to 100 million people died, including about 3 million people in Russia itself.

Captured Red Army soldiers appeared after the first combat clash between the Polish Army and the Red Army in February 1919 on the Lithuanian-Belarusian territory. Immediately after the appearance in the Polish camps of the first groups of captured Red Army soldiers there - due to the great overcrowding and unsanitary conditions of detention - epidemics of infectious diseases broke out: cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis, relapsing, typhus and typhoid fever, rubella, as well as raging at that time on the planet Spanish women. Thousands of people died in Polish camps due to diseases, as well as wounds, hunger and frost.

Military excesses and discrimination against "Bolshevik Russians"

On September 9, 1920, the report of officer Vdovishevsky to one of the departments of the High Command of the Polish Army says:

The command of the 3rd Army issued a secret order to subordinate units on the use of reprisals against newly taken prisoners as retribution for the murders and torture of our prisoners.

Allegedly, there is evidence (A. Veleveisky in the Gazeta Vyborchiy, February 23, 1994) about the order of the future prime minister, and then general, Sikorsky, to shoot 199 prisoners of war without trial or investigation. General Piasecki ordered not to take Russian soldiers prisoner, but to destroy those who surrendered.

The described excesses happened in August 1920, which was victorious for the Poles, when the Polish Army went on the offensive to the east. According to the Polish version, on August 22, 1920, the commander of the 5th Polish Army, General Władysław Sikorski, warned the Russian soldiers of the 3rd Cavalry Corps that anyone caught robbing or violence against the civilian population would be shot on the spot. On August 24, 200 Red Army soldiers of the 3rd Cavalry Corps were shot near Mlava, which, as it was proved, destroyed a company from the 49th Infantry Regiment, captured by the Russians two days earlier.

According to another version, we are talking about the order of the commander of the 5th Polish Army, Vladislav Sikorsky, given at 10 am on August 22, 1920, not to take prisoners from the Red Army column breaking out of the encirclement, especially the Kuban Cossacks, arguing that Cavalrymen of Guy's 3rd cavalry corps, during a breakthrough into East Prussia, allegedly hacked 150 Polish prisoners with sabers. The order was in effect for several days. [ ]

Particularly difficult was the fate of the captured Red Army soldiers who ended up in Polish prisoner of war camps. Communists, Jews (who, however, were often released after appeals from Jewish deputies of local and voivodship sejmiks, if they were not communists) or suspected of belonging to them, captured German Red Army soldiers were generally shot on the spot. Ordinary prisoners often became victims of the arbitrariness of the Polish military authorities. Robbery and abuse of captive women were widespread. For example, the administration of the Stshalkovo camp, in which the Petliurists were interned, attracted the latter to the protection of the "Bolshevik prisoners", putting them in a privileged position and giving them the opportunity to mock Russian prisoners of war.

Declarations

In mid-May 1919, the Ministry of Military Affairs of Poland distributed detailed instructions for prisoner-of-war camps, which were subsequently refined and finalized several times. It spelled out in detail the rights and obligations of prisoners, the diet and nutritional standards. It was supposed to use the camps built by the Germans and Austrians during the First World War as stationary camps. In particular, the largest camp in Strzalkow was designed for 25 thousand people.

Poland was interested in the image of its country, therefore, in the document of the military department dated April 9, 1920, it was indicated that it was necessary

“to be aware of the measure of responsibility of the military authorities to their own public opinion, as well as to the international forum, which immediately picks up any fact that can belittle the dignity of our young state ... Evil must be decisively eradicated. The army must first of all guard the honor of the state, observing military legal instructions, as well as treating unarmed prisoners with tact and culture.

true position

However, in reality, such detailed and humane rules for keeping prisoners of war were not respected, the conditions in the camps were very difficult. The situation was aggravated by the epidemics that raged in Poland during that period of war and devastation. In the first half of 1919, 122,000 cases of typhus were registered in Poland, including about 10,000 deaths; from July 1919 to July 1920, about 40,000 cases of the disease were recorded in the Polish army. Prisoner of war camps did not escape infection with infectious diseases, and often were their centers and potential breeding grounds. The documents mention typhus, dysentery, Spanish influenza (a type of flu), typhoid fever, cholera, smallpox, scabies, diphtheria, scarlet fever, meningitis, malaria, venereal diseases, tuberculosis.

The situation in the POW camps was the subject of parliamentary inquiries in Poland's first parliament; As a result of this criticism, the government and military authorities took appropriate action, and at the beginning of 1920 the situation there improved somewhat.

At the turn of 1920-1921. in the camps for captured Red Army soldiers, supplies and sanitary conditions again deteriorated sharply. Practically no medical assistance was provided to prisoners of war; hundreds of prisoners died every day from hunger, infectious diseases, frostbite.

The prisoners were placed in camps, mainly on a national basis. At the same time, according to the instructions of the II department of the Ministry of Military Affairs of Poland on the procedure for sorting and classifying Bolshevik prisoners of war dated September 3, 1920, “Bolshevik Russian prisoners of war” and Jews were in the most difficult situation. The prisoners were executed by the verdicts of various courts and tribunals, they were shot extrajudicially and during the suppression of insubordination.

Real improvements

By 1920, decisive steps taken by the Ministry of Military Affairs and the High Command of the Polish Army, combined with inspections and strict control, led to a significant improvement in the supply of food and clothing for prisoners of war, to a decrease in abuses by the camp administration. In many reports on the inspection of camps and work teams in the summer and autumn of 1920, the good food of the prisoners was noted, although in some camps the prisoners were still starving. An important role was played by the help of allied military missions (for example, the United States supplied a large amount of linen and clothes), as well as by the Red Cross and other public organizations - especially the American Christian Youth Association (YMCA). These efforts sharply intensified after the end of hostilities in connection with the possibility of an exchange of prisoners of war.

In September 1920, in Berlin, an agreement was signed between the organizations of the Polish and Russian Red Cross to provide assistance to prisoners of war on their territory of the other side. This work was headed by prominent human rights activists: in Poland - Stefania Sempolovskaya, and in Soviet Russia - Ekaterina Peshkova. According to the repatriation agreement signed on February 24, 1921 between the RSFSR and the Ukrainian SSR, on the one hand, and Poland, on the other, 75,699 Red Army soldiers returned to Russia in March-November 1921, according to the certificates of the mobilization department of the Headquarters of the Red Army.

On March 23, 1921, the Treaty of Riga was signed, which ended the Soviet-Polish war of 1919-1921. In paragraph 2 of Article X of this treaty, the signatories waived claims for “misconduct against the rules binding on prisoners of war, civilian internees and citizens of the opposing side in general”, thereby “settling” the issue of keeping Soviet prisoners of war in Polish camps.

The problem of developing a common position

In Soviet times, the fate of the Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity was not investigated for a long period, and after 1945 it was hushed up for politically motivated reasons, since the Polish People's Republic was an ally of the USSR. Only in recent decades has Russia regained interest in this issue. Deputy Secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation N. N. Spassky, in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, accused Poland of “the death of tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers who died in 1920-1921. in Polish concentration camps".

In 2004, the Federal Archival Agency of Russia, the Russian State Military Archive, the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of Socio-Economic History and the Polish General Directorate of State Archives, on the basis of a bilateral agreement dated December 4, 2000, made the first joint attempt by historians of the two countries to find the truth on the basis of a detailed study of archives - primarily Polish, since the events took place mainly on Polish territory. For the first time, researchers have reached agreement on the number of Red Army soldiers who died in Polish camps from epidemics, starvation and harsh conditions of detention.

However, on a number of aspects, the opinions of the researchers of the two countries differed, as a result of which the results were published in a common collection, but with different prefaces in Poland and Russia. The preface to the Polish edition was written by Waldemar Rezmer and Zbigniew Karpus from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, and to the Russian edition by Gennady Matveev from the Moscow State University. Lomonosov.

Polish historians estimated the number of Red Army prisoners of war at 80-85 thousand, and Russian - at 157 thousand. Polish historians estimated the number of deaths in the camps at 16-17 thousand, Russian historians at 18-20 thousand. and Russian documents, on the incompleteness of the Polish record of the death of prisoners of war, and in his later works increased the estimate of the number of dead to 25 - 28 thousand people.

A joint study showed that the main causes of death in the camps were diseases and epidemics (influenza - Spanish flu pandemic, typhoid, cholera and dysentery). Polish historians noted that these diseases also caused significant casualties among the military and civilian population. Between the Polish members of this group and the Russian historian G. Matveev, large differences remained on the issue of the number of captured Red Army soldiers, which, according to Matveev, indicates the uncertainty of the fate of about 50 thousand people.

G. F. Matveev points out that Polish historians underestimate the number of captured Red Army soldiers, and at the same time the number of dead prisoners, the doubtfulness of data from Polish documents during the war: “The complexity of the problem lies in the fact that currently available Polish documents do not contain much any systematic information about the number of Red Army soldiers who fell into Polish captivity.

This researcher also points out cases of execution by the Polish military of captured Red Army soldiers on the spot, without sending them to prisoner of war camps, which Polish historians do not deny either. Russian researcher T. Simonova writes that Z. Karpus determined the number of dead Red Army prisoners in Tukholi on the basis of the cemetery lists and death certificates compiled by the camp priest, while the priest could not perform the funeral service for the Communists, and the graves of the dead, according to eyewitnesses, were fraternal .

Insufficiency of data

Unlike information about the situation of Soviet and Ukrainian prisoners in Poland, information about captured Poles in Russia is extremely scarce and is limited to the end of the war and the period of repatriation, however, some rare documents have survived.

Open sources speak of 33 camps in Russia and Ukraine. As of September 11, 1920, according to data received by the Polish Section from 25 camps, 13 thousand people were kept in them. The names of the Tula and Ivanovo camps, camps near Vyatka, Krasnoyarsk, Yaroslavl, Ivanovo-Voznesensky, Orel, Zvenigorod, Kozhukhov, Kostroma, Nizhny Novgorod appear, camps are mentioned in Mtsensk, in the village of Sergeevo, Oryol province. The prisoners were subjected to forced labor. In particular, Polish prisoners worked on the Murmansk railway. As of December 1, 1920, the Main Directorate of Public Works and Duties of the NKVD had a plan for the distribution of work for 62,000 prisoners.

This number included not only Polish prisoners, but also prisoners of the civil war, as well as 1,200 Balakhovichites who were in the Smolensk camp.

Even the exact number of prisoners of war of the Polish-Soviet war is difficult to name, since along with them the Poles of the Polish Legion, who fought under the leadership of Count Sollogub on the side of the Entente, and the Poles of the 5th division of the Polish riflemen, who fought under the command of Colonel V. Chuma, were kept in the camps on Kolchak's side.

Examples of wartime excesses

In the spring of 1920, the Soviet-Polish war began, which served as a pretext for new repressions against the Poles in Siberia. The arrests of Polish soldiers began, which swept through almost all the major cities of Siberia: Omsk, Novonikolaevsk, Krasnoyarsk, Tomsk. The Chekists made the following accusations against the captured Poles: service in the Polish legion and robbery of civilians, participation in a “counter-revolutionary organization”, anti-Soviet agitation, belonging to “Polish citizenship”, etc.

The punishment was imprisonment in a concentration camp or forced labor for a period of 6 months to 15 years. The organs of the Cheka on the railway acted with particular cruelty. The so-called "Regional transport emergency commissions for the fight against counter-revolution" by their decisions in Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk sentenced Polish soldiers to death. As a rule, after a few days the sentence was carried out.

In 1921, after the signing of a peace treaty between Soviet Russia and Poland, the Polish delegation for repatriation demanded a judicial investigation in connection with the executions of Polish prisoners of war by the Cheka in Krasnoyarsk.

In Irkutsk, on the orders of the governor, a group of Polish citizens was shot in July 1921, the same thing happened in Novonikolaevsk, where on May 8, 1921, two Poles were shot.

From the soldiers of the 5th division of Polish riflemen who capitulated in Siberia in January 1920, who did not want to join the Red Army, the Yenisei Workers' Brigade was formed. In total, there were about 8 thousand captured Poles in the Krasnoyarsk camp. The food rations for prisoners of war were insufficient. At first, the prisoners received half a pound of bread, horsemeat and fish. The guards, which consisted of "internationalists" (Germans, Latvians and Hungarians), robbed them, so that they were left almost in tatters. Hundreds of prisoners became victims of a typhus epidemic. The situation of the prisoners who were in Tomsk on forced labor was difficult, sometimes they could not walk from hunger.

In general, a contemporary and to some extent a participant in those events, Professor of the Jagiellonian University Roman Dybossky estimates the losses of the Polish division in killed, tortured, dead at 1.5 thousand people.

Appeal

The Soviet authorities attached great importance to cultural, educational and political educational work among the prisoners. It was assumed that through such work among the rank and file (officers were considered counter-revolutionaries) it would be possible to develop their "class" consciousness and turn them into supporters of the Soviet regime. Such work was done mainly by Poles-communists. However, there is reason to believe that this work was not successful in the Krasnoyarsk camp. In 1921, out of more than 7 thousand prisoners, only 61 people joined the communist cells.

In general, the conditions of detention of Polish prisoners in Russia were much better than the conditions in which Russian and Ukrainian prisoners were kept in Poland. A certain merit in this belonged to the Polish Section at the PUR RKKA, whose work was expanding. In Russia, the vast majority of Polish prisoners were considered as "class brothers" and no reprisals were carried out against them. If there were individual excesses in relation to the prisoners, then the command sought to stop them and punish the perpetrators.

Number estimates

According to M. Meltyukhov, there were about 60 thousand Polish prisoners in Soviet Russia, including internees and hostages. Of these, 27,598 people returned to Poland, about 2,000 remained in the RSFSR. The fate of the remaining 32 thousand people is unclear.

According to other sources, in 1919-1920, 41-42 thousand Polish prisoners of war were taken (1500-2000 - in 1919, 19 682 (ZF) and 12 139 (South-West Front) in 1920; up to 8 thousand were the V division in Krasnoyarsk ). In total, from March 1921 to July 1922, 34,839 Polish prisoners of war were repatriated, and about 3 thousand more expressed a desire to remain in the RSFSR. Thus, the loss amounted to about 3-4 thousand prisoners of war. Of these, about 2,000 were documented as having died in captivity.

According to the data of Doctor of Historical Sciences V. Masyarzh from Siberia to Poland during the repatriation of 1921-1922. about 27 thousand Poles left.

The number of repatriates includes not only the Poles captured during the Soviet-Polish war of 1919-1921. According to the report of the Organizational Directorate of the Red Army on losses and trophies for 1920, the number of captured Poles on the Western Front as of November 14, 1920 amounted to 177 officers and 11,840 soldiers, that is, a total of 12,017 people. To this number should be added the Poles who were captured on the Southwestern Front, where over a thousand Poles were taken prisoner near Rovno during the breakthrough of the First Cavalry Army in early July alone, and according to the front’s operational report of July 27, only in the Dubno- Brodsky, 2 thousand prisoners were captured. In addition, if we add here the interned units of Colonel V. Chuma, who fought on the side of Kolchak's army in Siberia (over 10 thousand), then the total number of Polish prisoners of war and internees is 30 thousand people.

see also

Notes

1. The ECHR recognized the execution of Polish officers in Katyn as a military crime
2. "Russians should bear retribution for Poland", Newspaper.Ru. Retrieved 26 October 2017.
3. Against Warsaw and Moscow they play anti-Katyn (Russian), InoSMI.Ru(May 17, 2011). Retrieved 26 October 2017.
4. Life and death of the Red Army on "islands" Polish "GULAG" (Russian), RIA News(20151009T1338+0300Z). Retrieved 23 October 2017.
5. Zotov George. War with the dead // Arguments and facts. - 2011. - No. 19 for May 11. - S. 8-9.
6. Polish prisoners of war in the RSFSR, BSSR and Ukrainian SSR in 1919-1922. Documents and materials. M.: Institute of Slavonic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2004. Pp. 4-13, 15-17.
7. Meltyukhov M.I.[Soviet-Polish wars. Military-political confrontation 1918-1939] - M .: Veche, 2001. p. 104-105
8. Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity in 1919-1922. - Collection of documents and materials. - M.; St. Petersburg: Summer Garden, 2004. - S. 14-15. - 936 p. - 1000 copies. - ISBN 5-94381-135-4.
9. Simonova T. A field of white crosses. Rodina magazine, No. 1, 2007
10. Zbigniew Karpus. Facts about Soviet POWs of 1919-1921
11. Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity in 1919-1922.
12. G. F. MATVEEV Once more about the number of Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity in 1919-1920. , New and recent history. No. 3, 2006