The Polish Operation Stalin’s First Genocide of Poles 1937–1938
The Polish Operation Stalin’s First Genocide of Poles 1937–1938

Summary/Abstract: Below I present an annotated translation of a recently declassified Soviet document written by head of the NKVD Nikolai Yezhov. It details the fate of families and individuals of Polish nationality and mostly Catholic background who were subject to the first wave of repressions in the “Polish Operation,” or the systematic killing of every third or fourth person in the USSR’s Polish minority from 1937 to 1938. The vast majority of victims were not immigrants to the USSR (as were some enthusiastic Americans who tried to help the Soviets), but rather inhabitants of areas that became the USSR after the October Revolution. At first the Soviet government let them alone. Persecution began when the Soviet system solidified. In the Englishspeaking world there are no studies detailing the fate of this minority that numbered, by various counts, between 600,000 and one million persons.

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