Welcome to the Deep Dive. We are really glad
you could join us today. Yeah, it's great to
have you here. If you're tuning in, it means
you're the kind of person who really likes to
look past the surface level headlines. You want
to get into the actual gears of history. Right.
You want to know how things actually work, even
when the subject matter is, well, pretty difficult.
Yeah. And today, our mission is to do exactly
that. We're unpacking a single incredibly detailed
historical compilation about a massive yet surprisingly
overshadowed event. We're talking about the Polish
operation of the NKVD, which took place in the
Soviet Union between 1937 and 1938. It is a profoundly
heavy topic, but an absolutely crucial one if
you want to understand the machinery of the 20th
century. We are looking at a period during the
Great Purge, but zooming in on a very specific
targeted campaign. And to give you a sense of
the sheer scale we are dealing with right out
of the gate, many people are familiar with the
Great Purge as a broad concept of political repression
under Joseph Stalin, right? Sure. This is the
classic example of state terror. Exactly. But
what often gets lost in that broader narrative
is that there were specific national operations.
The Polish operation was the largest ethnic shooting
and deportation action of that entire campaign.
Wow. Yeah. Victims of this specific operation
accounted for nearly 45 % of all the people executed
during the various ethnic operations of that
era. Almost half. That is just staggering. It
really is. So we're going to explore how the
Soviet secret police engineered the mass execution
of over 111 ,000 people. Our goal today is to
help you understand not just what happened on
paper, but how a massive state bureaucracy was
essentially mobilized to erase a specific group
of people. And how modern historians debate the
labeling of this atrocity today, which is a whole
other layer. Right. OK, let's unpack this, because
this is a dark but vital piece of history that
you really need to know to truly understand the
mechanics of state -sponsored terror. It wasn't
just chaos, right? It was terrifyingly organized.
Highly organized. So where does a targeted operation
of this magnitude actually begin? Well, it officially
kicks off with a directive known as NKVD Order
No. 00485. Okay. This was signed by Nikolai Yesov,
the head of the NKVD, which was the Soviet secret
police, and the brutal enforcers of Stalin's
will in August 1937. And the language surrounding
this order from the very top of the Soviet leadership
is just chilling. I read that Joseph Stalin himself
approved the operation with a handwritten note,
right? Yes, a very specific handwritten note.
He wrote, very good. Dig up and purge this Polish
espionage mud in the future as well. Destroy
it in the interest of the USSR. Polish espionage
mud. That phrasing alone tells you so much about
the mindset at the top. But to roll out an operation
across an entire empire, I mean, you can't just
rely on a handwritten note. No, you definitely
can't. You have to sell it to the lower level
bureaucrats and the public. So how did they justify
targeting a specific ethnic group on such a massive
scale? What's fascinating here is the entirely
fabricated justification used to sell this operation
to the Soviet apparatus. They didn't just issue
a blanket order to arrest people of Polish descent.
They built an elaborate narrative. The Soviet
state claimed they were targeting a massive fifth
column, a secret network of spies and saboteurs
actively working to undermine the Soviet Union
from within. So they needed a boogeyman. Exactly.
They specifically pointed the finger at an organization
called the Polish Military Organization. Yezhov
even sent out a 30 -page secret letter, along
with the arrest order, detailing all the supposed
fascist, terrorist, and espionage activities
this group was coordinating across the country.
But wait, historians like Timothy Snyder have
pointed out a massive flaw in that narrative,
haven't they? Oh, a huge one. The Polish Military
Organization had actually been disbanded in 1921.
It didn't even exist by 1937. Not at all. The
Soviet secret police simply pretended it was
still an active, sprawling network. They resurrected
a ghost to serve as their primary antagonist.
But did anyone within the Soviet leadership actually
believe that a defunct military group was secretly
running the country? Or was everyone just playing
along to survive the political climate? It's
a textbook example of totalitarian scapegoating.
The Soviet Union was dealing with massive internal
crises at the time. The most notable was the
necessity to deflect blame for the Holodomor.
The famine in Ukraine. Yes. The catastrophic
state engineered famine that starved millions
of people to death due to disastrous Soviet agricultural
policies. Right. When millions of your own citizens
are starving because of your government's decisions,
you cannot admit catastrophic failure. You need
a villain. You have to tell the starving masses
we are failing because foreign spies are sabotaging
our crops and our factories. Wow. Okay. So a
top Soviet official named Dostoevsky basically
chose this defunct Polish military organization
to be the boogeyman. I want you to just imagine
that for a second. Imagine the sheer calculated
paranoia of a state that literally brings a defunct
organization back to life on paper just so it
has a convenient target to blame for its own
catastrophic domestic failures. Yeah. It's a
terrifying level of state -sanctioned gaslighting.
But if the organization didn't exist, how did
they find... members to arrest. Through brutal,
systematic torture. The secret police would arrest
individuals, perhaps someone with a known connection
to Poland, and torture them until they confessed
to being part of this fake organization. Unbelievable.
But the key to the torture was that the victim
had to name names of other spies to stop the
pain. This generated a self -fulfilling loop
of fabricated evidence. The state created a demand
for Polish spies, and the torture rooms manufactured
the supply. And this paranoia infected other
institutions as well. Didn't the Communist International
get involved? They did. The Communist International,
or Comintern, was essentially the global network
of communist parties directed by Moscow. When
this order came down, they started frantically
digging through their own internal personnel
files. Looking for who? Looking for Polish members
to offer up to the secret police as further evidence
of infiltration. It was a race to prove your
loyalty by sacrificing your own people. Which
brings us to exactly how the Soviets state process
that massive supply of human lives. Here's where
it gets really interesting. Because the way the
secret police handle the logistics of this operation
is almost as horrifying as the motive itself.
Absolutely. When you have a mandate to arrest
and execute tens of thousands of people, you
inevitably run into a bureaucratic bottleneck.
You simply can't hold trials for that many people.
So the state created what they call the album
procedure. The album procedure. It sounds almost
quaint, like flipping through a family photo
album. But the reality is deeply macabre. I find
the mechanics of this particularly striking because
it shows how state terror becomes institutionalized
and completely divorced from human empathy. To
give you a modern analogy, imagine working in
a massive corporate office. Your department manager
sits at a desk at the end of the week, mindlessly
rubber stamping a huge stack of expense reports.
They aren't looking at the individual line items.
They're just stamping the cover page to clear
their desk for the weekend. Now. Replace those
expense reports with lists of human lives. That
is the essence of the album procedure. It's an
incredibly apt analogy because it was designed
specifically to remove the individual from the
process. Under this system, a lower -level, two
-man secret police team, known as a Dvojka, would
interrogate victims, extract those false confessions,
and compile long lists of condemned poles. And
these lists were the albums? Yes. These names
were bound into physical albums. Then, instead
of holding individual trials or reviewing a single
shred of evidence, these massive albums were
passed up the chain to mid -range offices. Okay.
There, a troika, a three -man team consisting
of a communist official, a secret police leader,
and a party procurator, which is essentially
the state prosecutor, would review them. But
they weren't actually reviewing the individuals,
were they? Not at all. They were reviewing the
album as a single unit. With one single stamp
of approval from the troika, every single person
listed in that album was condemned. Just one
stamp? One stamp. Once it hit the paper, the
executions were carried out immediately. It is
industrial -scale murder. disguised as administrative
paperwork. And the pressure from Moscow to fill
these albums led to some deeply shocking, almost
absurd methods of finding victims. They really
did. When you dig into what happened in Leningrad,
it's absolutely chilling. The secret police agents
there had quarters to meet, and they simply needed
more names. So they opened the local city telephone
books. Literally just the fun books. Yeah, and
started looking for anyone with a Polish -sounding
last name. They arrested nearly 7 ,000 citizens
based on nothing more than the spelling of their
name in a public directory. It's insane. And
the vast majority of those nominal suspects were
executed within 10 days of their arrest. 10 days
from being a random name in a book to being executed
by the state. It highlights the absolute chaos
of the terror. And this rapid, completely arbitrary
method of selection led to massive collateral
damage. Because the agents relied so heavily
on name sounding or historical religious affiliations
like Catholicism, the victims weren't exclusively
ethnic Poles. The system was far too clumsy and
far too bloodthirsty, to be precise. Can you
break down the demographics of that collateral
damage? Because it wasn't just a few mistakes
here and there. Far from it. In the blind hunt
for Poles, the secret police swept up entirely
different ethnic groups who just happened to
be caught in the dragnet. Across the Soviet Union,
13 .4 % of those arrested during this specific
Polish operation were actually ethnic Ukrainians.
Another 8 .8 % were ethnic Russians. And in Belarus,
the situation was remarkably tragic. Almost half,
37 .3 % of the Poles arrested were actually ethnic
Belarusian Catholics. Why so many in Belarus?
Well, in the 1920s, during earlier, more tolerant
census periods, many of them had declared themselves
to be Poles or were registered as Catholics.
A decade later, that historical census data became
a death sentence. Let's ground this conversation
with the overall human cost. We were talking
about quotas and percentages, but you need to
hear the final toll of this bureaucratic machine.
Based on confirmed archival records, 139 ,835
people were officially sentenced during the Polish
operation. Of those, 111 ,091 were summarily
executed. To put that in perspective, that represented
22 % of the entire Polish population living in
the Soviet Union at that time. That's a staggering
figure. Nearly a quarter of a specific demographic,
erased in just over a year. And we also have
to look at the geography of this terror because
it wasn't just confined to the western border
regions near Poland. That's what you'd assume,
right? That it's a border issue. Exactly. While
it is true that the largest concentration of
victims came from the West, about 40 percent
from Soviet Ukraine and 17 percent from Soviet
by the Russia, the operation reached the absolute
deepest, most remote corners of the Soviet empire.
No matter how far you tried to get from Moscow,
the bureaucracy could reach you. That's one of
the most striking details. You wouldn't immediately
associate places deep in Siberia with targeted
Polish purges? No, you wouldn't. For example,
in a place called Belostok in the Tomsk Oblast,
which is deep in the heart of Siberia, 100 men
of Polish origin were rounded up, executed, and
their bodies were thrown into the Ob River. The
terror reached down into the Caucasus, too. Former
secret police archives in Tbilisi show at least
89 people in Georgia fell victims specifically
to this operation. It even reached into Central
Asia, with archives in Kyrgyzstan showing at
least 180 poles swept up in the purges there.
The reach of the state was absolute. So what
does this all mean for the people left behind?
When you take away 111 ,000 people, and it's
crucial to note that almost all of the victims
of the shootings were men, You don't just erase
those individuals. You shatter the families and
the communities they leave behind. And the Soviet
state recognized this. They didn't view the families
as tragic collateral damage. They viewed them
as a secondary problem to be solved. Yes, very
methodical. This was codified in a follow -up
directive. Ordinum 00486. This is where the long
-term demographic destruction becomes incredibly
apparent. The state recognized that executing
tens of thousands of fathers and husbands would
create a deeply resentful population. So the
wives of the executed men were categorically
treated as enemies of the state by association.
By association alone. Exactly. Under Order 00486,
these women were generally sentenced to deportation,
often sent to the harsh steppes of Kazakhstan,
for an average of five to ten years. All of their
family possessions were confiscated by the state.
What about the extended family? The elderly Terrence
of the executed men who relied on their sons
for support were left with absolutely no means
of survival. Without food or shelter, their fate
was essentially sealed as well. And then there
are the children. When you remove the father
permanently and exile the mother, you create
a generation of orphans. Right. The state swept
up these children who had no remaining relatives
able to take them in and put them into state
-run orphanages. But the goal wasn't just to
house them. It was to deliberately strip them
of their Polish identity. They were brought up
as generic Soviet citizens. Completely denied
any knowledge of their true origins, their parents'
fate, or their cultural heritage. It was an erasure
of the future. When you factor in this deliberate,
methodical destruction of the family unit, the
wives exiled to labor camps, the elderly parents
starved, the children culturally erased in institutions.
Historian Makars Jasiski suggests that a simple
body count doesn't capture the reality. Because
the damage is so much wider. Exactly. Statistical
extrapolation brings the true victim count of
this operation not just to the 111 ,000 who were
shot, but to anywhere from 200 ,000 to 250 ,000
people whose lives were effectively destroyed
by this single policy. Which brings us to a crucial
part of our discussion today. Because history,
for you listening right now, isn't just about
memorizing what happened in 1937. It is also
about how we define those events today, how we
frame them legally and how we understand state
violence. There is a significant ongoing debate
among historical scholars over how to classify
this targeted eradication. Specifically, does
the Polish operation of the NKVD constitute a
genocide? This is a highly complex historiographical
debate. It really hinges on the definitions established
by international law. specifically the UN Genocide
Convention, versus the geopolitical intent of
the perpetrators. Let's look at the argument
for genocide first. Why do many scholars believe
this fits the definition perfectly? Several prominent
historians make a very strong case for the genocide
label, based on the undeniable targeting of an
ethnic group. Michael Ellman notes it may qualify
under the UN Convention. Carol Kerskin argues
that because the Poles were singled out and eradicated
based on their ethnicity and their ethnicity
alone, it meets the legal criteria for genocide.
Terry Martin refers to it as ethnic terror that
verged on the genocidal. And Timothy Snyder is
quite explicit in his analysis. What does he
argue? He argues that when a state shoots the
fathers, deports the mothers, and actively erases
the cultural identity of the children in state
-run orphanages, all while the state's supreme
leader is openly referring to them as Polish
filth, that is fundamentally genocidal. The core
of this argument is that the targeted group was
defined by their ethnic identity, and the goal
was their destruction as a cohesive group within
Soviet borders. That makes complete sense on
its face. But I want to play devil's advocate
here because we want you to understand the different
ways scholars interpret the exact same archival
evidence. Well, of course. What is the counter
argument? If a state kills 111 ,000 people of
a specific ethnicity, how could it not be considered
a genocide? Well, if we connect this to the bigger
picture, we have to look at the deeply paranoid
geopolitical mindset of the Soviet leadership
at the time. Historians like Oli Sundström, Andrei
Klitschurchik. and Nicholas Worth represent a
different school of thought. They bond me that
the primary driver wasn't cure ethnic hatred,
but rather a catastrophic security dilemma. A
security dilemma regarding the borders, right?
Exactly. The Soviet Union was surrounded by states
they viewed as hostile capitalist threats. The
leadership was deeply paranoid about cross -border
loyalties. The argument here is that the Soviet
state didn't kill these people because they were
Polish in a vacuum, but because their Polishness
tied them in the paranoid conspiratorial minds
of the secret police to an enemy state right
next door. It was viewed as a security measure.
Yes, it was a brutal preemptive strike driven
by the fear of a fifth column in the event of
an invasion. To highlight how complex this is,
the historical record notes a rather bizarre
contradiction. What's that? Stalin himself actually
praised Poles as brave fighters, calling them
the third most dogged soldiers in the world after
the Russians and Germans. That is a wild contradiction.
On one hand, you have the state mechanically
eradicating a population, and on the other, the
leader of that state is openly praising their
martial spirit and courage. It really complicates
the idea of pure, blind ethnic hatred. It does.
And this raises an important question, one that
historians and legal scholars wrestle with constantly.
How much does the intent of the perpetrator matter
compared to the outcome for the victims? That's
correct. If a state kills over 100 ,000 people
of a specific ethnicity because it genuinely
fears they might act as foreign spies, does that
political motive override the ethnic reality
of the victims when we write the history books?
Does a security paranoia make it political mass
murder rather than a genocide, even if the result
is exactly the same for the families destroyed?
That is exactly the kind of question that makes
digging into these historical deep dives so profound.
It forces us to look past the black and white
narratives and examine the terrifying intersection
of law, history, bureaucracy, and human tragedy.
Absolutely. So to summarize what we've covered
today, we have looked closely at the Polish operation,
an incredibly lethal, highly organized campaign
of stave care that accounted for nearly half
of all ethnic executions during the Great Purge.
We saw the horrifying cold efficiency of the
album procedure, where lives were ended with
the casual stamp of a bureaucrat who never even
looked a victim in the eye. We learned about
the tragically absurd methods used to hunt citizens,
where a name in a directory was enough to secure
a death sentence in 10 days. And we explored
the lingering, ongoing debate over whether this
targeted eradication, which destroyed well over
100 ,000 lives and fractured countless families
through deportation and forced assimilation,
should be legally and historically classified
as a genocide or an extreme paranoid security
measure. Before we go, I want to leave you with
a thought to mull over. We've spent this time
looking at what a paranoid state could do with
paper, ink, and a clumsy bureaucracy. But I want
you to look at the smartphone sitting next to
you right now. Yeah. Your precise location data,
your search history, your professional networks,
your religious affiliations, your private messages,
they are all seamlessly cataloged in databases,
infinitely more detailed, permanent, and accessible
than anything the secret police of the 1930s
could have ever dreamed of. It's a sobering thought.
What happens when a modern state decides it needs
to find a new fifth column? It's something to
think about the next time you consider the digital
footprint you leave behind and who exactly possesses
the power to search it. Thank you so much for
joining us on this deep dive. Keep questioning
the history you thought you knew, and we will
catch you next time.