The problem of the mass death of the Red Army soldiers who were 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 state system in Poland in 1989 and the perestroika in the USSR created the conditions when historians were finally able to turn to the problem of the deaths 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 instructing 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 to carry out research work to identify archival materials concerning 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 V. I. Ilyukhin (at that time - the head of the department for supervision over the implementation of laws on state security of the USSR Prosecutor General's Office, a member of the board of the Prosecutor General's Office and senior assistant to the USSR Prosecutor General), this the work was carried out under the guidance of V. M. Falin, head of the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee. The relevant materials were kept in the building of the Central Committee of the CPSU on the Old Square. However, after the August 1991 events, all of them allegedly "disappeared", and further work in this direction was stopped. According to the testimony of Doctor of Historical Sciences A. N. Kolesnik, Falin has been restoring the names of the Red Army soldiers who died in Polish concentration camps since 1988, but, according to V. M. ", the lists he had collected, all the volumes were gone. And the employee who worked on drawing them up was killed.
Nevertheless, the problem of the deaths 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 Soviet Union. The fact that this happened at the time of the removal of the cover of secrecy 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, violating international legal acts regulating the conditions of detention of prisoners of war, caused the Russian side enormous moral and material damage, which has yet to be assessed. In this regard, the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation appealed in 1998 to the relevant state bodies of the Republic of Poland with a request to initiate a criminal case on the death of 83,500 Red Army prisoners in 1919-1921.
In response to this appeal, the Prosecutor General of Poland and Minister of Justice Hanna Sukhotskaya categorically stated that "… there will be no investigation into the case of the alleged extermination of Bolshevik prisoners in the war of 1919-1920, which the Prosecutor General of Russia demands from Poland." … Kh. Sukhotskaya substantiated her refusal by the fact that Polish historians "reliably established" the death of 16-18 thousand people.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 carried out." In order to "finally close" the question of the deaths of the Red Army soldiers, the Prosecutor General's Office of Poland proposed creating a joint Polish-Russian group of scientists to "… examine the archives, study all documents on this case and prepare a corresponding 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 by the Polish Prosecutor General's Office. In November 2000, on the eve of the visit of Russian Foreign Minister Ivanov to Warsaw, the Polish media also named the problem of the deaths of Red Army prisoners of war among the supposed topics of the Polish-Russian negotiations, which was updated thanks to the publications of the Kemerovo governor A. Tuleyev in Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
In the same year, a Russian commission was created to investigate the fate of the Red Army soldiers taken prisoner in Poland in 1920, with the participation of representatives of the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the FSB and the archival service of the Russian Federation. 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 ones, 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 Men in Polish Captivity in 1919-1922", allowing to understand the circumstances of the death of the Red Army soldiers. The review of the collection was prepared by the astronomer Alexei Pamyatnykh - holder of the Polish Cross of Merit (awarded on 4.04.2011 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 Men in Polish Captivity in 1919-1922." as a kind of "indulgence" for Poland on the death of tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war in Polish concentration camps. It is argued that "the agreement reached among 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 men who died in Polish camps from epidemics, hunger and harsh conditions of detention" has been achieved.
First, on a number of aspects, the opinions of the researchers of the two countries seriously differed, as a result of which the results were published in a common collection, but with different forewords in Poland and Russia. On February 13, 2006, after a telephone conversation between the coordinator of the international project "The Truth About Katyn" historian S. E. Strygin and one of the compilers of the collection, the Russian historian N. E. There are significantly more official documents on the extrajudicial executions of Soviet Red Army prisoners of war by Polish servicemen. very serious contradictions arose in the position of the Polish and Russian sides (in the figurative expression of N. E. Eliseeva, "… it came to hand-to-hand combat"). In the end, it was not possible to eliminate these disagreements and it was necessary to make two fundamentally different prefaces to the collection - from the Russian and Polish sides, 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. Matveyev, great differences remained on the issue of the number of captured Red Army soldiers. According to Matveyev's calculations, the fate of at least 9-11 thousand prisoners who did not die in the camps, but did not return to Russia, remained unclear. In general, Matveyev actually pointed to the uncertainty of the fate of about 50 thousand people due to: Polish historians underestimated the number of captured Red Army soldiers, and at the same time the number of prisoners killed; discrepancies between data from Polish and Russian documents; cases of Polish soldiers shooting Red Army prisoners on the spot, without sending them to prisoner of war camps; incomplete Polish records of the deaths of prisoners of war; doubtfulness of data from Polish documents during the war.
Thirdly, the second volume of documents and materials on the death of prisoners of Polish concentration camps, which was to be published shortly after the first, has not yet been published. And "the one that was published lies forgotten in the Main Directorate of State Archives and the Federal Archival Agency of Russia. And no one is in a hurry to get these documents from the shelf."
Fourthly, according to some Russian researchers, "despite the fact that the collection" Red Army Men in Polish Captivity in 1919-1922 "was compiled with the dominant opinion of Polish historians, most of its documents and materials testify to such a deliberate wild barbarism and inhuman attitude to the Soviet prisoners of war, that there can be no question of the transition of this problem to the "category of purely historical"! Moreover, the documents posted in the collection irrefutably testify that with regard to the Soviet Red Army prisoners of war, primarily ethnic Russians and Jews, the Polish authorities pursued a policy of extermination by hunger and cold, with a rod and a bullet, " "testify to such a deliberate savage barbarity and inhuman attitude towards Soviet prisoners of war that this should be qualified as war crimes, murders and cruel treatment of prisoners of war with elements of genocide."
Fifth, despite the Soviet-Polish study and publications available on the subject, the state of the documentary base on this issue is still such that there is simply no exact data on the number of Red Army soldiers killed. (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 the Russian archives in 1992, after publications appeared that these materials were made in the years. " restructuring "fakes).
The thesis situation with the death of the Red Army is as follows. As a result of the war started by Poland in 1919 against Soviet Russia, the Polish army captured over 150 thousand Red Army soldiers. In total, in conjunction with political prisoners and interned civilians, more than 200 thousand Red Army men, civilians, White Guards, fighters of anti-Bolshevik and nationalist (Ukrainian and Belarusian) formations ended up in Polish captivity and concentration camps.
In Polish captivity in 1919-1922. The Red Army soldiers were destroyed in the following main ways: 1) Massacres and executions. Basically, before imprisonment in concentration camps, they were: a) destroyed out of court, leaving the wounded on the battlefield without medical assistance and creating disastrous conditions for transportation to places of detention; b) executed by sentences of various courts and tribunals; c) shot when insubordination was suppressed.
2) Creation of unbearable conditions. Basically in the concentration camps themselves with the help of: a) bullying and beatings, b) hunger and exhaustion, c) cold and disease.
The Second Rzeczpospolita created a huge "archipelago" of dozens of concentration camps, stations, prisons and fortress casemates. It spread over the territory of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania, and included not only dozens of concentration camps, including those openly called in the then European press "death camps", and the so-called. internment camps, as which the Polish authorities used mainly concentration camps built by the Germans and Austrians during the First World War, such as Strzhalkovo, Shipyurno, Lancut, Tuchol, but also prisons, sorting stations, concentration points and various military facilities like Modlin and Brest Fortress, where there were four concentration camps at once.
Islands and islets of the archipelago were located, including in Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian and Lithuanian cities and villages and were called: Pikulitsa, Korosten, Zhitomir, Aleksandrov, Lukov, Ostrov-Lomzhinsky, Rombertov, Zdunskaya Volya, Torun, Dorogusk, Plock, Radom, Przemysl, Lviv, Fridrikhovka, Zvyagel, Dombe, Demblin, Petrokov, Vadovitsy, Bialystok, Baranovichi, Molodechino, Vilno, Pinsk, Ruzhany, Bobruisk, Grodno, Luninets, Volkovysk, Minsk, Pulavy, Povonzki, Exactly, Syuda, Kov should include the so-called. working teams that worked in the district and the surrounding landowners, formed from prisoners, among whom the mortality rate at times exceeded 75%. The most deadly for the prisoners were the concentration camps located on the territory of Poland - Strzhalkovo and Tuchol.
In the early 1920s, the Polish authorities tried to divert the attention of the world community from the mass death of Soviet prisoners of war due to inhuman treatment, shifting their attention to keeping Polish prisoners of war in Soviet captivity. However, the comparison proved to be very beneficial for the Soviet side. Despite much more difficult conditions - civil war, foreign intervention, devastation, famine, massive epidemics, lack of funds - Polish prisoners of war in Russia were in much more comfortable conditions for survival. In addition, their maintenance was supervised by relatives of high-ranking Bolshevik Poles like F. Dzerzhinsky.
Today, the Polish side recognizes the fact of mass deaths of prisoners in Polish concentration camps. However, it seeks to understate the figure reflecting the real number of those killed in captivity. This is carried out, among other things, with the help of semantic substitution.
First, the number of captured Red Army soldiers is significantly underestimated in order to reduce the total number of deaths. Secondly, when counting the dead prisoners, we are talking only about those who died during imprisonment. Thus, about 40% of prisoners of war who died before being imprisoned in concentration camps - directly on the battlefield or during transportation to concentration camps (and from them - back to their homeland) - are not taken into account. Thirdly, we are talking only about the death of the Red Army, thanks to which White Guards who died in captivity, fighters of anti-Bolshevik and nationalist formations and members of their families, as well as political prisoners and interned civilians (supporters of Soviet power and refugees from the east) are out of the limelight.
In general, Polish captivity and internment claimed the lives of more than 50 thousand lives of Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian prisoners: about 10-12 thousand Red Army soldiers died before being imprisoned in concentration camps, about 40-44 thousand in places of detention (about 30-32 thousand. the Red Army plus 10-12 thousand civilians and fighters of anti-Bolshevik and nationalist formations).
The deaths of tens of thousands of Russian prisoners and the deaths of Poles in Katyn are two different problems that are not related to each other (except that in both cases it is about the death of people). The mass death of Soviet prisoners of war is not a taboo in modern Poland. They are simply trying to present it in such a way as not to discredit the Polish side.
In Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, the Katyn theme has been massively promoted since late Soviet times, and almost nothing is known about the deaths of tens of thousands of compatriots in Polish concentration camps. Today, the main, common problem in the research of Katyn and "anti-Katyn" is that Russian historians are looking for the truth, while Polish historians are looking for benefits for their country.
Since the suppression of problems is clearly not conducive to their solution, I would like to urge not only scientists-historians and Russian-speaking astronomers who were awarded the Polish crosses "for Katyn", but also jurists from Poland and Russia to conduct a joint full and objective investigation of the fate of the "disappeared" in Polish captivity of tens of thousands of Red Army men. Undoubtedly, the Polish side has every right to investigate all the circumstances of the death of its fellow citizens in Katyn. But its eastern neighbors have exactly the same right to investigate the circumstances of the death of the Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity. And on the compilation, or rather, the restoration of those already available by the beginning of the 1990s. lists of compatriots who died in Polish concentration camps. This process can be started by resuming the work of the joint commission of scientists, which was not formally disbanded by anyone. Moreover, including in it, in addition to Russian and Polish historians and jurists, representatives of the Belarusian and Ukrainian sides. Also worthy of close attention are the proposals of Russian bloggers on the introduction of an official date for commemorating the Red Army soldiers who died in Polish captivity in 1919-1922 and the Kemerovo governor Aman Tuleyev - on the creation of the Russian Institute of National Remembrance, which will investigate crimes committed, including foreign land, against Soviet and Russian citizens.
