In the spring of 2012, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia was innocent of the mass shooting of soldiers and officers of the Polish army near Katyn. The Polish side has almost completely lost this case. There are surprisingly few media reports about this, but the lack of truthful information about the fate of the people who died should not open the way for political speculations that poison relations between the two peoples. And this applies not only to the fate of thousands of Polish soldiers and officers, but also to the fate of tens of thousands of Russian compatriots who found themselves in Polish captivity after the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1921. This article is an attempt to shed light on one of the "dark spots" of Russian, Polish and European history.
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As a result of the war started by Poland against Soviet Russia, the Polish army captured over 150 thousand Red Army men. 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.
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 (these were mainly concentration camps built by the Germans and Austrians during the First World War, such as Stshalkovo, Shipyurno, Lancut, Tuchola), but also prisons, sorting concentration stations, concentration points and various military facilities like Modlin and the Brest Fortress, where there were four concentration camps at once - Bug-shuppe, Fort Berg, Graevsky's barracks and an officer's …
Islands and islets of the archipelago were located, among other things, in Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian and Lithuanian cities and villages and were called Pikulice, Korosten, Zhitomir, Aleksandrov, Lukov, Ostrov-Lomzhinsky, Rombertov, Zdunskaya Volya, Torun, Dorogusk, Plock, Radom, Przemysl, Lvov, Fridrikhovka, Zvyagel, Domblin, Petrokov, Vadovitsy, Bialystok, Baranovichi, Molodechino, Vilno, Pinsk, Ruzhany, Bobruisk, Grodno, Luninets, Volkovysk, Minsk, Pulavy, Powonzki, Rovno, Stryi, Kovel …
This should also 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 prisoners were the concentration camps located in Poland - Strzhalkovo and Tuchol.
The situation of the prisoners already in the first months of the operation of the concentration camps was so terrible and disastrous that in September 1919 the legislative body (Seim) of Poland created a special commission to investigate the situation in the concentration camps. The commission completed its work in 1920 just before the start of the Polish offensive against Kiev. She not only pointed out the poor sanitary conditions in the camps, as well as the prevailing famine among the prisoners, but also admitted the guilt of the military authorities for the fact that "the death rate from typhus was brought to an extreme degree."
As Russian researchers note, today “the Polish side, despite the indisputable facts of inhuman treatment of the captured Red Army soldiers in 1919-1922, does not recognize its responsibility for their death in Polish captivity and categorically rejects any accusations in this regard. Poles are particularly outraged by attempts to draw parallels between Nazi concentration camps and Polish POW camps. However, there are grounds for such comparisons … Documents and evidence "allow us to conclude that the local executors were guided not by correct orders and instructions, but by verbal directives of the highest Polish leaders."
V. Shved gives the following explanation for this: “The head of the Polish state, a former militant terrorist Jozef Pilsudski, became famous in tsarist Russia as the organizer of the most successful actions and expropriations. He always ensured the maximum secrecy of his plans. The military coup that Pilsudski carried out in May 1926 came as a complete surprise to everyone in Poland. Piłsudski was a master of disguises and distractions. There is no doubt that he applied this tactic in the situation with the captured Red Army soldiers. " Also, “with a high degree of confidence, we can conclude that the predetermination of the death of captured Red Army soldiers in Polish camps was due to the general anti-Russian mood of Polish society - the more the Bolsheviks die, the better. Most politicians and military leaders of Poland at that time shared these sentiments."
The most vividly anti-Russian sentiment that prevailed in Polish society was formulated by the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Poland, Józef Beck: “As for Russia, I do not find enough epithets to characterize the hatred we have towards her.” The head of the then Polish state, Józef Piłsudski, expressed no less colorfully: “When I take Moscow, I will tell you to write on the Kremlin wall:“It is forbidden to speak Russian.”
As noted by the deputy commissar general of the Civil Administration of the Eastern Lands, Michal Kossakovsky, it was not considered a sin to kill or torture a “Bolshevik”, which included civilian Soviet residents. One of the examples of what this resulted in in practice: N. A. Walden (Podolsky), a cult worker of the Red Army, captured in the summer of 1919, later recalled how at the stops to the train, where he, undressed by the Poles to “underpants and shirt, barefoot,” was loaded and in which the prisoners drove for the first 7-8 days "without any food", Polish intellectuals came to mock or check personal weapons on the prisoners, as a result of which "we missed many for our trip."
"Horrors were happening in the Polish camps …" This opinion was shared by representatives of the joint Soviet-Polish commission, representatives of the Polish and Russian Red Cross, and the French military mission in Poland, and the emigre press ["Freedom" by B. Savinkov, Paris "Common Cause ", Berlin" Rul "…), and international organizations (among them the American Union of Christian Youth under the leadership of Secretary of War for Prisoners of War DO Wilson (UMSA), American Relief Administration (ARA)].
In fact, the stay of the Red Army in Polish captivity was not regulated by any legal norms, since the government of J. Pilsudski refused to sign the agreements prepared by the delegations of the Red Cross societies of Poland and Russia at the beginning of 1920. In addition, "the political and psychological atmosphere in Poland did not contribute to the observance of the generally accepted humane attitude towards former combatants." This is eloquently stated in the documents of the Mixed (Russian, Ukrainian and Polish delegations) commission on the repatriation of prisoners.
For example, the real position of the supreme Polish authorities in relation to the "Bolshevik prisoners" is set forth in the minutes of the 11th meeting of the commission on July 28, 1921. It states: "When the camp command considers it possible … to provide more human conditions for the existence of prisoners of war, then prohibitions come from the center." The same protocol formulated a general assessment of the situation in which the Red Army prisoners were in the Polish camps. The Polish side was forced to agree with this assessment: “The RUD (Russian-Ukrainian delegation) could never allow the prisoners to be treated so inhumanly and with such cruelty … there is no underwear … The RUD delegation does not remember that sheer nightmare and horror of beatings, mutilations and sheer physical extermination, which was carried out to the Russian Red Army prisoners of war, especially the communists, in the first days and months of captivity."
The fact that nothing has changed even after a year and a half follows from the report of the chairman of the Russian-Ukrainian delegation of the Mixed Soviet-Polish Commission on Prisoners of War, Refugees and Hostages E. Aboltin, prepared in February 1923: “Perhaps due to the historical hatred of the Poles to the Russians or for other economic and political reasons, prisoners of war in Poland were not regarded as unarmed enemy soldiers, but as disenfranchised slaves … Food was given unfit for consumption and below any living wage. When a prisoner of war was taken prisoner, they took off all wearable uniforms, and the prisoners of war remained very often in the same underwear, in which they lived behind the camp wire … the Poles treated them not as people of equal race, but as slaves. Beatings of prisoners of war were practiced at every step. There is also a mention of attracting these unfortunates to work that humiliates human dignity: instead of horses, people were harnessed to carts, plows, harrows, sewage carts.
From A. A. Ioffe's telegram to comrades Chicherin, Polbyuro, Tsentroevak from December 14, 1920, Riga: “The situation of the prisoners in the Strzhalkovo camp is especially difficult. The death rate among prisoners of war is so great that if it does not decrease, they will all die out within six months. In the same regime as the Communists, they keep all the captured Jewish Red Army soldiers, keeping them in separate barracks. Their regime is deteriorating as a result of anti-Semitism cultivated in Poland. Ioffe.
"The mortality rate of prisoners under the above conditions was terrible," noted in the report of the Russian-Ukrainian delegation. - How many of our prisoners of war died in Poland, it is impossible to establish, since the Poles did not keep any records of those who died in 1920, and the greatest death rate in the camps was in the fall of 1920.
According to the order of counting prisoners of war adopted in the Polish army in 1920, not only those who actually ended up in the camps, but also those who were left wounded on the battlefield or were shot on the spot were considered taken prisoner. Therefore, many of the "disappeared" tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers were killed long before being imprisoned in concentration camps. In general, the prisoners were destroyed in two main ways: 1) executions and massacres and 2) the creation of unbearable conditions.
Massacres and executions
Polish historians significantly underestimate the number of Soviet prisoners of war and most often do not take into account that not all of them ended up in the camps. Many have died before. The reasonableness of this assumption by Russian historians is consistent with Polish documentary evidence. So, in one of the telegrams of the Polish military command of December 3, 1919 it is said: “According to available data, the order of transportation, registration and sending of prisoners of war to the camp is not adhered to at the fronts … Prisoners are often not sent to assembly points, but are detained immediately upon capture. at the fronts and used at work, because of this, it is impossible to accurately count prisoners of war. Due to the poor condition of clothing and nutrition … epidemic diseases are spreading in a frightening way among them, bringing a huge percentage of mortality due to general exhaustion of the body."
Contemporary Polish authors, speaking of the enormous mortality rate among prisoners sent to concentration camps, themselves note that “Polish publicists and most historians point out, first of all, a lack of money. The revived Rzeczpospolita could barely dress and feed its own soldiers. There was not enough for the prisoners, because there could not be enough. However, not everything can be explained by the lack of funds. The problems of the prisoners of that war did not begin behind the barbed wire of the camps, but on the first line, when they dropped their weapons."
Russian scientists and researchers believe that even before imprisonment in concentration camps, only during the period of capturing and transporting prisoners of the Red Army from the front, a significant part of them (about 40%) died. A very eloquent evidence of this is, for example, the report of the command of the 14th Wielkopolska Infantry Division to the command of the 4th Army on October 12, 1920, in which, in particular, it was reported that “during the battles from Brest-Litovsk to Baranovichi, a total of 5000 prisoners and left on the battlefield about 40% of the named amount of wounded and killed Bolsheviks"
On December 20, 1919, at a meeting of the main command of the Polish Army, Major Yakushevich, an employee of the Volyn KEO (command of the stage district), reported: “Prisoners of war arriving in echelons from the Galician front look exhausted, hungry and sick. Only in one echelon, expelled from Ternopil and numbering 700 prisoners of war, only 400 arrived. The death rate of prisoners of war in this case was about 43%.
“Perhaps the most tragic fate is that of new arrivals, who are transported in unheated carriages without appropriate clothes, with colds, hungry and tired, often with the first symptoms of illness, lying madly with apathy on bare boards,” Natalia Belezhinskaya from the Polish Red Cross described the situation. “Therefore, many of them end up in hospitals after such a trip, and the weaker ones die.” The death rate of prisoners recorded at marshalling yards and shipments was very high. For example, in Bobruisk in December 1919 - January 1920, 933 prisoners died, in Brest-Litovsk from November 18 to November 28, 1920 - 75 prisoners, in Pulavy in less than a month, from November 10 to December 2, 1920 - 247 prisoners …
On December 8, 1920, the Minister of Military Affairs Kazimierz Sosnkowski even ordered an investigation into the transportation of hungry and sick prisoners of war. The immediate reason for this was information about the transportation of 200 prisoners from Kovel to a kind of "vestibule" before entering the camps - a concentration point for filtering prisoners of war in Pulawy. On the train, 37 prisoners of war died, 137 were sick. “They were on the road for 5 days and during all this time they were not allowed to eat. As soon as they were unloaded in Pulawy, the prisoners immediately jumped on the horse's carcass and ate the raw carrion. " General Godlevsky in a letter to Sosnkovsky indicates that in the indicated echelon on the day of departure, he counted 700 people, which means that 473 people died on the way. “Most of them were so hungry that they could not get out of the cars on their own. On the very first day in Puławy, 15 people died”.
From the diary of the Red Army soldier Mikhail Ilyichev (taken prisoner on the territory of Belarus, he was a prisoner of the Stshalkovo concentration camp): “… in the fall of 1920 we were transported in carriages half filled with coal. The tightness was hellish, before reaching the disembarkation station, six people died. Then they marinated us for a day in some kind of swamp so that we could not lie on the ground and sleep. Then they drove under escort to the place. One wounded man could not walk, we took turns dragging him, thereby knocking down the pace of the column. The convoy got tired of it, and they beat him with rifle butts. It became clear that we could not last long, and when we saw the rotten barracks and ours, wandering behind the thorn in what the mother had given birth to, the reality of imminent death became obvious."
Mass executions of Russian prisoners of war 1919-1920 - this is not a propaganda invention, as some Polish media are trying to present the case. One of the first testimonies we know belongs to Tadeusz Kossak, a soldier of the Polish corps formed during the First World War by the Austrians, who described in his memoirs published in 1927 ("Jak to bylo w armii austriackiej") how in 1919 in Volyn the lancers of the 1st regiment were shot 18 Red Army soldiers.
Polish researcher A. Velewiejski wrote in the popular in Poland “Gazeta Wyborcza” dated February 23, 1994 about the orders of General Sikorsky (the future prime minister of the second Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) to shoot 300 Russian prisoners of war with machine guns, as well as General Pyasetsky not to take Russian soldiers alive. There is information about other similar cases. Including evidence of the systematic reprisals of Poles with prisoners on the front line of the aforementioned K. Svitalski, one of the closest associates of Pilsudski. The Polish historian Marcin Handelsman, who was a volunteer in 1920, also recalled that "our commissars were not taken alive at all." This is confirmed by the participant of the Warsaw battle Stanislav Kavchak, who in the book “The Silent Echo. Memories of the war of 1914-1920. " describes how the commander of the 18th Infantry Regiment hanged all the captured commissars. According to the testimony of A. Chestnov, a Red Army soldier taken prisoner in May 1920, after the arrival of their group of prisoners in the town of Sedlec, all "… party comrades, including 33 people, were isolated and shot right there."
According to the testimony of the Red Army soldier V. V. Valuev, who escaped from captivity, who was captured on August 18 near Novominsk: “Of the entire staff (about 1000 people were captured - approx.), - he showed during interrogation in Kovno, - they chose communists, commanders, commissars and Jews, and right there in front of all the Red Army men one Jewish commissar was beaten and then shot. He further testified that their uniforms were taken away from everyone, and those who did not immediately follow orders were beaten to death by the Polish legionnaires. All prisoners were sent to the Tuchol concentration camp of the Pomeranian Voivodeship, where there were already many wounded who had not been bandaged for weeks, as a result of which worms started in their wounds. Many of the wounded died, 30-35 people were buried every day.
In addition to the recollections of eyewitnesses and participants, at least two official reports about the execution of captured Red Army soldiers are known. The first is contained in the summary of the III (operational) department of the High Command of the Polish Army (VP) of March 5, 1919. The second - in the operational summary of the command of the 5th Army of the VP, signed by the chief of staff of the 5th Army, Lieutenant Colonel R. Volikovsky, which says that on August 24, 1920, west of the Dzyadlovo-Mlawa-Tsekhanov line, about 400 Soviet Cossacks were taken prisoner in Poland Guy's 3rd Cavalry Corps. In retaliation "for 92 privates and 7 officers who were brutally killed by the 3rd Soviet Cavalry Corps", soldiers of the 49th Infantry Regiment of the 5th Polish Army shot 200 captured Cossacks from machine guns. This fact was not noted in the reports of the III Department of the High Command of the VP.
As the Red Army soldiers V. A. Bakmanov and P. T. Karamnokov, the selection of prisoners for execution near Mlawa was carried out by a Polish officer "by faces", "respectable and cleaner dressed, and more to cavalrymen." The number of those to be shot was determined by a French officer (pastor) who was present among the Poles, who said that 200 people would be enough.
Polish operational reports contain several direct and indirect reports about the execution of the Red Army during their capture. An example is the operational summary dated June 22, 1920. Another example is the report dated March 5, 1919 from the grouping of gen. A. Listovsky, in which it was reported: “… a detachment under the command of. Esmana, supported by the mobile detachment Zamechek, occupied the settlement of Brodnica, where 25 Red Army soldiers were taken prisoner, including several Poles. Some of them were shot. " The existing practice of treating prisoners of war is evidenced by a report from the Polesie grouping of the Polish North-Eastern Front on August 7, 1920: “During the night, subunits from [Soviet] 8th and 17th infantry divisions crossed over to our side. Several companies crossed over in full force with officers. Among the reasons for the surrender, the officers cite excessive fatigue, apathy and lack of food, as well as the proven fact that the 32nd Infantry Regiment does not shoot prisoners. " It is quite obvious, GF Matveev asserts, that “executions of prisoners should hardly be considered something exceptional if information about them fell into the documents intended for the high command. The reports contain reports of Polish punitive expeditions against the rebels in Volhynia and Belarus, accompanied by executions, arson of individual houses and entire villages."
It should be said that the fate of many prisoners, with whom the Poles did not want to "bother" for one reason or another, was unenviable. The fact is that the destruction of the Red Army soldiers who found themselves in the Polish rear was quite widespread at the final stage of the war. True, there is not much evidence of this at our disposal, but they are very weighty. How else can we understand the meaning of the address of the head of the Polish state and the supreme commander-in-chief Yu. Pilsudski "To the Polish people", dated around August 24, 1920, i.e. the time when the Red units defeated near Warsaw were rapidly retreating to the east. Its text was not included in the collected works of the marshal, but is given in full in the work of the Catholic priest M. M. Grzybowski. It, in particular, said:
“The defeated and cut off Bolshevik gangs are still wandering and hiding in the forests, plundering and plundering the property of the inhabitants.
Polish people! Stand shoulder to shoulder to fight the fleeing enemy. Let not a single aggressor leave the Polish land! For the fathers and brothers who died defending the Motherland, let your punishing fists, armed with pitchforks, scythes and flails, fall on the shoulders of the Bolsheviks. Return those captured alive into the hands of the nearest military or civilian authorities.
Let the retreating enemy not have a minute of rest, let death and captivity await him on all sides! Polish people! To arms!"
Pilsudski's appeal is extremely ambiguous, its content could be interpreted as a direct call for the extermination of the Red Army soldiers who found themselves in the Polish rear, although this is not directly stated. Pilsudski's appeal had the most serious consequences for the wounded Red Army soldiers "generously" thrown onto the battlefield. This is evidenced by a note published hot on the heels of the Battle of Warsaw in the Polish military magazine Bellona, which contained information about the losses of the Red Army. In particular, it says: "Losses by prisoners of up to 75 thousand, losses of those killed on the battlefield, killed by our peasants and wounded are very large" killed during the defense of the Fatherland A. V. Kirilin, "about 216 thousand were captured, of which a little more than 160 thousand were taken to the camps. That is, even before the Red Army men were in the camps, they were already killed on the way").
From the testimony of Ilya Tumarkin, who returned from captivity in Poland: “First of all: when we were captured, the felling of Jews began and got rid of death by some strange accident. The next day they drove us on foot to Lublin, and this crossing was a real Calvary for us. The bitterness of the peasants was so great that little boys threw stones at us. Accompanied by curses, abuse, we arrived in Lublin to the feeding point, and here began the most shameless beating of Jews and Chinese … 24 / V-21g. ”.
According to the testimony of the deputy. General Commissioner of the Civil Administration of the Eastern Lands Michal Kossakovsky, it was not considered a sin to kill or torture a captured Bolshevik. He recalls that "… in the presence of General Listovsky (the commander of the task force in Polesie), they shot a boy just because he allegedly smiled unkindly." In the concentration camps themselves, prisoners could also be shot for trifles. So, the captured Red Army soldier M. Sherstnev in the Bialystok camp was killed on September 12, 1920 only because he dared to object to the wife of Lieutenant Kalchinsky in a conversation in the officer's kitchen, who on this basis ordered him to be shot.
There is also evidence of the use of prisoners as live targets. Major General V. I. Filatov - in the early 1990s. the editor of Voenno-Istoricheskiy Zhurnal, who was one of the first to raise the topic of mass deaths of Red Army men in Polish concentration camps, writes that the favorite pastime of some Polish cavalrymen (“the best in Europe”) was to put prisoners of the Red Army throughout the huge cavalry parade ground and study on them how to "break up to the waist" from the entire "heroic" shoulder, at full gallop a man. The brave gentlemen chopped down the prisoners "on the fly, with a turn." There were a lot of dressing-places for "training" in the cavalry wheelhouse. As well as death camps. In Pulava, Domba, Stshalkovo, Tuholy, Baranovichi … Garrisons of brave cavalrymen stood in every little town and had thousands of prisoners “at hand”. For example, only the Lithuanian-Belarusian division of the Polish army left 1,153 prisoners at its disposal in Bobruisk.
According to IV Mikhutina, "all these unknown victims of arbitrariness, which do not lend themselves to at least an approximate calculation, expand the scale of the tragedy of Soviet prisoners of war in Polish captivity and show how incompletely reflect its known data."
Some Polish and Russian-speaking authors argue that the brutality of the Poles in the 1919-1920 war was caused by the brutality of the Red Army. At the same time, they refer to the scenes of violence against captured Poles, described in I. Babel's diary, which served as the basis for the novel "Cavalry" and represent Poland as a victim of aggressive Bolsheviks. Yes, the Bolsheviks knew that the nearest way to export the revolution to Europe was through Poland, which occupied an important place in the plans of the “world revolution”. However, the Polish leadership also dreamed of restoring the second Rzeczpospolita within the borders of 1772, that is, passing slightly west of Smolensk. However, both in 1919 and in 1920 Poland was the aggressor, which, after gaining independence, was the first to move its troops to the east. This is a historical fact.
In connection with the opinion widespread in Polish scientific literature and journalism about the cruelty of the Red Army in the occupied Polish territory in the summer of 1920, G. F. Matveyev cites evidence from a competent Polish military institution - the 6th exposition of the II department (military intelligence and counterintelligence) of the headquarters of the Warsaw military district of September 19, 1920. In the so-called "invasion report" she characterized the behavior of the Red Army as follows: "The behavior of the Soviet troops throughout the occupation was impeccable, it was proved that until the moment of retreat they did not allow any unnecessary robberies and violence. They tried to carry out requisitions formally and paid the required prices in money. The impeccable behavior of the Soviet troops in comparison with the violence and unnecessary plunder of our retreating units significantly undermined the credibility of the Polish authorities "(CAW. SRI DOK II371.1 / A; Z doswiadczen ostatnich tygodni. - Bellona, 1920, no. 7, s. 484).
Creation of unbearable conditions
In the works of Polish authors, as a rule, the fact of a very high mortality rate of Soviet servicemen in captivity due to unbearable conditions of existence is denied or hushed up. However, not only the memories of the survivors have survived, but also diplomatic notes from the Russian side (for example, a note dated January 6, 1921) with protests against the cruel treatment of prisoners, which detail the monstrous facts of the camp life of the Red Army soldiers.
Bullying and beatings. In Polish concentration camps, beatings, bullying and cruel punishment of prisoners were systematically practiced. As a result, “the inhuman conditions of the prisoners had the most dire consequences and led to their rapid extinction. Cases of beating of prisoners by officers of the Polish army were recorded in the Dombe camp … In the Tucholi camp, the commissar of the 12th regiment Kuzmin was beaten. In the Bobruisk prison, a prisoner of war was cut off his hands only because he did not comply with the order to scoop out the sewage with his bare hands. Instructor Myshkina, taken prisoner near Warsaw, was raped by two officers and thrown without clothes into a prison on Dzelitnaya Street in Warsaw. An actress of the field theater of the Red Army, Topolnitskaya, also taken prisoner near Warsaw, was beaten during interrogation with a rubber tourniquet, hung by her legs from the ceiling, and then sent to a camp in Domba. These and similar cases of bullying of Russian prisoners of war became known to the Polish press and caused certain protest voices and even parliamentary inquiries.
By paragraph 20 of the instruction of the Ministry of Military Affairs of Poland for the camps of June 21, 1920, the punishment of prisoners by flogging was strictly prohibited. At the same time, documents show that rod punishment "became a system in most Polish prisoner of war and internment camps throughout their entire existence." N. S. Raysky notes that in Zlochev the Red Army soldiers were also "beaten with whips made of iron wire from electric wires." Cases have been recorded when prisoners were beaten to death with rods and whips made of barbed wire. Moreover, even the press of that time wrote openly about such facts.
In some Polish camps, Russian prisoners were used as traction, instead of horses, in logging, arable land and road works. In the Stshalkovo camp, “prisoners of war are forced to carry their own feces instead of horses. They carry both plows and harrows."
As the plenipotentiary representative of the RSFSR in Poland wrote on January 6, 1922, “the arrested are driven out into the street every day and instead of walking, exhausted people are forced to run on command, ordering them to fall into the mud and rise again. If the prisoners refuse to lie down in the mud, or if someone from them, following the order, cannot get up, exhausted by the difficult conditions of their detention, then they are beaten with rifle butts.
“The disciplinary punishments applied to prisoners of war are distinguished by barbaric cruelty. The premise for those arrested in one camp is a closet of 2 cubic fathoms, similar in its condition to a cattle shed. From 10 to 17 people are imprisoned in this punishment cell … In addition to these cruel punishments in the camps, baton and fist massacre of prisoners of war flourishes … The attempts of our delegation to soften the regime in the camps, bringing a general provision on the rules of the internal order, crashed against the sabotage of the Polish delegation (from the certificate Embassy of the RSFSR in Warsaw on August 10, 1922).
In fairness, it is worth pointing out that in the same way the Poles dealt with not only Soviet prisoners, but also with the Poles - communists, who also died in the same camps.
On the basis of complaints and statements as a result of the collected information from the camps and prisons, the chairman of the RUD, E. N. Ignatov, informed Moscow on June 20, 1921 (head of the NKID Department to Yakubovich and to Tsentroevak Pilyavsky) that “the situation of prisoners of war in the camps had improved little, and in some even worsened in terms of the regime, and the beatings have not stopped to this day. The high and commanding staff rarely resort to assault, but the guards still hit."
Hunger and exhaustion. On paper, the prisoners' daily food ration included 500 g of bread, 150 g of meat or fish (beef - four times a week, horse meat - twice a week, dried fish or herring - once a week), 700 g of potatoes, various spices and two servings of coffee. A prisoner was entitled to 100 g of soap per month. Healthy prisoners, if they so wished, were allowed to be used at work - first in the military department (in garrisons, etc.), and later in government institutions and private individuals, from prisoners it was possible to form work teams with the aim of “replacing civilian workers at work, requiring a large number of workers, such as railway construction, unloading products, etc.”. The working prisoners received a full soldier's ration and a supplement to the salary. The wounded and sick should be "treated on an equal basis with the soldiers of the Polish Army, and civilian hospitals should be paid for their upkeep as much as for their own soldiers." In reality, such detailed and humane rules for keeping prisoners of war were not followed, the conditions in the camps were very difficult, as evidenced by dozens of documents.
A widespread phenomenon in Polish camps, despite the measures declared by the Polish authorities, was the death of prisoners from exhaustion. Cult worker of the Red Army Walden (Podolsky), who went through all the circles of the hell of Polish captivity in 1919-20, in his memoirs "In Polish Captivity", published in 1931, as if anticipating the controversy that flared up 80 years later, wrote: "I hear the protests of the indignant a Polish patriot who quotes official reports indicating that each prisoner was supposed to have so many grams of fat, carbohydrates, etc. That is why, apparently, Polish officers so willingly went to administrative positions in concentration camps."
Polish historians argue that at this time the camp guards ate no better than the prisoners, since the food situation was widespread. I wonder how often peelings and hay were in the diet of the Polish guards? It is known that there was no famine in Poland in 1919-1921. It is no coincidence that the official norms established by the Polish Ministry of Military Affairs in May 1919 were quite sparing. On a day, a prisoner, as mentioned above, was supposed to have 500 g of bread, 150 g of meat, 700 g of potatoes, etc. Moreover, during inspections of the camps, prisoners were fed according to these norms. Thus, the inspection of the High Command of the Polish Army, having checked the nutritional status in the camp in Modlin in the fall of 1920, found that the prisoners' nutrition was satisfactory. For this it was enough that on the day of the check in the camp “meat soup, thick and tasty, in sufficient quantity” was cooked and the prisoners received a pound of bread, coffee and marmalade. However, just a few days before the check, a telegram was sent from Modlin to Warsaw stating that 900 stomach patients were in the camp hospital and 58 people had already died. The telegram stated that "the main causes of the disease are the eating of various damp cleanings by the prisoners and the complete absence of shoes and clothes."
From the minutes of a meeting in the High Command of the Polish Army on the situation of prisoners of war (20.12.1919, Warsaw): “Lieutenant Ludwig, answering questions and accusations, declares that the reason for the shortcomings is the failure to comply with orders. All the problems of the prisoners were settled by orders, but they are not carried out. The prisoners receive a lot of food, they work - even a full soldier's ration, the causes of the plight are only theft and abuse … Mr. Magenheim complains that the orders of the Supreme] to [command] concerning the FGP are not being carried out; the military authorities ignore the FGP stages when dispatched to the place of residence. Moreover, they rip off both prisoners and refugees and re-emigrants, as well as prisoners from the [roshly] war (meaning the First World War - approx. N. M.); the latter are often unlawfully detained. It hurts us in foreign] public opinion."
Cold and sickness. Another reason for the premature death of many prisoners was the cold due to the lack of clothing and footwear, as well as the condition of the camp premises, which were not well suited for human habitation. Most of the barracks lacked heating and light. Many did not have bunks to sleep in, let alone mattresses and blankets or straw on the floor. From the report of Stephanie Stempolovskaya: "… the prisoners … at night because of the cold they cannot sleep, they run to keep warm" (report dated 10 / IX 1920). This is how the living conditions looked in three camps, which contain about half of the prisoners of war. The other half of the prisoners in small teams lived in rooms about which almost all reports are repeated briefly, succinctly "dark, cramped, dirty, cold", sometimes adding "the roofs are full of holes, water is flowing", "the glass is broken", "there are no windows at all, it is dark" etc.".
The situation was aggravated by the epidemics that raged in Poland during that period of war and devastation. The documents mention typhus, dysentery, Spanish flu, typhoid fever, cholera, smallpox, scabies, diphtheria, scarlet fever, meningitis, malaria, venereal diseases, tuberculosis. In the first half of 1919, 122 thousand cases of typhus were registered in Poland, including about 10 thousand with a fatal outcome; from July 1919 to July 1920, about 40 thousand cases of the disease were recorded in the Polish army. POW camps did not escape infection with infectious diseases, and were often their centers and potential breeding grounds. At the disposal of the Polish Ministry of Military Affairs at the end of August 1919, it was noted that “the repeated sending of prisoners deep into the country without observing the most basic sanitary requirements led to the infection of almost all prisoner camps with infectious diseases”.
There was no medical assistance at all. The wounded lay without bandages for two weeks, until worms started in the wounds and people died of blood poisoning.
The mortality rate among the prisoners in some periods was appalling. So, according to representatives of the International Red Cross, in the camp in Brest-Litovsk, which was under the jurisdiction of the high command, where there were, perhaps, the worst conditions, from September 7 to October 7, 1919, out of 4,165 sick Soviet and Ukrainian prisoners died 1,124, i.e. e. 27%. A sad "record" was set in August, when 180 people died of dysentery per day. During the epidemic of typhus that began on December 15, 1919 in Bobruisk, 933 people died during December and January, i.e. about half of the contingent contained there, which consisted only of the Red Army. But on average, the mortality rate was noticeably lower. So, the sanitary department of the Ministry of Military Affairs of Poland determined in February 1920, when there was no large influx of prisoners, the "normal" mortality rate in the POW camps under its jurisdiction was 7%, without specifying, however, per day, month or year.
The report of the Sanitary Department to the Minister of War on the plight of prisoners of war in the camps and the need to take urgent measures to improve it (December 1919) also cited numerous examples from reports describing the state of the camps, and noted that the deprivation and torture of prisoners left “an indelible stain on the honor of the Polish people and army”. For example, in the camp in Stshalkov “the fight against the epidemic, apart from such reasons as the non-functioning of the bathhouse and the lack of disinfectants, was hampered by two factors that were partially eliminated by the camp commandant: a) the constant taking away of the prisoners' linen and replacing it by the guard companies; b) punishment of the prisoners of the entire department by not being released from the barracks for three or more days.”
In the camp in Stshalkovo, a mortality rate of 100-200 people per month was the norm, during the most terrible period for prisoners of war - the winter of 1920-21. - the number of deaths was already in the thousands. In Brest in the second half of 1919, from 60 to 100 people died every day. In Tucholi, at the end of 1920, 400 people died in two months.
On December 22, 1920, the Lviv newspaper Vperyod reported that on the 9th, 45 Russian prisoners of war died in the Polish camp Tuchol in one day. The reason for this was that on a frosty and windy day, "half-naked and barefoot" prisoners were "taken to a bathhouse" with a concrete floor, and then transferred to dirty dugouts without a wooden floor. "As a result," the newspaper reported, "the dead or the seriously ill were continuously carried out." The official, based on the materials of the newspaper, protests by the Russian delegations in Riga and in the PRUVSK against the inhuman treatment of prisoners of war were investigated by the Polish military authorities. Its results naturally contradicted the newspaper reports. “On December 9, 1920, - the Polish delegation to PRUVSK informed the Russian delegation, - that day the death of 10 prisoners who died of typhus was established … The bath was heated … to the hospital ". According to the results of the investigation, the newspaper "Vperyod" was closed for an indefinite period "for posting exaggerated and biased information."
After the Battle of Warsaw on September 10, 1920, when more than 50 thousand Red Army soldiers were captured by the Polish army, the conditions of detention of prisoners of war in Poland deteriorated significantly. Subsequent battles on the Polish-Soviet front further increased the number of prisoners of war.
At the turn of 1920-1921. supply and sanitary conditions in the camps for prisoners of war again sharply deteriorated. Hunger and infectious diseases claimed the lives of hundreds of prisoners every day. It is no coincidence that the High Commissioner for Epidemic Control Emil Godlewski, in his letter to the Minister of War of Poland Kazimierz Sosnkowski in December 1920, described the situation in the POW camps as "simply inhuman and contrary not only to all hygiene requirements, but to culture in general."
In camp hospitals and hospitals there were still no mattresses, blankets, and often beds, there were not enough doctors and other medical personnel, and the available specialists and nurses from prisoners of war were placed in conditions that did not allow them to fulfill their professional duties."
Pointing out the terrible conditions in which the Red Army prisoners of war were at that time in various camps and prisons in Poland, the chairman of the Russian-Ukrainian delegation at the peace talks with Poland A. Ioffe sent a lengthy letter to the chairman of the Polish delegation J. Dombrowski on January 9, 1921. It cited examples of inhuman treatment, and drew attention to the fact that “repeated promises to take measures to improve the conditions of Russian-Ukrainian prisoners in their situation, no significant changes have occurred … According to the reports of the American Union of Christian Youth (POW Aid in Poland, report October 20, 1920), the prisoners of war were placed in rooms that were absolutely not suitable for housing: there was no furniture, no sleeping arrangements, so they had to sleep on the floor without any mattresses and blankets, almost all the windows were without glass, holes in the walls. Everywhere, prisoners of war have an almost complete lack of shoes and underwear and an extreme lack of clothing. For example, in the camps in Strzhalkov, Tucholi and Domba, prisoners do not change their underwear for three months, and most of them have only one change, and many have no underwear at all. In Domba, most of the prisoners are barefoot, and in the camp at the headquarters of the 18th division, most of them do not have any clothes. " “Without admitting the thought of the possibility of such conditions of existence for Polish prisoners of war in Russia and Ukraine,” the governments of Russia and Ukraine, further stated “categorically insist on an immediate change in the conditions of detention of Russian-Ukrainian prisoners of war,in particular, on the immediate removal from their posts of those persons of the administration of the camps who are guilty of the above atrocities."
The death toll went to tens of thousands. “Modern Polish journalism,” notes the Polish researcher I. Mechik, “interprets these figures as follows: prisoners brought epidemics of deadly diseases to the camps: typhus, dysentery, cholera and Spanish flu. This is true and difficult to argue with. Only if the prisoners walked naked, in the mud, starved, did not have blankets or blankets, the sick who walked under themselves were not separated from the healthy, then the result of such an attitude towards people should have been a terrible mortality. Russian authors often pay attention to this. They ask: was it not a deliberate extermination, maybe not at the level of the government, but at least at the level of the leadership of the camps? And it is also difficult to argue with this”.
Thus, the following conclusions can be drawn. In Polish captivity, the Red Army were destroyed in the following main ways:
1. Massacres and executions. Basically, before imprisonment in concentration camps, they:
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. Mainly in the concentration camps themselves with the help of:
a) bullying and beatings, b) hunger and exhaustion, c) cold and disease.
In general, Polish captivity and internment claimed 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 Red Army soldiers plus 10-12 thousand civilians and fighters of anti-Bolshevik and nationalist formations).
