Gulags as Genocide Polian

Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR, by Pavel Polian. 2003

Double Genocide (Red=Brown) Tacitly Validated. No Legitimate Dualism Between Classicide and Genocide. Deportation to Widely-Scattered, Remote Areas Is Itself a Form of Genocide

The obvious strength of this work is its comprehensiveness. It includes a table (pp. 327-333), covering 1920-1952, that lists the nationality that had experienced deportation, the dates of the deportation, the place of origin, and the destination of the deportation. The gulags had many inmates. The reader may be surprised at the numerous nationalities deported, and the very large number of episodes of deportation.

SOVIET COMMUNIST CLASSICIDE AND GENOCIDE OVERLAPPED. SOVIET POLES PREFERENTIALLY TARGETED FOR THEIR ETHNICITY

I now focus on the USSR, including the Great Terror (1937-1938). The Communists had various motives for conducting the deportations, and these motives overlapped. Consider, for example, the anti-kulak campaign (in 1934-1939), as described by Polian in his Reference 114 (quote) Particular peoples, especially Germans or Poles, were treated as kulaks almost indiscriminately, and even Russians, when judged against Koreans or Kazakhs, appeared kulak. Among those banished kulaks from Belorussia or Ukraine, the number of Poles was disproportionately high, and some anti-kulak operations targeted Poles almost exclusively. (unquote)(p. 112). During the later 1939-1941 deportations of Kresy Poles, one quoted NKVD said unabashedly that all the Poles, no matter how many there were, are enemies, and that one cannot, in this generation at least, convert a Pole to Communism. (pp. 117-118).

For more on the fact that the systematic mass murders of Soviet Poles, during the Great Terror (1937-1938), was an act of genocide, please see my review of OPERACJA ANTYPOLSKA… by historian Tomasz Sommer.

DO NOT, HOWEVER, FORGET GENOCIDE BY OBLIQUE INTENT AS OPPOSED TO GENOCIDE BY DIRECT INTENT

The facts are clear. The Soviet mass murders of Soviet Poles during the Great Terror (1937-1938) was an open-and-closed act of genocide. However, the targeting of an ethnicity, by direct intent, is not necessary for the act to qualify as genocide. Thus, the Soviets can also be guilty of genocide by oblique intent, insofar as they KNOW that their act will cause the massive disproportionate deaths of a specific ethnic group. Thus, for instance, the Holodomor qualifies as genocide, even if the Soviets technically didn’t target the Ukrainians “as Ukrainians”, as the Soviets certainly knew that the vast majority of the millions of famine-induced deaths would be of Ukrainians, and they went ahead and did it anyway. Thus, the Holodomor qualifies as Soviet genocide by oblique intent even if it does not quite qualify as Soviet genocide by direct intent.

The issue is even more basic. Why should the demonization and destruction of an identifiable group according to class (classicide) be any less significant than the destruction of an identifiable group according to ethnicity (genocide)? But that is exactly what happens as a result of the Holocaust supremacism that permeates much of western thinking.

SYSTEMATIC DEPORTATIONS THEMSELVES A FORM OF GENOCIDE

Clearly, at least some of the Soviet-enacted deportations qualified as nation-destroying acts–hence genocide. Unfortunately, Pavel Polian does not develop this theme. The reader should consider the fact that deportations are clearly nation-destroying acts in many ways. They scatter the peoples over long geographic distances, making them into thousands of little enclaves functionally nonexistent to each other. They deprive the deportees of their national institutions–such as monuments, churches, educational institutions, etc. Finally, they harm the targeted population biologically. Apart from the higher mortality, the deported peoples experience a net lower birth rate–moreover a depressed birth rate sustained over time.

IMAGINE A JEWISH HOLOCAUST THAT RELIED SOLELY ON MASS DEPORTATIONS

To make the point that the partial or total biological extinction of a targeted ethnicity is NOT necessary for it to qualify as genocide, let us focus on the much-mystified Holocaust. Imagine that the 11 million European and North African Jews mentioned in the Wannsee Protocol had all been deported to Siberia, and were scattered over many thousands of remote locations. The Jewish people would largely have ceased to function as a Jewish people, and additionally would have experienced biological losses as well, albeit over a long period of time. It would’ve been as destructive of Jewishness as the murder of 6 million of them and the physical destruction of thousands of Jewish institutions by the Nazis.

THE GULAGS HARMED THE USSR: AN INADVERTENT RIPOSTE TO THE “HOLOCAUST WAS IRRATIONAL BY HARMING THE NAZIS” ARGUMENT

One argument for Holocaust uniqueness, and the preeminence of the Holocaust over all other genocides, is the premise that it was the only time that a perpetrator committed a genocidal act that did him harm. Apart from the fact that the Shoah, in fact, did NOT harm the Nazis, the argument begs the question about other genocides that did harm to their perpetrators. Read on:

Polian contends that, despite the economic benefits of forced labor and the development of remote areas such as Siberia, the internal deportations actually harmed the Soviet Union, economically and otherwise, in the end. He comments, (quote) On the macroeconomic scale of the state, however, the deportations were disadvantageous, since they scratched millions of well-settled, economically productive families off the production cycle; rendered vast lands and numerous settlements deserted and neglected; caused the loss of population labor skills and traditions, and a dramatic decline in agricultural and industrial production; required additional expenses for the transportation of deportees who settled them down at new locations; and so on and so forth. (unquote)(pp. 319-320).

MINIMIZING THE SCALE OF THE 1939-1941 COMMUNIST DEPORTATIONS OF POLES FROM THE SOVIET-CONQUERED KRESY

One shortcoming of this work is author Pavel Polian’s systematic over-reliance on Soviet archives. For instance, he quotes a figure only 300,000-400,000 Poles deported from Soviet-conquered Eastern Poland to the gulags in 1939-1941–a figure that he admits is “surprisingly low”. (p. 118). For a scholarly defense of the multiples-greater traditional figure, by historian Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, please read the Peczkis review of Polish Poetry from the Soviet Gulags: Recovering a Lost Literature.

THE MYTHICAL 2 MILLION GERMAN EXPELLEE DEAD

The author also touches on the post-WWII movements of ethnic Germans in Poland (vertriebenen), realizing that they (and the deaths caused) occurred largely from German directives. There were three phases in these movements: (End 1944–spring 1945)–evacuation measures enacted by the German authorities, (March/April–July 1945)–the self-directed wild exile by the local Germans, and (only after Potsdam) the actual forced expulsions of the remaining Germans. (p. 40). He also rejects the overall figure of 2 million German dead, and endorses Rudiger Overmans and his figure of 400,000. (p. 40).

THOSE MUCH-MALIGNED OSADNIKI IN THE KRESY

Now let us roll back in time to pre-WWII eastern Poland. Interestingly, for all the attention that the OSADNIKI had played in both Soviet Communist and Ukrainian nationalist propaganda, not only had their impact on the local populations been negligible, but also they were not even all Polish. Polian estimates that 85% of OSADNIKI were Poles; the remainder included Ukrainians and Belorussians. (p. 116).

AFTER THE DEFEAT OF THE SOVIET’S ERSTWHILE NAZI GERMAN ALLY

There was a major wave of deportations after WWII, conducted to suppress opposition to Communism, and to punish peoples collectively for allegedly having sided with the Nazi Germans. Interestingly, the Soviets used Nazi methods, such as the burning of the inhabitants in a barn into which they had been herded, and burning of entire villages. (p. 147).