In lockstep with that process, the Soviet Council of Ministers decided on May 18, 1948, that the time was right for deportations of those who opposed them. Operation Vesna (Spring) was designed as a sudden assault on Lithuania and those described as “bandits, kulaks and their families.” The “total to be evicted” was preset at 12,134 families, or 48,000 people. The roundup began in May and exceeded the quota. The first official reports from the camps to which the deportees had been sent described poor housing and unhygienic conditions, with resulting cases of typhus and dysentery. If they made it through the first years, they survived, but the elderly did not last long.56
An even bigger sweep of all three countries was initiated on January 29, 1949, when Stalin signed Soviet government Order No. 390-138ss, code-named Priboy (Surf). Those designated for “eternal settlement” (vechnoe poseleniye) in the east included “all kulaks, bandits and their accomplices, illegal nationalists,” and all their families. There were quotas: 8,500 families or 25,500 people in Lithuania; 13,000 families or 39,000 people in Latvia; and 7,500 families or 22,000 people in Estonia. The brutal action began simultaneously on March 25 and included anyone out of favor with the police. Among the total of 94,779 people who ended up in the mix were 2,850 “elderly infirm people,” 146 “invalids,” and 185 children without any families.57 In the years to come, there would be more deportations, though none on this scale.
Stalin was relentless. He would brook no objection, nor tolerate any excuse. No matter what anyone said or did, by the time he died in 1953, the farms in all three states were almost totally collectivized.
The Kremlin imposed its will in every imaginable way, right down to deciding which individual Communists got onto the nomenklatura, the special list for the ruling elite that brought great privileges to the few. In time the Baltic peoples adjusted as best they could; their liberation would have to wait until the Soviet Union dissolved.
UKRAINE AND EASTERN POLAND
Soviet retribution in the area variously called western Ukraine/eastern Poland became entangled in the civil war raging there. Although the Ukrainian and Polish underground shared a common enemy—namely Soviet Communism—the few efforts they made to unify their struggle came to nothing, and they clashed. There were also bloody conflicts within the Ukrainian resistance movement, all of which worked to Moscow’s advantage.
When the Nazis invaded to the east in 1941, Ukraine initially greeted them warmly, showing its thin support for Communism. But what was to happen when the Germans were driven out? It would have been impossible for Moscow to try each and every collaborator because the elites in the civil service, the judiciary, and the economy—“essentially the entire existing order”—had accommodated itself to life under Nazism. One internal assessment from 1944 for Vinnytsia (in western Ukraine) stated that “almost 99 percent of the population hates the Bolsheviks and view them with hostility.” The Soviets opted for show trials of a “few” bad apples, overlooked the rest, and then conducted a determined counterinsurgency operation.58
The main opponent was the underground Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which had been established after the First World War, when the area was made part of Poland. When the Germans invaded in 1941, the OUN saw an opportunity for Ukrainian independence, but it went down the road to collaboration and participation in the Holocaust. In 1943 the OUN created a separate military branch (the UPA) that killed between 40,000 and 60,000 Poles in Volhynia, western Ukraine.59 The Polish Home Army fought back.
Stalin was determined to end this strife, based on his newly acquired conviction that homogenized states inside and outside the USSR would be easier to rule. So on September 9, 1944, he worked out an “agreement” with the Polish government-in-waiting (the PKNW) to accept the transfer of all the Poles out of Ukraine, Byelorussia, and Lithuania. In return Ukrainians living in the “new Poland” would be moved east into the USSR. What they were permitted to take with them was set down in detail, and it was far more generous than what was allowed to those deported out of the Caucasus.60
These were supposed to be “voluntary transfers,” when in fact they were forced deportations. The Soviets ran into immediate opposition from the UPA and soon faced a genuine insurgency. In 1944 the UPA killed 3,202 Soviet occupiers—mostly NKVD, police, and militia, as well as an additional 904 “Soviet activists,” presumably advisers and administrators. The insurgents killed another 2,539 of the enforcers in 1945, along with 823 Soviet “activists.” In 1946, as a sign of the guerrillas’ dwindling fortunes, their “kill” rate was down to 1,441 members of the occupation forces and 347 advisers.61 The UPA slaughtered twice and three times as many civilians, including Ukrainians, as often happens in a civil war. The conflict became vicious—the UPA spared no one, including children, who were sometimes executed in public for the “misdeeds” of their absent fathers, under suspicion of having answered the forced Soviet draft.
Later, when surviving members of the UPA looked back, they thought of 1944–45 as the time when the “Red Broom” swept through village and home, terrorized the inhabitants, and established a network of informers.62 In 1944 the NKVD “liquidated” (that is, killed), arrested, or forced the surrender of 123,782 people. The next year was worse when the toll was 129,016, and if in 1946 it fell to 29,480, by that time the resistance was all but eliminated there, as in the Baltic states. The NKVD also deported eastward a steady stream of suspected culprits, their relatives and their supporters, variously labeled “bandit accomplices” or kulaks. Most were sent away between 1944 and 1946, their total reaching 203,662 by 1955.63
The western Ukrainians, having lived outside the Soviet Union, with their own religious life and customs, had not experienced collectivization. However, they knew all about it and dreaded it, and for that reason Moscow waited until the guerrilla movement was defeated before the process began. In 1947–48 the Soviets levied heavy taxes on the kulaks or demanded delivery of so much that it was impossible to satisfy. Maria Pyskir, a young woman with a newborn, living in Hranky, Ukraine, when the collectivization began, recalled that people were browbeaten into joining the farms and that sometimes “the authorities would descend unannounced on a village and take away the heads of household for questioning and conversion.”64
In the meantime Stalin got rid of the Poles who lived in the region, even though they had been there for generations. By October 1946, the Soviets uprooted and sent to Poland from Ukraine a total of 272,544 Polish families, or 789,982 people of all ages.65 From Byelorussia they forced out 72,511 families, or a total of 231,152. The new Communist-dominated government in Poland consigned many to its recently acquired western border region. In exchange, the Poles uprooted and sent 122,454 Ukrainian families, or 482,109 people, to the Soviet Ukraine. These were the main deportations, though more followed in one direction or another.66