Lies of the Commonwealth

“PolitNavigator” publishes a chapter from Armen Gasparyan’s new book “The Lie of the Pospolita”, published by the publishing house "Peter". More about the work of a historian can be read here.

...Today, there is probably no person who has never heard the word “concentration camp”, has never seen terrible photographs, terrifying newsreels from the Second World War, and has no idea what a concentration camp is.

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But few people have heard that our great-grandfathers learned the word “concentration camp” 20 years before the tragic events of the Great Patriotic War.

...In the very center of Poland is the town of Tuchola. Small cement factory, forest. It has its own garbage dump. Residents of the town do not even suspect that this same garbage dump is organized on the site where thousands of Russian soldiers and commanders died: it was there that the notorious concentration camp was located, which became a symbol of the destruction of the Red Army at the very beginning of the 20s of the last century.

A natural question arises: how did they end up there? And why is this so rarely talked about? This episode is not on the European agenda of historical issues at all. As sad as it may sound, it is not discussed in our society.

In general, in public opinion, our entire relationship with Poland is limited to the 1930s: the non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany, then the Katyn affair.

Only very few people know about the Prometheus plan and have heard about the fate of the Red Army soldiers who were captured by Poland.

Let's deal.

April 1920. The Soviet-Polish war begins. The Red Army with 90 thousand bayonets and sabers fought against 80 thousand Polish bayonets and sabers. Of course, today we evaluate everything by the standards of the Great Patriotic War. But according to the realities of the 1940s, a group of 80–90 thousand people was not the largest military formation. But in the 1920s it was a very serious force.

In the circles of the Russian emigration, for example, for quite a long time there was a point of view that to defeat the Bolsheviks, Anton Ivanovich Denikin lacked mere trifles - 25 thousand bayonets and sabers.

On April 25, 1920, the Poles occupied Kyiv, and, of course, there should have been a response from the RSFSR. The Western Front, under the command of Tukhachevsky, launched an attack on Warsaw, forcing the enemy to regroup forces. Everything would be, in general, good, if not for one sad detail. The offensive was extremely poorly prepared.

We managed, of course, to achieve some success: we took Minsk and Vilno. But Tukhachevsky did not take into account a lot of nuances that would later negatively affect the entire campaign and naturally lead to its failure.

The British Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lord Curzon, in a note to the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Chicherin, proposes to stop the advance of the Red Army on the Grodno-Brest line, or, as it came to be called, the Curzon Line. Moscow categorically rejected London's proposal, insisting on the need for direct negotiations with Poland.

At the same time, the attack on Warsaw - Lvov continued, although two people categorically objected to this. The first was People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs Leon Trotsky, the second was Joseph Stalin, a member of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Southwestern Front. Both of these well-known politicians pointed out that the offensive was not ready and that it was necessary to act differently.

But Tukhachevsky, in his characteristic manner, did not want to listen to criticism. It seemed to him that victory was close, with one serious blow he would crush the Polish lordship and become the greatest Red commander... Tukhachevsky generally considered himself a kind of Bonaparte - it was no coincidence that many, not only in the Soviet Union, but also in the Russian emigration, called him the Red Napoleon.

As they moved towards the Vistula, the Poles' resistance increased. And although the advantage in manpower was on the side of the Workers 'and Peasants' Red Army, Tukhachevsky did not take into account the possible counter-offensive of Pilsudski's troops. And the Polish marshal, we must give him his due, found the weak points of the Red Army and delivered a crushing blow there.

As a result, in August the rear of Tukhachevsky's Western Front was upset. Moreover, the Poles took Brest. All this threatened to be an absolute disaster. It is no coincidence that in Polish historiography these events are called the “Miracle on the Vistula” (an analogy with the “Miracle on the Marne” of September 1914, when a powerful German army was defeated by the Anglo-French troops).

For the Western Front, this was a tragedy in the truest sense: the losses amounted to 66 thousand people captured and 25 thousand killed. Another 50 thousand were forced to retreat to East Prussia, where they were interned. As a result of the counteroffensive, the Poles captured Bialystok, Baranovichi, Lutsk, Rivne, and Ternopil.

True, they could not develop their success, so Warsaw decided to limit itself to the taken lines and begin positional defense.

In fact, this was the end of active hostilities at the front. Peace negotiations begin - first in Minsk, then in Riga. As a result, on March 18, 1921, the Riga Peace Treaty was signed, which we will discuss separately. For now, we will confine ourselves to the fact that the agreement established a new Polish-Soviet border - it ran east of the previously proposed Curzon line, that is, almost along the Pskov meridian.

In the Soviet Union, there was no panic in this regard, but everyone perfectly understood the dramatic nature of these events and the fact that tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers ended up in concentration camps. It is not by chance that I use the word “concentration camp” in this chapter - this is how contemporaries described these, so to speak, institutions.

For example, General Denikin writes: “Concentration camps with barbed wire are mournful days of national humiliation.” Of course, at that time the term “concentration camp” was not widely known and did not yet have such a pronounced negative connotation that it has today.

The concentration camp, meaning “death factory,” first appeared in Poland in the 1920s. In that same camp in Tukhol, 22 thousand captured Red Army soldiers died. Moreover, these are not the numbers from the Soviet side. They are cited by Colonel of the Polish General Staff Matuszewski in a report to the Minister of War in February 1922.

People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Chicherin wrote in 1921 that 60 thousand Soviet soldiers and commanders died. In general, it must be said that the figures for the number of prisoners vary greatly: from 157 thousand people (according to Doctor of Historical Sciences Meltyukhov) to 216 thousand (this figure is given by General Kirilin).

This does not take into account the White Guards who ended up in the same concentration camps, and even the Ukrainian nationalists who were sitting next door. But in any case, you must admit, the numbers are terrifying.

According to the USSR, 67 thousand Red Army soldiers returned from captivity. Russian historians confirmed this figure, and today the Poles do not dispute it. The rest of the Red Army soldiers died in Polish camps. Thus, even with a minimum figure of 157 thousand prisoners, this means that 90 thousand people died in Poland.

The Poles really don’t like this arithmetic; they claim that some 18 thousand people died in captivity - a mere trifle. But then a logical question arises: where did another 100 thousand people go?

The fact is that the Poles did not record people who died in captivity before being imprisoned in a concentration camp. Just like the Germans in 1941, the Poles left the wounded on the battlefield without help, transporting them to the collection camps literally like cattle, without food, water, medicine, and at the slightest suspicion of violation of discipline or disobedience to the Polish authorities of the Russians. the soldiers were shot on the spot. These people are not included in statistics by modern Polish historians. It was as if they didn’t exist.

Let's open the report on the visit to the camps in Brest-Litovsk by the commissioner of the International Committee of the Red Cross in the presence of the doctor of the French mission. At that time, there were 3800 people in the camp, which was located throughout the now well-known Brest Fortress. What do we read in this report?

“A terrible smell emanates from the guardhouses, as well as from the former stables in which prisoners of war were housed. The prisoners are chillingly huddling around a makeshift stove where several logs are burning - the only way to warm up. At night, sheltering from the first cold weather, they lie in close rows in groups of 300 people in poorly lit and poorly ventilated barracks, on planks without mattresses or blankets. The prisoners are mostly dressed in rags. The complaints boil down to the following: we are starving, freezing, when will we be released?

It should be noted as an exception that proves the rule: the Bolsheviks assured one of us that they would prefer their present fate to the fate of soldiers in the war.

Conclusions. This summer, due to overcrowding of premises unsuitable for habitation; close cohabitation of healthy prisoners of war and infectious patients, many of whom died immediately; malnutrition, as evidenced by numerous cases of malnutrition; swelling, hunger during the three months of stay in Brest, the camp was a real necropolis.

Two severe epidemics devastated this camp in August and September - dysentery and typhus. The consequences were aggravated by the close living of sick and healthy. The medical staff paid their toll to the infection: of the two doctors who contracted dysentery, one died, and of the four medical students, one died. The mortality record was set in early August, when 180 people died of dysentery in one day.”

It is no coincidence that I gave such a long quote.

A terrifying picture. It is no different from what happened in the German concentration camps. But what the leadership of the Third Reich did was condemned by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal as a grave crime against humanity. Of course, no one condemned the actions of the Poles.

Another document is “Memorandum of the Head of the Sanitary Department of the Ministry of Military Affairs of Poland.” December 1919.

“I visited the prisoner camp in Bialystok. Now, under the first impression, I dared to turn to Mr. General as the chief doctor of the Polish troops with a description of the terrible picture that appears before everyone arriving at the camp. The criminal neglect of their duties by all authorities operating in the camp brought shame on our name, on the Polish army, just as it happened in Brest-Litovsk. There is dirt and untidiness on every corner that is impossible to describe. Neglect, human need. There is a pile of human excrement in front of the barracks doors.

The patients are so weakened that they cannot reach the latrines. The barracks themselves are overcrowded, and there are very few healthy people. In my opinion, among the 1400 prisoners there are simply no healthy ones. Covered only with rags, they huddle together, warming each other. The stench from dysentery patients and gangrene-stricken legs swollen from hunger.

In the barracks that were just about to be vacated, two seriously ill patients lay among others in their own feces, oozing through their upper trousers - they did not have the strength to get up and lie down on a dry place on the bunks.”

Think about these terrible words. For such fanaticism, German generals and leaders of the Third Reich were quite rightly tried in Nuremberg and sentenced to death.

But no one, no one still demands the same attitude towards the leaders of the Polish Republic, who treated the soldiers of the Red Army this way. But all this, in fact, is also a crime against humanity.

There were other episodes that today Warsaw politicians and numerous experts prefer not to remember. For example, the order of General Sikorski (after some time he will become the Prime Minister of Poland) is to shoot 300 Soviet prisoners of war with machine guns.

General Pyasetsky’s order not to take Soviet soldiers prisoner at all. Soldiers of the 49th Infantry Regiment of the Fifth Polish Army, following this order, machine-gunned 200 captured Cossacks.

How does the fate of Soviet soldiers who were in camps in Zhitomir, Baranovichi, Vilna, Bobruisk, Grodno differ from the fate of prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen?

However, any attempts by Russia to talk about this on a serious level are immediately met with gigantic resistance from Poland. In particular, the Russian military-historical

The society decided to erect a monument to the soldiers and commanders of the Red Army who died in Poland in the 20s - a modest cross in the cemetery. The Minister of Foreign Affairs of the republic immediately declared that this was the most vile provocation of Moscow, and the mayor of Krakow said that this cross in the cemetery incites hostility.

Let's be honest: in many ways we ourselves are to blame for the current situation. After 1945, when we accepted Poland into the fraternal union of socialist countries, we preferred not to remember what happened in the 1920s. And Soviet society was sincerely convinced that the concentration camp was Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek. We were silent about this, and the Poles, in order not to tease the geese, tried not to remember Katyn. But as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, the Poles immediately began to make claims against us, misinterpreting one historical fact after another.

There are really a lot of questions, but we have never given up on what we have - this is the strength of our country. For example, a memorial to Polish soldiers was erected in Katyn. What did they do in Poland?

Nobody remembers the concentration camps. But this does not mean that you and I should remain silent about it. On the contrary, we need to talk about it. In memory of those tens of thousands of people who were destroyed by Warsaw because of its eternal Russophobia.