Stalin's Genocides by Norman M. Naimark Page A

institution. The gutting of the railways and the marked increase in accidents in 1938
    and 1939 made it something of a miracle that the Soviets were able to transport their industries in Ukraine to the east so rapidly after the initial German advances in June 1941.
    In sum, the forced deportation and persecution of national groups resulted primarily not from the real threats of war and infiltration, but from Stalin’s generalized xenophobia and his pathological fear of losing power through subversion, whether of the Fourth International or by hostile powers beyond his borders.
    The first major actions against the nationalities took place in 1932–33, when the borderlands of the West were
    “cleansed”—the Soviets’ word—of allegedly dangerous and traitorous Poles and Germans. Some 150,000 Polish and German families—meaning roughly 500,000
    people—were arrested and deported to the special settlements, joining the kulaks and “asocials” who already inhabited large stretches of the same territory. The same terrible conditions existed, and many of the deported perished in exile. The Great Purges of 1937 and 1938 also hit the nationalities disproportionately hard. The “rate of extermination” (the percentage of death sentences) was significantly higher in cases against “national” versus social and political enemies.4 As Old Bolsheviks and members of the nomenklatura were accused in the hundreds of thousands of being spies and agents of foreign powers, those removing nations 85
    foreigners who resided on Soviet territory were assumed to be in the pay of their respective “home” country’s secret services: Germans of Nazi Germany, Poles of sanacja Poland, French of France, the British of Great Britain, and so on. Those Soviet citizens who had contacts with foreigners, worked for foreign firms, or had lived abroad were also immediately suspect and were often arrested, purged, and exiled. Many were shot.
    The “German operation,” for example, included German citizens in the USSR, Soviet citizens of German origin, former personnel of German companies of all backgrounds, political emigres, deserters, and so on. Many non-Germans who were associated with Germans in any way were also arrested in the operation. Some 65,000 to 68,000 people were arrested; 43,000 of them were condemned to death.5
    While some Germans—those from the Volga German
    autonomous republic, for example—were not the subject of special “repressions,” the Poles, in the words of one NKVD official, were to be “completely destroyed.” Stalin was pleased with Yezhov’s fierce campaign against the Poles. “Very good!” he wrote on Yezhov’s report about its initial stages. “Dry up and purge this Polish espionage mud in the future as well. Destroy it in the interest of the USSR.” This genocidal language complemented NKVD
    orders to arrest entire Polish families as well, sending the women to the Gulag and the children under fifteen to NKVD orphanages. In the end, some 144,000 people were arrested in the Polish operation, 111,000 of whom were shot. Whatever the real danger to the Soviet Union of 86
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    Poland and Polish spies, the NKVD imbibed Stalin’s Po-lonophobia,6 supporting the campaign against the Poles by distorting evidence from its own Soviet spies in Poland that indicated the danger was less than that trumpeted by the authorities and encouraging stereotypical images of the “Polish threat.”7
    Even foreign communists in the Soviet Union and in Europe were suspected of spying, wrecking, and treason.
    Those out of the reach of the NKVD were called home to Moscow and eventually arrested. Stalin completely disbanded the Polish communist party in 1938; its leaders were executed or exiled; and its members were sent to the Gulag as agents of the Warsaw government and simulta-neously of Trotsky! The large number of Soviet Poles in the NKVD—many were originally recruited by the Polish Bolshevik and Cheka founder