The Deportation of the Poles to Kazakhstan: Ethnic Cleansing, Collective Suffering, and Cultural Assimilation

Abstract

The paper explores and analyzes one of the darkest pages of the history of the Polish people linked to the deportation of the Poles from Ukraine in 1936 and from Ukraine and Belarus in 1940-1941 to Kazakhstan. The central argument of the study is that the deportation of Poles from their historical homeland was carried out based exclusively on their ethnicity. We argue that the real intention of the Soviet regime’s genocidal policy was not confined only to the collective punishment and extermination of Poles as a distinct ethnic group, but the regime also sought to subject the deported Poles to slave labor exploitation for profit and to forced Russification. The assumption here is that Poles were uprooted from their homeland not only for extermination, but also the Soviet regime considered Poles to be an important component of its nation building project and their assimilation into Russian-dominated society was on the totalitarian regime’s agenda. The theoretical basis of this study constitutes the concept of ethnification of Stalinism, yet we add another dimension to our research, namely we employ the concept of racialization as a theoretical underpinning of the study to further deepen our analysis and indicate how ethnic identity of Poles was racialized. The study draws upon archival sources and the extant literature on the history of deportation in the Soviet Union, specifically we increasingly focus on Polish deportees’ collective and individual experiences who went through horrendous dehumanization and brutalization in exile in various parts of Kazakhstan between 1936 and 1956.