Black Earth(54)

With one exception, the 21,892 people murdered by the NKVD were men. Many of them, like these Polish Jews, had families in the German occupation zone, who now faced German repressions without heads of household. Since the Soviets were killing the same kinds of Polish citizens as the Germans—the educated elite—they were making the German task easier. When the families of the murdered officers were in the Soviet zone, the NKVD deported them to the Gulag. Surprised by a knock on the door, these people almost never escaped. One of the rare exceptions was the wife of a Polish officer who left her children with a trusted Jewish neighbor. But this was a rather isolated example of a failure of the NKVD. These Soviet deportations of 1940 repeated, on a smaller scale, the methods of the Great Terror. In the Polish Operation, Polish men had been shot and the families deported to be exploited and denationalized.

There was also continuity of personnel: Vasily Blokhin, one of the executioners of the Polish officers, had killed thousands of Soviet citizens during the Great Terror. Wearing a leather cap, apron, and gloves to the elbows, Blokhin personally shot about two hundred and fifty men each night. In the Soviet system, the number of executioners was very small, and they were officers. They followed clear written orders issued within a strict hierarchy. The Soviet system included within itself legal states of exception, which, once they had been used to justify the special measures needed for mass terror, could be terminated. In the German system, as it developed, innovations from below met wishes from above, orders were often unclear, and the officers tried to devolve the responsibility for the actual shooting to their men, or indeed to non-Germans who happened to be in the vicinity. The Soviet system was, therefore, much more precise and efficient in its campaigns of murder. But the German system was more efficient in creating large numbers of executioners.

The Soviets, at least some of them, believed in what they were doing. After all, they did it themselves and recorded what they did, in clear language, in official documents, filed in orderly archives. They could associate themselves with their deeds, because true responsibility rested with the communist party. The Nazis used grand phrases of racial superiority, and Himmler spoke of the moral sublimity involved in killing others for the sake of the race. But when the time came, Germans acted without plans and without precision, and with no sense of responsibility. In the Nazi worldview, what happened was simply what happened, the stronger should win; but nothing was certain, and certainly not the relationship between past, present, and future. The Soviets believed that History was on their side and acted accordingly. The Nazis were afraid of everything except the disorder they themselves created. The systems and the mentalities were different, profoundly and interestingly so.

Yet the two regimes acted in the same time and place. Whatever the Soviets did, and with whatever motives, they were doing to people who, if not killed or deported, would then face the Nazis and their methods. The damage that the NKVD inflicted was a matter of the deportation or death of human beings, and of the disruption of lives and the alteration of spirits. It was very important that the Soviets destroyed the Polish state in their half of Poland; it was very important that they physically removed those who were associated with Polish statehood. Yet perhaps most important was the way Soviet policies influenced those who survived and remained: these citizens of annihilated states, these new Soviet citizens, these people who would confront the Wehrmacht and the SS in 1941.

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Like the Nazis, the Soviets began from the assumption that the Polish state created in 1918 had no right to exist and so could be eliminated by decree and then mocked. But the form of the mockery was tellingly different. The Soviets, like the Germans, destroyed Polish state symbols, but on the logic that they represented a “bourgeois,” “reactionary,” “white,” or “fascist” Poland. The problem with the Polish state, in the Soviet view, was that it was a creation of the upper classes. This was very different from the Nazi view, which was that lower races such as the Poles did not deserve a political existence.

In western and central Poland, occupied by Nazi Germany, the higher Polish officials were hunted down, imprisoned in camps, and often killed, whereas the lower-level officials, such as the mayors, county commissioners, and village heads, were expected to follow new kinds of orders from German authorities. As Hans Frank, the head of the German colony known as the General Government, described the task: “The leadership elements we have now identified in Poland are what is to be liquidated.” This was race war: extermination of the vital racial forces of the enemy, and then the exploitation of its lower elements.