Unsettling Borderlands: The Population Exchange and the Polish Minority in Soviet Belarus,1944–1947

Introduction

On 27 December 1944, a crowd gathered on the railway station in Brest, a city in what was now Soviet Belarus. The people anxiously waited for the train to start moving. When it finally started its journey, the onlookers sighed with relief: it was indeed moving west, and the people who had signed up for transfer were indeed going to Poland—and not deported east as they feared. ¹ This little episode filled with uncertainty was a part of the Polish–Soviet population exchange in 1944–1947. After the war, Poland shifted west, losing its eastern borderlands, and acquiring lands taken from Germany (Silesia and part of East Prussia). The population exchange was a crucial part of this shift: by moving people, it made the territorial changes permanent. Poles from the USSR were resettled in Poland, usually in its “recovered” territories from which Germans had been expelled. Ukrainians and Belarusians moved east. One and a half million people left the USSR and half a million came in.

The Polish–Soviet population exchange was a part of the global moment of “unmixing” of diverse populations, rooted in the experience of the Second World War, ideational changes, and the changes in international relations caused by the decline of British power in the world. The pursuit of ethnic homogeneity by organized resettlement replaced the minority protection system, increasingly regarded as a failure. ² Population transfer was supposed to secure lasting peace between nation-states. The western Allies enthusiastically embraced this instrument of international politics. ³ Although the Russian empire and the Soviet Union had a long history of moving people in their borderlands, for the USSR, the 1944–1947 exchange with Poland was the first project of this kind on such a scale. ⁴ Stalin made use of the international situation and the intellectual climate to pursue his geopolitical goals by organizing the transfer: securing the Soviet territorial gains in 1939–1940 and creating the impression of a compromise on the “Polish question.”

The argument of this article is that during the exchange, the authorities in Belarus prioritized keeping the labor force over national homogenization, determined nationality by the territory of birth, and attempted to keep people by designating them as Belarusians irrespective of their self-identification. After the initial pressure on the Polish side to start accepting migrants and after the expulsions of Poles from Grodno, the Soviet authorities started to obstruct the resettlement because they realized that it would not only deal with the potentially troublesome Polish population but would also depopulate western Belarus. ⁵ The hopes for a mass migration to Belarus from Poland also proved futile. With this determination to secure former Eastern Poland and at the same time to keep the population, the territorial definition of Polish nationality prevailed in Belarus. Authorities maintained that all people who were born in the now-Belarusian territory of the kresy (borderlands) were Belarusians. The approach was meant to produce as low a number of Poles as possible. Because of that, the population exchange in Soviet Belarus was not so much a case of forced exclusion but rather of forced inclusion. As the article shows, “national indifference” could be a response not only of the masses but also of the elites. While the earlier scholarship saw the transfer as punitive national deportation, the article argues that in Belarusian–Polish borderlands, most of the time, it was neither punitive nor purely national, nor was it a deportation. In this area, the population transfer was more similar to an exodus of refugees than to a typical Soviet deportation. While the party-state attempted to keep the people in, the people who could plausibly claim Polish identity were often very eager to resettle to Poland, often because of poor living conditions and their hostility to Sovietization. Paradoxically, the de-Polonization of the new western territories of Soviet Belarus was achieved without the state’s commitment to ethnic cleansing, without the involvement of Belarusian nationalism, and was not the product of a coherent nationality policy.

Although the declarations about the voluntary character of the resettlement were false, the direction of the compulsion varied, and this ambivalence opened up a space of limited autonomy in which the people could exercise agency. Historiography has obscured this because the mechanism of Soviet punitive deportation was assumed to be at work in transferring the Poles from Soviet Belarus. ⁶ And, since the majority of the resettled came from rural areas, there was also an assumption of the passivity and immobility of peasants, these subalterns par excellence, who presumably do not act on their own but had to be acted upon. Last, but not least, much of the historiography tended to rely on nationalism as the default explanatory variable when dealing with Eastern Europe and to imagine it as a region uniquely susceptible to pathological forms of nationalism. ⁷ The article reconstructs this agency and looks at the ways in which people responded to Soviet population politics.

Scholars who, like the observers on the railway station mentioned above, attempted to make sense of the Soviet population politics, usually treated the transfer as a punitive national deportation. This was interpreted as a part of the shift from class to national categories in Soviet governance, which allegedly took place in the 1930s–1940s. ⁸ However, Philipp Ther argues that the USSR was ambivalent about ethnic cleansing, especially in Belarus and rural Lithuania. ⁹ Similarly, Jerzy Kochanowski notes that the population exchange exhibited a variety of Soviet approaches to the Polish minority and that it proceeded differently in different republics. ¹⁰ While the earlier national deportations can be explained by “Soviet xenophobia,” this explanation fits the Polish–Soviet exchange poorly, for two reasons. ¹¹ First, it was carried out when Poland was hardly a threat because it was devastated by the war and because the Moscow-controlled Polish communists were on course to take power. Second, the exchange let half a million de facto foreigners into the USSR. Furthermore, the variance in the outcome of the transfers between republics created a natural experiment. How can we explain the puzzle of the divergent trajectories of the Soviet republics in the population exchange? How did people respond to the resettlement? To what extent did people’s choices reflect stable national identities and to what extent they were contingent, situational, and driven by calculations of interest? And what does this nation-building project tell us about the evolution of Soviet governance after the war?

Historians who have studied the transfer have mostly focused on Ukraine ¹² or the destination of the “repatriates” from the USSR—the new Polish territories in the west. ¹³ This article concentrates on the less studied part of the Soviet–Polish borderland—Belarus. It focuses on the substate level and treats Soviet republics as distinct entities—not because the lands annexed in 1939–1940 formed a part of their primordial national territory, but because the implementation of the transfer was delegated to them. Each republic pursued its own line toward the Poles. Of course, the distinction between “Lithuania,” “Belarus,” and “Ukraine” was not clear-cut: the borders of Soviet ethnofederal units cut across the society of the borderlands. However, the trajectories of Soviet republics in the transfer diverged, as Stanisław Ciesielski, Jerzy Kochanowski, and Philipp Ther have pointed out. ¹⁴ Belarus stands out for three reasons. First, a lower share of the Polish population was resettled. On 31 October 1946, in the final report about the population exchange, the Soviet minister of internal affairs Sergei Kruglov gave the following numbers of people who had been registered as Polish and who had been transported to Poland: for Ukraine, 872,217 and 789,982; for Lithuania, 200,000 and 169,244; and for Belarus, 535,284 and 231,152. ¹⁵ Second, this partial homogenization was achieved without the involvement of Belarusian nationalism and in the absence of Belarusian–Polish ethnic conflict. ¹⁶ By contrast, many Poles either fled Ukraine themselves or welcomed the organized resettlement because they feared Ukrainian nationalists. Similarly, in Wilno/Vilnius, Lithuanian communists used the party-state to carry out ethnic cleansing. ¹⁷ Third, the Belarusian authorities prioritized keeping the labor force. ¹⁸ This mitigated the security concerns they might had about the potentially disloyal Poles. ¹⁹ In the area where national identities were ambiguous, the concepts of “Polonized Belarusians” and “Belarusian Catholics” allowed the authorities to retain the population. ²⁰ By contrast, in Western Ukraine, Khrushchev sanctioned mass arrests in Lwów/L’viv, and, according to NKVD reports, after these measures, people started to register for transfer in great numbers. ²¹ The reclassification and forced inclusion had its parallels in other European borderlands, most notably, in Silesia, where “altogether, some two million Upper Silesians spent the war as ‘Germans’ and entered the postwar world as ‘Poles.’” ²² While Soviet Belarus was not entirely unique, its study demonstrates a side of the population transfer which has been obscured by the tendency to tell the history of Eastern Europe as a history of ethnic conflict.

The concept of “national indifference” is central to this article. ²³ Similarly to this literature, the article treats fluid and ambiguous national identities as a modern rational response of people to state governance. The article extends this approach to the elites who put the economy before national homogenization and presents evidence of the ongoing resilience of national indifference after the Second World War. However, in analyzing people’s choices, the article adopts the framework of “strategic nationalism” which emphasizes the active instrumentalization of national identity by the people, rather than passive “indifference.” ²⁴

Setting the Stage

The transfer targeted the territory of former eastern Poland (also known as kresy) which the USSR annexed in 1939 and reannexed in 1944. The area of this territory was approximately two hundred thousand square kilometers. According to the 1931 Polish census, thirteen million people lived there, most of them in rural areas. ²⁵ Industrial enterprises were few, compared to central Poland. In 1939, the territory of Soviet Belarus had increased by 102,000 square kilometers where 4.7 million people lived. The violence of the Soviet “revolution from abroad” was often structured along ethnic lines and Poles tended to be the victims. ²⁶ Up to 325,000 people were deported in 1939–1941. ²⁷ The Poles accounted for 80 percent of them, largely because of the overlap of social and ethnic categories. ²⁸ Still, the legitimacy of Polish presence in what was now Belarus was not questioned in 1939–1941, especially when the Soviet line toward its Poles softened after the defeat of France in 1940 and the realization that war with Nazi Germany was approaching. The Nazi–Soviet war accelerated the dismantling of the old society which the Bolsheviks had started. The now-Belarusian territory of the kresy was among the most hard-hit by the war. Famine, disease, the Holocaust, the Nazi terror, and the proliferation of violence took a heavy toll. The Jews suffered the most and only one hundred twenty thousand to one hundred fifty thousand Belarusian Jews survived the Holocaust—mostly those who managed to evacuate before the advancing German army or were deported in 1939–1941. Overall, 2.2 million people perished. Although the estimates are somewhat unreliable, by the end of 1944, the number of people who identified as Polish before the war had decreased by almost 50 percent in the kresy. ²⁹ The war also raised the salience of ethnicity, making it a matter of life and death—most dramatically for Jews, but also for other people. Life in the interwar kresy was an education in nationalism, and the 1939–1944 period reduced the space of “national indifference” even further. The population exchange continued this trend of reducing the complexity of a society characterized by cultural hybridity and fluid identities.

In an act of performative diplomacy, on 9 September 1944, Panteleimon Ponomarenko and Edward Osóbka-Morawski, representatives of Soviet Belarus and the Polish Committee for National Liberation (PKWN), respectively, signed the agreement about the population exchange. It was modeled on the 1939 agreement with Nazi Germany about exchanging minorities. Unlike the exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923, the Polish–Soviet exchange was a unilateral Soviet decision. It was framed as an “agreement” for propaganda purposes. ³⁰ The PKWN was a Soviet puppet, a government in the making created in July 1944 from Polish communists who spent the war in the USSR. In the negotiations about the resettlement, Stalin appointed it to represent Poland. The authorities of Soviet Belarus also did not take part in the preparation of the agreement. ³¹ According to its text, Poles and Jews who were Polish citizens before 17 September 1939, and who lived in the territory which was annexed to Soviet Belarus in 1939 were eligible for transfer. In Poland, Belarusians, Russians, and Ruthenians were to be resettled to Belarus. The document referred to the resettlement as “repatriation” and “evacuation.” ³² People automatically renounced their Soviet citizenship when they crossed the border. Despite the seeming clarity, the criteria of eligibility for resettlement intertwined citizenship, ethnicity, and territory. The Polish representatives’ head office was in Baranovichi and the Belarusian delegation in Poland was in Białystok. The agreement promised that the resettlement would be voluntary. People could express consent either in written or in oral form. The registration for transfer started on 15 October 1944, and the resettlement was officially over by 15 June 1946, although in practice, it dragged on until 1947. Overall, 535,284 persons signed up for resettlement to Poland in Soviet Belarus, ³³ and 238,782 of them left. ³⁴ From that number, approximately five thousand were Jews and the rest were resettled as Poles. ³⁵

While the Soviet authorities were ambivalent about the Polish minority, the Polish communists, despite their limited power, did their best to sign up as many people as possible to resettle them to the “recovered territories” (Polish–German borderlands). The Polish Workers’ Party Polska Partia Robotnicza (PPR), reconstituted in 1942, was more nationalist than its interwar predecessor and it put its hope of winning popularity on securing the “recovered territories.” ³⁶ In February 1945, there were over three hundred Polish representatives in Belarus. ³⁷ As a rule, Polish offices recruited their staff from local Poles. ³⁸ Another crucial actor in the resettlement drama was the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK). The AK was the most important Polish resistance movement in the Second World War. While it was formally disbanded in January 1945, the post-AK units remained a formidable force. It had unintentionally contributed to the de-Polonization of the kresy. Initially, its propaganda claimed that the pre-war borders of Poland would be restored, ³⁹ possibly through a Third World War, or that Anders with his forces would march from Italy to Poland a la Dąbrowski. ⁴⁰ However, after the Yalta conference, the Polish underground pressured the people to register for transfer in the hope that mass registration would become a de facto plebiscite. ⁴¹ There were cases when they threatened people with death if they refused to register. ⁴² In May 1945, Ponomarenko wrote to Stalin that people were signing up for resettlement to demonstrate their Polish nationality. ⁴³ Such hopes proved futile and only resulted in a greater exodus.

Disentangling Populations and Keeping the Labor Force

Uncertainty about methods of separating Poles from Belarusians was present at all stages of the population exchange. First, the registration for transfer, and second, the struggle around purging the registration lists became the sites where national belonging was negotiated. The transfer agreement instituted the so-called mixed commissions (Polish and Soviet) which registered people for transfer. Given the vast scale of the transfer and its hurried pace, rigorous implementation of this procedure was unfeasible. The usual suspects—ethnographers, statisticians, and experts generally—were largely absent from this story. The ethnographers who played such a prominent role in the Soviet nationality policy in the 1920s ⁴⁴ were gone by the mid-1940s—they either died a natural death or perished in the great terror or still were in evacuation in the Soviet hinterland. The rule of thumb approach—what can be termed vernacular ethnographic knowledge—was to equate Catholicism and Polishness. However, it was unacceptable for the party-state which attempted to reduce the number of people who could be recognized as Poles to keep the labor force.

The necessity of keeping the people came from the need to restore the war-ravaged economy, the Soviet propaganda about Polish colonization, and the asymmetry in population movements. The view that Poles in Belarus were colonizers delegitimized their presence but also limited the number of people who could be plausibly recognized as Polish. Workers, artisans, and poor and middle peasants did not fit this description. Partly, this approach was a result of the realization that the number of people who would move from Poland to Belarus was by an order of magnitude lower than the number of people Belarus was about to lose. This strengthened the determination of the officials to keep the labor force in Belarus regardless of any unease they might had about the potentially disloyal Poles. Ponomarenko expected in 1944 that Belarus would receive over four hundred thousand people from Poland. ⁴⁵ However, only 27,806 persons arrived. ⁴⁶ This asymmetry was similar to the situation in Lithuania which received virtually no people from Poland during the exchange, and where, outside of Wilno/Vilnius, a similar line of keeping the people prevailed.

The controversy around the definition of Polishness had already started in 1939 when the Polish government in exile protested the issue of Soviet passports to the people who lived in the territory annexed by the USSR. During the transfer in 1944–1947, the Belarusian authorities usually prioritized nationality registered in documents (most importantly, passports) and Polish representatives insisted that self-identification was more important. ⁴⁷ The USSR developed a rigid system of institutionalizing nationality in internal passports which were introduced on 27 December 1932. ⁴⁸ On 27 April 1938, an NKVD order explained that it should be established not through self-identification but by the nationality of one’s parents. ⁴⁹ Peasants, however, were not granted internal passports until 1974 (although collective farm workers could apply and get a passport if they received permission). Despite the pressure, a lot of people in the borderlands had not obtained Soviet passports in 1939–1941. Many people did not have any documents at all because they had lost them during the war. To become eligible for resettlement, they had to confirm their nationality by certificates from village councils and district party committees. This opened possibilities for all kinds of subterfuge. For example, in February 1946, 80 percent of certificates issued by village councils in Volkovysk district were rejected by the district plenipotentiary for resettlement. ⁵⁰ Many people had obtained German identification documents under the occupation. ⁵¹ Granting the Nazi regime epistemic authority was embarrassing for the Soviets. However, prohibitions on using German documents for registration followed one another, which suggests that the practice continued. Eventually, Kuz’ma Kiselev, the commissar of foreign affairs of Belarus, ordered that the German-issued documents could be used, but only when no other documents were available. ⁵²

The uncertainty presented multiple opportunities for manipulating nationality. The identification papers for resettlement (evakolisty, evacuation cards) usually did not have photos and this made the illicit trade in forged documents easier. ⁵³ The Polish underground made forging identification documents into its forte during the war, and its workshops now started to forge papers allowing transfer to Poland. It was possible simply to carry one’s birth record from an Orthodox to a Catholic church, then obtain a certificate from a village council, and turn Polish overnight. People could destroy their documents which registered non-Polish nationality, fill out a special form, and receive a new passport or identification card. Such newly minted Poles were now eligible for the population exchange. ⁵⁴ Village councils issued certificates of nationality (spravki) for peasants who wanted to go to Poland but did not have any documents. People could obtain such papers in exchange for bribes and councils could arbitrarily refuse to issue certificates. Similar examples of strategic manipulation of ethnicity also abounded in other parts of the Polish–Soviet borderlands, both before and during the exchange. ⁵⁵

The Soviet state appeared to have remarkably little faith in its ability to hold people. The central committee of the communist party of Belarus first discussed the resettlement to Poland in April 1945. There, a realization came that the project of exchanging minorities which the party-state itself had organized might have unintended consequences. Ponomarenko criticized local organs of power for allowing Belarusian Catholics to register for resettlement. ⁵⁶ After that, the mixed commissions started purging the registration lists. On 22 June 1945, Vladimir Tsariuk also reported that “a large number of Belarusian Catholics had registered as Poles to move to Poland” and that evacuation lists had to be amended. ⁵⁷ At the sixth plenum of the communist party of Belarus, Klimov, the first secretary of Molodechno obkom, argued that interwar Poland tried to persuade Catholic believers that they were Poles. Because of that, he claimed, some local party organizations mistakenly reported that the majority of the population in their districts was Polish. ⁵⁸ The secretary of the Grodno obkom supported his colleague and bluntly expressed what was at stake:

Some [party] workers say that Poles are the majority in their districts. Let me ask you, then—why do we resettle Poles to Poland? It is obvious, that if Poles are the majority, we need to resettle to Belarus ourselves. In reality, this is not so. ⁵⁹

Of course, there were indeed people who identified as Belarusians and who belonged to the Catholic church. Some still confused nationality and religion even after the Second World War. ⁶⁰ However, the concept of “Belarusian Catholic” was mostly used to by the authorities to force people to stay, irrespective of their identity.

In addition to being denied exit as “Polonized Belarusians,” people also ran into difficulties because they were born within the postwar borders of Belarus. From this perspective, the mere fact of birth in this territory automatically made one a Belarusian, irrespective of documentary evidence or self-identification. In one of many similar cases, in 1945, a Pole was denied the right to resettle because he was born in Lida—a town that was now on the Belarusian side of the border. ⁶¹ In an even more blatant case, when the people were already waiting for a train to Poland, a chairman of the local village party committee and the police violently dispersed them and stated that they had no right to go to Poland because they were born in Belarusian territory. In many districts (Oshmiany, Lida, Baranovichi), the mixed commissions recorded all Poles born on the now-Belarusian territory as “Polish Belarusians” and denied them the right to resettle. ⁶² In March 1945, one of the Polish representatives complained that in the village Podovil’e, the chairman of the Glubokoe raispolkom held the opinion that only those born in Poland (in its new borders) were eligible for the evacuation. He considered that all those who were born in his district of Glubokoe were Belarusian and refused to register them. Any documentary proof of Polishness was ignored or destroyed. ⁶³ These examples suggest that the practice of establishing nationality and citizenship by place of birth (jus soli) prevailed in Soviet Belarus during the population exchange. ⁶⁴ This was highly unusual for 20th-century East-Central Europe—a region where ethnic nationalism with its practice of establishing nationality by blood (jus sanguinis) held sway. De jure, nationality in Soviet Belarus was still determined by the nationality of one’s parents. Nonetheless, to be recognized as a Pole, a person often had to be born in the Polish territory in its post-1945 borders, that is, west of the river Bug, and to be only temporarily present on Belarusian soil. ⁶⁵

The mixed commissions presumed to know the nationality of the people better than the people themselves. The notion that individuals have a “true” or “real” nationality that could be different from the nationality they chose for themselves was widespread. The officials claimed that sometimes a single talk was sufficient to explain to the muddled locals the difference between religion and nationality. However, the central committee instructed the mixed commissions that between 40 and 60 percent of people they checked had to be classified as Belarusians. ⁶⁶ As a result, decisions on individual cases were arbitrary because commissions were more concerned with fulfilling the instructions than with exercising their self-professed epistemological prowess. The commission was a parody of a court, one witness complained, where the Polish side acts as an advocate and the Belarusian as a prosecutor. ⁶⁷ The share of people excluded from registration lists was as high as 65 percent in some districts. ⁶⁸ In the summer of 1945, mixed commissions received quotas of the number of people who could be “verified” as Polish, set at 10–15 percent. ⁶⁹ The commissions also organized random check-ups when people had to show up in person and confirm their intention to go to Poland. ⁷⁰ The documents could be declared insufficient, fake, or simply torn apart by a bureaucrat in the commission. The practice of destroying certificates of Polish nationality was systematic, one report claimed. ⁷¹

Party secretaries and chairmen of village soviets had their own incentives to erase Polish identity to keep the people in Belarus. They treated their districts as personal fiefdoms and fiercely resisted any incursions into their turf. In many places, they took over the work of resettlement, sidelining mixed commissions and Polish representatives. They could make the resettlement conditional on paying arbitrary “taxes,” subscribing to state loans, or providing foodstuffs and firewood. Sometimes, peasants had to sow the fields before they were allowed to leave. In at least one village council, all people who showed up to receive certificates of Polish nationality were simply arrested. ⁷² Even when the mixed commission allowed people to go, local authorities could override this decision. ⁷³ Registration for transfer mattered little if a person happened to be mobilized for labor duty or to the army. In Lida, the commission was surrounded and all people who were registering were forcibly drafted into the army. ⁷⁴

In addition to the pragmatic concern about losing the labor force, the party-state in Belarus was ambivalent about the normative evaluation of the people who were moving to Poland. Anti-Polish sentiment was present among many party-state officials. ⁷⁵ There were cases when the Soviet officials forced the Poles to declare that they wanted to resettle, especially in cities like Grodno. ⁷⁶ In a village in the Skidel’ district, an NKVD officer beat up a Polish woman and threatened to deport her if she did not sign up for resettlement to Poland. ⁷⁷ “I do not want to go to Poland, but I am afraid [because] there have been a lot of arrests here and, as far as I know, of innocent people,” a Pole complained to a Soviet official. ⁷⁸ However, such cases were recorded as violations of the norm. For instance, a chairman of the village council who wanted to resettle the people by force was reprimanded for his “unacceptable” position. ⁷⁹ At the same time, the party leaders in Grodno declared in 1946 that they were fighting the “Polish-German nationalists” and not the Polish population per se. ⁸⁰ On 4 April 1945, Afanasyev and Balabutkin, party functionaries from the central committee and from the Brest obkom, arrived in Pruzhany district to supervise the resettlement. They ordered that only “reactionary elements” could be allowed to go to Poland, ⁸¹ but, at the same meeting, another party official expressed a view that only politically loyal people could leave. Those who were under suspicion or had a family member arrested would be denied exit. ⁸² In December 1945, Ponomarenko urged to organize the resettlement in such a way that the Poles would leave as “friends of the Soviet Union” and would not be alienated by their exclusion from the lists of voters for the Supreme Council elections. ⁸³ Kuz’ma Kiselev, the deputy chairman of the Soviet of People’s Commissars of Belarus, also ordered the creation of good conditions for “true Poles” leaving the country to promote the “friendship of peoples.” ⁸⁴ The Polish resettlement officials should be treated as representatives of a friendly state, a letter from the Council of Ministers instructed. ⁸⁵ The Polish communists also framed the people leaving the USSR as “patriots” who supposedly discarded particularistic attachment to the kresy and heeded the call of the Polish nation to secure the “recovered territories.”

The ambivalence about resettlement was not only a conflict between ideology and pragmatics of state power but also a tension within ideology. In numerous speeches, party-state officials warned that the transfer was only for the loyal and trustworthy and that families where someone had been arrested would not be permitted to leave Belarus. ⁸⁶ There was even an attempt to organize a “socialist competition” between districts for the best organization of the resettlement. ⁸⁷ Furthermore, analysis in terms of class and in terms of wartime behavior pulled in opposite directions. While the class approach touted mobile proletarians not weighed down by bourgeois commitment to private property, there was also a concern that people who were too eager to move were collaborators with the Germans who wanted to escape from the USSR. ⁸⁸

What made this problem of conflicting impulses even more pressing was that in many areas, the possibility of getting out of Soviet Belarus proved to be popular. The story of the resettlement is usually told as a tragedy—which it was. But for many people, it was also an opportunity. Evacuation papers became a valued commodity on the black market. In the last days of registration for resettlement, people took repatriation offices by storm, demanding to be included in the evacuation lists. ⁸⁹ Bribes were offered to be registered for resettlement. ⁹⁰ People crossed the border themselves fleeing west. ⁹¹ The authorities noted cases when even ethnic Russians applied for permission to go to Poland. ⁹²

Of course, the response of the society of the borderlands to the population transfer was as diverse as the society itself. Some people reacted with anger and defiance. Anna Gacz, a Polish woman from a village in Polotsk province, stated, “I am not going anywhere; stop compromising us by calling us Belarusians, we do not want to be them because there has never been a Belarusian state. This land was and will be Polish.” ⁹³ Some associated themselves with the Soviet project and expressed a preference for life in the USSR. Others decided to move. Their voices—which mostly survived in a mediated form in the Soviet sources—listed many reasons: Polish patriotism, Soviet persecution, expectations of a higher standard living in Poland, and the desire to reunite with family. The decision to move was not necessarily a manifestation of stable identity or an embrace of modern nationalism.

Although the sources do not permit a broad generalization, the evidence suggests that many people voted with their feet. “Escape from communism” is a cliché of the Cold War era historiography, but many migrants were indeed motivated by their distrust of the Soviet state, not only by positive association with Poland and by their national identity. One testimony estimated that half of the population of many villages and small towns moved to Poland because they were “fleeing from Bolshevism.” ⁹⁴ A report about the situation in Miory district stated that the “whole district wants to evacuate and there are villages where everyone has signed up for resettlement.” ⁹⁵ In rural areas, the looming collectivization was an important factor in shaping this attitude. The party-state did not start wholesale collectivization of agriculture in western Belarus until 1948, but by the start of the resettlement peasants had ample information about the living conditions of Soviet collective farmers. In 1945, one-third of collective farms in Belarus did not give the farmers grain in exchange for labor days. In 1947, Gusarov reported to Malenkov that the collective farmers in Polotsk, Polesie, and Vitebsk provinces were eating weeds and that 2.7 million people were starving. ⁹⁶ Collective farmers from Eastern Belarus traveled to the western noncollectivized areas to beg or work for food. ⁹⁷ In the spring of 1946, a Pravda correspondent wrote to the editor about the refugees from eastern Belarus who were trying to make their way west—“feeble, in tatters, and famished.” ⁹⁸ Refugees from the east of Ukraine also made their way to western parts of Soviet Belarus, bringing even more harrowing stories of famine. ⁹⁹

In a series of interviews carried out in Grodno province in 2002–2005, the interviewees recalled that in 1944–1947, one of the main reasons for resettlement to Poland was the fear of “the Soviets” (Savety). ¹⁰⁰ “People were afraid of the Bolsheviks. They were selling everything . . . People were leaving by themselves, nobody forced them, because they did not want to join the collective farm,” a woman from Kovniany village born in 1921 recalled. “Under the second Soviets [after 1944], a lot of people left for Poland, because here they were crushed by the taxes,” a peasant from Radzivilki village born in 1928 stated. Still, some of those who did not leave did so because they preferred the Soviet Union to Poland. “Why did not I leave? Because Poles were worse than the Bolsheviks!,” a woman from village Useniki (born 1919) opined. “After the war, a lot of people left for Poland. I did not leave. I did not want to leave under Poles,” a woman from Kovniany village (born 1921) concurred. ¹⁰¹

The party-state officials reluctantly admitted that hostility to Sovietization played a part in the desire to leave the USSR. In 1945, a Soviet report stated that “the mass registration for resettlement to Poland was, undoubtedly, influenced by numerous facts of the violation of socialist legality.” ¹⁰² This realization made the impulse to avoid mass exodus more urgent: it would be a propaganda disaster. For that reason, the Soviets carried out propaganda (“political work”) to make people stay. ¹⁰³ The topics and methods of this campaign were similar to the Soviet efforts to persuade displaced persons in western Europe to repatriate and ran into similar problems. ¹⁰⁴ According to one Soviet official, the propaganda battle around the resettlement “reflected in a focused way all our achievements and shortcomings.” ¹⁰⁵ However, the Soviet reports more often explained away such attitudes as coming from outside subversion. ¹⁰⁶ In July 1944, Beria reported to Stalin that a lot of Poles in Baranovichi province were negatively disposed toward the Soviet Union because of the Polish government in exile. ¹⁰⁷ When a peasant from the vicinity of Grodno stated that this land used to belong to Polish king Sigismund and it became “Russian” only later, the resettlement official concluded that “it is clear that a simple peasant could not dream up a thing like that by himself, it is evident that his thoughts are a result of the influence of the Polish nationalists.” ¹⁰⁸

What the party-state lacked in commitment to national homogenization, it made up by its commitment to winning the total war. Soviet citizens had to contribute to the war effort through the heavy burden of taxation, military draft, mobilization for labor duty, food requisitions, and dramatic decline in the standard of living. In March to April 1945, the authorities started registration of all people under fifty-five for the draft to the army and to industry. In 1946, Belarus continued to be under martial law. ¹⁰⁹ The extension of these measures to western Belarus’s population was not a specifically anti-Polish policy but was perceived as such. Soviet citizenship focused on obligations rather than rights ¹¹⁰ and this tendency became more pronounced during the war. Most of these measures were unpopular, especially among the Poles. When asked why he had registered for the transfer, one person replied, “I am tired of hiding my daughters from mobilization to the factories in the Urals.” ¹¹¹ Because of this, during the transfer, people were subject to what Krystyna Kersten called “situational coercion” (as opposed to direct coercion in deportations). ¹¹²

Generalizations, however, are difficult because of the changes in people’s attitudes. News about international conferences which, people hoped, would revise the border in Poland’s favor, caused periodical shifts in popular moods. ¹¹³ On the eve of the San Francisco conference, some people changed their minds and refused to leave. “We are local people, our grandfathers and great-grandfathers had lived here, this land belongs to the Poles and we will not leave it, and even if we do—we will come back soon,” one of them proclaimed in 1945. ¹¹⁴ The news about the atomic bombing of Japan and then about Churchill’s speech in Fulton provoked expectations that war was imminent. Registration ground to a halt. People who were already on trains to Poland worried whether they would make it to their destination before hostilities started. ¹¹⁵ The changes in attitudes to resettlement also had a lot to do with the agricultural cycle of sowing and harvesting. During the transfer, the linear time of the high modernist state clashed with the cyclical time of the peasants structured according to seasonal agricultural work. The evacuation in summer was unfortunate for peasants because they were reluctant to abandon the harvest they expected to reap. Winter cold was also deadly, especially for families with small children. ¹¹⁶ In practice, only two brief periods were tolerable for peasants—just before the spring sowing and in the early autumn after the harvesting.

The eagerness of many people to leave is even more striking because of their distrust of the party-state and the terrible traveling conditions. Many suspected that the transfer was a cover-up for deporting Poles to Siberia. ¹¹⁷ In Baranovichi the head of the resettlement commission, Sofia Wisznewska, met with the people who considered moving to Poland. “Is the registration for the evacuation some sort of trick?,” she was asked. ¹¹⁸ Some peasants believed that registration for resettlement was a hidden form of signing up people for collective farms. ¹¹⁹ Voting in the elections was also connected in people’s minds with the transfer: there was a rumor that those who had voted would not be allowed to go to Poland. ¹²⁰ For authorities, this presented a problem: participation in the election ritual had to be massive but many people either avoided it or had already left for Poland. ¹²¹

The rural–urban divide further complicated the calculus of resettlement. The party-state was more likely to force out urban Poles, especially in Grodno. ¹²² The Soviet practice of issuing passports and registering the place of residence made applying this pressure easier. In April 1945, 30 percent of the city’s population had been “cleansed” in this fashion. ¹²³ Most, but not all of them, were Poles. Similar cases were recorded in other cities too. A Pole from Kobryn, a town in the Polesie region, protested the violation of the principle that resettlement was voluntary. “They force us to leave, but maybe there will be a war, and the situation will change,” he reportedly said. ¹²⁴ The urbanization rate in Belarus was lower than that in Ukraine or Lithuania, and this partly explains its special trajectory in the transfer, as Stanisław Ciesielski has noted. ¹²⁵ However, social “cleansing” was also carried out in other liberated cities of the USSR, such as Kyiv, which were not nationally contested. ¹²⁶ More importantly, there are no data about the resettlement from Grodno itself, only for the Grodno district together with the city. Despite the urban–rural divide, Grodno district (including villages) had the lowest share of resettled in all Belarus: only 35 percent of all registered. ¹²⁷ A total of 65 percent stayed, compared to 50 percent in Baranovichi and 58 percent in Molodechno, and 57 percent republic-wide. ¹²⁸ By comparison, in the Vilnius district, over 80 percent of the registered people left for Poland. ¹²⁹ In 1959, Poles still constituted 38.1 percent of Grodno’s population, and 46.3 percent of Grodno province. ¹³⁰ This suggests that the party-state was not committed to total “cleansing” of Poles even in cities.

Conclusion

The population transfer in Soviet Belarus does not fit a familiar story of ethnic cleansing carried out by the modern state in pursuit of national homogeneity. In this presumably quintessential case of ethnic politics, the Soviet authorities prioritized the economy over national homogenization. The state was more eager to keep the Poles in Belarus rather than to expel them—even though in cities like Grodno, many Poles were forcibly expelled. The approach had its parallels in other borderlands, especially in Poland’s western areas, where a lot of former “Germans” were reclassified as “Poles” after the war, often to keep qualified specialists. ¹³¹ Rather than being a case of Soviet ethnic cleansing, in many ways the transfer from Soviet Belarus was a resurrection of the Russian Empire’s “attract and hold” policy. ¹³² Because of this, the exchange did not result in total national homogenization. Although during the second repatriation in 1956–1959, an additional 101,100 persons left Belarus, in 1959 the census yielded a number of 539,000 Poles in BSSR. ¹³³ Still, over several years, Stalinist rule had changed the national composition of the kresy more than over a century of Russian rule and decades of contestation by rival nationalist movements. This process was a result of historical accidents and unintended consequences, not of the realization of a national teleology. The population exchange offers a striking illustration of how Soviet governance occasionally reproduced the practices of ethnically based exclusion but shied away from the wholesale conflation of nationality and loyalty.

While the party-state was not committed to the comprehensive demographic de-Polonization of Soviet Belarus, the people themselves were often eager to leave Stalin’s Soviet Union even in areas where ethnic conflict was absent. The transfer of Poles from Belarus was often similar to an exodus of refugees, an exodus which the party-state provoked by its actions but which it attempted to stem. Hostility to Sovietization played a large part in individual decisions about resettlement. The population exchange turned into a quasi-referendum on the Soviet system. The society of the borderlands might have not formulated a comprehensive alternative to the Soviet system, ¹³⁴ but when the “exit” option became available, many eagerly took it. ¹³⁵ The fact that so many people willingly left the only socialist country in the world was embarrassing for the authorities of Soviet Belarus. It also called into question the narrative of reunification of Belarusian national territory. Because of these factors, in the official Soviet politics of memory, the mass resettlement of Poles from Belarus, like the Holocaust, was not denied outright but instead was downplayed and subsumed in the common experience of the “Soviet people” in the “Great Patriotic War.”