Russia has for decades promoted claims that tens of thousands, or even 100,000, Soviet prisoners of war were murdered in what it calls “Polish concentration camps” during the 1920 Polish-Soviet war.
This narrative emerged in its modern form in 1990, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged Soviet responsibility for the Katyń massacre of more than 20,000 Polish prisoners. Later that year, he ordered officials to find an issue in Polish-Soviet relations that could serve as a counterweight to Katyń, giving rise to what became known as “anti-Katyń”.
From the 1990s onward, Russian articles, interviews and official statements sought to portray the treatment of captured Red Army soldiers as comparable to, or worse than, Katyń. In 1998, Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika asked Poland to explain the alleged “genocide” of Soviet prisoners.
The language grew more inflammatory over time. One 1993 publication referred to Red Army soldiers in the “hell of Polish concentration camps”. In 2007, commentator Pyotr Pospelov said Józef Piłsudski deserved “the honor of being called the father of the system of concentration camps for the mass extermination of prisoners”, and described the Polish camp at Tuchola as a “death camp”, with Auschwitz its “logical continuation”.
“Polish death camps”
Russian state media reinforced the theme. In 2011, state television aired a report on “Polish death camps”, telling viewers that during the Polish-Bolshevik war, Poles held Russian prisoners in inhuman conditions, starved them and murdered them. In 2017, Russian authorities placed plaques at the Polish cemetery in Katyń commemorating Soviet prisoners who died in Polish camps during the 1920 war.
Many claims on those plaques were false, including assertions that “tens of thousands” died. Kremlin-backed narratives often cite 60,000 or 80,000 deaths. In 2014, Russian Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky put the figure at 100,000.
But the figures are not backed by any research. A joint Polish-Russian team of historians published a Russian-language study in 2004 based on surviving documents concluding that deaths of Soviet prisoners in Polish captivity did not exceed 18,000. Other estimates put the toll at 14,000 to 16,000.
Kremlin propaganda also counts as victims many men who never returned to Russia for other reasons, including about 25,000 volunteers who joined anti-Bolshevik units, prisoners who escaped, non-Russians such as Lithuanians, Austrians and Hungarians, and those who chose to remain in Poland.
As for the causes of death, the evidence shows prisoners died mainly from diseases including typhus, cholera and dysentery, instead of as a result of a planned extermination policy. Conditions in the camps were poor, especially after the battles of Warsaw and the Niemen River sharply increased the number of captives.
But Polish state historical research center Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) attributes that to the supply and organizational failings of a poor, war-ravaged state, not deliberate intent. It says Polish authorities struggled to contain epidemics, while many of the more than 100,000 Bolshevik prisoners taken by Poland were already exhausted, ragged and often ill.
Disease was a major killer more broadly at the time. In 1920 alone, more than 200,000 Red Army soldiers died from illness, compared with about 120,000 killed in battle.
The Soviets also held Polish POWs. Of 44,000 captured Polish soldiers, about 35,000 to 36,000 returned home after the war, while 2,000 to 3,000 stayed in Russia. That leaves the fate of roughly 5,000 to 7,000 unclear. There were documented cases of Bolshevik brutality, including torture and executions of captured Polish soldiers.
(jh)
Source: Polish Radio, IPN