Flight of Poles from the USSR

The flight and forced displacement of Poles from all territories east of the Second Polish Republic (Kresy) pertains to the dramatic decrease of Polish presence on the territory of the post-war Soviet Union in the first half of the 20th century. The greatest migrations took place in waves between the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and in the aftermath of World War II in Europe.

The first spontaneous flight of about 500,000 Poles occurred during the reconstitution of sovereign Poland following World War I. In the second wave, between November 1919 and June 1924, roughly 1,200,000 people left the territory of the USSR for Poland amid political repression of Polish–Soviet War and its aftermath. It is estimated that some 460,000 of them spoke Polish as a first language. However, throughout the interwar years, according to Polish estimates, some 1,2 million up to 1,3 million Poles remained in the vast territories of the Soviet Union including 260,000 in the former Minsk Voivodeship (Mińszczyzna), 230,000 in the Gomel Region (Homelszczyzna), 160,000 in the Kyiv region (Kijowszczyzna), and 300,000 in Podole region with roughly the same number spread out across the rest of the country. None of them were allowed to leave. In 1937–38 Polish minority became the target of the Polish Operation of the NKVD, in which 111,091 ethnic Poles were killed. The number of ethnic Poles in the USSR dropped by 165,000 in that period as the Soviet statistics indicate. Depending on size of their families, the fate of around 200,000–250,000 Poles was sealed after they have been purposely left with nothing to live on.

The next major wave of forcible displacement resulted from the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland in which 320,000 Polish citizens (originally estimated at 700,000 up to 1 million) were deported to Siberia in a Soviet attempt to de-Polonize annexed lands in 1940–41. About 150,000 of them perished in the Soviet Union before the end of the war. The opportunity for organized flight came in a remarkable reversal of fortune. Following Operation Barbarossa, the USSR was forced to fight its own former ally, Nazi Germany, and in July 1941 signed a London treaty with Poland, granting amnesty for Polish citizens in the Soviet Union. The evacuation of the Polish people from Siberia by General Anders lasted from March to September 1942. Well over 110,000 Poles went to Iran including 36,000 women and children.

Spontaneous flight from eastern borderlands of the Second Polish Republic occurred during the Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia lasting until the end of 1944. Most Poles who survived World War II on Soviet territory left in accordance with the Polish-Soviet repatriation agreements. It was the final wave of mass migrations, referred to as the Polish population transfers (1944–46) in the aftermath of Allied victory over Germany. The displacement followed the Curzon Line accepted by the US administration and UK government during the Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam meetings with the Soviet leaders. Although not invited to participate in the multilateral talks, new Poland was assigned the so-called Recovered Territories as compensation for the loss of the eastern half of its prewar territory to the Soviets.