332 GOLGOTA
- Officers and military judges of the contemporary Polish and Lithuanian Armies;
- Volunteers of all other armies other than the Bolshevik;
- Persons removed from the Communist Party;
- Refugees, political emigres, and contraband runners;
- Citizens of foreign states, representatives of foreign firms, etc.;
- Persons who have travelled abroad. Persons who are in contact with representatives
of foreign states. Persons who are esperantists or philatelists; - Officials of the Lithuanian Ministries;
- The staff of the Red Cross;
- Persons active in parishes; clergymen, secretaries, and active members of religious
communities; - Aristocrats, landowners, wealthy merchants, bankers, industrialists, hotel and
restaurant proprietors.^16
Similar measures were applied in Byelorussia and the Ukraine.
The history of the Soviet deportations of 1939-40 from the occupied territor-
ies has been obscured by the passions which attended later events. It can be seen
as the culmination of the Stalinist terror which started to snowball during the
collectivization campaign and the Purges, and which did not cease until the
German attack on the USSR in 1941. Its horrors were known and published long
before Solzhenitsyn wrote his Gulag Archipelago but were largely ignored by a
western public as yet unconditioned to receive them. The Poles were among the
foremost victims. They were deported in four vast railway convoys which left
for the east in February, April, and June 1940, and June 1941. They had all been
processed by the NKVD and sentenced either to lagier (concentration camps),
to hard labour, or to penal exile. The vast majority were convicted for no
known offence, but simply because the Polish nation was seen as the inveterate
enemy of its Russian masters. The conditions in those trains defy coherent
language. The passengers had been told to pack emergency rations for one
month, but to take a minimum of personal belongings. They were packed in a
standing position in sealed, windowless, and unheated cattle-wagons, for a win-
ter journey of three, four, five, or even six thousand miles. Their only view of
the outside world was through a small opening under the roof which could be
used for passing out excreta and corpses. Instances of derangement, frostbite,
starvation, infanticide, even cannibalism occurred. Those who survived the
trains often faced further journeys in the holds of river-boats, or on the backs of
open lorries, to the farthest recesses of the Soviet wilderness. One man who lived
to tell the tale was a trade unionist and a miner who was strong enough to with-
stand the rigours of a camp near the Cold Pole of the earth in north-eastern
Siberia:On 2.7 September 1939 I received an order from the political authorities of the Soviet
administration ... to call a meeting of all the workers' organisations... and to dissolve
them. At this meeting, the NKVD representatives present handed me the text of a reso-
lution to be submitted to the delegates of the workers' organisation and to be passed by
them. By this resolution, the workers were to express their satisfaction at the incorpora-