84 years ago, NKVD chief Nikolai Yezhov issued order number 00485 ordering “the complete liquidation of Polish spy networks”. Out of 143,000 people arrested in the USSR on charges of spying for Poland in the years 1937-1938, 111,000 were executed. According to Professor Timothy Snyder, according to cautious estimates, among those executed during this period were 85,000 Poles.
During the Great Terror, Poles living in the USSR also became victims of a bloody purge carried out by Stalin in the Red Army, the security service and the party apparatus. However, it was the great mass operations against “unwanted peoples”, among others, that made the Bolshevik terror go down in history as “great”. “Nationality operations” reached, among others, Germans, Poles, Latvians, Estonians, Greeks, Koreans, Finns and Chinese living in the USSR.
Activities undertaken by the Centre for Polish-Russian Dialogue and Understanding and the Institute of National Remembrance, including the creation of a popular scientific portal devoted entirely to the “Polish operation” of the NKVD in the years 1937-1938, are intended to change this state of affairs and contribute to the restoration of this crime against the Polish nation to its rightful place in public consciousness and memory.