Serov — 10 February 06:00 at Lwów
After the annexation of eastern Poland, Moscow organised the administrative elimination of the surviving Polish elites by mass deportation to Siberia and Kazakhstan. , 35, commissar-general of the Ukrainian state security (NKVD), was charged with executing the first wave. The target: 220,000 people — former Polish officials, military settlers (osadnicy, veterans installed in Volhynia by Piłsudski in 1921-1923), forest wardens, the families of officers already in custody, prosperous Jewish merchants.
The operation was planned for a single day: 10 February 1940, at 06:00 local time. Sixteen thousand NKVD men, supported by fourteen thousand local militiamen. The method: simultaneous irruption into homes, thirty minutes to pack a bundle (limit 60 kilograms per family), transfer by cart to the railway stations, embarkation in 110 trains bound for western Siberia, Kazakhstan and Arkhangelsk.
The temperature at Lwów: minus 45 degrees Celsius. Cattle wagons unheated, no food provided for a three-week journey. The first convoy left Lwów at 11:00. The last batch went out at 23:30.
Serov had to decide how to justify the operation in public.
How should this deportation be justified publicly to the local population?
Serov chose B. No public announcement was made. On the morning of 10 February the neighbours found the apartments emptied, the furniture untouched. The first wave's tally: 140,000 deported (NKVD figures released in 1991) — 60 percent of the initial target, but already enormous. Three further waves followed: 13 April 1940 (65,000), June 1940 (80,000), June 1941 (35,000). The total Soviet deportations of Poles in 1939-1941 came to between 320,000 and 1,100,000 people depending on the source. Mortality in transit and in exile: 30 to 40 percent in the first year. The Sikorski-Maisky agreement of 30 July 1941 (after the German invasion of the USSR) theoretically ordered the release of the Poles — some 110,000 would find their way to Anders' army. Many never came back. Serov continued his career: he commanded the Ukrainian NKVD, organised the deportation of the Crimean Tatars (1944), of the Chechens (1944), of the Volga Germans. First head of the KGB 1954-1958. Dismissed by Khrushchev in 1963. Died in 1990.
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