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Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia

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The main primary source of this book is a collection of thousands of handwritten statements collected by the Polish government in exile when they interviewed the surviving Polish citizens released after the 1942 "amnesty" of those detained by the Soviets after 1939. By careful research, crosschecking and comparison with other resources Professor Gross has been able to produce a work of exceptional clarity and importance in understanding the workings of Stalinism in particular and totalitarianism in general.

He provides an outline of Soviet occupation policy and methods. The whole process seems to have been well planned out, one phase setting up the conditions to implement the second, which in turn set up the conditions for the third, all this operating within an artificial atmosphere of fear, chaos and confusion. An initial period of lawlessness, promoted by the Soviets in order for a rapid collapse of the old order accompanied by the promoting of ethic hatreds among the four main groups- Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians and Jews, was followed by rapid consolidation of police powers by those who owed their new won power to Soviet authority alone. In the process of laying out this interesting story, Gross adds many interesting insights.

Discussion of social control, prisons and deportation, NKVD interrogation methods (including use of female interrogators) and much more provides a well rounded sketch of this particularly brutal episode of Polish history. I found his analysis of the "privatization of the public realm", "the spoiler state", "totalitarian language", and Soviet use of family networks to insure discipline and control illuminating.

Actually the only short coming of this very interesting book is that is was published in 1988 just before the end of the Soviet Union and thus produced without the use of the since partially-opened Soviet archives. He only has limited information on the Katyn massacres for instance. While this should not affect his conclusions or insights, it may give more accurate statistics than those quoted. Perhaps a new revised edition is called for. In the meantime, this book should be a welcome addition to any library on Polish history, Soviet history or the history of World War II.

Jan Gross does a commendable job in expanding the studies of World War II Central European History beyond the dominant themes: Poland, and the Holocaust.

He focuses on what was, from Versailles to Molotov-Ribbentrop, eastern Poland, today, Byelorussia, Lithuania and western Ukraine. The first map effectively demonstrates the shifting borders, and how ethnographic identities could be lost in a swirl of martial dust. Jan Gross starts with the dual invasion of September 1939, and at a social anthropological level, examines the initial responses of the ethnic populations of those areas either outright taken by Soviet forces, or first seized by German forces, and then ceded back to Soviet control. The first part "Seizure" is broken into three chapters that neatly chronicle the seizure, transfer of authority from Polish government to Soviet government, the so-called elections, and final imposition of total social control. The Soviets exploited the chaos and lawlessness that existed prior to and during the initial stages of their arrival to impose their own hierarchy and control mechanisms, whether through promises of wealth redistribution, political power via elections, or simple terror. While going through this process, Gross spends detailed, yet concise prose on scrutinizing the new power relationships between Poles "cruelly victimized" Ukrainians "always exploited" and Jews "weak...looking for some power to regulate their relationships." Gross goes to great lengths to destroy the myth that Jews were frequent, widespread conspirators or supporters of the new Communist regime. Gross proves that there was a level playing field, in which "people lost all privacy." He further goes to show how the Soviets tapped into the emotional vein of all peasants in the region since the 17th century, land distribution and reform, not so much to "make things better" but to "create havoc in the countryside." Ultimately, as gross notes, the Soviets sought an "induced self destruction of a community."

The elections were the final part of the triad for the imposition of Soviet control. They made everyone vulnerable, and created power struggles between teachers and other intellectual leaders, and the new regime and its officers, no matter how stupid, inept or corrupt. The great quote on p. 85 sums of the average reception of elections, held just weeks after the Soviets took over "What the voting was for...I don't know." Gross details the actual voting, counting of votes and manipulation of the results by the Soviets, and how the October 1939 elections set the stage for follow on elections (and state processes for control) in March 1940.

In his detailed examination of social control, Gross asserts his most interesting scholarly work, namely, that instead of the totalitarian state confiscating the private realm, in fact, the Soviet system privatized the public realm. In other words, the state did not control the terror-every private citizen had access to terror and its effects by making private matters an issue of public (Soviet) concern. As Gross further notes in his theory "the real power of the totalitarian state results from it being at the disposal of every inhabitant, available for hire at a moment's notice."

In the second part of the book "Confinements," Gross concentrates on the maintenance of terror until the (re) liberation by the Germans in 1941. He concentrates on the upending of the social apple cart where traditional authority figures such as parents, religious leaders and teachers are replaced by cultural, sports and militant atheism programs to woo, seduce, and control the youth. Through this, and the induction of permanent disorder, the Trotsky ideal of permanent revolution is maintained, even while Trotsky himself is drinking tequila and waiting for an ice pick in Mexico. The substructure for permanent chaos and terror is the NKVD, their prisons, tortures, and depopulation/deportation of peoples. Gross estimates that in 20 months, in just this region, approximately 120,000 people were arrested and imprisoned, and another 315,000 deported. For this rural area with few cities, this is indeed a staggering toll in such a short time, and added to the wider destruction of World War II, represents a towering figure of almost unimaginable and permeating suffering and loss. Gross ends the regular text with a challenge to historians to move into the kresy between the Oder and the Urals, and really examine the 1939-1941 period with its larger implications not only on the war, but all of post modern central European history.

Lastly, in this new expanded addition, Gross adds an after word, "Tangle Web," that examines the interaction of Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian and Lithuanian suffering, but primarily focused on Poles and Jews in previously Polish lands. That the Polish elites were decimated is not debatable; that the Jews were almost eliminated is also not debatable. What Gross tries to do, with mixed results, is move the debate past the common stereotypes (which means admitting that they exist, no easy task in this region) and into the long term effects, still present today, and, as Lenin would say, ask what is to be done? Finally Gross spends some more time on the issue, not of Polish Jewish relations, but of Soviet Jewish relations, and concludes that, referring to the deportations of Jews, the "victims of deportations turned out to be the lucky ones." Gross also shows other tidbits of anecdotal evidence that seems to show the potential for almost disastrous post war Polish Jewish relations existed, in not in fact, than at least in the perceived public perceptions, as early as late 1939, and grew worse under the cumulative pressures of Germans, Soviets, Germans again, Soviets again, imposition of Warsaw Pact in the 1939 to 1949 decade.

This book is a hard read, because it deals with many layers of issues simultaneously. Life, too, is not a series of isolated events, but a sequential interaction of parallel choices, actions, and occurrences. Gross thus makes a statement better than the average historical timeline, but more challenging in its presentation, and demanding in its search for illumination and accuracy.

According to the Polish national anthem, "Poland is not dead whilst we live. What others took by force, with the sword will be taken back." Both Nazi and Soviet occupiers must have taken these words to heart as they set out thoroughly to crush the Polish population between September 1939 and June 1941. In Revolution from Abroad: the Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorusssia, Jan T. Gross (New York University) draws on documents from Polish, German, Israeli, and U.S. archives to show with camera-like precision how ordinary Polish citizens at the grassroots level experienced the Soviet occupation of Poland and the mechanisms Soviet authorities used to induce their participation. U.S. citizens who have never known the horrors of foreign occupation will find this study especially sobering. Polish citizens never knew when a few Soviet soldiers might enter their houses and apartments, live there for several days or weeks, eat their food, and steal their possessions. If they resisted, they faced arrest, torture, and/or execution, often in full view of loved ones. As Soviet soldiers explained to the newly adopted Soviet citizens, "There are three categories of people in the Soviet Union: those who were in jail, those who are in jail, and those who will be in jail." (p. 230). Gross points out that, in sheer numbers, more Polish citizens suffered under Soviet occupation in the first two years of World World II (i.e. before the Nazis' mass annihilation of Jews began) than under German occupation. Whereas the Germans killed approximately 120,000 Poles, the Soviet security police (NKVD) nearly "matched that figure in just two episodes of mass execution" (viz., the mass murder of Polish prisoners of war in the spring of 1940, and the evacuation of prisons in the Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia during June and July 1941). (p. 228). However, despite the Soviets' greater victimization of Polish citizens in terms of loss of life, suffering inflicted by forced resettlement, and material losses through confiscation, Gross argues that, to the Polish and Jewish citizens, the Soviet occupiers seemed less "oppressive." They lacked the "discriminatory contempt" and "Übermensch airs" that the Nazis evinced so imperiously (p. 230). The author explains that perhaps one reason why the Soviet army seemed less oppressive at first is that it claimed to "liberate" Poland. Generally, the population was confused about Soviet intentions, and indeed, "nobody had warned the local community and the authorities that a Bolshevik invasion was possible and what to do in case it occurred" (p. 22). The deceptive slogans of national liberation soothed millions of wishful thinking Polish citizens-Jews, Ukrainians, Belorussians-who "could meet fellow ethnics" in the Red Army or the Soviet administration (p. 230). The stark contrast between soldiers in the Wehrmacht and those in the Red Army - the latter in coats of assorted lengths, with rags wrapped around their shoeless feet -- also made the Soviet occupiers seem less intimidating. Still another reason for the Red Army's cloddish image is the febrile rapaciousness with which the soldiers bought and consumed Polish goods. Expecting to hear discussions of lofty communist ideals, Poles instead saw "in the marketplace how these Soviet people ate eggs, shell and all, horseradish, beets, and other produce. Country women rolled with laughter" (p. 46). In a restaurant "a Red Army soldier might order several courses or a dozen pastries and eat them all on the spot" (p. 46). In comparison to Nazi Germany, then, the Soviet Union struck the Poles as a petty and materialistic "spoiler state."
In addition to these colorful descriptions in the first part of the book, Gross also raises a serious, but long neglected, topic in his final historiographical essay ("A Tangled Web"): Polish-Jewish relations during World War II. Why didn't more Polish citizens try to help the Polish Jews? To be sure, one faced severe penalties-torture and execution, often in front of one's family members. However, ignorance persists among Poles today about the ultimate fate of Polish Jews. Gross cites an opinion poll in which Poles were asked who suffered and died more, the Poles or Jews, during World War II? About 30% thought it was roughly equal. Almost no one realized that nearly all Polish Jews were killed. Gross also explains how anti-Semitism prevailed in Poland during the war and even after (Auschwitz) was revealed in all its horror (p . 248).
Revolution from Abroad thus makes an important contribution to a growing body of literature about the ignorance of the populations in Warsaw Pact countries of their countries' Nazi pasts. The Soviet-imposed myth about "communist heroes of resistance" enabled them for decades to avoid the painful questions faced long ago by other Western countries, West Germany in particular.

In contrast with his later works, Gross is quite candid about Jewish-Soviet collaboration against Poles. (pp. 29-35). However, his reflexive exculpation of this conduct in terms of the awfulization of minorities' experiences in prewar Poland is, at best, oversimplified. For instance, Jews retained their economic dominance, and the average Jew remained wealthier than the average Pole. For those not willfully blind, "Communist paradise" thinking ran smack against the fact that, whatever the wrongs non-Poles had experienced from Polish government policies, these were dwarfed by those faced by their co-nationals in the Soviet Union. Think of the purges of Jews in the 1930's and, especially, the intentional starvation of up to 7 million Ukrainians in the Holodomor. Gross admits the fact that many Jews voluntarily went westward to German-occupied regions of Poland. (pp. 205-207). Although not mentioned, this refutes the premise that non-Communist Jews necessarily saw Communism as the lesser of two evils. So why the Zydokomuna? Many Polish Jews, notably the descendants of Litvaks, had a Russophile orientation, and Jews had been significantly overrepresented in radical leftist political and social movements since time immemorial.

The following, though not described as such, serves as refutation of the Communist-propaganda mischaracterization of local Poles as wealthy, exploitive capitalists: "With some obvious exceptions, they [invading Soviets] could not immediately distinguish `people' from `Pans' [landlords]. Even the Polish military settlers--truly the betes noires of ideologically sophisticated Soviets because the majority of them were veterans of the Polish-Bolshevik war of 1920--lived and looked like any peasant in the vicinity." (p. 41; see also p. 246). Among those deported to the interior of the USSR, 27.6% were peasants, while artisans were a distant second at 8.0%. (p. xxi). Clearly, the Soviets were intent on destroying the Polish element, not merely waging war against "capitalists."

Gross gives many technical details of the Soviet-occupation apparatus and policies in eastern Poland. One hilarious irony occurred during the Communist war against religion. Sometimes they allowed a crucifix to remain, though now with a portrait of Lenin and Stalin on each side. Poles remarked that, once again, Christ was spread on a cross between two criminals! (p. 127).

As for the Gulag Poles, Gross cites a figure of 120,000 of them released in the 1941 "amnesty"; 800,000-850,000 remaining in captivity as of 1943, and 300,000-750,000 having already died. (p. 229). Oddly enough, he claims that, under the early German occupation (1939-1941), 100,000 Polish Jews perished compared with (a preposterously-low) 21,000 Polish gentiles. (p. 228). Is this an early manifestation of his later overt Judeocentric Polonophobia?

The joint invasion of Poland in September 1939 by Russia and Germany set in motion 50 years of disaster for the people of Poland. Hitler's crimes are well known. What is far less well known is that millions of Poles also were killed by the Russians. The famous Katyn massacre was a part of a campaign of mass murder. Millions of Poles were deported to Russia from 1939 to 1941 to serve as slave labor. When the Poles rose up to fight the Germans in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 Stalin stopped the Soviet armies and let the Germans slaughter them. I have a list of other examples political terror and mass murder on my profile.

The other reviews give a good summary of this well-researched history of Eastern Poland during the operative period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (from September 1939 until the Nazi invasion of Russia in June 1941). What you may not know is that Jan Gross stirred up a huge controversy in Poland with another of his books entitled "Neighbors". It describes the massacre of several hundred Jews in the small town of Jedwabne in Eastern Poland after it was overrun by the Nazis in the summer of 1941. The controversy arose from his claim (based on eye-witness accounts) that it was the Polish neighbors of the Jews who carried out their brutal execution (by burning them alive in a barn) and that a few Nazi soldiers did little more than standby. The Poles took extreme umbrage at this accusation and responded with a book of their own ("The Neighbors Respond") placing the blame on the Nazis aided by a few Polish criminals, and accusing Gross of poor research and distorting the facts. I read both books and concluded that the articles in "Respond" actually work against the Poles by revealing that latent anti-semitism still exists in significant segments of Polish society. If you read the reviews of both books you will see that the controversy still rages. It now follows Gross in every book that he publishes because he has become a persona non grata to Polish nationalists who attack him every chance they get. See the one-star review herein. Indeed, in "Revolution" Gross has included a supplement entitled "A Tangled Web" (again using eyewitness accounts) refuting the claim in "Respond" that Jews (unlike other minority groups) corroborated with the Communist oppressors during the occupation. Gross also makes the point that after the war Poles generally remained very anti-semitic and this caused almost all the surviving Jews to flee Poland. Of course the Poles hate this narrative. The accusation hurts their national pride and their reaction has been to deny and strike back. My reading of Eastern European history disclosed, however, that even before WWII anti-semitism was rife in Poland and that its government actually considered legislation to rid Poland of Jews. One proposal was to ship them to Madagascar (the Nazis also considered this ridiculous solution). But keep in mind that practically the entire world was anti-semitic at the time (e.g. Henry Ford, Charles Lindberg, Father Coughlin). It is not surprising that Poles would also harbor strong anti-semitic feelings. This anti-semitism issue, however, is only one of the subjects of the book. The main part of the book is devoted to the Russian regime's take-over of Eastern Poland and its brutalization, imprisonment and destruction of the minorities (Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, and Belorussians) who inhabited it at the time. And Gross does an outstanding job of covering this neglected but important part of Eastern European history. Highly recommended.

Jan Gross' study of the Soviet invasion of "eastern Poland" is typically conservative cold war historiography of the Hoover Institution mold. It was Professor Gross' followup to his "Polish Society Under German Occupation." Though this work is interesting as one of the few in-depth case studies of the title event - and I gave it three stars when two-and-a-half would do it justice - I have several criticisms after reading.

First, the very designation of this area as "eastern Poland" merely regurgitates the nationalist claim based on Polish occupation, first under the old Polish Kingdom, then under the prewar Republic; an occupation based on conquest and partition, most recently the division of Ukraine and Byelorussia between Marshal Pilsudski and Soviet Russia in 1920. From this volume one would not know the treachery of the good Marshal to the West Ukrainian allies who fell under his wing. The discontent of the non-Polish national minorities - comprising a third of the prewar population - is glossed over as we proceed to the main event. Poles themselves were the minority in the region under review, though they are the central characters under study. All others are confined to the margins, as they were in prewar Poland.

Professor Gross does touch on the friendly reception given to the Red Army by Polish Jews, attributing this to happy deliverance from the threat of Hitler's Germany. That it was also deliverance from an increasingly bigoted, anti-Semitic Polish regime is, however, politely downplayed. The more guarded reception given to Soviet forces by Ukrainians and Byelorussians is noted, as well as the accompanying ethnic violence. The overall attitude of the "Pravoslav" (Orthodox) population is left in the dark; again this is not Professor Gross' main concern anyway.

Nor is there an overall social analysis of the early wartime occupation period, to shed further light on its inner workings at the local level. Gross' emphasis is on the punitive: arrest, exile, deportation, prison - especially as these repressions affected Poles. Little detail is given of how the Soviet occupiers played on ethnic division to create a new administration, though they assuredly did, and fairly successfully. Instead we're given several anecdotal accounts of arrogant commissars proclaiming "I am the people!" as they stalk to the head of ration lines. While true as far as they go, such stories don't inform the reader how Soviet occupation differed from German. Were Orthodox peasants more likely to cooperate with the arrogant commissars and Soviet programs than Catholics? Perhaps the evidence is too scanty, but the question is not pursued.

Instead Professor Gross asserts that the Soviet occupation administration was "staffed largely by criminals" as conscious policy, following the emptying of Polish prisons and assuming that the occupants would naturally gravitate to their lawless rule. Not enough is known about this prison population to warrant such blanket accusation of "treason." What kind of prisoners were ever given such offers, and how many of them accepted, and why? How many who did accept cooperation were non-Poles? Which again raises the brushed-aside ethnic question, and the manipulation of underlying class divisions. Were those Jews who also accepted cooperation therefore criminals? By all accounts, no. A closer look is demanded before sweeping judgments are offered on the connections between criminality and cooperation. I understand that in a newer edition, Professor Gross has attempted this, but with mixed results according to another reviewer.

In further contradiction, Professor Gross states the administration was "privatized" - that is, placed in the hands of collaborators and their families as part of "the induced self-destruction of society." Changing of rulers, the turning of tables, is surely what any revolution is all about, while the losing side of course sees nothing but mindless chaos in the process. Although such administration sounds little different from the feudal governing practice of prewar Poland, there is a hint of revolution in Professor Gross' listing of such local collaborator networks, the majority of whose given names were clearly non-Polish. The occupation regime is described as doling out injustice at the caprice of these individuals on high, or common citizens exercising their new-found "empowerment" to denounce. While this was part of the picture, these persons certainly did not set the guidelines of judgment, however abused. This would make the Soviet state appear much more "at the service" of the occupied than could have been the case.

Which raises Gross' concept of "the establishment of disorder." By this obviously conservative device he seems to mean the introduction of public democracy, giving as examples students freed from addressing their teachers as "Pan Professor," or rising as he enters, or induced to smoke cigarettes in class (how much like Soviet-occupied Poland Emory University must have seemed to Pan Professor Gross!) "Lifting," as he writes on p. 134, "the full panoply of social controls, not only the old government authority and enforcement apparatus but also customs, traditions, and even plain common sense." Yet this exactly describes a revolutionary process, in the postwar West as much as the wartime East. I doubt if anyone in Poland seriously plans to reintroduce prewar feudalisms into Polish life, beyond kneejerk rhetoric: try forcing modern students to rise on demand as Pan Professor stalks to the podium.

Much of the rest of the book is devoted to detailed description of prison, deportation, exile, and the general repressive system of the occupation - as it affected Poles. But much of the living picture for those left behind is lacking. What agricultural or industrial policy did the authorities attempt to follow, beyond nationalizing the upper and middle class minority? How did they bring the poor majority along with them, if at all? Perhaps data on this was never readily available, but again the questions are only half-pursued and lost in anti-socialist rhetoric.

But where statistics are available, as in the number of deaths under occupation repression, the highest estimates are routinely given to demonstrate that Soviet rule was worse than the German by "three or four," even for Jews. And yet we're told that "the Soviet occupation was somehow less oppressive in its atmosphere and style" (p. 250). Aside from the fact that Professor Gross' duty is to explore why this was so, beyond its mere statement, this is not how Stalinist terror has normally been perceived by its subjects. One suspects that the Red Terror of Soviet-Occupied East Poland was not as bloodthirsty as depicted in nationalist historiography; or as it would become in this region during the postwar Soviet hunt for Ukrainian insurgents, when no one puzzled over a strange lack of oppression.

Finally we come to Professor Gross' concluding concept of "the spoiler state." Such a state, he writes, is based on mass deprivation of rights, goods, and services, ensuring that nothing can get done if the state cannot control it, based on the deliberate marginalizing and waste of human potential. Such regimes could not accomplish much in the way of feeding, clothing, or sheltering their subjects, he writes on p. 238, raising Cambodia's Pol Pot and Albania's Enver Hoxha as demonstrative proof. As if "Peoples' Poland" ever bore *any* similarity to such Third World sinkholes! Anyone familiar with the prewar feudalism of eastern Europe knows that "the spoiler state" had been around the neighborhood a lot longer than Marx or Lenin. Since the book's publication, life has caught up with academic posing: we've seen how the post-Communist regimes, with their kleptocracies and neoliberal "downsizing," have not offered better to more. When outside investors buy up a Polish company, only to shut it down to destroy the competition, inducing mass local unemployment, they perpetrate the same denial and waste; spoiling, not producing or creating, leaving the jobless ex-Solidarity worker under exclusive private institutions amidst an atomized society (to paraphrase Gross).

Professor Gross' depth as an historian has grown, in my opinion, in the twenty-plus years since this book. In works like "Neighbors" or "Fear" he's gone beyond the "cold war paradigm" to get to the nitty-gritties of Polish society. Ironically, he's found less welcome to raise doubts and questions in the New Democratic Poland than under the old "spoiler system" he castigated.

I am just Grossly, Grossed out by Gross' Gross books. I am sick and tired, and emotionally drained of Gross' over-the-top, sensationlistic and unsubstanciated ramblings, that are more "dis"- proven each day. Example: Look at gross' Jedwabne, started with 1600, now down to "200" actual bodies exhumed, filled with German bullets. Get a life. Gross is synonymous with "dark, depressing and drudgery reading. Why did I bother?