Double genocide theory

A street art mural at Gdańsk Jasień railway station by Piotr Jaworski and Mateusz Rybka.[1] On the mural, Nazi German Führer Adolf Hitler, Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin and current Russian dictator Vladimir Putin are placed beside each other, superimposed by the slogan "NO MORE TIME", to imply that their respective ideologies pose similar danger to Eastern Europeans.

The double genocide theory (Lithuanian: Dvigubo genocido požiūris, lit. 'Double genocide approach') is a theory said to have emerged in Lithuania after the Soviet Union ended in December 1991.[2] Formerly Soviet-occupied countries built monuments and museums to show the world the evidence of their suffering under Soviet totalitarianism.[2]

Despite the efforts being normal for national memory preservation, it has been a subject of controversy among scholars worldwide.[2] This leads to the reverse usage of double genocide theory as a negative word for what is allegedly historical revisionism.[2]

Overview

The double genocide theory holds that two equally serious genocides happened in World War II (WWII), with the Holocaust committed by Nazi Germany against Jews[3][4] and the other genocide committed by the Soviet Union against Eastern Europeans, including the Poles, Ukrainians, and Baltic states' population.[2]

The Museum of the Occupation of Latvia, a private museum documenting the crimes against Latvia committed by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union between 1940 and 1991.[5]

Background

Supporters of the double genocide theory base their views on a series of events that involved Soviet Union's actions in their countries, which are outlined as follows.

Soviet persecution of Poles

See the main article: Soviet persecution of Poles during World War II
Rows of exhumed bodies of Polish officers, killed in the 1940 Katyn massacre, placed on the ground by the mass graves, awaiting examination.

Following the invasion of Poland, Poland was divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.[6][7] Nazi Germany occupied western Poland, while the Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland until late June 1941 when the Nazi-led Axis powers invaded the Soviet Union.[6][7] By the time, the Soviet Union had already arrested 500,000 Poles in the Kresy macroregion.[8] At least 150,000 Poles were killed by the Soviets on Polish soil throughout WWII.[8]

Soviet-occupied Poland (1939‒41)

The Soviet Union occupied 52.1% of pre-war Poland (c. 200,000 km2), with over 13,700,000 citizens.[9] Among citizens who were ethnic minorities, 37% were Ukrainians, 14.5% Belarusians, 8.4% Jews, 0.9% Russians and 0.6% Germans.[9] Joseph Stalin's occupation of eastern Poland is said to be motivated by his baseless perception that pre-war Poland was a "crime against revolution [...] counter-revolutionary activity".[10]

Katyn massacre

See the main article: Katyn massacre

On March 5, 1940, Lavrentiy Beria asked Joseph Stalin in a memo to order the execution of 25,700 Polish "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries" in the Soviet-occupied zone.[11] Six members of the Soviet Politburo – Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Mikhail Kalinin – signed an order to carry out the execution.[11] German-American historian Gerhard Weinberg said that the Soviets decided to kill the captured Poles because they considered the Poles the "avowed enemies of Soviet authority".[12] Weinberg further noted:[12]

Stalin could be certain that any revived Poland would be unfriendly [. ...] depriving it of a large proportion of its military and technical elite would make it weaker.

Memo from Beria to Stalin which proposed the execution of Polish officers, policemen, etc.

Between April and May 1940, around 22,000 Poles were executed by the Soviets in the Katyn forest (now in Smolensk, Russia).[13][14] The victims were mainly captured Polish soldiers, police and members of the intelligentsia.[13][14] They were executed as part of the Soviet campaign to erase Poland's culture and identity.[13][14] Before that, 111,091 persons associated with Poland had already been killed by the Soviets during the Stalinist purges between August 25, 1937 and November 15, 1938.[15]

Exhumation of the Katyń forest massacre victims, murdered in 1940 by order of Soviet authorities.
Photo from the 1943 exhumation of a mass grave of Polish officers killed by the NKVD in the Katyń Forest in 1940. Inside of one of the largest graves.

Between February 10, 1940 and June 1941, as many as 1,200,000 Poles were deported to mainland Russia.[16] The deportation happened while Polish and Jewish property across the occupied zone were taken away by the Soviets.[17] Polish Jews made up 30% of the Poles deported to Siberia,[18][19] making them statistically the most targeted group among the deportees.[18][19]

Destruction of Polish society

In both the Nazi- and Soviet-occupied zone, the oppression of Poles was motivated by anti-Polish racism[7][20] (also called anti-Polonism[21] or Polonophobia[22]), which predated the Soviet Union.[20][23] In the Soviet-occupied zone, Russian culture was also imposed on the Poles by reorganizing Polish universities in line with the Statute Books for Soviet Higher Schools, and prioritizing Russian studies while suppressing Polish studies.[9] Traces of Polish history were systematically erased by the Soviets.[9] All Polish parties and organizations were dissolved,[9] while the Polish currency was made invalid,[9] causing the whole population to lose their life savings overnight.[24]

NKVD prisoner massacres

See the main article: NKVD prisoner massacres

Before Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Soviets were holding hundreds of thousands of political prisoners in NKVD prisons across its occupied Eastern European territories.[25] Right after the invasion began, the NKVD was ordered to kill or evacuate 140,000 prisoners from Soviet-occupied eastern Poland.[25]

The order was carried out hastily.[25] Two-thirds of the said prisoners were killed by the NKVD.[25] Among the prisoners killed by the NKVD, at least 9,800 were reportedly executed in prisons and 1,443 executed during evacuation.[25] Geographically, 20,000–30,000 of them died in Soviet-occupied eastern Poland, and 9,000 in the Ukrainian SSR,[25] which had just gone through the Holodomor[26][27] and Great Purge-related massacres in the 1930s.[28][29] They were targeted for mass murder over their Polish or Ukrainian identity.[25][29]

Historian Yury Boshyk wrote:[28]

It was not only the numbers of the executed, but also the manner in which they died that shocked the populace. When the families of the arrested rushed to the prisons after the Soviet evacuation, they were aghast to find bodies so badly mutilated that many could not be identified. It was evident that many of the prisoners had also been tortured before death; others were killed en masse.

Formation of Soviet puppet state in Poland

After Nazi Germany was defeated, the Soviet Union set up a puppet state in Poland,[30] subjecting Poland to communist totalitarianism until 1989,[31][32] while Soviet troops did not leave Poland until 1993.[33] The puppet state's founding came with the arrest of 25,000 Polish Home Army soldiers,[34] who were deported to Gulags in mainland Russia.[34] As many as 100,000 Polish women were also raped by Soviet soldiers right after the war.[35]

Polish resistance

Some anti-communist Poles took up arms against the Soviets.[36] However, the armed resistance failed due to the lack of foreign support.[36] Tens of thousands of them were deported to mainland Russia,[36] with a few to no confirmed survivors.[36] Among them consisted of 6,000 Poles who had been jailed in Borowicze (now Borovichi, Russia) and 6,300 in Stalinogorsk (now Novomoskovsk, Russia).[36] The exact number is unknown as nobody has access to all of the Soviet documents.[36] Most Polish deportees were jailed in Gulags in Workutstroj,[37] Pieczorłag and Uchtiżemłag, located in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in northwestern Russia.[36]

Throughout the Cold War, the Poles resisted the Soviet puppet regime peacefully. Instances of peaceful Polish resistance included the June 1956 Poznań protests (c. 100 killed and 600 wounded),[38] March 1968 protests,[32] December 1970 protests (44 killed, 1,000+ wounded and 3,000+ arrested),[39] June 1976 protests,[40] 1971 Łódź strikes,[41] 1980 Lublin strikes,[42] 1981 warning strike,[43] 1981 Polish hunger demonstrations,[44] 1982 demonstrations in Poland[45] and 1988 Polish strikes,[46] which contributed to the fall of the puppet regime in 1989.[46]

Soviet persecution of Baltic states' population

It is notable that the Baltic states also suffered under both the Nazis and Soviets.[47] Under Nazi occupation, Estonia lost 25% of her pre-war Jewish population,[48] Latvia lost 75% of her pre-war Jewish population,[49] and Lithuania lost over 95% of her Jewish population.[50][51]

1940–41

The Soviets first occupied the Baltic states between June 1940 and June 1941,[52] during which at least 124,467 were deported to mainland Russia,[52] including modern Latvia's founder Kārlis Ulmanis (1877 – 1942) who died of dysentery in a Gulag in Soviet Turkmenistan.[53] Baltic states' soldiers who refused integration into the Red Army were shot.[54][55] More were arrested and deported by the NKVD.[54][55] The year was seen by Estonians and Latvians as the "year of horror".[54][55]

1941–44

Due to the oppressive Soviet actions, many Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians,[54][55] who were not aware of the Holocaust, accepted the Nazi takeover as the only alternative.[54][55] In Nazi-occupied Latvia, 160,000 were conscripted to fight for Hitler by July 1944.[54][56] In Nazi-occupied Lithuania, at least 20,000 were conscripted.[56][57]

Nazi occupiers who conscripted them dodged the Hague Convention by listing the conscripts as "volunteers" to make them look like Nazi fans in the eyes of foreign observers,[55] including pro-Soviet Western scholars who are influential in academia and history writing.[58][59] Despite general Western academic silence, historian Robert Conquest classified the selective deportations as a policy of "decapitation" by killing off their elites, "as was later evidently to be the motive for the Katyn massacre [in which about 22,000 Poles were killed]".[60]

1944–91

Following Soviet reconquest, resistance happened across the Baltic states from 1944 to 1956 in response to Soviet ethnic cleansing and totalitarianism.[61][62] When the Soviets cracked down on them, at least 505,000 Baltic states' residents (124,000 from Estonia, 136,000 from Latvia and 245,000 from Lithuania) were deported to Gulags in mainland Russia.[47] The Baltic states lost 20% of their total population as a result,[47] including 250,000 who fled to Western countries.[47]

The plan of deportations of the civilian population in Lithuania during the Operation Priboi created by the Soviet MGB.

In addition to mass deportations, the Soviets also scared locals into obeying them by dumping some of the insurgents' bodies at villages.[63] On October 15, 1956, Adolfas Ramanauskas ("Vanagas"), chief commander of the Union of Lithuanian Freedom Fighters,[63] released a report to highlight the tortures some of them had suffered:[63][64]

The right eye is covered with haematoma, on the eyelid there are six stab wounds made, judging by their diameter, by a thin wire or nail going deep into the eyeball. Multiple haematomas in the area of the stomach, a cut wound on a finger of the right hand. The genitalia reveal the following: a large tear wound on the right side of the scrotum and a wound on the left side, both testicles and spermatic ducts are missing.

Colonization during Cold War

The Soviet regime imported millions of colonizers from other parts of the Soviet Union,[65] changing Baltic states' ethnic composition forever.[65]

Ethnic breakdown 1939 1970 1989
Estonians in Estonia 88%[65] 60%[65] 61.5%[66]
Latvians in Latvia 75%[65] 57%[65] 50.7%[65]
Lithuanians in Lithuania 85%[67] 84.6%[67] 80.6%[67]

Contrary to common Russian and Western leftist claims, the occupied Baltic states were exploited subjects rather than beneficiaries from the decades-long Soviet colonization.[68] Declassified archives showed that much more money was taken from the occupied Baltic states than ever invested back,[68] including huge Soviet spending on military infrastructure to oppress the native population.[68] The myth of "generous Soviet aid in developing the Baltics" is false propaganda invented for justifying Soviet colonization under which the Baltic states went through decades of oppressive rule.[68]

Baltic states' residents holding hands during the Baltic Way, a cross-border peaceful demonstration, on August 23, 1989.
A protest sign from the 1980s calling on the United Nations to abolish Soviet colonialism in the Baltic states.
"27 years ago, 2 million people across Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia joined hands forming an unbroken chain between their capitals. They showed the Baltic Way and the eternal, indomitable spirit of their people in the face of Soviet occupation. They inspired the world. They inspired all oppressed people. Vice President Biden joined each of their Presidents to lay a wreath at the Freedom Monument in Latvia to celebrate this remarkable history and look to the future of the Baltic people." Joe Biden (1942 ‒ ), August 24, 2016.

Deportations of Chechens and Ingush

Routes of the deportations of Chechens and Ingush from the Northern Caucasus in February 1944.

After the Soviets reconquered Chechnya, the Chechens and Ingush were mass-deported from the Northern Caucasus as they were falsely accused of collaborating with the Nazis.[69] As many as 400,000 Chechens and 91,250 Ingush were expelled from the area within 8 days.[69]

Due to the area's mountainous terrain that favors guerrilla war, the Soviets entrapped the Chechens and Ingush by inviting them to join the Red Army Day celebrations on February 23, 1944.[69] Once they showed up, they were arrested by soldiers armed with machine guns.[69] The Chechen and Ingush deportees were sent to camps across Central Asia and Siberia.[69] They were not allowed to return to Chechnya until 1957.[69]

The Chechens and Ingush lost as much as 33% of their total pre-war population,[70] the same % loss as that of the Cambodian genocide (1975‒79) under the pro-Soviet Khmer Rouge.[71] Despite general Western academic silence, the deportations were seen by some scholars as a genocide.[69]

Debates

Issue I: double genocide theory

Dovid Katz

American Yiddish scholar Dovid Katz saw the double genocide theory as a form of Holocaust revisionism, allegedly caused by a "recent initiative that seeks to create a moral equivalence between Soviet atrocities committed against the Baltic region and the Holocaust in European history".[72]

Dovilė Budrytė

In a 2016 paper, Lithuanian-American political scientist Dovilė Budrytė said that the reason for the popular use of genocide by Ukrainians and Baltic states' people to classify Soviet crimes is that it serves as a form of "nation-building myths rooted in traumas",[73] citing studies done by other scholars.[74] She saw those views as "postcolonial trauma narratives",[73] warning against any "unquestioning acceptance".[73]

Based on her 2016 paper, Budrytė claimed in a 2023 paper that Baltic states' strong support for Ukraine's fight against the Russian invasion came from "vicarious identification with Ukraine" in relation to their shared history of having suffered "genocides" under Soviet rule.[75]

She also said that it was important to go beyond the "West" and "non-West" dichotomy in terms of lived experiences,[75] while highlighting the need of considering "power structures, broader political contexts and existing local and international norms" in order to know how valid certain claims are.[75]

James Kirchick

In a book review of Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, American reporter James Kirchick said that the Holodomor was not popularly remembered among Western intellectuals due to "the machinations of that [Soviet] regime in crafting the internationally agreed-upon legal definition of the term [genocide]".[76]

In the early drafts of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Soviets reportedly managed to lobby against including "social" and "political" group in the definition to prevent themselves from being held liable for their mass murders.[76] The victims belonged to several ethnic groups randomly labelled as "reactionary" or "counterrevolutionary", who were killed until Stalin chose to stop.[76]

Defending Snyder against allegations of "minimizing the Holocaust", Kirchick said that Snyder documented Nazi and Soviet atrocities equally.[76] He also noted that Stalin enabled Hitler's war in Europe in the following ways:

Michael Shafir

Romanian-Israeli political scientist Michael Shafir also shared the view of Dovid Katz,[77] calling the theory "competitive martyrdom component of Double Genocide".[77]

Kristen Ghodsee

American ethnographer Kristen Ghodsee, who previously claimed that "East German women had better sex under communism",[78] pushed the belief that the double genocide theory was somehow promoted by "economic and political elites" due to "fears of a leftist resurgence in the face of [...] extreme social inequalities [... and] the excesses of neoliberal capitalism".[79] She accused the "elites" of "focusing almost exclusively on Joseph Stalin's crimes" in debates about communism and "linking all leftist ideals to the excesses of Stalinism".[79]

Timothy Snyder

American historian Timothy Snyder published the book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin in 2010, which touches the debate, but has been accused by some left-wing scholars,[80] including Dovid Katz and Efraim Zuroff,[80] of "suggesting a moral equivalence between Soviet mass murders and the Nazi Holocaust". In response, Snyder said,[81]

I coincide with Zuroff and Katz on the centrality of the Holocaust, but we must not overlook how Stalin enabled Hitler's crimes.

While accusing Snyder of trivializing the Holocaust, Zuroff himself denied the Holodomor[82][26] and Bosnian genocide,[83] despite the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) having ruled that the Bosnian genocide was indeed a genocide.[84][85]

In addition, scholars who hold similar views to Zuroff often accuse the NATO of "inventing" the Bosnian genocide to justify the bombing and "destruction" of Yugoslavia,[84][85] or blame the Bosnian genocide victims for their own suffering.[84][85] The leading Bosnian genocide deniers include but not limited to Michael Parenti, Edward S. Herman, David Peterson, Jared Israel, Tariq Ali, Mick Hume and Diana Johnstone,[84][85] most of whom also reject the double genocide theory.[84][85]

Issue II: Katyn massacre

Over the past decades, it has been debated whether the Katyn massacre ‒ a major war crime committed by the Soviets[16] ‒ could be seen as a genocide in relation to the double genocide theory. Many Polish scholars, including historian Adam Basak,[16][86] jurist Cezary Mik,[16][87] Karolina Kosińska,[16][88] and prosecutor Małgorzata Kuźniar-Plota,[16][89] who investigated the massacre,[16][89] believed that the Katyn massacre qualified as a genocide.[16]

Adam Basak

Historian Adam Basak noted:[16][86]

[The Soviet Politburo's] intent was to destroy a part of the Polish national group [...] twenty-six thousand representatives of the intellectual elite, selected because of their social status and social function.

Cezary Mik

Jurist Cezary Mik called the massacre "genocidal murder of the Polish elite in Katyn and other places",[16][87] while Karolina Kosińska said:[16][88]

If we talk about a specific plan to destroy a group, we can undoubtedly point to the USSR's policy [. ...] various genocidal acts against the Polish nation, acts the most spectacular of which was the Katyn Massacre.

Małgorzata Kuźniar-Plota

More importantly, prosecutor Małgorzata Kuźniar-Plota,[16][89] who investigated the massacre,[16][89] ruled that:[16][89]

[The Katyn massacre] had all the characteristics of the crime of genocide specified in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.[90]

Issue III: Holodomor

Passer-bys ignore corpses of starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, Ukraine, 1933.
Poster by Ukrainian-Australian artist Leonid Denysenko to commemorate the Holodomor.
See the main article: Holodomor

Holodomor, a related event that happened in Soviet Ukraine before WWII,[26][27] is sometimes raised in debates about the double genocide theory.[26][27] The Holodomor was a man-made[26][27] famine in which around 7,000,000 people died under Stalin's policies.[26][27] As of 2025, the Holodomor is recognized by over 30 countries as a genocide:[91]

Map Countries which officially recognize the Holodomor as genocide

 Andorra,  Argentina,  Australia,  Belgium,  Brazil,  Bulgaria,  Canada,  Colombia,  Czech Republic,  Ecuador,
 Estonia,  France,  Georgia,  Germany,  Hungary,  Iceland,  Ireland,  Italy,  Latvia,
 Lithuania,  Mexico,  Moldova,  Paraguay,  Peru,  Poland,  Portugal,  Romania,  Slovakia,  Spain,  Ukraine,  United Kingdom,  United States,   Vatican City

Many Western scholars who reject the double genocide theory are also found to have denied the Holodomor,[92][93] mainly out of communist sympathy, which prevents them from recognizing the worth of Ukrainians as equal humans. Such denial is considered essentially racist and dehumanizing.[92][93] Jurij Dobczansky, a senior Library of Congress cataloging specialist,[94] commented on such denial:[95]

Holodomor denial [...] consists of especially vitriolic anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian tirades [...] accusations of foreign influence and Nazi sympathies, or ulterior motives.

References

  1. ↑ Vidar (10 March 2022). "No more time (by TUSE in Gdansk, Poland)". Street Art Utopia.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4
    • Moses, Anthony Dirk (May 2012). "The Canadian Museum for Human Rights: The 'Uniqueness of the Holocaust' and the Question of Genocide". Journal of Genocide Research. 14 (2): 215–238. doi:10.1080/14623528.2012.677762. S2CID 216139226.
    • Brook, Daniel (2015-07-26). "Double Genocide". Slate. ISSN 1091-2339. Retrieved 2023-06-15.
    • Budrytė, Dovilė (2018). "Memory, War, and Mnemonical In/Security: A Comparison of Lithuania and Ukraine". In Budrytė, Dovilė; Buhari-Gulmez, Didem; Resende, Erica (eds.). Crisis and Change in Post-Cold War Global Politics: Ukraine in a Comparative Perspective. Springer International Publishing. pp. 155–177. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-78589-9_7. ISBN 978-3-319-78589-9.
  3. ↑
  4. ↑
  5. ↑ "Museum of the Occupation of Latvia". Latvijas Okupācijas muzejs. Retrieved March 18, 2025.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Telegrams sent by Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, German ambassador to the Soviet Union, from Moscow to the German Foreign Office: No. 317 Archived 2009-11-07 at the Wayback Machine of 10 September 1939, No. 371 Archived 2007-04-30 at the Wayback Machine of 16 September 1939, No. 372 Archived 2007-04-30 at the Wayback Machine of 17 September 1939. The Avalon Project, Yale Law School. Retrieved 14 November 2006.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 1939 wrzesień 17, Moskwa Nota rządu sowieckiego nie przyjęta przez ambasadora Wacława Grzybowskiego (Note of the Soviet government to the Polish government on 17 September 1939, refused by Polish ambassador Wacław Grzybowski). Retrieved 15 November 2006.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1
    • DAVID ENGEL, FACING A HOLOCAUST: THE POLISH GOVERNMENT-IN-EXILE AND THE JEWS, 1943–1945, at 71 (1993) (“The German broadcast [announcing the discovery of the Katyn graves] charged that these officers had been shot by the Soviets in March 1940 . . . .”).
    • "In the 1939-1941 period alone, Soviet-inflicted suffering on all citizens in Poland exceeded that of Nazi-inflicted suffering on all citizens. (...) 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." Johanna Granville, H-Net Review of Jan T. Gross. Revolution from Abroad.
    • Tomasz Szarota & Wojciech Materski (2009), Polska 1939–1945. Straty osobowe i ofiary represji pod dwiema okupacjami, Warsaw: Institute of National Remembrance, ISBN 978-83-7629-067-6 (Excerpt reproduced in digital form).
    • Sterio, Milena (2012). "Katyn Forest Massacre: Of Genocide, State Lies, and Secrecy". Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law. 44 (3). Retrieved March 11, 2025.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 Trela-Mazur, Elżbieta (1998) [1997]. Włodzimierz Bonusiak; Stanisław Jan Ciesielski; Zygmunt Mańkowski; Mikołaj Iwanow (eds.). Sovietization of educational system in the eastern part of Lesser Poland under the Soviet occupation, 1939-1941 [Sowietyzacja oświaty w Małopolsce Wschodniej pod radziecką okupacją 1939-1941]. Kielce: Wyższa Szkoła Pedagogiczna im. Jana Kochanowskiego. pp. 43, 294. ISBN 83-7133-100-2.. Also in: Trela-Mazur 1997, Wrocławskie Studia Wschodnie, Wrocław.
  10. ↑ Władysław Anders (1995). Bez ostatniego rozdziału (in Polish). Lublin: Test. p. 540. ISBN 83-7038-168-5.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Brown, Archie (2009). The Rise and Fall of Communism. HarperCollins. p. 140. ISBN 978-0061138799. Archived from the original on 18 June 2013. Retrieved 7 May 2011.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Weinberg, Gerhard (2005). A World at Arms. Cambridge University Press. p. 107. ISBN 978-0521618267.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 Sanford, George (2005). Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940. Routledge. pp. 20–24. ISBN 0415338735.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2
  15. ↑ McLoughlin, Barry, and McDermott, Kevin (eds). Stalin's Terror: High Politics and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union. Palgrave Macmillan, December 2002. ISBN 1-4039-0119-8, p. 164
  16. ↑ 16.00 16.01 16.02 16.03 16.04 16.05 16.06 16.07 16.08 16.09 16.10 16.11 16.12 16.13
  17. ↑ (in Polish) Represje 1939-41 Aresztowani na Kresach Wschodnich Archived 2006-10-21 at the Wayback Machine (Repressions 1939–41. Arrested on the Eastern Borderlands.) Ośrodek Karta. Retrieved 15 November 2006.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Grabowski, Jan; Klein, Shira (February 9, 2023). "Wikipedia's Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust". The Journal of Holocaust Research. 37 (2): 133–190. doi:10.1080/25785648.2023.2168939. Retrieved January 20, 2025.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Jan Tomasz Gross, Revolution from Abroad (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 196–98.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Myron Weiner, Sharon Stanton Russell, ed. (2001). "Stalinist Forced Relocation Policies". Demography and National Security. Berghahn Books. pp. 308–315. ISBN 1-57181-339-X.
  21. ↑ Thaddeus C. Radzilowski, Anti-Polonism Archived 15 June 2016 at the Wayback Machine
  22. ↑ Ilya Prizel (13 August 1998). National Identity and Foreign Policy: Nationalism and Leadership in Poland, Russia and Ukraine. Cambridge University Press. p. 171. ISBN 978-0-521-57697-0.
  23. ↑ Myroslav Shkandrij, Russia and Ukraine: literature and the discourse of empire from Napoleonic to postcolonial times, McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 2001, 354 pages. ISBN 0-7735-2234-4 Page 69.
  24. ↑ Karolina Lanckorońska (2001). "I - Lwów". Wspomnienia wojenne; 22 IX 1939 - 5 IV 1945 (in Polish). Kraków: ZNAK. p. 364. ISBN 83-240-0077-1.
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 25.2 25.3 25.4 25.5 25.6
    • Popiński, Krzysztof; Kokurin, Aleksandr; Gurjanow, Aleksandr (1995). Drogi śmierci. Ewakuacja więzień sowieckich z Kresów Wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej w czerwcu i lipcu 1941 [Roads of death. Evacuation of Soviet prisons from the Eastern Borderlands of the Second Polish Republic in June and July 1941] (in Polish). Warszawa: Wydawnictwo "Karta". ISBN 83-900676-9-2.
    • Mikoda, Janina, ed. (1997). Zbrodnicza ewakuacja więzień i aresztów NKWD na Kresach Wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej w czerwcu – lipcu 1941 roku. Materiały z sesji naukowej w 55. rocznicę ewakuacji więźniów NKWD w głąb ZSRR, Łódź 10 czerwca 1996 r. [Criminal evacuation of NKVD prisons and detention centers in the Eastern Borderlands of the Second Polish Republic in June–July 1941. Materials from the scientific session on the 55th anniversary of the evacuation of NKVD prisoners deep into the USSR, Łódź, June 10, 1996] (in Polish). Warszawa: Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu – Instytut Pamięci Narodowej. ISBN 83-903356-6-2.
    • Musiał, Bogdan (2001). Rozstrzelać elementy kontrrewolucyjne. Brutalizacja wojny niemiecko-sowieckiej latem 1941 roku [Shoot the counter-revolutionary elements. The brutalization of the German-Soviet war in the summer of 1941] (in Polish). Warszawa: Stowarzyszenie Kulturalne Fronda. ISBN 83-88747-40-1.
    • Berkhoff, Karel Cornelis (2004). Harvest of Despair. p. 14. ISBN 0674020782. Retrieved 2013-12-30.
    • Robert Gellately. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. Knopf, 2007 ISBN 1-4000-4005-1
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 26.2 26.3 26.4 26.5
  27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 27.2 27.3 27.4
  28. ↑ 28.0 28.1 Richard Rhodes (2002). Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-375-40900-9. Rather than releasing their prisoners as they hurriedly retreated during the first week of the war, the Soviet secret police killed most of them. In the first week of the invasion, the NKVD prisoner executions totaled some 10,000 in western Ukraine and more than 9,000 in Vinnytsia, eastward toward Kyiv. Comparable numbers of prisoners were executed in eastern Poland, Byelorussia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The Soviet areas had already sustained hundreds of thousands of executions during the 1937–1938 Great Purge.
  29. ↑ 29.0 29.1 Valery Vasiliev, Yuriy Shapoval, "Stages of «Great Terror»: The Vinnytsia Tragedy", Zerkalo Nedeli, No. 31 (406), August 17–23, 2002, (in Russian Archived 2007-11-28 at the Wayback Machine, in Ukrainian Archived 2009-05-18 at the Wayback Machine)
  30. ↑ The Great Globe Itself: A Preface to World Affairs By William Bullitt, Francis P. Sempa  
  31. ↑ "Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, 1989". Office of the Historian (US Government). Retrieved March 11, 2025.
  32. ↑ 32.0 32.1
  33. ↑
  34. ↑ 34.0 34.1 Paczkowski, Andrzej (1999). "Enemy Nation". Black Book of Communism. Crimes, Terror, Repression. London: Harvard University Press. pp. 372‒375. Archived from the original on January 31, 2023. Retrieved March 11, 2025.
  35. ↑ Joanna Ostrowska, Marcin Zaremba, "Kobieca gehenna" (The women's ordeal) Archived 2019-03-23 at the Wayback Machine, Polityka - No 10 (2695), 2009-03-07; pp. 64-66. (in Polish) 
    Dr. Marcin Zaremba Archived 2011-10-07 at the Wayback Machine of Polish Academy of Sciences, the co-author of the article cited above – is a historian from Warsaw University Department of History Institute of 20th Century History (cited 196 times in Google scholar). Zaremba published a number of scholarly monographs, among them: Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm (426 pages),[1] Marzec 1968 (274 pages), Dzień po dniu w raportach SB (274 pages), Immobilienwirtschaft (German, 359 pages), see inauthor:"Marcin Zaremba" in Google Books.
    Joanna Ostrowska Archived 2016-03-14 at the Wayback Machine of Warsaw, Poland, is a lecturer at Departments of Gender Studies at two universities: the Jagiellonian University of Kraków, the University of Warsaw as well as, at the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is the author of scholarly works on the subject of mass rape and forced prostitution in Poland in the Second World War (i.e. "Prostytucja jako praca przymusowa w czasie II Wojny Światowej. Próba odtabuizowania zjawiska," "Wielkie przemilczanie. Prostytucja w obozach koncentracyjnych," etc.), a recipient of Socrates-Erasmus research grant from Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin, and a historian associated with Krytyka Polityczna.
  36. ↑ 36.0 36.1 36.2 36.3 36.4 36.5 36.6 The establishment of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944-1949 By Norman Naimark  
  37. ↑ "Poles and Polish citizens in the Gulag". Gulag Online. Retrieved March 11, 2025.
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  39. ↑ "Piotr Brzeziński z IPN: "Czarny czwartek" mógł być prowokacją wymierzoną w Gomułkę". dzieje.pl (in Polish). Archived from the original on 2 August 2021. Retrieved 2 January 2021.
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  42. ↑ Warsaw Voice, Solidarity 1980-81
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  49. ↑ "The Names of Shoah Victims from Latvia". Yad Vashem.
  50. ↑ Porat, Dina (2002). "The Holocaust in Lithuania: Some Unique Aspects". In David Cesarani (ed.). The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation. Routledge. pp. 161–162. ISBN 978-0-415-15232-7.
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    • The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1986)
    • Stephane Courtois; Werth, Nicolas; Panne, Jean-Louis; Paczkowski, Andrzej; Bartosek, Karel; Margolin, Jean-Louis & Kramer, Mark (1999). The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-07608-7.
    • Küng, Andres. Communism and Crimes against Humanity in the Baltic States. 1999 "Communism and Crimes against Humanity in the Baltic states". Archived from the original on 2001-03-01. Retrieved 2018-05-07.
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    • Georgii Kas’ianov. “The Holodomor and the Building of a Nation.” Russian Social Science Review 52 (2011): 71–93.
    • Rebekah Moore. “‘A Crime against Humanity Arguably Without Parallel in European History’: Genocide and the ‘Politics’ of Victimhood in Western Narratives of the Ukrainian Holodomor.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 58 (2012): 367–79.
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  78. ↑ Kristen R. Ghodsee, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, Nation Books, 2018. ISBN 9781568588902.
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  82. ↑ "Zuroff: Israel should not recognize Holodomor as genocide". The Jerusalem Post | JPost.com. 2019-01-22. Retrieved 2024-05-11.
  83. ↑ Solomon, Esther. "Jews Can't Let the Genocide Deniers Win". Haaretz.
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  86. ↑ 86.0 86.1 See Adam Basak, Katyń: Problem odpowiedziałności karnej sprawców w świetle Norymbergi, in 21 Studia na Faszyzmem i Zbrodniami Hitlerowskimi 325, 325–60 (Karol Jonca ed., 1998).
  87. ↑ 87.0 87.1 See Cezary Mik, Lech Aleksander Kaczyński (18.6.1949-10.4.2010), 1/2 Kwartalnik Prawa Publicznego 5, 10 (2010) (describing the life as well as public and academic work of the late Lech Kaczyński, President of Poland, who, while heading a Polish delegation for the celebrations of the seventieth anniversary of the Katyn Massacre, died along with the ninety-five people accompanying him on April 10, 2010 in a plane crash in Smolensk).
  88. ↑ 88.0 88.1 Karolina Kosińska, Zbrodnia ludobójstwa w prawie międzynarodowym 34 (2009).
  89. ↑ 89.0 89.1 89.2 89.3 89.4 See Małgorzata Kuźniar-Plota, Kwalifikacja prawna Zbrodni Katyńskiej—Wybrane zagadnienia, in Zbrodnia Katyńska: W kRęgu Prawdy i Kłamstwa 46 (Sławomir Kalbarczyk ed., 2010).
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  91. ↑ "Global Holodomor Recognition - HREC". Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (HREC). Retrieved March 18, 2025.
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  93. ↑ 93.0 93.1
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  95. ↑ Dobczansky, Jurij (2009). "Affirmation and Denial: Holodomor-related Resources Recently Acquired by the Library of Congress". Holodomor Studies. 1 (2 [Summer-Autumn 2009]): 155–164.