This chapter explores further changes within the Polish community in post-Stalin years. The worldview of the descendants of the deported is
drastically different from the parental one. Poles who do not know Stalinism and the war years became part of Soviet society, e.g. reduced the importance of ethnicity to a minimum by urbanization and interethnic marriages. Although the cultural feature which the old generation continued to keep and the ethnic label in everyone’s passports saved the base for following ethnic revival in the
post-Soviet period. The great role for maintaining the identity line was religion.
The Khrushchev Thaw released Catholic priests and preachers from the camps and allowed them to settle into the areas of special settlements (e.g. freed villages from this status). Authorities did now expect them to renew the religious activity, but from the second half of the 1950s Catholic clergy had preached all over North Kazakhstan. This was the reason for maintaining and developing the distinctive features of the Polish population, which served for ethnic identification in previous historical periods. As Khrushchev could not use Stalin’s terror methods to reduce the impact of Catholics, although he supported anti-religious communism, he promoted “scientific atheism” which influenced on the second generation by the same way as for the liminal – education.
Nevertheless, oppressive methods were not excluded: the 1950–1970s were characterized by harassment, surveillance and contract killings.
Special attention in the chapter is paid to the war period, which made a significant contribution to the process of erasing the topic of mass deportations through the switching attention to the war meaning and a general decline in the quality of life in the USSR in the 1940s. Later, in the 1950s and 1970s, the ideas of "development of virgin lands" and the culture of veterans appeared, where Poles also took part along with other Soviet citizens.
Social, economic and cultural causes of this growing integration
During World War II mass deportations to Kazakhstan continued. In the 1940s groups of Chechens-Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Greeks, Moldovans, Bulgarians arrived in Kazakhstan. Also, the second wave of Polish deportees settled Aktobe, Akmola, Kostanay, Pavlodar, North Kazakhstan and
Semipalatinsk regions. Kamenka and nearby villages received Chechens, Ingushes and the German deportees from the Saratov region. Interviewees do not remember the conflict situation between ethnic groups, and there are no official documents about massive ethnic conflicts. Polish villagers helped
Chechen families with food and work, but experienced difficulties with communication because of the language barrier. There is also a lack of
information about interactions between Polish groups of different waves. The representative of the second generation of Kamenka villagers remember that locals (including Poles) used the wordpshekiapplicable to Polish-speaking deportees. However, the context and further details are unknown. Therefore, we cannot make any assumption.
There are a lot of recollections about war years. For deportees these were the years of adaptation in a new climate and recreating of own farms
(khozyajstvo): garden and livestock. The latter was in the interest of authorities because the cities and army needed the provisions. Therefore, during the war period, deportees were deeply involved in home front activities. According to recollection, the food tax in Kamenka was more than half of all natural
products. To avoid class division the authorities had a strict restriction on the scale of each garden and numbers of animals. For every “redundancy” there was an additional tax.88The war period for Kamenka villagers was a years of
growing liminal generation, they did not see the battles but saw the hunger and a
88Author interview. 30/I/22. Kamenka, Kazakhstan, audio tape.
lot of death of family members because of unsanitary-caused diseases.
Some Polish deportees of the first wave (1936–1937) even had been drafted to the army. First German deportees of the same period were mostly refused to be drafted. However, all deported groups in Kazakhstan were under the same restrictions and were not rehabilitated until 1956. Also, among the residents of Kamenka, the memories of those whose relatives went to the army have been preserved. Open sources inform about two Polish military divisions in the USSR: Anders Army (1941–1942) and Berling Army (1943–1945).
However, the majority of Polish special settlers were sent to the labour army in Ural, including women. At the end of the war they were demobilized back to Kamenka or sent to Karaganda for further work. They worked with criminals and political prisoners without being accused.
Later, in the Soviet period those of them who were at the front line had a special status –frontovik which allowed Polish veterans and their family members priority to administrative workplaces. Although until the Brezhnev’s period the Victory Day was not celebrated widely, military experience became a significant factor which indoctrinated deportees into another social group. In Kamenka one of the Polish frontoviksbecame the chairman of the collective
farm in the 1960s.
This occasion became a part of the Sovietization process that will be described later. In fact, the Victory did not bring Kazakhstani deportees any benefits.
Special settlers continued to register in the commandant's office, were not allowed to leave the living place and paid high taxes. Brown claims that until the 1950s deportees stayed isolated from Soviet society.89
I had no opportunity to find out what divisions Poles were in. The only
89 Brown, Kate. 2009.Biography of No Place. From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland.Harvard University Press, 190.
interviewer – the son of frontoviks of Kamenka – did not know what army his father joined, but remembered that it was a Polish division. However, there is a monument of WWII soldiers in the square of the village which includes the father of the interviewer as well as other 50 people (see Image 3). According to the official information that I took from the local librarian, other frontoviks were the Soviet soldiers because they had Soviet military awards such as Badge of Honor or Order for Bravery in Battle.90
In general the war and postwar period were the years of developing the kolkhoz. Villagers had serious difficulties with climate adaptation and food provision. The children of the 1940s remember those years as marked by
“constant feeling of hunger” as well as floods (the largest one occurred in 1949, and Kamenka villagers had to move the village and rebuild the houses, school and administrative center).
In the 1940s arrests on thefts and escapes decreased but continued.91 Hunger and need pushed villagers to violate Soviet rules. Besides that a lot of deportees convicted under Article 58: counter-revolutionary activities (which
91Barnes, Steven. 2011.Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 155.
90This information was presented through the video dedicated to Victory Day, which contained names, short biographies and military awards. Unfortunately, this video was not published in the open source.
included anti-Soviet and anti-Stalin comments). According to recollections, most of them were made because ofdonos (denunciation) which were rewarded by the local commandant. Kamenka villagers still remember the surnames of those who “turned” people over to the authorities. Curiously enough, their ethnicity was not meaningful because they were motivated by material needs.
One person cost 28 kopeek.92
The efficiency of special settlements is arguable. The elderly foremen and other workers of Kamenka remember only high state taxes and frequent cases of the neglect of collective and individual work plans (trudodni – labour days), although most of the special settlers worked for 10–12 hours without days off.
All ruling positions in Kamenka and nearby villages were placed under the most educated members of the local community. Soviet authorities did not provide staff for special settlements until the Brezhnev period. Teachers were also Polish or German who agreed to support Soviet ideology (at least at work time). Only the commandants sent to the settlements were, according to
recollections, Russians and Kazakhs. Until the cancellation of komendaturain 1956 commandants had unlimited power: extortion was the most widespread
92Author interview. 30/I/22. Kamenka, Kazakhstan, audio tape.
method. Many women suffered from violent actions to avoid arrests or to take some provision for children.93
All of this constructed the culture of fear which affected the next
generations and prepared them to fit in the ‘safe’ Soviet pathway: kindergarten, school, college, work and family.
One of the deportees writes about these confusing feelings on the most important news of 1953: “Stalin died. The family did not know how to react, we wanted to celebrate, but there was a great fear, we had to cry, but we did not want to.”94This phrase describes mixed feelings of deportees about the
reorganization of Soviet authorities: they were happy that Stalin was gone, but they did not know what or who would be after him.
The first act of liberalizing the regime – the “Beriev amnesty” (Decree of the USSR PSS of March 27, 1953) – practically did not affect the regime of special settlement. In 1956 first rehabilitation came to Kamenka’s
administration. Although it was not dedicated to deportation processes
(documents were mostly on the arrested under Article 58 or for escapes), special settlers of Kamenka and all Kazakhstan felt the Thaw. At this stage
94Poplawski, Waclaw. 2015. Zemnye desyatiletiya[In Russian]. Astana.
93Jolluck, Katherine R. 2002.Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II. University of Pittsburgh Pre, 242.
(1954–1963), we can talk about amnesty, but not rehabilitation of Poles in Kazakhstan.
Then followed the exposure of the cult of Stalin, the official transformation of special settlements into state farms and permission to leave them. However all ethnic deportees could move anywhere besides their previous place of living.
Anyway, the Poles did not rush back to Ukraine. Some of the deportees with their children visited Ukraine where they saw “poverty.” Agriculture of
Kazakhstan became better than Ukrainian which suffered from WWII battles.
The first generation who experienced 20 years of hunger chose to stay in established places of special settlements. Deportees did not have the opportunity to become part of the Polish People’s Republics, because this part of the Soviet Union did not propose any repatriation programmes.95
Besides economic reasons, the first generation of Kazakhstani Poles were led by the desire of social comfort for themselves and their children. Their attachment to local identity with state agitation maintained deportees as
explorers of the steppe made the first generation affiliated with their villages in Kazakhstan. The second generation had a thin connection with parents’
memories, language and even culture, including religion. They shared a local
95Those Poles and Polish groups who were deported from Polish territories or who had relatives in those territories could not move there, because of state’s restriction (deportees and repressed people could move anywhere beside their indigious lands) and lack of adaptational programmes for Ukrainized/Russificated Poles in Poland.
identity, but in another – ‘Soviet’ – way. They were affected by the state
ideology in a much stronger way than the first generation. Moreover, they had limited opportunities to grasp ethnic identity, due to lack of family education (practicing traditions and focusing on family history). Work and physical labor they took up most of the adult population's time. And the children were left to themselves and the school. The differences between two generations and the features of the second generation are described in the next subchapter.
Manifestations of the integration
In the 1950–1960s Sovietization became different. If in childhood the transitional generation more often adhered to "family" views that prescribed keeping to religion and speakingsurzhyk surrounded by representatives of their ethnic group, in adolescence even this connection with the older generation weakened. The status of the Russian language at that time was already unconditional. The second generation heard Ukrainian (or more rare Polish) from their grandparents. In the interview one representative of the second generation (born in 1979) shared the desire to know Polish, but as his
surroundings spoke Russian it was “almost impossible.”96The main reason to know the language was to teach children and consider himself ‘true’ Polish.
96Author interview. 14/VI/22. Kamenka, Kazakhstan, audio tape.
Despite the fact that after Stalin's death, the topic of resettlement is
discussed more often, the older generation began to pass on history to children and grandchildren, but this does not become an impetus for the revival of ethnic identity among the younger generation. The young people used the opportunity to leave the village to get higher education in the nearest cities. The choice was caused by the wide promotion of education. Furthermore, it was free, but only in Russian which stimulated the assimilation processes with Soviet-Russians.
The second generation shows controversial attitudes to the fact of
deportation. Most interviewees clearly differentiate the Soviet position to their parents and grandparents and to them personally. They evaluate the Soviet attitudes to them as positive, but negative to their ancestors. The main justification is the difference between periods. For the second generation
Stalin’s period was associated with wars, repressions and fear that they had not hit. But Khrushchev and Brezhnev brought the feeling of future communism and free education, medicine and other social benefits.
From the perspective of modern time, it was difficult to differentiate nostalgia from historically meaningful features during the interviews with the second generation. Most of them are struggling with perceiving changes that have come after the Soviet period, especially in the ethnic/national question. It seems that the Soviet idea of ethnic invisibility was better accepted than the
multiethnicity of independent Kazakhstan. One of the reasons that most of the interviewers faced the conflicts or neglects that were based on language and ethnic reasons, between Russian- and Kazakh-speaking mostly (this includes only micro-level of the social life, for example, disputes in the bus or market);
which were unusual and even condemned in the Soviet period. Nevertheless, the wider historical context allows to divide and differentiate nostalgia from facts.
Some researchers also call interethnic marriages a tool of Sovietization.97 The number of mixed marriages increased even in the 1940s. Usually then a Polish married German, Russian or Kazakh in Kamenka it was a tough occasion for their parents. Olesya Statsenko, sharing the recollections of her grandmother – a deportee from Barnevka (North Kazakhstan), says: “He met my
grandmother Miretskaya Yanina Ivanovna in Kokchetav region in the village Krasnaya Polyana at the dances. Surprisingly, she had already had a beau, handsome German, they had dated for a long time. However, when her parents found out that they dated, they forbade them to see each other. She ought to marry a Polish guy, such were the principles [ustoi] then. And my grandmother could not disobey them and married my grandfather Maryan…”98In the next decades this was normalized. In Kamenka all types of Russian, Polish, German,
98Kazinform. 2016.80 let deportacii poljakov v Kazahstan: perepletenie istorii i sudeb.
URL:https://www.inform.kz/ru/80-let-deportacii-polyakov-v-kazahstan-perepletenie-istorii-i-sudeb_a2918271
97Edgar, Adrienne Lynn. 2007. “Marriage, Modernity, and the ‘Friendship of Nations’: Interethnic Intimacy in Post-War Central Asia in Comparative Perspective.”Central Asian Survey 26 (4),580.
Ingush, Kazakh marriages existed. Soviet authorities elaborated the policy and ideology to interethnic marriages only in the post-war and post-Stalin period.99 Dedicated to post-war period Edgar states: “The Soviet state celebrated mixed marriages as proof of the unbreakable ‘friendship of nations’ anda sign of the imminent appearance of a ‘Soviet people’”. And in the Khrushchev and
Brezhnev years interethnic marriages were considered “evidence of progress in the consolidation of a unified ‘Soviet people’” which means that the
assimilation was a twin goal of interethnic marriages in Soviet policy.100 Moreover, mixed marriages contained the component of ‘modernity’ that the second generation followed unconsciously. Descendants of deportees had not a lot of differences (they were not as religious as their parents and spoke mostly Russian) besides household and food habits. That is why “mixed
families tended to adopt the features of standardized ‘all-Soviet’ culture which the local population, tellingly, called ‘Russian’. Weddings were celebrated
‘po-russki’ – at the Soviet registry office (ZAGS), followed by dinner with family and friends.”101 Edgar claims that this component of ‘modernity’
encouraged “more equitable gender relations,” although in rural areas it
101Ibid, 589.
100Ibid.
99Edgar, Adrienne Lynn. 2007. “Marriage, Modernity, and the ‘Friendship of Nations’: Interethnic Intimacy in Post-War Central Asia in Comparative Perspective.”Central Asian Survey 26 (4),582.
changed. Men and women had strict areas of responsibility with a patriarchal accent.
However, the Soviets could not make all ceremonies culturally neutral or transformate to the Soviet way. The cultural (religious) features were stable for funeral ceremonies. The interviewee shares the memories of a special person for prayer, black banners (styagi) and funeral crosses. There were several traditions at the memorial service: diggers should sit separately, everyone should eat with spoons and everyone should eat the main meal –kutya (rice with raisin).Yet Victoria Smolkin pointed out the mixed reaction of the Soviets to the funeral, which was associated with anti-religious campaigns. And if the wedding managed to be translated into a civil channel, then the person's send-off
concerned spirituality, which Soviet atheism could not cover. The main attempts to transform social rituals belong to the Khrushchev period, when the militant anti-religious movement turns to “scientific atheism".
Persisting "deviations"
The first generation did not cease to be religious in the post-Stalin period.
Catholic religion is tightly connected with the ethnic identity of Kazakhstani
Poles.102Secret masses were held in private homes, the liminal generation was secretly baptized by grandmothers (church servants have not been in special settlements for a long time), and the tradition of celebrating religious dates is preserved. Subsequent generations perceive the latter as an intra-family
tradition. Almost all respondents share memories of celebrating Christmas and Easter. And almost everyone continues to implement it in their families. Some of them even admit that “they cannot believe in the Christian God” at the same time, none of the respondents consider themselves atheists.
Nevertheless, the Catholic movement in Kazakhstan is reviving,
Karaganda becomes the religious center, where Catholic priests were exiled in the 1930s and 1940s. Among the liminal and the second generation of deported Poles of Kamenka, there are also representatives who are committed to the Catholic movement not only as a tribute to their ancestors (including Waclaw Poplawski or others who helped to build kostelin Zeleniy Gay). In the 1950s and 1970s, Catholics were still in a defensive position towards the authorities, under Khrushchev, priests supported and tried to unite those believers who had not departed from their beliefs.
102We distinguish here two notions: religion and church – because the role of Catholic church in preserving ethnic identity is arguable. Catholic church has never shown preference to any ethnic group nor in the Soviet period, nor in post-Soviet time.