Early in the war, prior to mid-1941, the USSR had made at least a few attempts to hide its savagery. When a million Poles were taken to work camps inside the Soviet Union, where they were enslaved, and when an estimated 15,000 to 22,000 Polish officers were murdered in a mass execution in Katyn Forest, Soviet authorities made an effort to prevent the news media from reporting about these events.
Also in 1941, the USSR rounded up and executed Polish labor leaders: an ironic crime, because the Soviet Union presented itself as a worker’s paradise.
By August 1944, the Soviets took little effort to hide their actions. The advancing Soviet Army paused its attack on Warsaw in order to give the Nazis time to finish butchering thousands of Jews in the Warsaw uprising. The Soviet Socialists were entirely complicit in the murdering of these Holocaust victims.
The USSR continued this pattern up to the very end of the war, as historians Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein write:
A fourth atrocity occurred in the spring of 1945. With the war winding down and the defeat of Hitler certain, sixteen Polish leaders were summoned to Moscow to negotiate postwar arrangements for their country. A promise of safe passage was given, but in the familiar Soviet manner broken, as all sixteen were arrested and imprisoned. Again, the common feature, beyond the usual treachery and deception, was the meaning of such episodes for postwar Poland. By these actions, the Soviets were systematically liquidating Polish leaders who could have resisted the Red takeover of their country.
Joseph Stalin seemed more intent on killing people than on winning the war. Soviet troops spent time and energy murdering and raping civilian populations - efforts which could have been used to defeat the enemy on the battlefield.
By war’s end, millions of Poles were dead at the hands of the USSR. Weakened, Poland was in no position to resist the postwar occupational dictatorship.
