Books: Soviet Polonaise

THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON (299 pp.)—Anonymous—Preface by T. S. Eliotf—Scribner ($2.75).

Despite its lyric title and a preface by T. S. Eliot, there is nothing poetic about this book. It is the harrowing story of Polish citizens nabbed by Soviet secret police in 1939-41 and packed off as prisoners to the dark side of the moon—i.e., forced labor in Soviet Asia.

The author is a Polish woman who, say the publishers, “for obvious reasons prefers to remain anonymous.” Just as obviously, as Eliot concedes in the preface, the book’s credibility suffers by its anonymity. But the basic facts are beyond dispute. When the Red Army made its deal with the Nazis and marched into eastern Poland in September 1939, NKVD operatives came tumbling after the army. They arrested tens of thousands of Poles; the author says “more than a million.”

The Soviet Government itself admitted the arrests, if not the number of them, in a pact signed with the Polish Government in Exile in London in June 1941. The Soviets promised amnesty to “all Polish citizens at present deprived of their liberty” in the U.S.S.R. so that a Polish army could be raised and trained on Soviet soil. There were thousands so freed, and thousands who were not.

The Stragglers. Most of the men who enlisted, says the author, came straggling in from lagiers (penal work camps) and prisons all over the U.S.S.R.—lousy, hungry, destitute. They were incredulous: “Who ever heard, in the Soviet Union, of amnesties which really resulted in anybody being let off?”

They had been arrested and deported as “anti-Soviet elements” on any of a hundred charges—as troublemakers, trade unionists, aristocrats, speculators, intellectuals. Doubtless for some of them it was a form of justice: the Polish Republic of the 1930s had had its share of dictators, spies and stooges. But Soviet arrests were Byzantine in size.

A young woman who had been a mathematics lecturer at the University of Lwow was jailed because her father was in trouble with the NKVD. She never saw him again. Some months later she herself was ,in Kazakstan, living mostly on whey, wild roots and tea. Her job on a Soviet dairy farm was explained “in quite a friendly way” by the ouprav (overseer). She was to follow the cows around, gather their dung, smear it over the wickerwork of nearby sheds. In time the dung would dry and then presto, said the overseer, the sheds would be habitable. For this she was paid a few kopecks a week, allowed to receive an occasional parcel from home.

This was “free exile.” Conditions in the lagiers were much worse, and often fatal. A member of the executive council of the Polish Socialist Party was sent to a gold-mining camp in eastern Siberia. The work day was 12 to 15 hours long. Since the ground was frozen most of the time, the mining was done largely with crowbars and chisels. The size of the bread ration depended on the amount of work performed. Feeble, inefficient or unwilling workers were taken aside and shot.

Page after page of The Dark Side of the Moon is filled with such stories. The author declares that they have all been carefully checked. Now & then she makes an obviously earnest attempt to analyze the Soviet point of view—to understand why a revolutionary government which inherited a “top-heavy, illiterate and decomposing” empire should think that any means of maintaining itself, however brutal, are justified. What happened in Poland, the author concludes, can never be understood in European terms: it was the application of old, half-Asiatic techniques, modified—or intensified—by 20-odd years of Marxist expediency and justice.