Soviet Deportations to Siberia 1940-1941: Family Records

Between February 1940 and June 1941 the Soviet authorities deported several hundred thousand Polish citizens from the occupied eastern half of Poland to Siberia, Kazakhstan and the Russian north. Many of the Polish families who later settled in Britain began their wartime road in those transports: deportation, release after the amnesty of August 1941, the march south to Anders’ Army, then Persia, Africa, India or Palestine, and finally a Polish Resettlement Corps camp in England or Scotland.

The deportation itself left records. NKVD transport and settlement files, the questionnaires collected by Anders’ Army in 1943, Polish Red Cross tracing cards and later survivor registers can name the family, the home village, the date of arrest and the place of exile. This guide explains where those records are today and how a document kept in a British home, such as a Soviet release certificate or a camp photograph from Tehran, points to them.

The four deportations of 1940 and 1941

Soviet forces occupied eastern Poland from 17 September 1939. Four mass deportations followed, each aimed at a different group of people. The dates below are those used by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) and the Sybir Memorial Museum in Bialystok.

10 February 1940: families of military settlers (osadnicy), foresters, railway workers and civil servants, taken at night in severe frost to special settlements in the Russian north, the Urals and Siberia.
13 April 1940: mainly women and children, the families of men already held as prisoners of war or arrested, including the families of the Katyn victims; most went to collective farms in Kazakhstan.
June 1940: refugees who had fled from the German zone in 1939 and had refused Soviet passports, together with professionals and traders.
May and June 1941: people suspected of hostility to Soviet rule, interrupted by the German attack on 22 June 1941. This wave also covered the Baltic states.

How many people were taken is still disputed. Soviet NKVD figures count roughly 320,000 to 340,000 deportees in the four waves; Polish wartime estimates and later Polish historians have put the total far higher. For family research the exact total matters less than the pattern: the group your family belonged to usually tells you which wave took them, and the wave narrows the likely destination.

What happened after the amnesty of 1941

The Sikorski-Mayski agreement, signed in London on 30 July 1941, restored relations between the Polish government and the Soviet Union. A decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of 12 August 1941 granted an “amnesty” to Polish citizens held in camps, prisons and places of exile. Released people received a certificate, usually called by its Russian name udostoverenie, which allowed them to travel. Many families still keep one of these slips of paper, often folded small and worn soft.

Released men, and many women, made their way to the recruitment centres of the Polish army forming under General Anders at Buzuluk, Tatishchevo and Totskoye, later in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. In 1942 the army and about 40,000 civilians were evacuated to Persia. From there the road led to Iraq, Palestine, Egypt and Italy for the soldiers, and to camps in Iran, India, East Africa, Mexico and New Zealand for the families. After 1946 most of the soldiers, and in time many of the families, came to Britain. Our guide to Anders’ Army records covers the military side of that road; this page covers the deportation that came before it.

Documents British families often still hold

Deported families carried very little, so a surviving paper from this period is a strong starting point. The following are the items we see most often, and what each one establishes.

The amnesty certificate (udostoverenie): name, date and place of issue, and often the place of exile the person was leaving. It fixes the family in a specific district in the autumn of 1941.
A Soviet work book, settlement pass or collective farm receipt: names the settlement (posiolek) or kolkhoz, which is the key to NKVD settlement files and to the Index of the Repressed.
Letters and postcards from exile: the postmark and the address give the region (oblast) and district, and the text often names relatives left behind.
Photographs from Pahlavi, Tehran, Isfahan or an African camp: place the family on the evacuation route of 1942 and point to Red Cross and camp registers.
A pre-war document from the home village: a school certificate, a settler’s land grant or a parish certificate. It names the place of origin, which Soviet files recorded only approximately.

A single name on a release certificate can be enough. The certificate gives the Soviet district, the district gives the settlement, and the settlement gives the file in which the whole family was listed together.

Where the deportation records are today

Index of the Repressed (Indeks Represjonowanych)

The largest name index is the Index of the Repressed, begun in 1988 by the Eastern Archive and the KARTA Centre and run since 2013 by the IPN. It brings together Soviet records obtained through the Memorial society from archives in Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Lithuania, Polish Red Cross tracing material and personal questionnaires. The published database gives name, parents’ names, year of birth, the kind of repression (deportation, exile, camp, prison or execution) and the place. Polish spelling with diacritics is needed in the IPN search; an English interface built by Stephen Morse lets you search without them. The index is large but incomplete. A missing name does not mean a family was not deported.

The Anders’ Army questionnaires at the Hoover Institution

In 1943 General Anders set up a Documents Bureau to record what Polish citizens had suffered under Soviet rule. Soldiers and civilians filled in questionnaires and wrote accounts of their arrest, deportation and release. More than 18,000 of these personal documents are held in the Wladyslaw Anders collection at the Hoover Institution in California. Microfilm copies were given to Poland between 1999 and 2001, and a digital copy of the whole collection is available through the Polish State Archives’ online catalogue. The Pilecki Institute publishes translated testimonies from the same collection on its Chronicles of Terror site. If your relative served in the 2nd Polish Corps, there is a fair chance that he or she wrote one of these accounts.

Soviet files in Russian, Kazakh and Ukrainian archives

NKVD transport lists, special settlement registers and personal files survive in the state archives of the Russian Federation, Kazakhstan and the former Soviet republics. Access from abroad is uneven and, since 2022, Russian archives are in practice closed to Western requests. Material already copied to the Index of the Repressed or to the Memorial society’s databases is the usual route.

Polish Red Cross and the Polish authorities in exile

The Polish Red Cross Information Bureau in Warsaw holds wartime tracing records, including cards for people sought by relatives in Britain after 1945. The Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London holds the records of the Polish government in exile, the embassy in the USSR and its welfare delegates, and the 2nd Polish Corps, including lists of deported military families compiled during the war. The Polish Library at POSK in London holds published lists, among them the 1944 Ministry of Defence list of military families deported to the USSR.

Survivor registers and memory projects

The Kresy-Siberia Foundation maintains a Wall of Names with tens of thousands of entries submitted by families, plus testimonies and photographs. The Sybir Memorial Museum in Bialystok and the Association of Siberian Deportees (Zwiazek Sybirakow) hold records of deportees who returned to Poland after the war. These collections are valuable for context and for finding relatives, but they are not official records and each entry needs checking against a primary source.

A worked example

An illustrative case, not a client file. A family in Bradford keeps a Soviet release certificate issued in October 1941 in the Arkhangelsk region to a woman born in 1908, and a photograph captioned “Tehran 1942”. The certificate suggests the February 1940 deportation, which took settler and forestry families to the Russian north. A search of the Index of the Repressed under her maiden and married names, with Polish spelling, finds the family group: husband, wife and three children, deported from a village in the Wolyn voivodeship to a special settlement in Arkhangelsk oblast. The village name then leads to the pre-war parish register for the children’s baptisms and the parents’ marriage, and the husband’s name to the Anders’ Army questionnaires and his later Polish Resettlement Corps file.

From the deportation record to the Polish family

Soviet files recorded the place of origin as the deportees gave it, often as a district rather than a village, and names were transcribed into Russian and back. The work after the first find is to confirm the identity against Polish sources: the parish or civil register of the home village, the 1921 settler grants, school and residence records. Those registers for the pre-war eastern voivodeships are now held partly in Poland and partly in the archives of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. Our guide to Polish church records explains what the parish books contain, and the census guide covers the 1921 and 1931 returns.

Our military research service follows one person or one family across these collections: the Index of the Repressed, the Anders’ Army questionnaires, Polish Red Cross and government-in-exile files, the British Ministry of Defence file for a soldier who later served under British command, and the pre-war Polish registers that confirm who the family were. You receive an English-language report with references, copies where the archives permit, and a clear statement of what remains unresolved. Where the family came to Britain through the Polish Resettlement Corps, our guide to Polish Resettlement Corps records explains the British side of the story.

Official sources

(Polish military research)