Louis Menand: Looking Back at the Cold War : The New Yorker: Although eastern Poland was one of the most impoverished areas in Central Europe, it was better off than the Soviet Union. As soon as the Soviets gained control of it, in 1939, they looted whatever they could get their hands on. Representatives of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (also known as the N.K.V.D., predecessor of the K.G.B.) carried out an extermination program targeting the Polish �lite.
In the most notorious case, almost fifteen thousand Polish officers, most of them professionals in the reserve corps, were arrested and deported. More than four thousand were shot and buried in a forest outside Katyn, in western Russia. The rest went to special camps. Fewer than five hundred were ever heard of again. In all, 1.2 million Poles were deported to the U.S.S.R. by the Soviets from their half of Poland, an area with a population of thirteen million. Half of them died in captivity.