As a result, nearly 140,000 people, or some 22% of Poles living within the Soviet Union, primarily in modern-day Belarus and Ukraine, were detained and sentenced, of which at least 111,000 were sentenced to be executed with a bullet to the back of the head, with the sentence being carried out immediately.

The remainder were deported to gulags, the Soviet Union’s infamous network of prison and labor camps, in Siberia and Central Asia.

The Sunday commemorations were held at the Łostowicki Cemetery, in front of a memorial stone installed there in 2018 by the late Mayor of Gdańsk Paweł Adamowicz. The event was organized jointly by the authorities of the city of Gdańsk, the Katyn Family Association, and the Gdańsk chapter of the Association of Siberian Deportees.

Speaking during the event, Gdańsk’s deputy mayor, Emilia Lodzińska, stressed that those responsible for the genocide 1937-1938 genocide were never brought to justice.

“When we remember our fellow Poles murdered at the behest of Joseph Stalin, let us not forget all the other victims of the criminal communist system. Remembering the victims is our duty,” Lodzińska said.

Similar ‘national operations’ carried out by the NKVD targeted other national and ethnic groups living in the Soviet Union, among them Ukrainians, Belarusians, Jews, Finns, Latvians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Chinese, Koreans, and Germans, as well as ethnic Russians returning to the Soviet Union from Manchuria, which was captured by the Japanese Empire in 1935.

Poles, however, comprised 44.9% of the victims of all such ‘national operations’.