Stanisław Swianiewicz

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Stanisław Swianiewicz (1899-1997) was a Polish economist and historian. A veteran of the Polish-Bolshevik War, during World War II he was the only one survivor of the Katyn Massacre and an eye witness of the transport of Polish prisoners of war to the forests outside of Smolensk by the NKVD.

[edit] Biography

Stanisław Swianiewicz was born in 1899 in Dvinsk in Imperial Russia (modern Daugavpils, Latvia), to a Polish szlachta family. Brought up in a multi-cultural society of Livonia, he spoke Polish, Russian and German as his native tongues. After graduating from a trade school in Orel, he attended Moscow University's Law Faculty, then including all social sciences. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 he left Moscow and returned to his homeland, where in 1919 he became a commander of the Polska Organizacja Wojskowa in the area of Livonia. During the Polish-Bolshevik War he crossed the front lines and reached Vilna (modern Vilnius), where he took part in the defense of that city against the Reds. He also took part in the seizure of that city by the forces of Gen. Lucjan Żeligowski.

Demobilized, he attended the Stefan Batory University of Wilno, where he continued his studies. He graduated in 1924 and then spent several years on various scholarships in Paris, Breslau (modern Wrocław) and Kiel. A specialist in Soviet economy and a liberalist, Swianiewicz attended lectures of Władysław Zawadzki, who also became his tutor. In April of 1939 the President of Poland Ignacy Mościcki awarded him with professorship. Apart from his work at his alma mater, Swianiewicz was also active in several NGOs promoting links between various nations of Central and Eastern Europe and studying the peculiarities of that part of the continent. In 1938 he published his Polityka gospodarcza Niemiec hitlerowskich (Economical Policies of Nazi Germany), in which he was the first economist to compare the Nazi and Soviet socialist economies. He was also a journalist of various newspapers, including the Kurier Wileński.

On August 2, 1939 he was mobilized to the Polish Army as a reserve officer. He took part in the Polish Defensive War at the onset of World War II. After the Soviet invasion of Poland, in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet Alliance, his unit was trying to reach the Hungarian or Romanian borders in order to evade being captured and find its way to France, where the Polish Army was being re-created. However, after the battle of Krasnobród on September 23, he was taken prisoner of war by the Soviets. Through the transfer camp in Putyvl he was interned in the NKVD camp in Kozielsk, together with several thousand of other Polish officers, professors, border guards and policemen. Interrogated by kombrig Vasili Mikhaylovich Zarubin, Swianiewicz spoke fluent Russian and was apparently found useful. After the start of the Katyn Massacre in the spring of 1940, he was attached to a group of ca. 100 Polish officers being moved by train to a small station in Gniezdovo near Katyn. There all of his comrades were massed in buses with blindfolded windows and transported to the mass murder site, while Swianiewicz himself was withdrawn from the transport.

He was then transferred to the prison in Smolensk, the NKVD Lubyanka Prison and then to Butyrki Prison in Moscow. After roughly a year of interrogation, his pre-war books on Soviet economy were interpreted as espionage, for which he was sentenced to 8 years in Gulag. Transported to Ust-Vymskiy Lager in Komi, he was released from the prison camp following the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement in August of 1941. However, soon after his release he was again arrested and sent back to the camp. Following an intervention of numerous Polish politicians, he was finally released soon afterwards, and joined the Polish Army being formed by Gen. Władysław Anders in southern Soviet Union. He was one of the first witnesses to inform the Polish authorities of the number of Polish POWs held in Soviet camps until the spring of 1940. He remained in the Polish embassy in Moscow as one of the officials entitled with searching for roughly 22,000 Polish officers missing. He left Russia in July of 1942 and reached Great Britain, where he remained active collaborator of the Polish government in exile. He was also a co-author of The crime of Katyn; facts & documents, one of the first monographes of the mass murder of Polish officers by the Soviets, published in 1948.

After the war he had to remain in exile in London and started giving lectures at numerous universities around the world, including the USA, Indonesia and Canada. He was a notable economist, but also he testified at various occasions on the Katyn Massacre. Since his family had to stay in stalinist Poland, during the hearing before Madden Committee of the Congress, he testified in a mask and under a false name. He was also a professor at the Saint Mary's University of Halifax, Nova Scotia . In 1956, 18 years after their last meeting, his wife Olimpia was allowed to leave Poland and join him in London. In the 1970's he also became an active member of various organizations documenting and fighting against breaking of human rights in countries of the Soviet bloc. He never returned to Poland and spent his last years in an Antokol hotel run by General Tadeusz Pełczyński and his wife. He died there in 1997 and was buried in Halifax, next to his wife.

They had four children. Witold Swianiewicz was the editor of the first edition of his father's W cieniu katynia, while Maria Nagięć née Swianiewicz is a professor at the University of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn.

[edit] Bibliography

• Stanisław Swianiewicz (1983 (1930)). Lenin jako ekonomista. Poznań, Głosy, 15. 
• Stanisław Swianiewicz (1938). Polityka gospodarcza Niemiec hitlerowskich. Warsaw, Polityka. 
• various authors (1948). The crime of Katyn; facts & documents, Zdzisław Stahl, Władysław Anders, Stanisław Swianiewicz, Józef Cat Mackiewicz, London, Gryf, 303. 
• Stanisław Swianiewicz (1965). Forced Labour and Economic Development; An Enquiry into the Experience of Soviet Industrialization. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 332. ISBN 0313249830. 
• Stanisław Swianiewicz (1976). W cieniu Katynia. Paris, Instytut Literacki, 359. ISBN 2716800278. 
• Stanisław Swianiewicz (1996). Dzieciństwo i młodość. Warsaw, Jan Jacek Swianiewicz, 107. ISBN 8386367261. 

[edit] Further reading

• Fischer, Benjamin B., "The Katyn Controversy: Stalin's Killing Field", Studies in Intelligence, Winter 1999-2000, last accessed on 10 December, 2005