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| . That gave the cue as to how the Polish undeground was to be regarded. From that point, the term “White Poles” was used by the Soviets to smear the Poles—again falsely—as reactionary fascists. The Polish leader, General Władysław Sikorski, was accused of being a fascist who was collaborating with Nazi Germany (the Soviet Union’s erstwhile ally), and the Polish partisans became “White Poles,” “White bandits,” “agents of Sikorski,” or simply “Polish fascists.” Soon after the Soviet partisan command in Moscow ordered the liquidation of the Polish underground loyal to the London government. See Tadeusz Gasztold, “Sowietyzacja i rusyfikacja Wileńszczyzny i Nowogródczyzny w działalności partyzantki sowieckiej w latach 1941–1944,” in Adam Sudoł, ed., Sowietyzacja Kresów Wschodnich II Rzeczypospolitej po 17 września 1939 (Bydgoszcz: Wyższa Szkoła Pedagogiczna w Bydgoszczy, 1998), 279; Krajewski, Na Ziemi Nowogródzkiej, 143; Zygmunt Boradyn, Niemen–rzeka niezgody: Polsko-sowiecka wojna partyzancka na Nowogródczyźnie 1943–1944 (Warsaw: Rytm, 1999), 114. Israeli historian Leonid Smilovitsky notes that these as well as other epithets such as “national fascists” and “Polish-Hitlerite units” were used to describe the Home Army in Soviet documents from that era. See Leonid Smilovitskii, Katastrofa evreev v Belorussii 1941–1944 gg. (Tel Aviv: Biblioteka Matveia Chernogo, 2000), 141. This book is available online in English translation as Leonid Smilovitsky, Holocaust in Belorussia, 1941–1944, Internet: . Stalin did not shy away from making such charges openly in his dealings with Western leaders. In an outburst at the Tehran Conference in 1943, the man who approved the Katyn massacre hurled accusation after accusation at the London Poles, calling them cowards, Hitler’s accomplices, and murderers. See Lynne Olson and Stanley Cloud, A Question of Honor. The Kościuszko Squadron: Forgotten Heroes of World War II (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 296. Curiously, the term “White Poles” was also borrowed by Nazi German propaganda. The relentless repetition of this hateful propaganda doubtless had a considerable effect on how Soviet-Jewsh partisans came to view Polish partisans. Today, the term “White Poles” retains currency only in Holocaust historiography. The anti-Polish propaganda renewed in 1943 was in fact a continuation of the anti-Polish campaign that became widespread at the time of the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939. For a description of that campaign, see Ewa M. Thompson, Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenpoint Press, 2000), 163–81; Ewa M. Thompson, “Nationalist Propaganda in the Soviet Russian Press, 1939–1941,” Slavic Review, vol. 50, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 385–99. In spite of all this Soviet agitation, intensive efforts on the part of the Germans, starting in 1943, to win over the Poles to the “anti-Bolshevik front” met with a complete fiasco. See Czesław Brzoza and Andrzej Sowa, Historia Polski 1918–1945 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2006), 609–10, 639–40.
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