Skidel revolt

Skidal after the 1939 annexation by the USSR

Location of Skidal on the Russian map of Polish territories (yellow) incorporated into the Soviet Belarus (pink) after the invasion of Poland

The Skidel revolt (Polish: Powstanie skidelskie) or Skidal uprising (term used in Soviet historiography) was an anti-state and anti-Polish sabotage action of the Jewish and ethnic Belarusian inhabitants of the Polish town of Skidal (now Skidzyel’, Belarus) at the onset of World War II. It started on the second day of the Soviet invasion of Poland in an attempt to assist the external attack.

In 1940 the NKVD found clear evidence of the widespread robberies and mass murders committed on the side by scores of intoxicated peasants and criminal opportunists, but the Soviet military court threw out the case as a misrepresentation of the actual class struggle. After the annexation of eastern Poland, the Soviet propaganda turned the Skidzyel’ events into a liberation movement, and mythologized them.

The revolt of 18 September 1939 was organized and helped by a fifth column from the Communist Party of West Belarus delegalized in 1938. According to Russian documents, it consisted of around 200 men, although their number has been contested by Polish historians as exaggerated. A group of Soviet-armed Jews and Belarusians, all citizens of Poland, carrying assault rifles and a Soviet heavy machine gun (but also axes and home-made weapons), massacred an unspecified number of ethnic Poles including civil servants, landowners, priests, rural settlers, Polish policemen and reserve officers at Skidel, Brzostowica Mała, Lerypol, Budowla, Ostryna, Jeziory and other locations. Several Polish families were rescued by their Belarusian neighbors in the village of Sawalówka.

On 19 September 1939 the 102nd Uhlan Regiment of the Polish Army was sent to the area from Grodno, assisted by the local police and a group of volunteers from the prewar Strzelec organization. After some heavy fighting around Ostryna, Dubno and Jeziory, the soldiers put down the revolt and took control of Skidel and neighboring settlements. The traitors against the nation captured with weapons and guilty of committing treason were summarily executed on 19 September (some 18 to 31 men according to Soviet sources), but the fighting continued. One day after the Red Army tanks took over Skidel on 20 September 1939, the rebels massacred all Polish males in the village of Kurpiki. Some of the local saboteurs were executed by the Polish self-defence. Soviet historians blamed them later for most of the extrajudicial killings.