ABSTRACT
A parliamentary committee working on a draft of Poland's new constitution was faced recently with a troubling question: are the ethnic Poles who have been living in the former Soviet Union Polish citizens or not? Or, rather, should they or should they not be given Polish citizenship on request, without undergoing a lengthy and complicated procedure designed for aliens? The answer to this question is relatively easy - and positive - in the case of those who, usually against their will, remained on Soviet territory after the Polish-Soviet border had been shifted westward at the end of World War II. But what about those Polish inhabitants of Belarus and Ukraine who were living in the areas awarded to the Soviet Union in the Riga treaty of 1921? Most of them were later (in the 1920s and 1930s) deported to Kazakhstan. Their offspring still live there, preserving the Polish language and Polish identity. Are those children and grandchildren of deportees, born in Kazakhstan, still entitled to Polish citizenship? What if they come from mixed marriages? What about those whom Soviet authorities forced to erase the notification of Polish nationality from their passports? And further: what about grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Polish patriots exiled by the tsars to Siberia in the 19th century? Many of them do not speak Polish anymore but still consider themselves Polish.
