The article sheds light on the circumstances of the arrest and subsequent death of Olgierd Najman Mirza Kryczyński, one of the outstanding Polish–Lithuanian public figures of Tatar origin. His fate and the fate of his brother Leon, killed by the Nazis in the Piaśnica forest in 1939, have very much in common.
The introductory part deals with Olgierd Kryczyński’s biographical data. He was born in Vilnius on 22 October 1884 in the family of the future General of the Russian Tsarist army Konstantyn Kryczyński and Maria Achmatowicz. He graduated from Saint-Petersburg University, Faculty of Law. In 1908 Olgierd and his brother Leon, together with other Tatar students, set up a Tatar student society with the aim to find out more about the past of the Tatar nation. Other important episodes of Olgierd Kryczyński’s life are also found in the article.
The main source of the article was the documents kept in the Lithuanian Special Archives. Olgierd Kryczyński was arrestes by the NKVD on 15 February 1941. He was charged under Articles 58(4), 58(11), 58(13) of the Criminal Code of the Soviet Federal Republic of Russia with counter-revolutionary activities, with sabotage, an attempt to ovethrow the socialist order of the USSR, and other crimes. The file contains the interrogation documents gathered from the day he was detained to the day he was shot in prison, in Gorky, on 2 June 1942. He was indicted with what he did through his lifetime: till 1919 – Prosecutor in the Simferopol County, where the Crimea Democratic Republic was emerging; after it failed, till 1920 – Vice-Minister of Justice in Azerbaijan; Chairman of the Cukture and Education Union of Polish Tatars in Poland; and the job of Procecutor for many years.
The documents tell that he was under surveillance for a year before his arrest. There were three informes who reported on Olgierd Kryczyński, claiming that he was an enemy of the USSR and contributed to the foundation of the organization that aspired at the Crimea’s and Azerbaijan’s independence from the USSR.
Olgierd Kryczyński rejected the charges, retained his dignity during the investigation, and tried to protect the other members of the community from possible arrests.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
