Under those conditions and considering that if one were exiled, which happened frequently in the USSR, the passport was a proof, as it stated [12] your registration in the locality to which one was exiled, and it is clear that the passport had a tremendous importance in the USSR. Consequently, the interest taken by the population, particularly by all kinds of “suspicious” elements, such as former officers, police functionaries, political activists, members of various political organisations, and the “bourgeois” (tenement house owners, factory owners, and merchants), was great, or actually it was not so much interest as fear connected with that experience, as there were already rumours that all those mentioned above would receive passports with §11 and that eo ipso664 they would be forced to leave Lvov.
Arrests and exile of officers, their families, and political activists. One did not have to wait too long for those doubts to be justified, because soon after the ordinance about the “passportisation” a new wave of arrests began among the remaining officers and police functionaries. If they were not there, their closest family members were arrested. Most of the women and children were deported to Kazakhstan, [13] while the men were sent north or east to various camps and prisons in the interior of Russia. The arrests affected the Polish population most as they were conducted among officers, police functionaries, administration employees, and judiciary employees. By contrast, the exile and persecution of real estate owners, factory owners, wholesale merchants, and bank directors affected the Jews most significantly, as most of the Poles and Ukrainian nationalists from those strata had gone either abroad or to the Polish territories occupied by the Germans. The Jews who had no possibility to go abroad were reluctant to go to the Germans, so most of them remained on the spot, hoping for a privileged position as they had never enjoyed privileges before. As for members of political organisations, former members of parliament and senators, they were not treated in a uniformly. Most of them were arrested, but many others, even with well-known surnames, were left in peace. For instance, [14] MP Sommerstein was arrested immediately after the Bolsheviks’ arrival together with Professor Schorr,665 and the arrests during “passportisation” affected attorney Leder, who was
