(more than 62 per cent) and Russian (20.5 per cent). Soviet party specialists arrived throughout 1940; in total they numbered more than 30,000.
In October 1940, executive committees of oblast and area councils started accepting local delegates. Until the outbreak of war with Germany, about 18,000 people were hired, including more than 3,000 Jews. Jewish professionals could hold lower-ranking positions from the very beginning of the Soviet occupation. The new authorities wiped away all Polish traces from offices and the economy, and given how few Belarusians were educated, they needed to employ Jews, whether they liked it or not. This was particularly true for theareas of education, health, and justice, but even beyond that – for example, the department of roads and communication in the Białystok oblast employed 230 Jewish employees until 1 February 1940. In Białystok, more significant was the percentage of Jews among employees of the Municipal Executive Committee. At the beginning of 1940, this important office employed only 32 Belarusians, and as many as 137 Poles and 138 Jews.
Based on fragmentary historical research, it is not clear to what extentthe Jewish residents of the Northeast Borderlands were affected by the pol-icy of repressions, which were applied by the new authorities. Operationalreports of the Commissioner of Internal Affairs of the BSSR, Lavrentiy Tsanava, to the Secretary of the Central Committee of the BSSR, Panteleimon Ponomarienko, clearly suggest that in autumn 1939 security agencies wereworking intensively to seek out information about the Jewish political par-ties, especially the Bund and Zionist circles. On 7 October, Tsanava reportedthat leaders of the Białystok Bund had already been arrested and that theagency was preparing to arrest Tsukunft31 activists and Zionist revisionists. After Białystok, the operation covered provincial towns. In October, securityservices took interest in a Poale Zion cell in Łomża, investigated Zionists in Sokółka, and arrested a Jewish Trotskyist in Pińsk.
However, while the first two mass deportations in February and Aprilwere directed mainly against Poles, the third one from the end of June 1940 targeted almost exclusively Jewish byezhentsy from central Poland. In Western Belarus, nearly 23,000 people were deported.32
