"Koreans were only the first ethnic group to come under suspicion. Balkars, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Germans, Greeks, Ingushi, Meskhetians, Kalmyks, Karachai, Poles and Ukrainians - all these different nationalities were subjected to persecution by Stalin at various times. The rationales for this policy subtly mixed the languages of class and race. Baltic Germans were 'kulak colonizers to the marrow of their bones'. Poles were informed: 'You are being de-kulakized not because you are a kulak, but because you are a Pole.' One internal OGPU report contained the telling phrase Raz Poliak, znachit kulak: 'If it's a Pole, then it must be a kulak.' As early as March 1930 thousands of Polish families were being deported eastwards from Byelorussia and the Ukraine, partly because of their resistance to collectivization and partly because the authorities feared they planned to emigrate westwards. There was a fresh wave of deportations in 1935, which removed more than eight thousand Polish families from the border regions of Kiev and Vinnitsya to eastern Ukraine. Two years later, an investigation into what was alleged to be 'the most powerful and probably the most important diversionist-espionage networks of Polish intelligence in the USSR' led to the arrest of no fewer than 140,000 people, nearly all of them Poles."