the mass expulsion or killing of members of an unwanted ethnic or religious group in a society by a more powerful ethnic group.
Sounds like a reasonable definition. Now, how does it work when people are killed because of their political / social ideas? And they just happen to be a different ethnic group than the killers?
Is that covered under "religion" in that definition?
Hard to claim it was anything else. Those folks were no threat, they were not all military, but were all Polish.
I disagree, slightly. Those Poles WERE a threat to the Soviet system, that's why they were killed. Never forget that the Soviet system wasn't just communism, it was also totalitarian, and EVERYTHING that wasn't part of their system was a threat to that system, in their eyes.
The ideas and personal beliefs of those Poles killed were the threat, not the physical abilities of the individuals who held them.
Put another way, they weren't killed because they were Poles, they were killed because they weren't good communist Poles. I think that makes it ideological cleansing, not ethnic cleansing, unless political ideology is considered religion as used in the quoted definition.
Its all word games, when it comes to labels and definitions. One of the things the Soviets did was have one of their doctors declare dissenters as mentally ill, so their arrest and imprisonment wasn't a punishment for dissent, it was to help them, to cure them of their mental illness, and re-educate them so they could be productive members of society, again.
Word games.