The Katyn massacre case still haunts researchers, despite the Russian side’s admission of guilt. Experts find many inconsistencies and contradictions in this case that do not allow them to make an unambiguous verdict.
Strange haste
By 1940, there were up to half a million Poles in the territories of Poland occupied by Soviet troops, most of whom were soon liberated. But about 42 thousand officers of the Polish army, policemen and gendarmes, who were recognized as enemies of the USSR, continued to remain in Soviet camps.
A significant part (26 to 28 thousand) of prisoners were employed in road construction and then transported to a special settlement in Siberia. Later, many of them would be liberated, some would form the “Anders Army”, others would become the founders of the 1st Army of the Polish Army.
However, the fate of approximately 14 thousand Polish prisoners of war held in the Ostashkov, Kozel and Starobelsk camps remained unclear. The Germans decided to take advantage of the situation by announcing in April 1943 that they had found evidence of the execution of several thousand Polish officers by Soviet troops in the forest near Katyn.
The Nazis quickly assembled an international commission, which included doctors from controlled countries, to exhume corpses from mass graves. In total, more than 4,000 remains were recovered, killed, according to the conclusion of the German commission, no later than May 1940 by the Soviet military, that is, when the area was still in the zone of Soviet occupation.
It should be noted that the German investigation began immediately after the disaster at Stalingrad. According to historians, this was a propaganda move in order to divert public attention from national shame and switch to the “bloody atrocity of the Bolsheviks.” According to Joseph Goebbels, this should not only damage the image of the USSR, but also lead to a break with the Polish authorities in exile and official London.
Not convinced
Of course, the Soviet government did not stand aside and initiated its own investigation. In January 1944, a commission led by the chief surgeon of the Red Army, Nikolai Burdenko, came to the conclusion that in the summer of 1941, due to the rapid advance of the German army, Polish prisoners of war did not have time to evacuate and were soon executed. To prove this version, the “Burdenko Commission” testified that the Poles were shot from German weapons.
In February 1946, the “Katyn tragedy” became one of the cases that was investigated during the Nuremberg Tribunal. The Soviet side, despite providing arguments in favor of Germany's guilt, was nevertheless unable to prove its position.
In 1951, a special commission of the House of Representatives of Congress on the Katyn issue was convened in the United States. Its conclusion, based only on circumstantial evidence, declared the USSR guilty of the Katyn murder. As justification, in particular, the following signs were cited: USSR opposition to the investigation of the international commission in 1943, reluctance to invite neutral observers during the work of the “Burdenko Commission”, except for correspondents, as well as the inability to present sufficient evidence of German guilt in Nuremberg.
Confession
For a long time, the controversy surrounding Katyn was not renewed, since the parties did not provide new arguments. Only during the years of Perestroika did a Polish-Soviet commission of historians begin to work on this issue. From the very beginning of the work, the Polish side began to criticize the results of the Burdenko commission and, referring to the glasnost proclaimed in the USSR, demanded to provide additional materials.
At the beginning of 1989, documents were discovered in the archives indicating that the affairs of the Poles were subject to consideration at a Special Meeting of the NKVD of the USSR. From the materials it followed that the Poles held in all three camps were transferred to the disposal of the regional NKVD departments and then their names did not appear anywhere else.
At the same time, historian Yuri Zorya, comparing the NKVD lists of those leaving the camp in Kozelsk with the exhumation lists from the German “White Book” on Katyn, discovered that these were the same people, and the order of the list of persons from the burials coincided with the order of the lists for dispatch .
Zorya reported this to KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, but he refused further investigation. Only the prospect of publishing these documents forced the USSR leadership in April 1990 to admit guilt for the execution of Polish officers.
“The identified archival materials in their entirety allow us to conclude that Beria, Merkulov and their henchmen were directly responsible for the atrocities in the Katyn forest,” the Soviet government said in a statement.
Secret package
Until now, the main evidence of the guilt of the USSR is considered to be the so-called “package No. 1”, stored in the Special Folder of the Archive of the CPSU Central Committee. It was not made public during the work of the Polish-Soviet commission. The package containing materials on Katyn was opened during Yeltsin's presidency on September 24, 1992, copies of the documents were handed over to Polish President Lech Walesa and thus saw the light of day.
It must be said that the documents from “package No. 1” do not contain direct evidence of the guilt of the Soviet regime and can only indirectly indicate it. Moreover, some experts, drawing attention to the large number of inconsistencies in these papers, call them fakes.
In the period from 1990 to 2004, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation conducted its investigation into the Katyn massacre and still found evidence of the guilt of Soviet leaders in the deaths of Polish officers. During the investigation, surviving witnesses who testified in 1944 were interviewed. Now they stated that their testimony was false, as it was obtained under pressure from the NKVD.
Today the situation has not changed. Both Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev have repeatedly spoken out in support of the official conclusion about the guilt of Stalin and the NKVD. “Attempts to cast doubt on these documents, to say that someone falsified them, is simply not serious. This is being done by those who are trying to whitewash the nature of the regime that Stalin created in a certain period in our country,” said Dmitry Medvedev.
Doubts remain
However, even after the official recognition of responsibility by the Russian government, many historians and publicists continue to insist on the fairness of the conclusions of the Burdenko Commission. Viktor Ilyukhin, a member of the Communist Party faction, spoke about this in particular. According to the parliamentarian, a former KGB officer told him about the fabrication of documents from “package No. 1.” According to supporters of the “Soviet version,” key documents of the “Katyn affair” were falsified in order to distort the role of Joseph Stalin and the USSR in the history of the 20th century.
Main Researcher Institute Russian history RAS Yuri Zhukov questions the authenticity of the key document of “package No. 1” - a note from Beria to Stalin, which reports on the NKVD’s plans for captured Poles. “This is not Beria’s personal letterhead,” notes Zhukov. In addition, the historian draws attention to one feature of such documents, with which he has worked for more than 20 years.
“They were written on one page, a page and one third at most. Because no one wanted to read long papers. So again I want to talk about the document that is considered key. It’s already four pages long!” the scientist sums up.
In 2009, on the initiative of independent researcher Sergei Strygin, an examination of Beria’s note was carried out. The conclusion was this: “the font of the first three pages is not found in any of the authentic NKVD letters of that period identified to date.” At the same time, three pages of Beria’s note were typed on one typewriter, and the last page on another.
Zhukov also draws attention to another oddity of the “Katyn case.” If Beria had received the order to shoot Polish prisoners of war, the historian suggests, he would probably have taken them further to the east, and would not have killed them here near Katyn, leaving such clear evidence of the crime.
Doctor historical sciences Valentin Sakharov has no doubt that the Katyn massacre was the work of the Germans. He writes: “In order to create graves in the Katyn Forest of Polish citizens allegedly shot by the Soviet authorities, they dug up a mass of corpses at the Smolensk Civil Cemetery and transported these corpses to the Katyn Forest, which greatly indignant the local population.”
All the testimony that the German commission collected was extracted from the local population, Sakharov believes. In addition, Polish residents called as witnesses signed documents for German which they did not own.
However, some documents that could shed light on the Katyn tragedy are still classified. In 2006, MP State Duma Andrei Savelyev submitted a request to the archive service of the Armed Forces of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation about the possibility of declassifying such documents.
In response, the deputy was informed that “the expert commission of the Main Directorate educational work Armed Forces Russian Federation made an expert assessment of documents on the Katyn case stored in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, and made a conclusion that it was inappropriate to declassify them.”
IN Lately You can often hear the version that both the Soviet and German sides took part in the execution of the Poles, and the executions were carried out separately at different times. This may explain the presence of two mutually exclusive systems of evidence. However, at the moment it is only clear that the “Katyn case” is still far from being resolved.
The investigation into all the circumstances of the massacre of Polish military personnel, referred to as the “Katyn massacre,” still causes heated discussions in both Russia and Poland. According to the “official” modern version, the murder of Polish officers was the work of the NKVD of the USSR. However, back in 1943-1944. a special commission headed by the chief surgeon of the Red Army N. Burdenko came to the conclusion that the Polish soldiers were killed by the Nazis. Despite the fact that the current Russian leadership agreed with the version of the “Soviet trace,” there are indeed a lot of contradictions and ambiguities in the case of the mass murder of Polish officers. To understand who could have shot Polish soldiers, it is necessary to take a closer look at the investigation process of the Katyn massacre itself.
In March 1942, residents of the village of Kozyi Gory, in the Smolensk region, informed the occupation authorities about the site of a mass grave of Polish soldiers. The Poles working in the construction platoon dug up several graves and reported this to the German command, but they initially reacted with complete indifference. The situation changed in 1943, when a turning point had already occurred at the front and Germany was interested in strengthening anti-Soviet propaganda. On February 18, 1943, German field police began excavations in the Katyn Forest. A special commission was formed, headed by Gerhardt Butz, a professor at the University of Breslau, a “luminary” of forensic medicine, who during the war years served with the rank of captain as the head of the forensic laboratory of Army Group Center. Already on April 13, 1943, German radio reported that the burial site of 10 thousand Polish officers had been found. In fact, German investigators “calculated” the number of Poles who died in the Katyn Forest very simply - they took the total number of officers of the Polish army before the start of the war, from which they subtracted the “living” - the soldiers of Anders’ army. All other Polish officers, according to the German side, were shot by the NKVD in the Katyn Forest. Naturally, there was also the inherent anti-Semitism of the Nazis - the German media immediately reported that Jews took part in the executions.
On April 16, 1943, the Soviet Union officially denied the “slanderous attacks” of Nazi Germany. On April 17, the Polish government in exile turned to the Soviet government for clarification. It is interesting that at that time the Polish leadership did not try to blame the Soviet Union for everything, but focused on the crimes of Nazi Germany against the Polish people. However, the USSR broke off relations with the Polish government in exile.
Joseph Goebbels, the “number one propagandist” of the Third Reich, managed to achieve even greater effect than he had originally imagined. The Katyn massacre was presented by German propaganda as a classic manifestation of the “atrocities of the Bolsheviks.” It is obvious that the Nazis, accusing the Soviet side of killing Polish prisoners of war, sought to discredit the Soviet Union in the eyes of Western countries. The brutal execution of Polish prisoners of war, allegedly carried out by Soviet security officers, should, in the opinion of the Nazis, push the USA, Great Britain and the Polish government in exile away from cooperation with Moscow. Goebbels succeeded in the latter - in Poland the version about the execution of Polish officers Soviet NKVD accepted by many. The fact is that back in 1940, correspondence with Polish prisoners of war who were on the territory of the Soviet Union ceased. Nothing more was known about the fate of the Polish officers. At the same time, representatives of the United States and Great Britain tried to “hush up” the Polish issue, because they did not want to irritate Stalin during such a crucial period, when Soviet troops were able to turn the tide at the front.
To ensure a larger propaganda effect, the Nazis even involved the Polish Red Cross (PKK), whose representatives were associated with the anti-fascist resistance, in the investigation. On the Polish side, the commission was headed by Marian Wodzinski, a physician from the University of Krakow, an authoritative person who participated in the activities of the Polish anti-fascist resistance. The Nazis even went so far as to allow representatives of the PKK to the site of the alleged execution, where graves were being excavated. The commission's conclusions were disappointing - the PKK confirmed the German version that the Polish officers were shot in April-May 1940, that is, even before the start of the war with Germany Soviet Union.
On April 28-30, 1943, an international commission arrived in Katyn. Of course, this was a very loud name - in fact, the commission was formed from representatives of states occupied by Nazi Germany or that maintained allied relations with it. As one would expect, the commission took Berlin's side and also confirmed that Polish officers were killed in the spring of 1940 by Soviet security officers. Further investigative actions by the German side, however, were stopped - in September 1943, the Red Army liberated Smolensk. Almost immediately after the liberation of the Smolensk region, the Soviet leadership decided on the need to conduct its own investigation - to expose Hitler's slander about the involvement of the Soviet Union in the massacres of Polish officers.
On October 5, 1943, a special commission of the NKVD and NKGB was created under the leadership of People's Commissar of State Security Vsevolod Merkulov and Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Sergei Kruglov. Unlike the German commission, the Soviet commission approached the matter in more detail, including organizing interrogations of witnesses. 95 people were interviewed. As a result, interesting details emerged. Even before the start of the war, three camps for Polish prisoners of war were located west of Smolensk. They housed officers and generals of the Polish Army, gendarmes, police officers, and officials captured on Polish territory. Most of the prisoners of war were used for road work of varying degrees of severity. When the war began, the Soviet authorities did not have time to evacuate Polish prisoners of war from the camps. So the Polish officers ended up in German captivity, and the Germans continued to use the labor of prisoners of war on road and construction work.
In August - September 1941, the German command decided to shoot all Polish prisoners of war held in Smolensk camps. The execution of the Polish officers was carried out directly by the headquarters of the 537th Construction Battalion under the leadership of Chief Lieutenant Arnes, Chief Lieutenant Rekst and Lieutenant Hott. The headquarters of this battalion was located in the village of Kozyi Gory. In the spring of 1943, when a provocation against the Soviet Union was already being prepared, the Nazis rounded up Soviet prisoners of war to excavate graves and, after the excavations, removed from the graves all documents dated after the spring of 1940. This is how the date of the supposed execution of Polish prisoners of war was “adjusted”. The Soviet prisoners of war who carried out the excavations were shot by the Germans, and local residents were forced to give testimony favorable to the Germans. 
On January 12, 1944, a Special Commission was formed to establish and investigate the circumstances of the execution of prisoners of war by Polish officers in the Katyn Forest (near Smolensk). This commission was headed by the chief surgeon of the Red Army, Lieutenant General of the Medical Service Nikolai Nilovich Burdenko, and included a number of prominent Soviet scientists. It is interesting that the commission included the writer Alexei Tolstoy and Metropolitan of Kiev and Galicia Nikolai (Yarushevich). Although public opinion in the West by this time was already quite biased, nevertheless, the episode with the execution of Polish officers in Katyn was included in the indictment of the Nuremberg Tribunal. That is, Hitler Germany’s responsibility for committing this crime was actually recognized.
For many decades the Katyn massacre was forgotten, however, when in the late 1980s. The systematic “shaking” of the Soviet state began, the history of the Katyn massacre was again “refreshed” by human rights activists and journalists, and then by the Polish leadership. In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev actually admitted the responsibility of the Soviet Union for the Katyn massacre. From that time on, and for almost thirty years now, the version that Polish officers were shot by the NKVD of the USSR has become the dominant version. Even the “patriotic turn” of the Russian state in the 2000s did not change the situation. Russia continues to “repent” for the crime committed by the Nazis, and Poland puts forward increasingly stringent demands for recognition of the execution in Katyn as genocide.
Meanwhile, many domestic historians and experts present their point of view on the Katyn tragedy. Thus, Elena Prudnikova and Ivan Chigirin in the book “Katyn. A lie that became history” draws attention to very interesting nuances. For example, all the corpses found in burials in Katyn were dressed in Polish army uniforms with insignia. But until 1941, Soviet prisoner of war camps were not allowed to wear insignia. All prisoners were equal in status and could not wear cockades or shoulder straps. It turns out that Polish officers simply could not have worn insignia at the time of death if they had actually been shot in 1940. Since the Soviet Union did not sign the Geneva Convention for a long time, the detention of prisoners of war with the preservation of insignia in Soviet camps was not allowed. Apparently, the Nazis did not think through this interesting point and themselves contributed to exposing their lies - Polish prisoners of war were shot after 1941, but then the Smolensk region was occupied by the Nazis. Anatoly Wasserman also points out this circumstance, referring to the work of Prudnikova and Chigirin, in one of his publications.
Private detective Ernest Aslanyan draws attention to a very interesting detail - Polish prisoners of war were killed with firearms manufactured in Germany. The NKVD of the USSR did not use such weapons. Even if the Soviet security officers had German weapons at their disposal, they were by no means in the same quantity as was used in Katyn. However, for some reason this circumstance is not considered by supporters of the version that the Polish officers were killed by the Soviet side. More precisely, this question, of course, was raised in the media, but the answers to it were given somewhat incomprehensible, notes Aslanyan.
The version about the use of German weapons in 1940 in order to “write off” the corpses of Polish officers as Nazis really seems very strange. The Soviet leadership hardly expected that Germany would not only start a war, but would also be able to reach Smolensk. Accordingly, there was no reason to “expose” the Germans by shooting Polish prisoners of war with German weapons. Another version seems more plausible - executions of Polish officers in the camps of the Smolensk region actually took place, but not at all on the scale that Hitler’s propaganda spoke of. There were many camps in the Soviet Union where Polish prisoners of war were kept, but nowhere else were mass executions carried out. What could force the Soviet command to arrange the execution of 12 thousand Polish prisoners of war in the Smolensk region? It is impossible to answer this question. Meanwhile, the Nazis themselves could well have destroyed Polish prisoners of war - they did not feel any reverence for the Poles, and were not distinguished by humanism towards prisoners of war, especially towards the Slavs. Killing several thousand Poles was no problem at all for Hitler’s executioners.
However, the version of the murder of Polish officers by Soviet security officers is very convenient in the modern situation. For the West, the use of Goebbels propaganda is a wonderful way to once again “prick” Russia and blame Moscow for war crimes. For Poland and the Baltic countries, this version is another tool of anti-Russian propaganda and a way to achieve more generous funding from the United States and the European Union. As for the Russian leadership, its agreement with the version of the execution of the Poles on the orders of the Soviet government is explained, apparently, by purely opportunistic considerations. As “our answer to Warsaw,” we could raise the topic of the fate of Soviet prisoners of war in Poland, of whom there were more than 40 thousand people in 1920. However, no one is addressing this issue.
A genuine, objective investigation into all the circumstances of the Katyn massacre is still waiting in the wings. We can only hope that it will completely expose the monstrous slander against the Soviet country and confirm that the real executioners of Polish prisoners of war were the Nazis.
(mostly captured officers of the Polish army) on the territory of the USSR during the Second World War.
The name comes from the small village of Katyn, located 14 kilometers west of Smolensk, in the area of the Gnezdovo railway station, near which mass graves of prisoners of war were first discovered.
As evidenced by documents transferred to the Polish side in 1992, the executions were carried out in accordance with the resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940.
According to an extract from minutes No. 13 of the Politburo meeting of the Central Committee, more than 14 thousand Polish officers, police officers, officials, landowners, factory owners and other “counter-revolutionary elements” who were in camps and 11 thousand prisoners in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus were sentenced to death.
Prisoners of war from the Kozelsky camp were shot in the Katyn forest, not far from Smolensk, Starobelsky and Ostashkovsky - in nearby prisons. As follows from a secret note from KGB Chairman Shelepin sent to Khrushchev in 1959, a total of about 22 thousand Poles were killed then.
In 1939, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Red Army crossed the eastern border of Poland and were captured by Soviet troops, according to different sources, from 180 to 250 thousand Polish troops, many of whom, mostly privates, were then released. 130 thousand military personnel and Polish citizens, whom the Soviet leadership considered “counter-revolutionary elements,” were imprisoned in the camps. In October 1939, residents of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus were liberated from the camps, and more than 40 thousand residents of Western and Central Poland were transferred to Germany. The remaining officers were concentrated in the Starobelsky, Ostashkovsky and Kozelsky camps.
In 1943, two years after the occupation of the western regions of the USSR by German troops, reports appeared that NKVD officers had shot Polish officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk. For the first time, the Katyn graves were opened and examined by the German doctor Gerhard Butz, who headed the forensic laboratory of Army Group Center.
On April 28-30, 1943, an International Commission consisting of 12 forensic medicine specialists from a number of European countries (Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland, Italy, Croatia, Holland, Slovakia, Romania, Switzerland, Hungary, France, Czech Republic) worked in Katyn. Both Dr. Butz and the international commission concluded that the NKVD was involved in the execution of captured Polish officers.
In the spring of 1943, a technical commission of the Polish Red Cross worked in Katyn, which was more cautious in its conclusions, but the facts recorded in its report also implied the guilt of the USSR.
In January 1944, after the liberation of Smolensk and its environs, the Soviet “Special Commission to establish and investigate the circumstances of the execution of prisoners of war Polish officers in the Katyn Forest by the Nazi invaders” worked in Katyn, headed by the chief surgeon of the Red Army, academician Nikolai Burdenko. During the exhumation, examination of material evidence and autopsy of corpses, the commission found that the executions were carried out by the Germans no earlier than 1941, when they occupied this area of the Smolensk region. The Burdenko Commission accused the German side of shooting the Poles.
The question of the Katyn tragedy remained open for a long time; The leadership of the Soviet Union did not recognize the fact of the execution of Polish officers in the spring of 1940. According to the official version, the German side used the mass grave in 1943 for propaganda purposes against the Soviet Union, to prevent the surrender of German soldiers and to attract the peoples of Western Europe to participate in the war.
After Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the USSR, they returned to the Katyn case again. In 1987, after the signing of the Soviet-Polish Declaration on Cooperation in the Fields of Ideology, Science and Culture, a Soviet-Polish commission of historians was created to investigate this issue.
The Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the USSR (and then the Russian Federation) was entrusted with the investigation, which was conducted simultaneously with the Polish prosecutor's investigation.
On April 6, 1989, a funeral ceremony took place to transfer symbolic ashes from the burial site of Polish officers in Katyn to be transferred to Warsaw. In April 1990, USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev handed over to Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski lists of Polish prisoners of war transported from the Kozelsky and Ostashkov camps, as well as those who had left the Starobelsky camp and were considered executed. At the same time, cases were opened in the Kharkov and Kalinin regions. On September 27, 1990, both cases were combined into one by the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation.
On October 14, 1992, the personal representative of Russian President Boris Yeltsin handed over to Polish President Lech Walesa copies of archival documents about the fate of Polish officers who died on the territory of the USSR (the so-called “Package No. 1”).
Among the transferred documents, in particular, was the protocol of the meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of the Soviet Union on March 5, 1940, at which it was decided to propose punishment to the NKVD.
On February 22, 1994, a Russian-Polish agreement “On burials and places of memory of victims of wars and repressions” was signed in Krakow.
On June 4, 1995, a memorial sign was erected in Katyn Forest at the site of the execution of Polish officers. 1995 was declared the Year of Katyn in Poland.
In 1995, a protocol was signed between Ukraine, Russia, Belarus and Poland, according to which each of these countries independently investigates crimes committed on their territory. Belarus and Ukraine provided the Russian side with their data, which was used in summing up the results of the investigation by the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation.
On July 13, 1994, the head of the investigative group of the GVP Yablokov issued a resolution to terminate the criminal case on the basis of paragraph 8 of Article 5 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR (due to the death of the perpetrators). However, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office and the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation canceled Yablokov's decision three days later, and assigned further investigation to another prosecutor.
As part of the investigation, more than 900 witnesses were identified and questioned, more than 18 examinations were carried out, during which thousands of objects were examined. More than 200 bodies were exhumed. During the investigation, all the people who worked at that time were questioned. government agencies. The director of the Institute of National Remembrance, Deputy Prosecutor General of Poland, Dr. Leon Keres, was notified of the results of the investigation. In total, the file contains 183 volumes, of which 116 contain information constituting a state secret.
The Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation reported that during the investigation of the Katyn case, the exact number of people who were kept in the camps “and in respect of whom decisions were made” was established - just over 14 thousand 540 people. Of these, more than 10 thousand 700 people were kept in camps on the territory of the RSFSR, and 3 thousand 800 people were kept in Ukraine. The death of 1 thousand 803 people (of those held in the camps) was established, the identities of 22 people were identified.
On September 21, 2004, the Main Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation again, now finally, terminated criminal case No. 159 on the basis of paragraph 4 of part 1 of Article 24 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation (due to the death of the perpetrators).
In March 2005, the Polish Sejm demanded that Russia recognize the mass executions of Polish citizens in the Katyn Forest in 1940 as genocide. After this, the relatives of the victims, with the support of the Memorial society, joined the fight for recognition of those executed as victims of political repression. The Main Military Prosecutor's Office does not see repression, answering that “the actions of a number of specific high-ranking officials of the USSR are qualified under paragraph “b” of Article 193-17 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR (1926) as an abuse of power, which had grave consequences in the presence of particularly aggravating circumstances, 21.09 .2004, the criminal case against them was terminated on the basis of clause 4, part 1, article 24 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation due to the death of the perpetrators.”
The decision to terminate the criminal case against the perpetrators is secret. The military prosecutor's office classified the events in Katyn as ordinary crimes, and classified the names of the perpetrators on the grounds that the case contained documents constituting state secrets. As a representative of the Main Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation stated, out of 183 volumes of the "Katyn Case", 36 contain documents classified as "secret", and in 80 volumes - "for official use". Therefore, access to them is closed. And in 2005, employees of the Polish prosecutor's office were familiarized with the remaining 67 volumes.
The decision of the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation to refuse to recognize those executed as victims of political repression was appealed in 2007 in the Khamovnichesky Court, which confirmed the refusals.
In May 2008, relatives of the Katyn victims filed a complaint with the Khamovnichesky Court in Moscow against what they considered to be an unjustified termination of the investigation. On June 5, 2008, the court refused to consider the complaint, arguing that district courts do not have jurisdiction to consider cases that contain information constituting state secrets. The Moscow City Court recognized this decision as legal.
The cassation appeal was transferred to the Moscow District Military Court, which rejected it on October 14, 2008. On January 29, 2009, the decision of the Khamovnichesky Court was supported by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation.
Since 2007, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) from Poland began to receive claims from relatives of Katyn victims against Russia, which they accuse of failing to conduct a proper investigation.
In October 2008, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) accepted for consideration a complaint in connection with the refusal of Russian legal authorities to satisfy the claim of two Polish citizens, who are descendants of Polish officers executed in 1940. The son and grandson of Army officers reached the Strasbourg court Polish Jerzy Yanovets and Anthony Rybovsky. Polish citizens justify their appeal to Strasbourg by the fact that Russia is violating their right to a fair trial by not complying with the provision of the UN Human Rights Convention, which obliges countries to ensure the protection of life and explain every case of death. The ECHR accepted these arguments, taking the complaint of Yanovets and Rybovsky into proceedings.
In December 2009, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) decided to consider the case as a matter of priority, and also referred a number of questions to the Russian Federation.
At the end of April 2010, Rosarkhiv, on the instructions of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, for the first time posted on its website electronic samples of original documents about the Poles executed by the NKVD in Katyn in 1940.
On May 8, 2010, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev handed over to the Polish side 67 volumes of criminal case No. 159 on the execution of Polish officers in Katyn. The transfer took place at a meeting between Medvedev and acting President of Poland Bronislaw Komorowski in the Kremlin. The President of the Russian Federation also handed over a list of materials in individual volumes. Previously, materials from a criminal case had never been transferred to Poland - only archival data.
In September 2010, as part of the execution by the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation of the Polish side's request for legal assistance, the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation transferred to Poland another 20 volumes of materials from the criminal case on the execution of Polish officers in Katyn.
In accordance with the agreement between Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski, the Russian side continues to work on declassifying materials from the Katyn case, which was conducted by the Main Military Prosecutor's Office. On December 3, 2010, the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation transferred another significant batch of archival documents to Polish representatives.
On April 7, 2011, the Russian Prosecutor General's Office handed over to Poland copies of 11 declassified volumes of the criminal case on the execution of Polish citizens in Katyn. The materials contained requests from the main research center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, certificates of criminal records and burial places of prisoners of war.
As Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Yuri Chaika reported on May 19, Russia has practically completed the transfer to Poland of the materials of the criminal case initiated upon the discovery of mass graves of the remains of Polish military personnel near Katyn (Smolensk region). Accessed May 16, 2011, Polish side.
In July 2011, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) declared admissible two complaints by Polish citizens against the Russian Federation related to the closure of the case of the execution of their relatives near Katyn, in Kharkov and in Tver in 1940.
The judges decided to combine two lawsuits filed in 2007 and 2009 by relatives of the deceased Polish officers into one proceeding.
The material was prepared based on information from RIA Novosti and open sources
Katyn: Chronicle of events
The term “Katyn crime” is a collective one; it refers to the execution in April-May 1940 of almost 22 thousand Polish citizens held in various camps and prisons of the NKVD of the USSR:
14,552 Polish officers and police captured by the Red Army in September 1939 and held in three NKVD prisoner of war camps, including -
4421 prisoners of the Kozelsky camp (shot and buried in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, 2 km from Gnezdovo station);
6311 prisoners of the Ostashkovsky camp (shot in Kalinin and buried in Medny);
3820 prisoners of the Starobelsky camp (shot and buried in Kharkov);
7305 arrested, held in prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSR(they were shot, apparently, in Kyiv, Kharkov, Kherson and Minsk, possibly in other unspecified places on the territory of the BSSR and Ukrainian SSR).
Katyn - just one of a number of execution sites - became a symbol of the execution of all of the above groups of Polish citizens, since it was in Katyn in 1943 that the burials of murdered Polish officers were first discovered. Over the next 47 years, Katyn remained the only reliably known burial site for the victims of this “operation.”
Background
On August 23, 1939, the USSR and Germany entered into a non-aggression pact - the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. The pact included secret protocol on the delimitation of spheres of interest, according to which, in particular, the eastern half of the territory of the pre-war Polish state was given to the Soviet Union. For Hitler, the pact meant the removal of the last obstacle before attacking Poland.
On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany attacked Poland, thereby starting World War II. On September 17, 1939, in the midst of the bloody battles of the Polish Army, which was desperately trying to stop the rapid advance of the German army deep into the country, in agreement with Germany, the Red Army invaded Poland - without a declaration of war by the Soviet Union and contrary to the non-aggression treaty in force between the USSR and Poland. Soviet propaganda declared the Red Army operation a “liberation campaign in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus.”
The advance of the Red Army came as a complete surprise to the Poles. Some did not even rule out that the entry of Soviet troops was directed against German aggression. Realizing that Poland was doomed in a war on two fronts, the Polish commander-in-chief issued an order not to engage in battle with Soviet troops and to resist only when attempting to disarm Polish units. As a result, only a few Polish units resisted the Red Army. Until the end of September 1939, the Red Army captured 240-250 thousand Polish soldiers and officers, as well as border guards, police, gendarmerie, prison guards, etc. Unable to contain such a huge mass of prisoners, immediately after disarmament, half of the privates and non-commissioned officers were sent home, and the rest were transferred by the Red Army to a dozen specially created prisoner of war camps of the NKVD of the USSR.
However, these NKVD camps were also overloaded. Therefore, in October - November 1939, the majority of privates and non-commissioned officers left the prisoner of war camps: the inhabitants of the territories occupied by the Soviet Union were sent home, and the inhabitants of the territories occupied by the Germans were handed over to Germany under an agreement on the exchange of prisoners (Germany in return handed over to the Soviet Union those captured German troops of Polish military personnel - Ukrainians and Belarusians, residents of territories ceded to the USSR).
The exchange agreements also concerned civilian refugees who found themselves in territory occupied by the USSR. They could apply to the German commissions operating on the Soviet side in the spring of 1940 for permission to return to permanent residence in Polish territories occupied by Germany.
About 25 thousand Polish privates and non-commissioned officers were left in Soviet captivity. In addition to them, army officers (about 8.5 thousand people), who were concentrated in two prisoner of war camps - Starobelsky in the Voroshilovgrad (now Lugansk) region and Kozelsky in the Smolensk (now Kaluga) region, as well as border guards, were not subject to dissolution or transfer to Germany. police officers, gendarmes, prison guards, etc. (about 6.5 thousand people), who were gathered in the Ostashkovo prisoner of war camp in the Kalinin (now Tver) region.
Not only prisoners of war became prisoners of the NKVD. One of the main means of “Sovietization” of the occupied territories was a campaign of continuous mass arrests for political reasons, directed primarily against officials of the Polish state apparatus (including officers and police officers who escaped captivity), members of Polish political parties and public organizations, industrialists, large landowners, and businessmen , border violators and other “enemies of Soviet power.” Before the verdict was passed, those arrested were kept for months in prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and BSSR, formed in the occupied territories of the pre-war Polish state.
On March 5, 1940, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (Bolsheviks) decided to shoot “14,700 Polish officers, officials, landowners, policemen, intelligence officers, gendarmes, siege guards and jailers in prisoner-of-war camps,” as well as 11,000 arrested and held in Western prisons. regions of Ukraine and Belarus "members of various counter-revolutionary espionage and sabotage organizations, former landowners, factory owners, former Polish officers, officials and defectors."
The basis for the Politburo’s decision was a note from the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR Beria to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks to Stalin, in which the execution of the listed categories of Polish prisoners and prisoners was proposed “based on the fact that they are all inveterate, incorrigible enemies of Soviet power.” At the same time, as a solution, the final part of Beria’s note was reproduced verbatim in the minutes of the Politburo meeting.
Execution
The execution of Polish prisoners of war and prisoners belonging to the categories listed in the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of March 5, 1940, was carried out in April and May of the same year.
All prisoners of the Kozelsky, Ostashkovsky and Starobelsky prisoner of war camps (except for 395 people) were sent in stages of approximately 100 people to the disposal of the NKVD Directorates for the Smolensk, Kalinin and Kharkov regions, respectively, which carried out executions as the stages arrived.
At the same time, executions of prisoners in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus took place.
395 prisoners of war, not included in the execution orders, were sent to the Yukhnovsky prisoner of war camp in the Smolensk region. They were then transferred to the Gryazovets prisoner of war camp in the Vologda region, from which at the end of August 1941 they were transferred to form the Polish Army in the USSR.
On April 13, 1940, shortly after the start of executions of Polish prisoners of war and prison inmates, an NKVD operation was carried out to deport their families (as well as the families of other repressed persons) living in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and BSSR to settlement in Kazakhstan.
Subsequent events
On June 22, 1941, Germany attacked the USSR. Soon, on July 30, an agreement was concluded between the Soviet government and the Polish government in exile (located in London) to invalidate the Soviet-German treaties of 1939 concerning “territorial changes in Poland”, to restore diplomatic relations between the USSR and Poland, to establish territory of the USSR of the Polish army to participate in the war against Germany and the liberation of all Polish citizens who were imprisoned in the USSR as prisoners of war, arrested or convicted, and also held in a special settlement.
This agreement was followed by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of August 12, 1941 on granting amnesty to Polish citizens who were imprisoned or in a special settlement (by that time there were about 390 thousand of them), and the Soviet-Polish military agreement of August 14, 1941 on the organization Polish army on the territory of the USSR. The army was planned to be formed from amnestied Polish prisoners and special settlers, primarily from former prisoners of war; General Vladislav Anders, who was urgently released from the internal NKVD prison at Lubyanka, was appointed its commander. 
In the fall of 1941 - spring of 1942, Polish officials repeatedly turned to the Soviet authorities with requests about the fate of thousands of captured officers who did not arrive at the places where Anders' army was formed. The Soviet side replied that there was no information about them. On December 3, 1941, in a personal meeting in the Kremlin with Polish Prime Minister General Wladislaw Sikorski and General Anders, Stalin suggested that these officers may have fled to Manchuria. (By the end of the summer of 1942, Anders’ army was evacuated from the USSR to Iran, and later it took part in Allied operations to liberate Italy from the Nazis.)
On April 13, 1943, German radio officially reported the discovery of burials of Polish officers executed by Soviet authorities in Katyn near Smolensk. By order of the German authorities, the identified names of those killed began to be read out over loudspeakers in the streets and squares of occupied Polish cities. On April 15, 1943, there was an official denial by the Sovinformburo, according to which Polish prisoners of war in the summer of 1941 were engaged in construction work west of Smolensk, fell into the hands of the Germans and were shot by them.
From the end of March to the beginning of June 1943, the German side, with the participation of the Technical Commission of the Polish Red Cross, carried out an exhumation in Katyn. The remains of 4,243 Polish officers were recovered, and the first and last names of 2,730 of them were established from personal documents discovered. The corpses were reburied in mass graves next to the original burials, and the results of the exhumation in the summer of the same year were published in Berlin in the book “Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn”. The Germans handed over the documents and objects found on the corpses for detailed study to the Institute of Forensic Medicine and Criminalistics in Krakow. (In the summer of 1944, all of these materials, except for a small part of them, secretly hidden by employees of the Krakow Institute, were taken by the Germans from Krakow to Germany, where, according to rumors, they were burned during one of the bombings.)
On September 25, 1943, the Red Army liberated Smolensk. Only on January 12, 1944, the Soviet “Special Commission to Establish and Investigate the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of Prisoners of War in the Katyn Forest” by the Nazi invaders was created, the chairman of which was appointed Academician N.N. Burdenko. Moreover, already from October 1943, specially seconded employees of the NKVD-NKGB of the USSR were preparing falsified “evidence” of the responsibility of the German authorities for the execution of Polish officers near Smolensk. According to the official report, the Soviet exhumation in Katyn was carried out from January 16 to 26, 1944, at the direction of the “Burdenko Commission”. From the secondary graves left after the German exhumation, and one primary grave, which the Germans did not have time to explore, the remains of 1,380 people were extracted; from the documents found, the commission established the personal data of 22 people. On January 26, 1944, the Izvestia newspaper published an official report from the “Burdenko Commission”, according to which Polish prisoners of war, who were in three camps west of Smolensk in the summer of 1941 and remained there after the invasion of German troops in Smolensk, were shot by the Germans in the fall of 1941.
To “legalize” this version on the world stage, the USSR tried to use the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which tried the main Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg in 1945-1946. However, after hearing on July 1-3, 1946, the testimony of witnesses for the defense (represented by German lawyers) and prosecution (represented by the Soviet side), due to the obvious unconvincingness of the Soviet version, the MVT decided not to include the Katyn massacre in its verdict as one of the crimes of Nazi Germany.
On March 3, 1959, Chairman of the KGB under the Council of Ministers of the USSR A.N. Shelepin sent to the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee N.S. Khrushchev received a top secret note confirming that 14,552 prisoners - officers, gendarmes, policemen, etc. persons of the former bourgeois Poland,” as well as 7,305 prisoners in prisons in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus were shot in 1940 based on the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of March 5, 1940 (including 4,421 people in the Katyn Forest). The note proposed to destroy all records of those executed.
At the same time, throughout post-war years, until the 1980s, the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs repeatedly made official demarches with the statement that the Nazis were established as responsible for the execution of Polish soldiers buried in the Katyn Forest.
But the “Katyn lie” is not only the USSR’s attempts to impose on the world community the Soviet version of the execution in the Katyn Forest. This is also one of the elements of the internal policy of the communist leadership of Poland, brought to power by the Soviet Union after the liberation of the country. Another direction of this policy was large-scale persecution and attempts to denigrate members of the Home Army (AK) - a massive anti-Hitler armed underground subordinated during the war to the Polish "London" government in exile (with which the USSR broke off relations in April 1943, after it appealed to the International Red Cross with a request to investigate the murder of Polish officers whose remains were discovered in the Katyn Forest). A symbol of the slander campaign against AK after the war was the posting of posters on the streets of Polish cities with the mocking slogan “AK is a spit-stained dwarf of reaction.” At the same time, any statements or actions that directly or indirectly questioned the Soviet version of the death of captured Polish officers were punished, including attempts by relatives to install memorial plaques in cemeteries and churches indicating 1940 as the time of death of their loved ones. In order not to lose their jobs, in order to be able to study at the institute, relatives were forced to hide the fact that a member of their family died in Katyn. Polish state security agencies were looking for witnesses and participants in the German exhumation and forced them to make statements “exposing” the Germans as the perpetrators of the execution. 
The Soviet Union admitted guilt only half a century after the execution of captured Polish officers - on April 13, 1990, an official TASS statement was published about “direct responsibility for the atrocities in the Katyn Forest of Beria, Merkulov and their henchmen,” and the atrocities themselves were qualified in it as “one of the gravest crimes of Stalinism." At the same time, USSR President M.S. Gorbachev handed over to the President of Poland W. Jaruzelski the lists of executed Polish prisoners of war (formally these were lists of orders to send convoys from the Kozelsky and Ostashkovsky camps to the NKVD in the Smolensk and Kalinin regions, as well as a list of records of former prisoners of war of the Starobelsky camp) and some other NKVD documents .
In the same year, the prosecutor's office of the Kharkov region opened criminal cases: on March 22 - on the discovery of burials in the forest park area of Kharkov, and on August 20 - against Beria, Merkulov, Soprunenko (who was in 1939-1943 the head of the USSR NKVD Directorate for Prisoners of War and internees), Berezhkov (chief of the Starobelsky prisoner of war camp of the NKVD of the USSR) and other NKVD employees. On June 6, 1990, the prosecutor's office of the Kalinin region opened another case - about the fate of Polish prisoners of war who were held in the Ostashkov camp and disappeared without a trace in May 1940. These cases were transferred to the Main Military Prosecutor's Office (GVP) of the USSR and on September 27, 1990 they were combined and accepted for proceedings under No. 159. The GVP formed an investigation team headed by A.V. Tretetsky.
In 1991, the investigative team of the Main Prosecutor General's Office, together with Polish specialists, carried out partial exhumations in the 6th quarter of the forest park zone of Kharkov, on the territory of the dacha village of the KGB in the Tver region, 2 km from the village of Mednoye and in the Katyn forest. The main result of these exhumations was the final procedural establishment of the burial places of the executed Polish prisoners of the Starobelsky and Ostashkovsky prisoner of war camps.
A year later, on October 14, 1992, by order of Russian President B.N. Yeltsin, documents were made public and transferred to Poland, exposing the leadership of the USSR in committing the “Katyn crime” - the above-mentioned decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of March 5, 1940 on the execution of Polish prisoners, Beria’s “staged” note to this decision, addressed to Stalin (with handwritten signatures of Politburo members Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and Mikoyan, as well as marks of voting “for” Kalinin and Kaganovich), a note from Shelepin to Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959 and other documents from the Presidential Archives. Thus, documentary evidence became available to the public that the victims of the “Katyn crime” were executed for political reasons - as “inveterate, incorrigible enemies of the Soviet regime.” At the same time, it became known for the first time that not only prisoners of war were shot, but also prisoners in prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and BSSR. The Politburo decision of March 5, 1940 ordered, as already mentioned, the execution of 14,700 prisoners of war and 11 thousand prisoners. From Shelepin’s note to Khrushchev it follows that approximately the same number of prisoners of war were shot, but fewer prisoners were shot - 7,305 people. The reason for the "underfulfillment" is unknown.
On August 25, 1993, Russian President B.N. Yeltsin, with the words “Forgive us...”, laid a wreath at the monument to the victims of Katyn at the Powązki memorial cemetery in Warsaw.
On May 5, 1994, the Deputy Head of the Security Service of Ukraine, General A. Khomich, handed over to his deputy Prosecutor General Poland S. Snezhko named alphabetical list of 3435 prisoners in prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR, indicating the numbers of orders, which, as has been known since 1990, meant being sent to death. The list, immediately published in Poland, became conventionally called the “Ukrainian list.”
The “Belarusian list” is still unknown. If the “Shelepinsky” number of executed prisoners is correct and if the published “Ukrainian list” is complete, then the “Belarusian list” should include 3870 people. Thus, to date we know the names of 17,987 victims of the “Katyn crime”, and 3,870 victims (prisoners of prisons in the western regions of the BSSR) remain nameless. The burial places are reliably known only for 14,552 executed prisoners of war.
On July 13, 1994, the head of the investigative group of the Main Prosecutor’s Office A.Yu. Yablokov (who replaced A.V. Tretetsky) issued a resolution to terminate the criminal case on the basis of paragraph 8 of Article 5 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR (due to the death of the perpetrators), and in the resolution Stalin, members of the Politburo Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Kalinin and Kaganovich, Beria and other leaders and NKVD employees, as well as the perpetrators of the executions, were found guilty of committing crimes under paragraphs “a”, “b”, “c” of Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity). It was precisely this qualification of the “Katyn affair” (but in relation to the Nazis) that was already given by the Soviet side in 1945-1946 when it was submitted to the IMT for consideration. Three days later, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office and the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation canceled Yablokov's decision, and further investigation was assigned to another prosecutor.
In 2000, Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Russian memorial complexes were opened at the burial sites of executed prisoners of war: June 17 in Kharkov, July 28 in Katyn, September 2 in Medny.
On September 21, 2004, the Main Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation terminated criminal case No. 159 on the basis of paragraph 4 of part 1 of Article 24 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation (due to the death of the perpetrators). Having informed the public about this only a few months later, the then Chief Military Prosecutor A.N. Savenkov, at his press conference on March 11, 2005, declared secret not only most of the investigation materials, but also the resolution itself to terminate the “Katyn case.” Thus, the personal composition of the perpetrators contained in the resolution was also classified.
From the response of the Main Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation to the subsequent request from Memorial, it is clear that “a number of specific high-ranking officials of the USSR” were found guilty, whose actions were qualified under paragraph “b” of Article 193-17 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR in force in 1926-1958 (abuse of power by a person in command composition of the Red Army, which had serious consequences in the presence of particularly aggravating circumstances).
The GVP also reported that in 36 volumes of the criminal case there are documents classified as “secret” and “top secret,” and in 80 volumes there are documents classified “for official use.” On this basis, access to 116 of the 183 volumes is closed.
In the fall of 2005, Polish prosecutors were familiarized with the remaining 67 volumes, “not containing information constituting state secrets.”
In 2005-2006, the GVP of the Russian Federation refused to consider applications submitted by relatives and Memorial for the rehabilitation of a number of specific executed Polish prisoners of war as victims of political repression, and in 2007, the Khamovnichesky District Court of Moscow and the Moscow City Court confirmed these refusals by the GVP.
In the first half of the 1990s, our country took important steps towards recognizing the truth in the “Katyn case”. The Memorial Society believes that now we need to return to this path. It is necessary to resume and complete the investigation of the “Katyn crime”, give it an adequate legal assessment, make public the names of all those responsible (from decision-makers to ordinary executors), declassify and make public all investigation materials, establish the names and burial places of all executed Polish citizens, recognize executed by victims of political repression and rehabilitate them in accordance with the Russian Law “On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression.”
The information was prepared by the International Society "Memorial".
Information from the brochure “Katyn”, released for the presentation of the film of the same name by Andrzej Wajda in Moscow in 2007.
Illustrations in the text: made during the German exhumation in 1943 in Katyn (published in books: Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn. Berlin, 1943; Katyń: Zbrodnia i propaganda: niemieckie fotografie dokumentacyjne ze zbiorów Instytutu Za-chodniego. Poznań, 2003), photographs taken by Aleksey Pamyatnykh during the exhumation carried out by the GVP in 1991 in Medny.
In the application:
- Order No. 794/B dated March 5, 1940, signed by L. Beria, with a resolution by I. Stalin, K. Voroshilov, V. Molotov, A. Mikoyan;
- Note from A. Shelepin to N. Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959
During World War II, both sides of the conflict committed many crimes against humanity. Millions of civilians and military personnel died. One of the controversial pages of that history is the execution of Polish officers near Katyn. We will try to find out the truth, which was hidden for a long time by blaming others for this crime.
For more than half a century, the real events in Katyn were hidden from the world community. Today, information on the case is not secret, although opinions on this matter are ambiguous among historians and politicians, as well as among ordinary citizens who participated in the conflict between the countries.
Katyn massacre
For many, Katyn became a symbol of brutal murders. The shooting of Polish officers cannot be justified or understood. It was here, in the Katyn Forest in the spring of 1940, that thousands of Polish officers were killed. The mass murder of Polish citizens was not limited to this place. Documents were made public according to which, during April-May 1940, more than 20 thousand Polish citizens were exterminated in various NKVD camps.
The shooting in Katyn has long complicated Polish-Russian relations. Since 2010, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and the State Duma have recognized that the mass murder of Polish citizens in the Katyn Forest was the activity of the Stalinist regime. This was made public in the statement “On the Katyn tragedy and its victims.” However, not all public and politicians in the Russian Federation they agree with this statement.
Captivity of Polish officers
Second World War for Poland began on September 1, 1939, when Germany entered its territory. England and France did not enter into conflict, awaiting the outcome of further events. Already on September 10, 1939, USSR troops entered Poland with the official goal of protecting the Ukrainian and Belarusian population of Poland. Modern historiography calls such actions of aggressor countries the “fourth partition of Poland.” Red Army troops occupied the territory of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. By decision, these lands became part of Poland.
The Polish military, defending their lands, could not resist the two armies. They were quickly defeated. Eight camps for Polish prisoners of war were created locally under the NKVD. They are directly related to the tragic event, called the “execution in Katyn”.
In total, up to half a million Polish citizens were captured by the Red Army, most of whom were eventually released, and about 130 thousand people ended up in camps. After a while, some of the ordinary military, natives of Poland, were sent home, more than 40 thousand were transported to Germany, the rest (about 40 thousand) were distributed among five camps:
- Starobelsky (Lugansk) - 4 thousand officers.
- Kozelsky (Kaluga) - 5 thousand officers.
- Ostashkovsky (Tver) - gendarmes and police officers in the amount of 4,700 people.
- allocated for road construction - 18 thousand privates.
- 10 thousand ordinary soldiers were sent to work in the Krivoy Rog basin.
By the spring of 1940, letters to relatives, which had previously been regularly transmitted through the Red Cross, stopped coming from prisoners of war in three camps. The reason for the silence of the prisoners of war was Katyn, the history of the tragedy of which connected the fates of tens of thousands of Poles.
Execution of prisoners
In 1992, a proposal document dated August 3, 1940 from L. Beria to the Politburo was made public, which discussed the issue of shooting Polish prisoners of war. The decision on capital punishment was made on March 5, 1940.
At the end of March, the NKVD completed the development of the plan. Prisoners of war from the Starobelsky and Kozelsky camps were taken to Kharkov and Minsk. Former gendarmes and police officers from the Ostashkovsky camp were transported to the Kalinin prison, from which ordinary prisoners were taken in advance. Huge pits were dug not far from the prison (Mednoe village).
In April, prisoners began to be taken out for execution in groups of 350-400. Those sentenced to death assumed that they would be released. Many left in the carriages in high spirits, not even realizing that they would soon die.
How the execution at Katyn took place:
- the prisoners were tied up;
- they threw an overcoat over their heads (not always, only for those who were especially strong and young);
- led to a dug ditch;
- killed by a shot in the back of the head from a Walther or Browning.
It was the latter fact that for a long time indicated that German troops were guilty of crimes against Polish citizens.
Prisoners from the Kalinin prison were killed right in their cells.
From April to May 1940 the following were shot:
- in Katyn - 4421 prisoners;
- in the Starobelsky and Ostashkovsky camps - 10,131;
- in other camps - 7305.
Who was shot in Katyn? Not only career officers were executed, but also lawyers, teachers, engineers, doctors, professors and other representatives of the intelligentsia mobilized during the war.
"Missing" officers
When Germany attacked the USSR, negotiations began between the Polish and Soviet governments regarding joining forces against the enemy. Then they began to search for the officers taken to Soviet camps. But the truth about Katyn was still unknown.
None of the missing officers could be found, and the assumption that they escaped from the camps was unfounded. There was no news or mention of those who ended up in the camps mentioned above.
The officers, or rather their bodies, were found only in 1943. Mass graves of executed Polish citizens were discovered in Katyn.
German side investigation
German troops were the first to discover mass graves in the Katyn Forest. They exhumed the excavated bodies and conducted their investigation.
The exhumation of the bodies was carried out by Gerhard Butz. International commissions were brought in to work in the village of Katyn, which included doctors from German-controlled European countries, as well as representatives of Switzerland and Poles from the Red Cross (Polish). Representatives of the International Red Cross were not present due to a ban by the USSR government.
The German report included the following information about Katyn (the execution of Polish officers):
- As a result of the excavations, eight mass graves were discovered, from which 4,143 people were removed and reburied. Most of the dead were identified. In graves No. 1-7 people were buried in winter clothes (fur jackets, overcoats, sweaters, scarves), and in grave No. 8 - in summer clothes. Also in graves No. 1-7 were found newspaper scraps dating from April-March 1940, and there were no traces of insects on the corpses. This indicated that the execution of Poles in Katyn took place in the cool season, that is, in the spring.
- Many personal belongings were found with the dead; they indicated that the victims were in the Kozelsk camp. For example, letters from home addressed to Kozelsk. Many also had snuff boxes and other items with the inscription “Kozelsk”.
- Tree cuttings showed that they were planted on the graves about three years ago from the time of discovery. This indicated that the pits were filled in in 1940. At this time, the territory was under the control of Soviet troops.
- All Polish officers in Katyn were shot in the back of the head with German-made bullets. However, they were produced in the 20-30s of the 20th century and were exported in large quantities to the Soviet Union.
- The hands of those executed were tied with a cord in such a way that when trying to separate them, the noose was tightened even more. The victims from grave No. 5 had their heads wrapped so that when trying to make any movement, the noose strangled the future victim. In other graves, the heads were also tied, but only those who stood out sufficiently physical strength. On the bodies of some of the dead, traces of a tetrahedral bayonet, like a Soviet weapon, were found. The Germans used flat bayonets.
- The commission interviewed local residents and found that in the spring of 1940, a large number of Polish prisoners of war arrived at the Gnezdovo station, who were loaded into trucks and taken towards the forest. The local residents never saw these people again.
The Polish commission, which was present during the exhumation and investigation, confirmed all German conclusions in this case, without finding any obvious traces of document fraud. The only thing the Germans tried to hide about Katyn (the execution of Polish officers) was the origin of the bullets used to carry out the killings. However, the Poles understood that representatives of the NKVD could also have similar weapons.
Since the autumn of 1943, representatives of the NKVD took up the investigation of the Katyn tragedy. According to their version, Polish prisoners of war were engaged in road work, and when the Germans arrived in the Smolensk region in the summer of 1941, they did not have time to evacuate them.
According to the NKVD, in August-September of the same year, the remaining prisoners were shot by the Germans. To hide traces of their crimes, representatives of the Wehrmacht opened the graves in 1943 and removed from them all documents dating from after 1940.
The Soviet authorities prepared a large number of witnesses to their version of events, but in 1990 the surviving witnesses retracted their testimony for 1943.
The Soviet commission, which carried out repeated excavations, falsified some documents, and completely destroyed some of the graves. But Katyn, the history of the tragedy of which haunted Polish citizens, nevertheless revealed its secrets.
Katyn case at the Nuremberg trials
After the war from 1945 to 1946. The so-called Nuremberg trials took place, the purpose of which was to punish war criminals. The Katyn issue was also raised at the trial. The Soviet side blamed German troops for the execution of Polish prisoners of war.
Many witnesses in this case changed their testimony; they refused to support the conclusions of the German commission, although they themselves took part in it. Despite all the attempts of the USSR, the Tribunal did not support the prosecution on the Katyn issue, which actually gave rise to the idea that Soviet troops were guilty of the Katyn massacre.
Official recognition of responsibility for Katyn
Katyn (the shooting of Polish officers) and what happened there have been reviewed by different countries many times. The United States conducted its investigation in 1951-1952; at the end of the 20th century, a Soviet-Polish commission worked on this case; since 1991, the Institute of National Remembrance was opened in Poland.
After the collapse of the USSR, the Russian Federation also took up this issue anew. Since 1990, a criminal investigation by the military prosecutor's office began. It received #159. In 2004, the criminal case was dropped due to the death of the accused.
The Polish side put forward a version of the genocide of the Polish people, but the Russian side did not confirm it. The criminal case on the fact of genocide was discontinued.
Today, the process of declassifying many volumes of the Katyn case continues. Copies of these volumes are transferred to the Polish side. The first important documents on prisoners of war in Soviet camps were handed over in 1990 by M. Gorbachev. The Russian side admitted that behind the crime in Katyn was Soviet authority represented by Beria, Merkulov and others.
In 1992, documents on the Katyn massacre were made public, which were stored in the so-called Presidential Archives. Modern scientific literature recognizes their authenticity.
Polish-Russian relations
The issue of the Katyn massacre appears from time to time in Polish and Russian media. For Poles, it has significant significance in the national historical memory.
In 2008, a Moscow court rejected a complaint about the execution of Polish officers by their relatives. As a result of the refusal, they filed a complaint against the Russian Federation with the European Court. Russia was accused of ineffective investigations, as well as of neglecting the close relatives of the victims. In April 2012, he qualified the execution of prisoners as a war crime, and ordered Russia to pay 10 of the 15 plaintiffs (relatives of 12 officers killed in Katyn) 5 thousand euros each. This was compensation for the plaintiffs' legal costs. It is difficult to say whether the Poles, for whom Katyn has become a symbol of family and national tragedy, achieved their goal.
Official position of the Russian authorities
Modern leaders of the Russian Federation, V.V. Putin and D.A. Medvedev, share the same point of view on the Katyn massacre. They made statements several times condemning the crimes of the Stalinist regime. Vladimir Putin even expressed his assumption, which explained Stalin's role in the murder of Polish officers. In his opinion, the Russian dictator thus avenged his defeat in 1920 in the Soviet-Polish war.
In 2010, D. A. Medvedev initiated the publication of documents classified in Soviet times from “package No. 1” on the website of the Russian Archive. The Katyn massacre, the official documents of which are available for discussion, is still not fully resolved. Some volumes of this case still remain classified, but D. A. Medvedev told the Polish media that he condemns those who doubt the authenticity of the documents presented.
On November 26, 2010, the State Duma of the Russian Federation adopted the document “On the Katyn Tragedy...”. This was opposed by representatives of the Communist Party faction. According to the accepted statement, the Katyn massacre was recognized as a crime that was committed on the direct orders of Stalin. The document also expresses sympathy for the Polish people.
In 2011 official representatives The Russian Federation began to declare its readiness to consider the issue of rehabilitation of the victims of the Katyn massacre.
Memory of Katyn
Among the Polish population, the memory of the Katyn massacre has always remained part of history. In 1972, a committee was created in London by Poles in exile, which began collecting funds for the construction of a monument to the victims of the massacre of Polish officers in 1940. These efforts were not supported by the British government, as they were afraid of the reaction of the Soviet government.
By September 1976, a monument was opened at the Gunnersberg cemetery, which is located west of London. The monument is a low obelisk with inscriptions on the pedestal. The inscriptions are made in two languages - Polish and English. They say that the monument was built in memory of more than 10 thousand Polish prisoners in Kozelsk, Starobelsk, Ostashkov. They went missing in 1940, and part of them (4,500 people) were exhumed in 1943 near Katyn.
Similar monuments to the victims of Katyn were erected in other countries of the world:
- in Toronto (Canada);
- in Johannesburg (South Africa);
- in New Britain (USA);
- at the Military Cemetery in Warsaw (Poland).
The fate of the 1981 monument at the Military Cemetery was tragic. After installation, it was removed at night by unknown people using a construction crane and machines. The monument was in the form of a cross with the date “1940” and the inscription “Katyn”. Adjoining the cross were two pillars with the inscriptions “Starobelsk” and “Ostashkovo”. At the foot of the monument were the letters “V. P.”, meaning “Eternal Memory”, as well as the coat of arms of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the form of an eagle with a crown.
The memory of the tragedy of the Polish people was well illuminated in his film “Katyn” by Andrzej Wajda (2007). The director himself is the son of Jakub Wajda, a career officer who was executed in 1940.
The film was shown in different countries, including in Russia, and in 2008 he was in the top five of the international Oscar award in the category for best foreign film.
The plot of the film is based on a story by Andrzej Mularczyk. The period from September 1939 to the autumn of 1945 is described. The film tells the story of the fate of four officers who ended up in a Soviet camp, as well as their close relatives who do not know the truth about them, although they guess the worst. Through the fate of several people, the author conveyed to everyone what the real story was.
“Katyn” cannot leave the viewer indifferent, regardless of nationality.
