The question of who is responsible for the death of Polish military prisoners in Katyn (more precisely, in the Kozya Gory tract) has been discussed for more than 70 years. “LG” has addressed this topic more than once. There are also official estimates from the authorities. But many dark places remain. Professor of the Moscow State Linguistic University (MSLU), Doctor of Historical Sciences Alexey PLOTNIKOV shares his vision of the situation.

- Alexey Yuryevich, what was the total number of Polish prisoners of war?

There are several sources, and there are discrepancies between them. According to various estimates, 450-480 thousand Polish soldiers were captured by the Germans in 1939. In the USSR there were 120-150 thousand of them. The data cited by a number of experts - primarily Polish - about the internment of 180 or even 220-250 thousand Poles is not supported by documents. It should be emphasized that at first these people - from a legal point of view - were in the position of internees. This is explained by the fact that there was no war between the Soviet Union and Poland. But after the Polish government in exile declared war on the Soviet Union on December 18, 1939 (the so-called Angers Declaration) over the transfer of Vilna and the Vilna region to Lithuania, the internees automatically turned into prisoners of war. In other words, legally, and then actually, prisoners of war, they were made by their own emigrant government.

- How did their destinies turn out?

Differently. Natives of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, privates and sergeants, were sent home even before the emigrant government declared war on the USSR. It is not known exactly how many there were. Then the USSR and Germany entered into an agreement under which all prisoners of war conscripted into the Polish army from territory ceded to the USSR, but captured by the Germans, were transferred to the Soviet Union, and vice versa. As a result of the exchange in October and November 1939, about 25 thousand prisoners of war were transferred to the USSR - citizens of the former Poland, natives of territories ceded to the Soviet Union, and more than 40 thousand to Germany. Most of them, privates and sergeants, were sent home. The officers were not released. Employees of the border service, police and punitive structures were also detained - those who were suspected of involvement in sabotage and espionage activities against the USSR. Indeed, in the 1920-1930s, Polish intelligence was very active in the western regions of the Soviet Union.
By the beginning of 1940, no more than 30 thousand Polish prisoners of war remained in the USSR. Of these, approximately 10 thousand are officers. They were distributed to specially created camps. There were 4,500 Polish prisoners of war in the Kozelsky camp (in 1940 - Western, now Kaluga region), 6,300 in Ostashkovsky (Kalinin, now Tver region), and 3,800 in the Starobelsky camp (Voroshilovgrad, now Lugansk region). At the same time, captured officers were kept mainly in the Starobelsky and Kozelsky camps. Ostashkovsky was predominantly “soldiers”, there were no more than 400 officers. Some Poles were in camps in Western Belarus and Western Ukraine. These are the original numbers.

On July 30, 1941, the Kremlin and the Sikorsky government signed a political agreement and an additional protocol to it. It provided for the provision of an amnesty to all Polish prisoners of war. These allegedly turned out to be 391,545 people. How does this compare with the numbers you provided?

Indeed, about 390 thousand Poles were included in the amnesty in August 1941. There is no contradiction here, since along with prisoners of war in 1939-1940, civilians were also interned. This is a separate topic. We are talking about prisoners of war - former Polish soldiers of the Polish Army.

- Where and how many, besides Katyn, were Polish prisoners of war shot during the Great Patriotic War?

It’s unlikely that anyone will name it exactly. If only because some of the archival documents are still classified. I will only say about two burials not far from Katyn (Goat Mountains). The first was located in Serebryanka (Dubrovenka) near Krasny Bor, the second - not yet documented - to the west of the village of Katyn. Information about him is contained in the memoirs of the daughter of one of the dead Poles, Shchiradlovskaya-Petsa.

Your opponents claim that Polish prisoners of war in Katyn were shot on the orders of Stalin. Why don't you agree with them?

Supporters of the Polish (it would be more honest to say - Goebbels) version do not explain, but ignore or openly suppress facts that are inconvenient for themselves.
I will list the main ones. First of all, it has been proven: German-made cartridges of 6.35 and 7.65 mm caliber (GECO and RWS) were found at the scene of the execution. This indicates that the Poles were killed with German pistols. The Red Army and the NKVD troops did not have weapons of such calibers. Attempts by the Polish side to prove the purchase of such pistols in Germany specifically for the execution of Polish prisoners of war are untenable. The NKVD used its own standard weapons. These are revolvers, and the officers have TT pistols. Both are 7.62 mm caliber.
In addition, and this is also documented, the hands of some of those executed were tied with paper twine. This was not produced in the USSR at that time, but it was produced in Europe, including Germany.
Another important fact: documents on the execution of the sentence were not found in the archives, just as the execution sentence itself was not found, without which no execution would be possible in principle.
Finally, documents were found on individual corpses. Moreover, both by the Germans during the exhumation in February-May 1943, and by the Burdenko commission in 1944: officer IDs, passports, and other identification documents. This also indicates that the USSR was not involved in the execution. The NKVD would not have left such evidence - it was strictly prohibited by the relevant instructions. There would be no newspapers left that were printed in the spring of 1940, but they were “found” by the Germans in large quantities at burial sites. In the fall of 1941, the Germans themselves could leave documents with those executed: then, in their opinion, they had nothing to fear. Back in 1940, the Nazis, without hiding, destroyed several thousand representatives of the Polish elite. For example, in the Palmyra Forest near Warsaw. It is noteworthy that the Polish authorities rarely remember these victims.

- So it won’t be possible to declare them victims of the NKVD.

It won't work. The Polish version is untenable for a number of reasons. It is known that many witnesses saw the Poles alive in 1940-1941.
Archival documents have also been preserved about the transfer of cases against Polish prisoners of war to the Special Meeting (OSO) of the NKVD of the USSR, which did not have the right to sentence them to death, but could sentence them to a maximum of eight years in the camps. In addition, the USSR never carried out mass executions of foreign prisoners of war, especially officers. Especially in an out-of-court manner without completing the relevant procedures provided for by law. Warsaw stubbornly ignores this. And one more thing. Until the fall of 1941, in the Kozyi Gory tract there was no technical possibility of quietly shooting several thousand people. This tract is located 17 kilometers from Smolensk near the Gnezdovo station and until the war it remained an open recreation area for townspeople. There were pioneer camps here, an NKVD dacha burned by the Germans during their retreat in 1943. It was located 700 meters from the busy Vitebsk highway. And the burial sites themselves are located 200 meters from the highway. It was the Germans who surrounded this place with barbed wire and set up guards.

- Mass graves in Medny, Tver region... There is no complete clarity here either?

Tver (more precisely, the village of Mednoe near Tver) is the second point on the “Katyn map”, where Polish prisoners of war were allegedly buried. Recently the local community started talking about this loudly. Everyone is tired of the lies that the Poles and some of our fellow citizens are spreading. It is believed that Polish prisoners of war who were previously held in the Ostashkov camp are buried in Mednoye. Let me remind you that there were no more than 400 officers out of a total of 6,300 Polish prisoners of war. The Polish side categorically claims that they all lie in Medny. This contradicts the data contained in the memorandums of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation. They were sent to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in connection with the consideration in 2010-2013 of the “Case of Yanovets and others against Russia”. The memorandums of the Ministry of Justice - and they reflect our official position - clearly indicate that during the exhumation carried out in 1991 in Medny, the remains of only 243 Polish military personnel were discovered. Of these, 16 people were identified (identified by badges).

- To put it mildly, significant differences.

We must say frankly: this is obvious and unprincipled manipulation. Despite this, the Poles erected a memorial in Mednoye and hung signs with the names of the 6,300 Poles allegedly shot and buried there. The figures I have mentioned allow us to imagine the scale of cynicism and falsification that the Poles have resorted to and continue to resort to. It's sad that they have like-minded people in our country. We won’t speculate about their motives. But they have no arguments! This is the jesuitical and shameless position of the current Warsaw: to reject and ignore inconvenient facts and talk about its position as the only correct one and not subject to doubt.

- There is a lot of controversy in this regard in the so-called “Katyn No. 3” - Kyiv Bykivna.

In 2012, in Bykivna, the then presidents of Poland and Ukraine, Komorowski and Yanukovych, opened a memorial in memory of the three and a half thousand Polish officers allegedly shot there (please note: again, it was the officers). However, this has not been confirmed by anything. There are not even milestone lists that exist in the “Katyn case”. It is unfoundedly alleged that 3,500 Polish officers were kept in prisons in Western Ukraine. And supposedly they were all shot in Bykovnya.
The opponents' method of conducting discussions is amazing. We are used to presenting facts and arguments. And they give us figures taken from the ceiling, not supported by documents, and present them as indisputable evidence.

Have you ever personally had a discussion with those domestic historians who adhere to the Polish position?

I would be glad! We are always open for discussion. But our opponents avoid discussions and contacts. They operate on the principle of “a scorpion under a stone.” He usually sits for a long time, and at some point he crawls out, bites and hides again.

At the beginning of the year, the Polish Sejm received a bill from Deputy Zielinski. He proposed declaring July 12 as the Day of Remembrance for the victims of the 1945 “August Raid.” In Poland it is called Lesser Katyn or New Katyn. The feeling that the Poles bake their “Katyn” like pancakes...

This once again confirms that « Katyn” as such has long been a tool and at the same time a “source” of the information war against Russia. For some reason this is underestimated here. But in vain.
On July 9, the Polish Sejm adopted the law proposed by Zelinsky on “Remembrance Day on July 12.” So now official Warsaw has another “anti-Russian bogeyman”...
The history of “Little Katyn” is as follows. In July 1945, a military and security operation was carried out against gangs that committed murders and sabotage in the rear of the 1st Belorussian Front. During the operation, more than seven thousand armed people were detained. Approximately 600 of them turned out to be associated with the Home Army (AK). The Polish side claims that everyone was shot immediately. In Warsaw, they refer to one document - a coded telegram from the head of Smersh, Viktor Abakumov, to the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR, Lavrenty Beria, No. 25212 dated July 21, 1945. It allegedly talks about the liquidation of anti-Soviet formations and contains a “proposal to shoot” the mentioned 592 Poles. But in the USSR, I repeat once again, such extrajudicial executions have never been carried out - especially foreign prisoners of war.
At that time, the employees of the GUKR “Smersh” NGO of the USSR did not have any legal grounds for shooting the Poles. Order of the NKVD of the USSR No. 0061 of February 6, 1945, which introduced at the final stage of the war in the front line the right to shoot bandits and saboteurs captured at the scene of a crime, became invalid after the end of hostilities. It was officially canceled even before the start of the “August Operation”. This alone calls into question the reliability of the encryption provided by the Poles.
The indiscriminate, “equalizing” nature of the application of mass execution to all 592 arrested “Akovites” without exception, and only to them, also raises great doubts. The usual practice of law enforcement agencies of the USSR at that time was to divide those arrested according to contingents, categories and other criteria with individual application of appropriate measures.
It is noteworthy that the above encryption was compiled in gross violation of the norms of official subordination. GUKR "Smersh" was not subordinate to the NKVD of the USSR and for this reason its chief, Colonel General Viktor Abakumov, who reported directly to Stalin, in principle should not have asked for "instructions" from the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs. Moreover, instructions about execution.
A recent examination of the “cipher telegram” clearly shows that we are dealing with a fake. If only because part of the document was printed on one typewriter, and part on another. The publication of the data from this examination, I hope, will put an end to Polish myth-making on these events. However, there is no doubt that “Malye”, “New” and other Katyns will be followed by others. Polish falsifiers of history have lost their sense of reality and are unlikely to stop.

- What can you say about the so-called grave No. 9, discovered in Katyn in the spring of 2000?

Indeed, in 2000, during the construction of a transformer station in Katyn, a previously unknown burial site was discovered. Based on their uniforms and other signs, they established that there were Polish military personnel there. At least two hundred remains. Poland responded to the news of the discovery of a new grave by saying that the wife of then Polish President Kwasniewski arrived in Katyn and laid flowers. But the Polish side did not respond to the proposal to carry out joint exhumation work. Since then, “Grave No. 9” has been a figure of “silence” for the Polish media.

- What, there are “other” Poles lying there?

It’s a paradox, but official Warsaw does not need the remains of “unverified” compatriots. She only needs “correct” burials, which confirm the Polish version of the execution by the “evil NKVD”. After all, during the exhumation of the “unknown grave”, there is almost no doubt that further evidence will be discovered pointing to German perpetrators. To complete the picture, it is necessary to say something about the actions of our authorities. Instead of initiating exhumation, they classified all materials. Russian researchers have not been allowed to visit “Grave No. 9” for sixteen years now. But I am sure: the truth will triumph sooner or later.

- If we sum up the conversation, what issues are among the unresolved?

I have already said most of it. The main thing is that the collected facts and evidence confirming the guilt of the Germans in the execution of Poles in Katyn are ignored by Warsaw and somehow “shamefully” kept silent by our authorities. It’s time to finally understand that the Polish side in the “Katyn issue” has long been not only biased, but also incapable of negotiating. Warsaw does not accept and will not accept any “inconvenient” arguments. The Poles will continue to call white black. They have driven themselves into the Katyn dead end, from which they cannot and do not want to get out. Russia must show political will here.

The “case of the Katyn execution” will dominate Russian-Polish relations for a very long time, causing serious passions among historians and ordinary citizens.

In Russia itself, adherence to one or another version of the “Katyn massacre” determines a person’s belonging to one or another political camp.

Establishing the truth in the Katyn history requires a cool head and prudence, but our contemporaries often lack both.

Relations between Russia and Poland have not been smooth and good neighborly for centuries. The collapse of the Russian Empire, which allowed Poland to regain state independence, did not change the situation in any way. New Poland immediately entered into an armed conflict with the RSFSR, in which it succeeded. By 1921, the Poles managed not only to take control of the territories of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, but also to capture up to 200,000 Soviet soldiers.

They don’t like to talk about the future fate of prisoners in modern Poland. Meanwhile, according to various estimates, from 80 to 140 thousand Soviet prisoners of war died in captivity from the appalling conditions of detention and abuse of the Poles.

Unfriendly relations between the Soviet Union and Poland ended in September 1939, when, after Germany attacked Poland, the Red Army occupied the territories of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, reaching the so-called “Curzon Line” - the border that was supposed to become the dividing line of the Soviet and Polish states according to proposal British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon.

Polish prisoners taken by the Red Army. Photo: Public Domain

Missing people

It should be noted that this liberation campaign of the Red Army in September 1939 was launched at the moment when the Polish government left the country and the Polish army was defeated by the Nazis.

In the territories occupied by Soviet troops, up to half a million Poles were captured, most of whom were soon released. About 130 thousand people remained in the NKVD camps, recognized by the Soviet authorities as dangerous.

However, by October 3, 1939, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks decided to disband private soldiers and non-commissioned officers of the Polish army who lived in the territories ceded to the Soviet Union. Privates and non-commissioned officers living in Western and Central Poland returned to these territories controlled by German troops.

As a result, just under 42,000 soldiers and officers of the Polish army, police, and gendarmes remained in Soviet camps, who were considered “inveterate enemies of Soviet power.”

Most of these enemies, from 26 to 28 thousand people, were employed in the construction of roads, and then sent to Siberia for special settlements. Many of them would later join the “Anders Army” that was being formed in the USSR, and the other part would become the founders of the Polish Army.

The fate of approximately 14,700 Polish officers and gendarmes held in the Ostashkovsky, Kozelsky and Starobelsky camps remained unclear.

With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, the question of these Poles hung in the air.

Doctor Goebbels' cunning plan

The first to break the silence were the Nazis, who in April 1943 informed the world about the “unprecedented crime of the Bolsheviks” - the execution of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest.

The German investigation began in February 1943, based on the testimony of local residents who witnessed how, in March-April 1940, NKVD officers brought Polish prisoners to the Katyn Forest, who were never seen alive again.

The Nazis assembled an international commission consisting of doctors from the countries under their control, as well as Switzerland, after which they exhumed corpses from mass graves. In total, the remains of more than 4,000 Poles were recovered from eight mass graves, who, according to the findings of the German commission, were killed no later than May 1940. Proof of this was declared to be the absence of things from the dead that could indicate a later date of death. The Hitler commission also considered it proven that the executions were carried out according to the scheme adopted by the NKVD.

The beginning of Hitler's investigation into the Katyn massacre coincided with the end of the Battle of Stalingrad - the Nazis needed a reason to divert attention from their military disaster. It was for this reason that the investigation into the “bloody crime of the Bolsheviks” was launched.

Calculation Joseph Goebbels was not only aimed at causing, as they now say, damage to the image of the USSR. The news of the destruction of Polish officers by the NKVD inevitably caused a rupture in relations between the Soviet Union and the Polish government in exile located in London.

Employees of the USSR NKVD in the Smolensk region, witnesses and/or participants in the Katyn execution in the spring of 1940. Photo: Commons.wikimedia.org

And since official London stood behind the Polish émigré government, the Nazis cherished the hope of creating a quarrel not only between the Poles and Russians, but also Churchill with Stalin.

The Nazis' plan was partly justified. Head of the Polish government in exile Wladislaw Sikorski really became furious, broke off relations with Moscow and demanded a similar step from Churchill. However, on July 4, 1943, Sikorsky died in a plane crash near Gibraltar. Later in Poland a version would appear that the death of Sikorsky was the work of the British themselves, who did not want to quarrel with Stalin.

The guilt of the Nazis in Nuremberg could not be proven

In October 1943, when the territory of the Smolensk region came under the control of Soviet troops, a Soviet commission began to work on the spot to investigate the circumstances of the Katyn massacre. The official investigation was launched in January 1944 by the “Special Commission to Establish and Investigate the Circumstances of the Execution of Prisoners of War Polish Officers in the Katyn Forest (near Smolensk) by the Nazi invaders,” which was headed by Chief Surgeon of the Red Army Nikolai Burdenko.

The commission came to the following conclusion: Polish officers who were in special camps in the Smolensk region were not evacuated in the summer of 1941 due to the rapid advance of the Germans. The captured Poles ended up in the hands of the Nazis, who carried out massacres in the Katyn Forest. To prove this version, the “Burdenko Commission” cited the results of an examination, which showed that the Poles were shot from German weapons. In addition, Soviet investigators found belongings and objects from the dead that indicated that the Poles were alive at least until the summer of 1941.

The guilt of the Nazis was also confirmed by local residents, who testified that they saw how the Nazis took Poles to the Katyn Forest in 1941.

In February 1946, the “Katyn massacre” became one of the episodes considered by the Nuremberg Tribunal. The Soviet side, blaming the Nazis for the execution, nevertheless failed to prove its case in court. Adherents of the “NKVD crime” version are inclined to consider such a verdict in their favor, but their opponents categorically disagree with them.

Photos and personal belongings of those executed at Katyn. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

Package number 1

Over the next 40 years, the parties did not present any new arguments, and everyone remained in their previous positions, depending on their political views.

A change in the Soviet position occurred in 1989, when documents were allegedly discovered in Soviet archives indicating that the execution of the Poles was carried out by the NKVD with the personal sanction of Stalin.

On April 13, 1990, a TASS statement was released in which the Soviet Union admitted responsibility for the shooting, declaring it "one of the grave crimes of Stalinism."

The main evidence of the guilt of the USSR is now considered to be the so-called “package number 1”, stored in the secret Special Folder of the Archive of the CPSU Central Committee.

Meanwhile, researchers point out that the documents from “package number 1” have a huge number of inconsistencies that allow them to be considered a fake. A lot of documents of this kind allegedly testifying to the crimes of Stalinism appeared at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, but most of them were exposed as fakes.

For 14 years, from 1990 to 2004, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office conducted an investigation into the “Katyn massacre” and ultimately came to the conclusion that Soviet leaders were guilty of the deaths of Polish officers. During the investigation, the surviving witnesses who testified in 1944 were again interrogated, and they stated that their evidence was false, given under pressure from the NKVD.

However, supporters of the version of “Nazi guilt” reasonably note that the investigation by the Main Military Prosecutor’s Office was carried out in the years when the thesis of “Soviet guilt for Katyn” was supported by the leaders of the Russian Federation, and therefore there is no need to talk about an impartial investigation.

Excavations in Katyn. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

“Katyn 2010” will be “hanged” on Putin?

The situation has not changed today. Since Vladimir Putin And Dmitry Medvedev in one form or another expressed support for the version of “the guilt of Stalin and the NKVD,” their opponents believe that an objective consideration of the “Katyn Affair” is impossible in modern Russia.

In November 2010, the State Duma adopted a statement “On the Katyn tragedy and its victims,” in which it recognizes the Katyn massacre as a crime committed on the direct orders of Stalin and other Soviet leaders, and expresses sympathy for the Polish people.

Despite this, the ranks of opponents of this version are not dwindling. Opponents of the State Duma’s decision of 2010 believe that it was caused not so much by objective facts as by political expediency and the desire to use this step to improve relations with Poland.

International memorial to the victims of political repression. Mass grave. Photo: www.russianlook.com

Moreover, this happened six months after the topic of Katyn acquired a new meaning in Russian-Polish relations.

On the morning of April 10, 2010, a Tu-154M aircraft, on board which was Polish President Lech Kaczynski, as well as 88 more political, public and military figures of this country, at the Smolensk airport. The Polish delegation flew to mourning events dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the tragedy in Katyn.

Despite the fact that the investigation showed that the main cause of the plane crash was the mistaken decision of the pilots to land in bad weather conditions, caused by pressure from high-ranking officials on the crew, in Poland itself to this day there are many who are convinced that the Russians deliberately destroyed the Polish elite.

No one can guarantee that in half a century another “special folder” will not suddenly surface, containing documents allegedly indicating that the plane of the Polish President was destroyed by FSB agents on the orders of Vladimir Putin.

In the Katyn massacre case, all the i’s are still not dotted. Perhaps the next generation of Russian and Polish researchers, free from political bias, will be able to establish the truth.

Without trial or investigation

In September 1939, Soviet troops entered Polish territory. The Red Army occupied those territories that were assigned to it according to the secret additional protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, that is, the current western Ukraine and Belarus. During the march, the troops captured almost half a million Polish residents, most of whom were later released or handed over to Germany. According to the official note, about 42 thousand people remained in Soviet camps.

On March 3, 1940, in a note to Stalin, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Beria wrote that in camps on Polish territory there were a large number of former officers of the Polish army, former employees of the Polish police and intelligence agencies, members of Polish nationalist counter-revolutionary parties, members of uncovered counter-revolutionary insurgent organizations and defectors.

People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Beria ordered the execution of Polish prisoners

He branded them “incorrigible enemies of Soviet power” and proposed: “Cases about prisoners of war in camps - 14,700 former Polish officers, officials, landowners, police officers, intelligence officers, gendarmes, siege officers and jailers, as well as cases about those arrested and in prison Western regions of Ukraine and Belarus in the amount of 11,000 people, members of various espionage and sabotage organizations, former landowners, factory owners, former Polish officers, officials and defectors - to be considered in a special manner, with the application of capital punishment to them - execution." Already on March 5, the Politburo made a corresponding decision.

Execution

By the beginning of April, everything was ready for the destruction of prisoners of war: prisons were liberated, graves were dug. The condemned were taken away for execution in groups of 300-400 people. In Kalinin and Kharkov, prisoners were shot in prisons. In Katyn, those who were especially dangerous were tied up, an overcoat thrown over their heads, taken to a ditch and shot in the back of the head.

At Katyn, prisoners were tied up and shot in the back of the head.

As subsequent exhumation showed, the shots were fired from Walter and Browning pistols, using German-made bullets. The Soviet authorities later used this fact as an argument when they tried to blame German troops for the execution of the Polish population at the Nuremberg Tribunal. The tribunal rejected the charge, which was, in essence, an admission of Soviet guilt for the Katyn massacre.

German investigation

The events of 1940 have been investigated several times. German troops were the first to investigate in 1943. They discovered burials in Katyn. The exhumation began in the spring. It was possible to approximately establish the time of burial: the spring of 1940, since many of the victims had scraps of newspapers from April-May 1940 in their pockets. It was not difficult to establish the identities of many of the executed prisoners: some of them kept documents, letters, snuff boxes and cigarette cases with carved monograms.

At the Nuremberg Tribunal, the USSR tried to shift the blame to the Germans

The Poles were shot with German bullets, but they were supplied in large quantities to the Baltic states and the Soviet Union. Local residents also confirmed that the trains with captured Polish officers were unloaded at a station nearby, and no one ever saw them again. One of the participants in the Polish commission in Katyn, Jozef Mackiewicz, described in several books how it was no secret to any of the locals that the Bolsheviks shot Poles here.

Soviet investigation

In the fall of 1943, another commission operated in the Smolensk region, this time a Soviet one. Her report states that there were actually three work camps for prisoners in Poland. The Polish population was employed in road construction. In 1941, there was no time to evacuate the prisoners, and the camps came under German leadership, which authorized the executions. According to members of the Soviet commission, in 1943 the Germans dug up the graves, seized all newspapers and documents indicating dates later than the spring of 1940, and forced locals to testify. The famous “Burdenko Commission” largely relied on the data from this report.

Crime of the Stalinist regime

In 1990, the USSR officially admitted responsibility for the Katyn massacre.

In April 1990, the USSR admitted responsibility for the Katyn massacre. One of the main arguments was the discovery of documents indicating that Polish prisoners were transported by order of the NKVD and were no longer listed in statistical documents. Historian Yuri Zorya found out that the same people were on the exhumation lists from Katyn and on the lists of those leaving the Kozel camp. It is interesting that the order of the lists for the stages coincided with the order of those lying in the graves, according to the German investigation.

Today in Russia the Katyn massacre is officially considered a “crime of the Stalinist regime.” However, there are still people who support the position of the Burdenko Commission and view the results of the German investigation as an attempt to distort Stalin’s role in world history.

On March 5, 1940, the USSR authorities decided to apply the highest form of punishment to Polish prisoners of war - execution. This marked the beginning of the Katyn tragedy, one of the main stumbling blocks in Russian-Polish relations.

Missing officers

On August 8, 1941, against the backdrop of the outbreak of war with Germany, Stalin entered into diplomatic relations with his newfound ally, the Polish government in exile. As part of the new treaty, all Polish prisoners of war, especially those captured in 1939 on the territory of the Soviet Union, were granted an amnesty and the right to free movement throughout the territory of the Union. The formation of Anders' army began. However, the Polish government was missing about 15,000 officers who, according to documents, were supposed to be in the Kozelsky, Starobelsky and Yukhnovsky camps. To all the accusations of the Polish General Sikorski and General Anders of violating the amnesty agreement, Stalin replied that all the prisoners were released, but could escape to Manchuria.

Subsequently, one of Anders’ subordinates described his alarm: “Despite the “amnesty”, Stalin’s own firm promise to return prisoners of war to us, despite his assurances that prisoners from Starobelsk, Kozelsk and Ostashkov were found and released, we did not receive a single call for help from prisoners of war from the above-mentioned camps. Questioning thousands of colleagues returning from camps and prisons, we have never heard any reliable confirmation of the whereabouts of the prisoners taken from those three camps.” He also owned the words spoken a few years later: “Only in the spring of 1943 a terrible secret was revealed to the world, the world heard a word that still emanates horror: Katyn.”

re-enactment

As you know, the Katyn burial site was discovered by the Germans in 1943, when these areas were under occupation. It was the fascists who contributed to the “promotion” of the Katyn case. Many specialists were involved, the exhumation was carefully carried out, they even took local residents on excursions there. The unexpected discovery in the occupied territory gave rise to a version of a deliberate staging, which was supposed to serve as propaganda against the USSR during the Second World War. This became an important argument in accusing the German side. Moreover, there were many Jews on the list of those identified.

The details also attracted attention. V.V. Kolturovich from Daugavpils outlined his conversation with a woman who, together with fellow villagers, went to look at the opened graves: “I asked her: “Vera, what did people say to each other while looking at the graves?” The answer was the following: “Our careless slobs can’t do that - it’s too neat a job.” Indeed, the ditches were perfectly dug under the cord, the corpses were laid out in perfect stacks. The argument, of course, is ambiguous, but we should not forget that according to the documents, the execution of such a huge number of people was carried out in the shortest possible time. The performers simply did not have enough time for this.

Double jeopardy

At the famous Nuremberg Trials on July 1-3, 1946, the Katyn massacre was blamed on Germany and appeared in the indictment of the International Tribunal (IT) in Nuremberg, section III “War Crimes”, for cruel treatment of prisoners of war and military personnel of other countries. Friedrich Ahlens, commander of the 537th regiment, was declared the main organizer of the execution. He also acted as a witness in the retaliatory accusation against the USSR. The tribunal did not support the Soviet accusation, and the Katyn episode is absent from the tribunal’s verdict. All over the world this was perceived as a “tacit admission” by the USSR of its guilt.

The preparation and progress of the Nuremberg trials were accompanied by at least two events that compromised the USSR. On March 30, 1946, the Polish prosecutor Roman Martin, who allegedly had documents proving the guilt of the NKVD, died. Soviet prosecutor Nikolai Zorya also fell victim, who died suddenly right in Nuremberg in his hotel room. The day before, he told his immediate superior, Prosecutor General Gorshenin, that he had discovered inaccuracies in the Katyn documents and that he could not speak with them. The next morning he “shot himself.” There were rumors among the Soviet delegation that Stalin ordered “to bury him like a dog!”

After Gorbachev admitted the guilt of the USSR, researcher on the Katyn issue Vladimir Abarinov in his work cites the following monologue from the daughter of an NKVD officer: “I’ll tell you what. The order regarding the Polish officers came directly from Stalin. My father said that he saw an authentic document with Stalin’s signature, what should he do? Put yourself under arrest? Or shoot yourself? My father was made a scapegoat for decisions made by others.”

Party of Lavrentiy Beria

The Katyn massacre cannot be blamed on just one person. Nevertheless, the greatest role in this, according to archival documents, was played by Lavrenty Beria, “Stalin’s right hand.” The leader’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, noted the extraordinary influence that this “scoundrel” had on her father. In her memoirs, she said that one word from Beria and a couple of forged documents was enough to determine the fate of future victims. The Katyn massacre was no exception. On March 3, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Beria suggested that Stalin consider the cases of Polish officers "in a special manner, with the application of capital punishment to them - execution." Reason: “All of them are sworn enemies of the Soviet regime, filled with hatred of the Soviet system.” Two days later, the Politburo issued a decree on the transport of prisoners of war and preparations for execution.

There is a theory about the forgery of Beria’s “Note”. Linguistic analyzes give different results; the official version does not deny Beria’s involvement. Nevertheless, statements about the falsification of the “note” are still being made.

Frustrated hopes

At the beginning of 1940, the most optimistic mood was in the air among Polish prisoners of war in Soviet camps. Kozelsky and Yukhnovsky camps were no exception. The convoy treated foreign prisoners of war somewhat more leniently than its own fellow citizens. It was announced that the prisoners would be transferred to neutral countries. In the worst case, the Poles believed, they would be handed over to the Germans. Meanwhile, NKVD officers arrived from Moscow and began work.

Before departure, the prisoners, who truly believed they were being sent to a safe place, were given vaccinations against typhoid fever and cholera, presumably to reassure them. Everyone received a packed lunch. But in Smolensk everyone was ordered to prepare to leave: “We have been standing on a siding in Smolensk since 12 o’clock. April 9, getting up in the prison cars and preparing to leave. We are being transported somewhere in cars, what next? Transportation in “crow” boxes (scary). We were taken somewhere in the forest, it looked like a summer cottage…” - this is the last entry in the diary of Major Solsky, who rests today in the Katyn forest. The diary was found during exhumation.

The downside of recognition

On February 22, 1990, the head of the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee, V. Falin, informed Gorbachev about new archival documents found that confirm the guilt of the NKVD in the Katyn execution. Falin proposed urgently forming a new position of the Soviet leadership in relation to this case and informing the President of the Polish Republic, Wladimir Jaruzelski, about new discoveries in the matter of the terrible tragedy.

On April 13, 1990, TASS published an official statement admitting the guilt of the Soviet Union in the Katyn tragedy. Jaruzelski received from Mikhail Gorbachev lists of prisoners being transferred from three camps: Kozelsk, Ostashkov and Starobelsk. The main military prosecutor's office opened a case on the fact of the Katyn tragedy. The question arose of what to do with the surviving participants of the Katyn tragedy.

This is what Valentin Alekseevich Alexandrov, a senior official of the CPSU Central Committee, told Nicholas Bethell: “We do not exclude the possibility of a judicial investigation or even a trial. But you must understand that Soviet public opinion does not entirely support Gorbachev's policy regarding Katyn. We in the Central Committee have received many letters from veterans’ organizations in which we are asked why we are defaming the names of those who were only doing their duty in relation to the enemies of socialism.” As a result, the investigation against those found guilty was terminated due to their death or lack of evidence.

Unresolved issue

The Katyn issue became the main stumbling block between Poland and Russia. When a new investigation into the Katyn tragedy began under Gorbachev, the Polish authorities hoped for a confession of guilt in the murder of all the missing officers, the total number of which was about fifteen thousand. The main attention was paid to the issue of the role of genocide in the Katyn tragedy. However, following the results of the case in 2004, it was announced that it was possible to establish the deaths of 1,803 officers, of whom 22 were identified.

The Soviet leadership completely denied the genocide against the Poles. Prosecutor General Savenkov commented on this as follows: “during the preliminary investigation, at the initiative of the Polish side, the version of genocide was checked, and my firm statement is that there is no basis to talk about this legal phenomenon.” The Polish government was dissatisfied with the results of the investigation. In March 2005, in response to a statement by the Main Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation, the Polish Sejm demanded recognition of the Katyn events as an act of genocide. Members of the Polish parliament sent a resolution to the Russian authorities, in which they demanded that Russia “recognize the murder of Polish prisoners of war as genocide” based on Stalin’s personal hostility towards the Poles due to defeat in the 1920 war. In 2006, relatives of the dead Polish officers filed a lawsuit in the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights, with the aim of obtaining recognition of Russia in the genocide. The end to this pressing issue for Russian-Polish relations has not yet been reached.

The case of the Katyn massacre 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.

Katyn tragedy: who shot the Polish officers?

Magazine: History from the “Russian Seven”, Almanac No. 3, autumn 2017
Category: Mysteries of the USSR
Text: Russian Seven

Strange haste

By 1940, up to half a million Poles found themselves 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 (from 26 to 28 thousand) of prisoners was 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 aimed at diverting public attention from national shame and switching to the “bloody atrocity of the Bolsheviks.” According to Joseph Goebbels, this would 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, Burdenko's 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. Her 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, the 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 by the Yeltsin 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.
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, this is simply being frivolously 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

Nevertheless, 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. In particular, Viktor Ilyukhin, a member of the Communist Party faction, spoke about this. 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.
Chief researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Yuri Zhukov, questions the authenticity of the key document of “package No. 1” - Beria’s note 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 summarizes.
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.” Moreover, 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 of 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 for allegedly Polish citizens shot by the Soviet authorities, they dug up a lot of corpses at the Smolensk Civil Cemetery and transported these corpses to the Katyn Forest, which made the local population very indignant.”
All the testimony that the German commission collected was extracted from the local population, Sakharov believes. In addition, the Polish residents called as witnesses signed documents in German, which they did not speak.
However, some documents that could shed light on the Katyn tragedy are still classified. In 2006, State Duma deputy Andrei Savelyev submitted a request to the archive service of the Armed Forces of the Russian Ministry of Defense about the possibility of declassifying such documents.
In response, the deputy was informed that “the expert commission of the Main Directorate of Educational Work of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation carried out an expert assessment of the documents on the Katyn case stored in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, and concluded that it was inappropriate to declassify them.”
Recently, 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 obvious that the Katyn case is still far from being resolved.

Why did the USSR and Poland exchange territories in 1951?

In 1951, the largest peaceful exchange of state territories in the history of Polish-Soviet relations took place. The agreement legitimizing this fact was signed in Moscow on February 15. The areas of the territories to be exchanged were the same! Each was equal to 480 square meters. km. Poland wanted to take ownership of the oil fields in the Nizhne-Ustrytsky region. In exchange for such a royal gift, the USSR was able to arrange “convenient railway communications.” The Soviet Union was interested in another profitable acquisition - the Lviv-Volyn coal deposit.
The agreement clearly stated that the Polish Republic and the USSR would exchange territories that were absolutely equal in area, “kilometer per kilometer.” All real estate located on these lands became the property of the new owner. The previous owners were not entitled to any compensation for its value. At the same time, the property had to be in good condition. Under the 1951 treaty, the USSR received land in the Lublin Voivodeship; A similar-sized part of the Drohobych region was transferred to Poland.