Katyn tragedy brief. Did the USSR shoot Polish officers in the Katyn forest?

There are still many unclear and contradictory aspects in the Katyn events, many inconsistencies that give rise to well-founded questions. But there are no clear and unambiguous answers to these questions.

However, so far the Katyn disputes have led to nothing. Opponents do not hear each other. Therefore, new versions are born. And new questions arise.

This article is devoted to different versions of the Katyn tragedy, as well as questions to which there is no answer.

Deep roots

The Katyn tragedy has a rich backstory. The roots of those events lie in the collapse Russian Empire in 1917 and in the subsequent division of its former territories.

Poland, which gained independence, wanted more - the restoration of the state within the historical borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of 1772 and the establishment of control over Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania. But Soviet Russia also wanted to control these territories.

Because of these contradictions, the Soviet-Polish war began in 1919, which ended in 1921 with the defeat of the Soviet Republic. Tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers ended up in Polish captivity, where many of them died in concentration camps. In March 1921, a peace treaty was signed in Riga, according to which Western Ukraine and Western Belarus went to Poland.

The USSR was able to win back the situation with the borders after 18 years. In August 1939, Germany and the USSR signed a non-aggression pact, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Previously, similar documents were concluded between Nazi Germany and Poland, Great Britain, France, Romania and Japan. Soviet Union was the last state in Europe to conclude such an agreement.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had an additional secret protocol, which discussed new possible borders of the USSR and Poland in the “case of territorial and political reorganization.”

On September 1, 1939, the Germans invaded Poland from the west and north. The Soviet Union began military operations against Poland only on September 17. By that time, the Polish army was practically destroyed by the Germans. The few pockets of Polish resistance were also eliminated. According to the agreement, Western Ukraine and Western Belarus were returned to the Soviet Union. And on September 22, Germany and the USSR held a joint military parade in Brest-Litovsk.

Thousands of Poles were captured by the Soviets, and it was decided to send them to several concentration camps for filtering and determining their future fate. This is how Polish prisoners of war ended up in the USSR. There is still debate about what happened to them next.

Two truths about Katyn

Historically, in the case of the execution of prisoners of war of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, there are two main mutually exclusive versions. Each of them has its own system of evidence, which opponents cannot ignore and cannot refute. Historians and ordinary citizens are divided into two irreconcilable camps that have been arguing with each other until they are hoarse for more than 70 years. Each side accuses opponents of falsifying facts and lying.

Katyn, Rosja, 04.1943

The first version was outlined by the Nazi occupation authorities in April 1943. An international commission consisting of 12 forensic doctors, mainly from countries occupied or allied with Germany, came to the conclusion that the Poles were shot before the war (in March-April 1940) by the Soviet NKVD. This version was voiced personally by the Nazi Minister of Education and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.

The second version was presented by the Soviet side after an investigation by a special commission in 1944, headed by surgeon Nikolai Burdenko. The commission came to the conclusion that the Soviet authorities in 1941 did not have time to evacuate captured Polish officers due to the rapid advance of the Germans, so the Poles were captured by the Nazis, who shot them. The Soviet side presented this version in February 1946 at the Nuremberg Tribunal. This version was the official Soviet point of view for many years.

But everything changed in the spring of 1990, when Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that the Katyn tragedy was “one of the grave crimes of Stalinism.” Then it was stated that the death of Polish officers in Katyn was the work of the NKVD. Then in 1992, this was confirmed by the first President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin.

Thus, the version that Polish prisoners of war were shot by the NKVD became the second official Russian state point of view on the Katyn tragedy. However, after this, the controversy surrounding the Katyn tragedy did not subside, as obvious contradictions and inconsistencies remained, and many questions were not answered.

Third version

However, it is quite possible that the Poles were shot by the Soviet and German sides. Moreover, the USSR and Germany could carry out executions of Poles separately at different times, or they could do it together. And this very likely explains the presence of two mutually exclusive systems of evidence. Each side was simply looking for evidence that they were right. This is the so-called third version, which some researchers have recently adhered to.

There is nothing fantastic in this version. Historians have long known about the secret economic and military-technical cooperation between the USSR and Germany, which developed in the 20s and 30s and was approved by Lenin.

In August 1922, a cooperation pact was concluded between the Red Army and the German Reichswehr. The German side could create military bases for testing on the territory of the Soviet Republic newest types weapons and equipment prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles, as well as for the education and training of military specialists. Soviet Russia not only had monetary compensation for Germany's use of these bases, but also received access to all new German military technologies and testing of weapons and equipment.

Thus, joint Soviet-German aviation and tank factories, joint command schools, and joint ventures for the production of chemical weapons appeared on the territory of the USSR. There are constant trips of delegations to exchange experience, training is organized at the academies of German and Soviet officers, joint field exercises and maneuvers are held, various chemical experiments are carried out and much more.

The German military leadership underwent academic training in Moscow even after Hitler came to power in 1933. Soviet command personnel also studied at German military academies and schools.

In Western historiography, there is an opinion that in August 1939, in addition to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, an agreement was also signed between the NKVD and the Gestapo. In our country, this document is considered a fake. But foreign researchers are confident that such an agreement between the Soviet and German intelligence services actually existed, and that this document was signed by Lavrentiy Beria and Heinrich Muller. And it was within the framework of this cooperation that the NKVD handed over to the Gestapo German communists who were imprisoned in Soviet prisons and camps. In addition, it is known that the NKVD and the Gestapo jointly held several conferences in Krakow and Zakopane in 1939–1940.

So the Soviet and German intelligence services could well have carried out joint secret actions. We also know about the punitive “Action AB” that the Nazis carried out against the Polish intelligentsia at the same time. Perhaps similar joint Soviet-German actions took place in Katyn? There is no answer to this question.

Another oddity: for some reason the German side is not involved in the Katyn debate at all. The Germans remain silent, although they could have stopped all the Polish-Russian Katyn disputes long ago. But they don't. Why? There is no answer to this question either...

"Special folder"

As already mentioned, in the spring of 1990, the first and only president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, admitted that the Katyn tragedy was “one of the grave crimes of Stalinism,” and that the death of Polish officers in Katyn was the work of the NKVD. Then in 1992, this was confirmed by the first President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin. Both presidents made such serious conclusions based on the so-called “Package No. 1,” which was stored in the archives of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee and at that time contained only three (!) indirect documents about the Katyn massacre. There are still many questions about the contents of this “Special Folder”.

One of the documents in the folder is a handwritten memo to N. S. Khrushchev, which was written in 1959 by the Chairman of the KGB of the USSR A. N. Shelepin. He proposed destroying the personal files of Polish officers and other documents. The note said: “The entire liquidation operation specified persons was carried out on the basis of the Resolution of the CPSU Central Committee of March 5, 1940. All of them were sentenced to capital punishment in accounting cases... All these cases are of neither operational interest nor historical value.”

Researchers have several questions about Shelepin’s note.

Why was it handwritten? Didn't the KGB chairman really have a typewriter? Why did she write in drawing font? To hide the real handwriting of the writer, since Shelepin’s usual handwriting is known? Why does Shelepin write about the Resolution of the CPSU Central Committee of March 5, 1940? Didn’t the KGB chairman know that in 1940 there was no CPSU yet? All these questions are unanswered...

In 2009, on the initiative of independent researcher Sergei Strygin, leading expert of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs Eduard Molokov conducted an examination of the font used to print Beria’s note to Stalin from the “Special Folder”. This note is still the main evidence in the case of the execution of Polish officers.

The examination revealed that three pages of Beria’s note were typed on one typewriter, and the last page on another. Moreover, “the font of the first three pages is not found in any of the authentic NKVD letters of that period identified to date.” A suspicion arose: is Beria’s note genuine? There is no answer to this question.

State Duma deputy Viktor Ilyukhin also doubted the authenticity of the documents from the “Special Folder”. Previously, he was an investigator and criminologist, senior assistant to the USSR Prosecutor General.

In 2010, Ilyukhin made a sensational statement that the documents from the “Special Folder” were a well-made fake. One of the manufacturers of these forgeries personally told Ilyukhin about his participation in the 90s in a group of specialists in forging documents from the party archive.

“In the early 90s of the last century, a group of high-ranking specialists was created to forge archival documents relating to important events of the Soviet period. This group worked within the structure of the security service of Russian President B. Yeltsin,” Ilyukhin argued based on the story of a former KGB officer.

The witness, who was not named for obvious reasons, presented Ilyukhin with blank forms of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the NKVD of the USSR and the People's Commissariat of Defense of the USSR, other party-Soviet organizations of the Stalin period, many fake seals, stamps and facsimiles, as well as some archival files marked “Top Secret”. Using these materials, it was possible to concoct any documents with the “signatures” of Stalin and Beria.

The witness also presented Ilyukhin with several forgeries of the main document of the “Special Folder” - a note from L.P. Beria to the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) dated March 5, 1940, which proposed shooting more than 20 thousand Polish prisoners of war.

Naturally, Ilyukhin wrote several letters and requests about these facts, where he asked many questions. His letters to the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation, the then President of the Russian Federation D. A. Medvedev, and the then Chairman of the State Duma of the Russian Federation B. V. Gryzlov are known. But, alas, there was no reaction to all his appeals.

After Ilyukhin’s death in 2011, documents about the falsification of the Katyn case disappeared from his safe. Therefore, all his questions remained unanswered...

Evidence from Professor Gaek

Valuable evidence about the Katyn affair is also contained in some brochures and books published immediately after the war.

F. Gaek

For example, there is a well-known report by the Czechoslovakian professor of forensic medicine Frantisek Hajek, who, as part of an international commission created by the Nazis, personally participated in the examination of corpses in the Katyn Forest in the spring of 1943. His professional analysis of the German exhumations was called "The Katyn Evidence" and was published in Prague in 1945.

This is what the Czech professor Hajek wrote in this report: “All the corpses we examined had gunshot wounds in the back of the head, only one had a gunshot wound in the forehead. The shots were fired from a short distance with a 7.65 caliber short-barreled firearm. The hands of a significant number of corpses were tied behind their backs with twine (which was not produced in the USSR at that time - D.T.)... A very important and interesting fact is that the Polish officers were executed with German-made cartridges...

Among the 4,143 corpses of executed officers, there were also 221 corpses of executed civilians. The official German report is silent about these corpses and does not even decide whether they were Russians or Poles.

The condition of the corpses suggests that they were there (in the ground - D.T.) for several months, or, taking into account the lower oxygen content from the air and the sluggish oxidation process, that they lay there for at most 1.5 years. Analysis of clothing, its metal parts and cigarettes also speaks against the idea that corpses could lie in the ground for 3 years...

No insects or their transitional forms, such as testicles, larvae, pupae, or even any of their remains, were found either in the corpses, or in the clothes or in the graves. The lack of transitional forms of insects occurs when the corpse is buried during a period of absence of insects, i.e. from late autumn until early spring, and when relatively little time had passed from burial to exhumation. This circumstance also suggests that the corpses were buried approximately in the fall of 1941.”

And again questions arise. Is this Professor Hajek's report genuine or is it a fake? If the report is real, then why are its conclusions ignored? There are no answers to these questions either...

Dead but alive

Interesting information about Katyn is given in the book “Strong in Spirit,” which was written in 1952 by the commander of the partisan detachment, Hero of the Soviet Union Dmitry Medvedev. In the book, he talks about a Polish uhlan who came to join their partisan detachment. For some reason, the Pole introduced himself to the partisans as Anton Gorbovsky. But him real name there was Gorbik. At the same time, Gorbik-Gorbovsky claimed that the Germans brought all his comrades to Katyn and shot them there.

It has been established that Anton Yanovich Gorbik was born in 1913. Lived and worked in the city of Bialystok. In 1939, Gorbik-Gorbovsky ended up in the Kozelsk camp for Polish prisoners, and met the war in a camp near Smolensk, where the Poles were captured by the Germans. The Nazis invited the captured Poles to swear an oath to Hitler and fight on the side of Germany. Most of the Poles refused to do this, and then the Germans decided to shoot them.

They were taken out for execution at night, and Gorbik, taking advantage of the fact that the headlights of the car were directed at the ditch where the corpses fell, climbed a tree and thereby escaped death. Then he moved to the Soviet partisans.

It later turned out that Anton Yanovich Gorbik in 1942-1944 commanded a national Polish partisan detachment stationed in the Rivne region and was part of a partisan association under the command of Hero of the Soviet Union Dmitry Medvedev. After the liberation of the Rivne region by units of the Red Army, Anton Gorbik was interned by the Soviet authorities, and in 1944-1945 he was tested in the Ostashkovsky testing and filtration camp of the NKVD of the USSR No. 41. In 1945, Gorbik was repatriated and returned to Poland.

Meanwhile, a memorial plaque in the Katyn memorial complex states that Polish second lieutenant Anton Gorbik was shot in Katyn in 1940.

By the way, in post-war Poland there were dozens of people like Gorbik who were allegedly “shot in Katyn”. But, for obvious reasons, no one remembers them. There are similar stories in Mednoye near Tver. That is, there are errors in the Katyn execution lists? How many more such “living corpses” are buried in Katyn? There are no answers to these questions...

Testimony of a former cadet

The rapid advance of German troops in the summer of 1941 created panic not only among our troops, but also among the party-Soviet bureaucracy, which, abandoning all its papers, was in a hurry to evacuate. At that time, library and archival collections, museum relics, and even the regional party archive were simply forgotten in Smolensk. There is evidence that the captured Poles were also forgotten. The Red Army was quickly retreating, and there was no time for Polish prisoners of war.

From a letter to the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation from retired colonel Ilya Ivanovich Krivoy, October 26, 2004:

“In 1939, I was recalled from the Kyiv Industrial Institute by the district military registration and enlistment office and sent to study in Smolensk at the Smolensk Rifle and Machine Gun School that was being formed there. This school was formed on the basis of a tank brigade that left for the western border of the USSR. The military camp of the tank brigade was located on the western outskirts of the city of Smolensk near Shklyana Gora on Moprovskaya Street.

The first time I saw Polish prisoners of war was in the early summer of 1940, then in 1941 I personally saw Polish prisoners several times during excavation work to repair the Vitebsk highway. The last time I saw them was literally on the eve of the Great Patriotic War on June 15-16, 1941, during the transportation of Polish prisoners of war in cars along the Vitebsk highway from Smolensk in the direction of Gnezdovo.

The evacuation of the school began on July 4–5, 1941. Before loading onto the train, the commander of our training company, Captain Safonov, went to the office of the military commandant of the Smolensk station. Arriving from there already in the dark, Captain Safonov told the cadets of our company (including me) that in the office of the military commandant of the station, he (Safonov) personally saw a man in the uniform of a state security lieutenant, who begged the commandant for a train to evacuate captured Poles from the camp, but the commandant did not give him any carriages.

Safonov told us about the commandant’s refusal to provide carriages for evacuating the Poles, apparently in order to once again emphasize the critical situation that had developed in the city. Besides me, at this story there were also platoon commander Chibisov, platoon commander Katerinich, the commander of my squad Dementyev, the commander of the neighboring squad Fedorovich Vasily Stakhovich (a former teacher from the village of Studena), cadet Vlasenko, cadet Dyadyun Ivan, and three or four more cadets.

Later, in conversations among themselves, the cadets said that if they were the commandant, they would have done exactly the same thing, and would also have evacuated their compatriots first, and not the Polish prisoners.

Therefore, I assert that the Polish prisoners of war officers were still alive on June 22, 1941, contrary to the statement of the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation that they were all allegedly shot in the Katyn Forest by the NKVD of the USSR in April-May 1940.”

Why is this testimony of a former military man not taken into account? There is no answer to this question.

Poles, Jews and Hitler's bunker

There is another interesting evidence related to the executed Poles, Jews and Hitler’s bunker, which was built by the Nazis near Katyn and the Goat Mountains.

Smolensk local historian and researcher Joseph Tsynman in his book “In Memory of the Victims of the Katyn Forest” wrote the following:

“During the war years in Smolensk, more than 2 thousand Jews, prisoners of the Warsaw ghetto, and about 200 Jews from the Smolensk ghetto built concrete above-ground and underground bunkers. Poles lived Jewish origin and Jewish prisoners in Gnezdovo and Krasny Bor, where the Headquarters of the Commanders-in-Chief of the Soviet and then German troops were located.

All prisoners wore Polish military uniform. Since nationality was not written on the faces of the prisoners, Smolensk residents believed at that time that these were Polish officers who, under the leadership of the Germans, built Hitler’s bunker and other military structures in Krasny Bor, Gnezdovo and other places. The construction sites were secret. After the construction was completed, all the prisoners, along with the Ukrainian, Polish and Czech guards, were shot by the Germans in Kozye Gory.”

It turns out that the Germans shot Jews dressed in Polish uniforms? But then whose corpses were exhumed by the Nazis in the spring of 1943? Polish or Jewish? There is no answer to these questions.

However, other researchers put forward the version that after the construction of Hitler’s bunker, Polish officers were shot.

In the autumn of 1941, construction began in Krasny Bor of a huge secret underground complex, to which the Germans gave the name “Berenhale” - “Bear’s Den”. Its dimensions and even its location are still unknown exactly. Hitler's bunker near Smolensk is one of the mysterious mysteries of the Second World War, which for some reason they are in no hurry to solve.

According to scattered information, the bunker was built by Soviet and Polish prisoners of war from concentration camps located on the outskirts of Smolensk. They were then shot in Goat Mountains, another version claims.

Why is this version not being explored? Why is Hitler's Smolensk bunker not being investigated? Is there a connection between the construction of the bunker and the execution of Poles in Katyn? There is no answer to these questions...

GRAVE No. 9

On March 31, 2000, in the Goat Mountains, next to the Katyn Memorial, workers were digging a trench with an excavator for a cable to a transformer substation building and accidentally caught the edge of a burial site that was previously unknown. At the edge of the grave, the remains of nine people in Polish military uniform were found and removed.

It is unknown how many corpses were there, but, apparently, the burial was large. The workers claimed that spent cartridges from Belgian-made pistol cartridges were found in the grave, as well as the Pravda newspaper from 1939. This burial was called “Grave No. 9.”

After this, law enforcement agencies were invited. A pre-investigation check by the prosecutor's office began as a mass grave of people with signs of violent death was discovered. Unfortunately, according to for unknown reasons no criminal case was initiated. Then “grave No. 9” was covered with a large layer of sand, paved with asphalt and fenced with a fence with barbed wire. Although earlier the wife of the then President of Poland, Jolanta Kwasniewska, laid flowers at her.

Some researchers believe that “Grave No. 9” is the key to solving the Katyn tragedy. Why has this burial not been investigated for 15 years? Why was “grave No. 9” filled up and paved over? There is no answer to these questions.

Instead of an epilogue

Unfortunately, the attitude towards the Katyn massacre is still determined not by facts, but by political preferences. Until now, there has not been a single truly independent examination. All studies were conducted by stakeholders.

For some reason, decisions on this crime are made by politicians and government authorities, and not by investigators, not by criminologists, not by historians, and not by scientific experts. Therefore, it seems that the truth will only be established by the next generations of Russian and Polish researchers, who will be free from modern political engagement. Katyn is waiting for objectivity.

For now, one thing is clear - it’s too early to put an end to the Katyn affair...

What happened in Katyn
In the spring of 1940, in the forest near the village of Katyn, 18 km west of Smolensk, as well as in a number of prisons and camps throughout the country, executions were carried out over several weeks. Soviet NKVD thousands of captured Polish citizens, mostly officers. The executions, the decision of which was made by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in March 1940, took place not only near Katyn, but the term “Katyn execution” is applied to them in general, since the executions in the Smolensk region became known first.

In total, according to data declassified in the 1990s, NKVD officers shot 21,857 Polish prisoners in April-May 1940. According to the Russian Main Military Prosecutor's Office, released in 2004 in connection with the closure of the official investigation, the NKVD opened cases against 14,542 Poles, while the deaths of 1,803 people were documented.

The Poles, executed in the spring of 1940, were captured or arrested a year earlier among (according to various sources) from 125 to 250 thousand Polish military personnel and civilians, whom the Soviet authorities, after the occupation of the eastern territories of Poland in the fall of 1939, considered “unreliable” and were moved to 8 specially created camps on the territory of the USSR. Most of them were soon either released home, or sent to the Gulag or to settlement in Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan, or (in the case of residents of the western regions of Poland) transferred to Germany.

However, thousands" former officers Polish army, former employees of the Polish police and intelligence agencies, members of Polish nationalist counter-revolutionary parties, participants in uncovered counter-revolutionary rebel organizations, defectors, etc.", the head of the NKVD Lavrentiy Beria proposed to be considered "inveterate, incorrigible enemies of Soviet power" and apply capital punishment to them - execution.

Polish prisoners were executed in many prisons throughout the USSR. According to the KGB of the USSR, 4,421 people were shot in the Katyn Forest, in the Starobelsky camp near Kharkov - 3,820, in the Ostashkovsky camp (Kalinin, now Tver region) - 6,311 people, in other camps and prisons in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus - 7 305 people.

Investigations
The name of the village near Smolensk became a symbol of the crimes of the Stalinist regime against the Poles also because it was from Katyn that the investigation into the executions began. The fact that the German field police were the first to present evidence of the guilt of the NKVD in 1943 predetermined the attitude towards this investigation in the USSR. Moscow decided that it would be most plausible to blame the fascists themselves for the execution, especially since during the execution the NKVD officers used Walthers and other weapons that fired German-made cartridges.

After the liberation of the Smolensk region Soviet troops a special commission conducted an investigation, which established that the captured Poles were shot by the Germans in 1941. This version became official in the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries until 1990. The Soviet side also brought charges regarding Katyn after the end of the war as part of the Nuremberg trials, but it was not possible to provide convincing evidence of the Germans’ guilt; as a result, this episode was not included in the indictment.

Confessions and apologies
In April 1990, Polish leader Wojciech Jaruzelski came to Moscow on an official visit. In connection with the discovery of new archival documents indirectly proving the guilt of the NKVD, the Soviet leadership decided to change its position and admit that the Poles were shot by Soviet state security officers. On April 13, 1990, TASS published a statement that read, in part: “The identified archival materials taken together allow us to conclude that there is direct responsibility for the atrocities in Katyn forest Beria, Merkulova ( Vsevolod Merkulov, who in 1940 headed the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD - Vesti.Ru) and their henchmen. The Soviet side, expressing deep regret in connection with the Katyn tragedy, declares that it represents one of the grave crimes of Stalinism."

Mikhail Gorbachev gave Jaruzelski lists of officers sent to the stage - in fact, to the place of execution, from the camps in Kozelsk. Ostashkov and Starobelsk, and the Soviet Prosecutor General's Office soon began an official investigation. In the early 90s, during a visit to Warsaw, Russian President Boris Yeltsin apologized to the Poles. Representatives of the Russian government have repeatedly stated that they share the grief of the Polish people for those killed in Katyn.

In 2000, a memorial to the victims of repression was opened in Katyn, common not only to the Poles, but also to Soviet citizens who were shot by the NKVD in the same Katyn forest.

At the end of 2004, the investigation opened in 1990 was terminated by the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation on the basis of clause 4 of part 1 of Art. 24 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation - in connection with the death of suspects or accused. Moreover, out of 183 volumes of the case, 67 were transferred to the Polish side, since the remaining 116, according to the military prosecutor, contain state secrets. Supreme Court of the Russian Federation in 2009.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in an article published in the Polish Gazeta Wyborcza on the eve of a working visit in August 2009: “Shadows of the past can no longer darken today, and especially tomorrow, cooperation. Our duty to the departed, to history itself, is to do everything “In order to rid Russian-Polish relations of the burden of mistrust and prejudice that we inherited, turn the page and start writing a new one.”

According to Putin, “the people of Russia, whose fate was distorted by the totalitarian regime, well understand the heightened feelings of the Poles associated with Katyn, where thousands of Polish military personnel are buried.” “We must together preserve the memory of the victims of this crime,” the Russian Prime Minister urged. Chapter Russian government I am confident that “the Katyn and Mednoye memorials, as well as the tragic fate of Russian soldiers taken captive by Poland during the 1920 war, should become symbols of common grief and mutual forgiveness.”

In February 2010, Vladimir Putin visited his Polish colleague Donald Tusk on April 7, where memorial events dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre will be held. Tusk accepted the invitation, and Lech Walesa, the first prime minister of post-communist Poland Tadeusz Mazowiecki, as well as family members of the victims of NKVD executions will come to Russia with him.

It is noteworthy that on the eve of the meeting of the prime ministers of Russia and Poland in Katyn channel "Russia Culture" showed a film that and.

Rehabilitation requirements
Poland demands that the Poles executed in 1940 in Russia be recognized as victims of political repression. In addition, many there would like to hear from Russian officials an apology and recognition of the Katyn massacre as an act of genocide, and not references to the fact that the current authorities are not responsible for the crimes of the Stalinist regime. The termination of the case, and especially the fact that the resolution to terminate it, along with other documents, was considered secret and was not made public, only added fuel to the fire.

After the decision of the GVP, Poland began its own prosecutorial investigation into the “mass murder of Polish citizens committed in the Soviet Union in March 1940.” The investigation is headed by Professor Leon Keres, head of the Institute of National Remembrance. The Poles still want to find out who gave the order for the execution, the names of the executioners, and also give a legal assessment of the actions of the Stalinist regime.

Relatives of some officers who died in the Katyn Forest appealed to the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation in 2008 with a demand to consider the possibility of rehabilitating those executed. The GVP refused, and later the Khamovnichesky Court rejected the complaint against its actions. Now the demands of the Poles are being considered by the European Court of Human Rights.

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);

– 7,305 arrested, held in prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSR (apparently shot 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 a 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 unleashing the Second world war. 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 to their homes 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 the Polish political parties and public organizations, industrialists, large landowners, 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 autumn 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 to detailed study at 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 IMT decided not to include the Katyn massacre in its verdict as one of the crimes of Nazi Germany.

At the same time, throughout the post-war years, right up to 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.

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 group of the GVP, together with Polish specialists, carried out partial exhumations in the 6th quarter of the Kharkov forest park area, on the territory holiday village

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.

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 the Deputy Prosecutor General of Poland S. Snezhko a named alphabetical list of 3,435 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.

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 Memorial’s subsequent request, 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 committed important steps

on the way to recognition of 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".
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

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.

Will not 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, not far from 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. Officers, let me remind you, there were no more than 400 people from total number 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 jesuitism and shamelessness of the 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 the division of those arrested according to contingents, categories and other criteria with individual use 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 summarize 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 20th Congress had devastating consequences not only within the USSR, but also for the entire world communist movement, because Moscow lost its role as a cementing ideological center, and each of the people's democracies (with the exception of the PRC and Albania) began to look for its own path to socialism, and under this actually took the path of eliminating the dictatorship of the proletariat and restoring capitalism.

The first serious international reaction to Khrushchev’s “secret” report was the anti-Soviet protests in Poznan, the historical center of Greater Poland chauvinism, that followed soon after the death of the Polish communist leader Boleslaw Bierut. Soon the unrest began to spread to other cities in Poland and even spread to other Eastern European countries, to a greater extent - Hungary, to a lesser extent - Bulgaria. In the end, Polish anti-Sovietists, under the smokescreen of “the fight against Stalin’s personality cult,” managed not only to free the right-wing nationalist deviationist Wladyslaw Gomulka and his comrades from prison, but also to bring them to power.

And although Khrushchev tried to somehow resist at first, in the end he was forced to accept Polish demands in order to defuse the current situation, which was ready to get out of control. These demands contained such unpleasant aspects as unconditional recognition of the new leadership, the dissolution of collective farms, some liberalization of the economy, guarantees of freedom of speech, meetings and demonstrations, the abolition of censorship, and, most importantly, the official recognition of the vile Hitlerite lie about the involvement of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the Katyn execution of Polish prisoners of war officers. Having rashly given such guarantees, Khrushchev recalled Soviet Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, a Pole by birth, who served as Poland's Minister of Defense, and all Soviet military and political advisers.

Perhaps the most unpleasant thing for Khrushchev was the demand to admit the involvement of his party in the Katyn massacre, but he agreed to this only in connection with V. Gomulka’s promise to put on the trail of Stepan Bandera, the worst enemy of Soviet power, the leader of the paramilitary forces of Ukrainian nationalists who fought against the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War and continued their terrorist activities in the Lviv region until the 50s of the twentieth century.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), headed by S. Bandera, relied on cooperation with the intelligence services of the USA, England, and Germany, and on permanent connections with various underground circles and groups in Ukraine. To do this, its emissaries penetrated there through illegal means, with the goal of creating an underground network and smuggling anti-Soviet and nationalist literature.

It is possible that during his unofficial visit to Moscow in February 1959, Gomulka announced that his intelligence services had discovered Bandera in Munich, and hastened the recognition of “Katyn guilt.” One way or another, but on the instructions of Khrushchev, on October 15, 1959, KGB officer Bogdan Stashinsky finally eliminates Bandera in Munich, and the trial held over Stashinsky in Karlsruhe (Germany) will find it possible to give the killer a relatively mild punishment - only a few years in prison, since The main blame will be placed on the organizers of the crime - the Khrushchev leadership.

Fulfilling this obligation, Khrushchev, an experienced ripper of secret archives, gives appropriate orders to KGB Chairman Shelepin, who moved to this chair a year ago from the post of First Secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee, and he begins feverishly “working” on creating a material basis for Hitler’s version of the Katyn myth.

First of all, Shelepin creates a “special folder” “On the involvement of the CPSU (this mistake alone indicates the fact of gross falsification - until 1952 the CPSU was called the CPSU (b) - L.B.) in the Katyn execution, where, in his opinion, the four main documents: a) lists of executed Polish officers; b) Beria’s report to Stalin; c) Resolution of the Party Central Committee of March 5, 1940; d) Shelepin’s letter to Khrushchev (the homeland should know its “heroes”!)

It was this “special folder”, created by Khrushchev at the request of the new Polish leadership, that spurred all the anti-people forces of the PPR, inspired by Pope John Paul II (former Archbishop of Krakow and Cardinal of Poland), as well as US President Jimmy Carter’s assistant for national security, permanent director of “ research center, called the “Stalin Institute” at the University of California, a Pole by origin, Zbigniew Brzezinski to more and more brazen ideological sabotage.

In the end, after another three decades, the story of the visit of the leader of Poland to the Soviet Union repeated itself, only this time in April 1990, the President of the Republic of Poland W. Jaruzelski arrived on an official state visit to the USSR demanding repentance for the “Katyn atrocity” and forced Gorbachev to make the following statement: “Recently, documents have been found (meaning Khrushchev’s “special folder” - L.B.), which indirectly but convincingly indicate that thousands of Polish citizens who died in the Smolensk forests exactly half a century ago, became victims of Beria and his henchmen. The graves of Polish officers are next to the graves of Soviet people who fell from the same evil hand.”

Considering that the “special folder” is a fake, then Gorbachev’s statement wasn’t worth a penny. Having achieved from the incompetent Gorbachev leadership in April 1990 a shameful public repentance for Hitler’s sins, that is, the publication of the “TASS Report” that “the Soviet side, expressing deep regret in connection with Katyn tragedy, declares that it represents one of the grave crimes of Stalinism,” counter-revolutionaries of all stripes successfully took advantage of this explosion of the “Khrushchev time bomb” - false documents about Katyn - for their base subversive purposes.

The first to “respond” to Gorbachev’s “repentance” was the leader of the notorious “Solidarity” Lech Walesa (they put a finger in his mouth - he bit his hand - L.B.). He proposed resolving other important problems: to reconsider assessments of post-war Polish-Soviet relations, including the role of the Polish Committee of National Liberation created in July 1944, treaties concluded with the USSR, because allegedly they were all based on criminal principles, to punish those responsible for genocide, to resolve free access to the burial places of Polish officers, and most importantly, of course, compensation for material damage to the families and loved ones of the victims. On April 28, 1990, a government representative spoke at the Polish Sejm with information that negotiations with the USSR government on the issue of monetary compensation were already underway and that at the moment it was important to compile a list of all those applying for such payments (according to official data, there were up to 800 thousand).

And the vile action of Khrushchev-Gorbachev ended with the dispersal of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the dissolution of the military alliance of the Warsaw Pact countries, and the liquidation of the Eastern European socialist camp. Moreover, it was believed that the West would dissolve NATO in response, but “screw you”: NATO is doing “Drang nach Osten”, brazenly absorbing the countries of the former Eastern European socialist camp.

However, let’s return to the kitchen of creating a “special folder”. A. Shelepin began by breaking the seal and entering the sealed room where the records of 21,857 prisoners and internees of Polish nationality since September 1939 were kept. In a letter to Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959, justifying the uselessness of this archival material by the fact that “all accounting files are of neither operational interest nor historical value,” the newly minted “chekist” comes to the conclusion: “Based on the above, it seems advisable to destroy all accounting records.” cases against persons (attention!!!) executed in 1940 as part of the said operation.” This is how the “lists of executed Polish officers” in Katyn arose. Subsequently, the son of Lavrenty Beria would reasonably note: “During Jaruzelski’s official visit to Moscow, Gorbachev gave him only copies of the lists of the former Main Directorate for Prisoners of War and Internees of the NKVD of the USSR found in the Soviet archives. The copies contain the names of Polish citizens who were in the Kozelsky, Ostashkovsky and Starobelsky NKVD camps in 1939-1940. None of these documents talk about the participation of the NKVD in the execution of prisoners of war.”

The second “document” from the Khrushchev-Shelepin “special folder” was not at all difficult to fabricate, since there was a detailed digital report of the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR L. Beria

I.V. Stalin "On Polish prisoners of war." Shelepin had only one thing left to do - to come up with and finish printing the “operative part”, where Beria allegedly demands the execution of all prisoners of war from the camps and prisoners held in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus “without calling those arrested and without bringing charges” - fortunately, typewriters in the former NKVD The USSR has not yet been written off. However, Shelepin did not risk forging Beria’s signature, leaving this “document” as a cheap anonymous letter. But its “operative part”, copied word for word, will be included in the next “document”, which Shelepin “literally” will call in his letter to Khrushchev “Resolution of the CPSU Central Committee (?) of March 5, 1940”, and this lapsus calami, this the typo in the “letter” still sticks out like an awl from a sack (and, really, how can you correct “archival documents”, even if they were invented two decades after the event? - L.B.).

True, this main “document” itself about the party’s involvement is designated as “an extract from the minutes of a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee. Decision dated 03/05/40.” (The Central Committee of which party? In all party documents, without exception, the entire abbreviation was always indicated in full - Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) - L.B.). The most surprising thing is that this “document” was left without a signature. And on this anonymous letter, instead of a signature, there are only two words - “Secretary of the Central Committee.” That's all!

This is how Khrushchev paid the Polish leadership for the head of his worst personal enemy Stepan Bandera, who spoiled a lot of blood for him when Nikita Sergeevich was the first leader of Ukraine.

Khrushchev did not understand something else: that the price he had to pay to Poland for this generally irrelevant terrorist attack at that time was immeasurably higher - in fact, it was equal to the revision of the decisions of the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences on the post-war statehood of Poland and other Eastern European countries .

However, the fake “special folder” fabricated by Khrushchev and Shelepin, covered in archival dust, waited in the wings three decades later. As we have already seen, the enemy of the Soviet people, Gorbachev, fell for it. The ardent enemy of the Soviet people, Yeltsin, also fell for it. The latter tried to use Katyn forgeries at meetings of the Constitutional Court of the RSFSR dedicated to the “CPSU case” initiated by him. These fakes were presented by well-known “figures” of the Yeltsin era – Shakhrai and Makarov. However, even the flexible Constitutional Court could not recognize these forgeries as genuine documents and did not mention them anywhere in its decisions. Khrushchev and Shelepin worked dirty!

Sergo Beria took a paradoxical position on the Katyn “case”. His book “My Father – Lavrentiy Beria” was signed for publication on April 18, 1994, and the “documents” from the “special folder” were, as we already know, made public in January 1993. It is unlikely that Beria's son did not know about this, although he makes a similar appearance. But his “awl from the bag” is an almost exact reproduction of the figure of Khrushchev’s number of prisoners of war executed in Katyn - 21 thousand 857 (Khrushchev) and 20 thousand 857 (S. Beria).

In his attempt to whitewash his father, he admits the “fact” of the Katyn execution by the Soviet side, but at the same time blames the “system” and agrees that his father was allegedly ordered to hand over the captured Polish officers to the Red Army within a week, and the execution itself was supposedly entrusted carry out to the leadership of the People's Commissariat of Defense, that is, Klim Voroshilov, and adds that “this is the truth that is carefully hidden to this day... The fact remains: the father refused to participate in the crime, although he knew that it was already possible to save these 20 thousand 857 lives I can’t... I know for sure that my father motivated his fundamental disagreement with the execution of Polish officers in writing. Where are these documents?

The late Sergo Lavrentievich stated correctly - these documents do not exist. Because it never happened. Instead of proving the inconsistency of recognizing the involvement of the Soviet side in the Hitler-Goebbels provocation in the “Katyn Affair” and exposing Khrushchev’s cheapness, Sergo Beria saw in this a selfish chance to take revenge on the party, which, in his words, “always knew how to have a hand in dirty things and when the opportunity arises, shift responsibility to anyone other than the top party leadership.” That is, as we see, Sergo Beria also contributed to the big lie about Katyn.

At careful reading The “Report of the head of the NKVD Lavrentiy Beria” draws attention to the following absurdity: the “Report” gives digital calculations about 14 thousand 700 people from among the former Polish officers, officials, landowners, police officers, intelligence officers, gendarmes, siege soldiers and jailers (hence Gorbachev’s figure - “about 15 thousand executed Polish officers” - L.B.), as well as about 11 thousand people arrested and in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus - members of various counter-revolutionary and sabotage organizations, former landowners , manufacturers and defectors."

In total, therefore, 25 thousand 700. The same figure also appears in the supposedly mentioned above “Extract from a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee,” since it was rewritten into a false document without proper critical understanding. But in this regard, it is difficult to understand Shelepin’s statement that 21 thousand 857 accounting files were kept in the “secret sealed room” and that all 21 thousand 857 Polish officers were shot.

Firstly, as we have seen, not all of them were officers. According to the calculations of Lavrentiy Beria, in general there were only a little over 4 thousand army officers themselves (generals, colonels and lieutenant colonels - 295, majors and captains - 2080, lieutenants, second lieutenants and cornets - 604). This is in prisoner of war camps, and in prisons there were 1207 former Polish prisoners of war. In total, therefore, 4 thousand 186 people. In big encyclopedic dictionary"In the 1998 edition it is written as follows: “In the spring of 1940, the NKVD authorities killed over 4 thousand Polish officers in Katyn.” And then: “Executions on the territory of Katyn were carried out during the occupation of the Smolensk region by Nazi troops.”

So who, in the end, carried out these ill-fated executions - the Nazis, the NKVD, or, as the son of Lavrentiy Beria claims, units of the regular Red Army?

Secondly, there is a clear discrepancy between the number of those “shot” – 21 thousand 857 and the number of people who were “ordered” to be shot – 25 thousand 700. It is permissible to ask how it could happen that 3843 Polish officers were unaccounted for, what department fed them During their lifetime, on what means did they live? And who dared to spare them if the “bloodthirsty” “Secretary of the Central Committee” ordered every last “officer” to be shot?

And one last thing. In the materials fabricated in 1959 on the “Katyn case” it is stated that the “troika” was the trial court for the unfortunate. Khrushchev “forgot” that in accordance with the Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of November 17, 1938 “On arrests, prosecutorial supervision and investigation,” the judicial “troikas” were liquidated. This happened a year and a half before the Katyn execution, which was incriminated to the Soviet authorities.

The truth about Katyn

After the shamefully failed campaign against Warsaw, undertaken by Tukhachevsky, obsessed with the Trotskyist idea of ​​a world revolutionary fire, the western lands of Ukraine and Belarus were transferred to bourgeois Poland from Soviet Russia according to the Riga Peace Treaty of 1921, and this soon led to the forced Polization of the population of the so unexpectedly freely acquired territories: to close Ukrainian and Belarusian schools; to transformation Orthodox churches to Catholic churches; to the expropriation of fertile lands from peasants and their transfer to Polish landowners; to lawlessness and arbitrariness; to persecution on national and religious grounds; to the brutal suppression of any manifestations of popular discontent.

Therefore, Western Ukrainians and Belarusians, who had imbibed the bourgeois Wielkopolska lawlessness, yearned for Bolshevik social justice and true freedom, as their liberators and deliverers, as relatives, greeted the Red Army when it came to their lands on September 17, 1939, and all its actions to liberate the Western Ukraine and Western Belarus lasted 12 days.

Polish military units and formations of troops, offering almost no resistance, surrendered. The Polish government of Kozlovsky, which fled to Romania on the eve of Hitler’s capture of Warsaw, actually betrayed its people, and the new emigrant government of Poland, led by General W. Sikorsky, was formed in London on September 30, 1939, i.e. two weeks after the national disaster.

By the time of the treacherous attack fascist Germany In the USSR, 389 thousand 382 Poles were kept in Soviet prisons, camps and places of exile. From London they closely monitored the fate of Polish prisoners of war, who were used mainly in road construction work, so that if they had been shot by Soviet authorities in the spring of 1940, as Goebbels’s false propaganda trumpeted this to the whole world, it would have been known in a timely manner through diplomatic channels and would cause great international resonance.

In addition, Sikorsky, seeking rapprochement with I.V. Stalin, sought to expose himself to in the best light, played the role of a friend of the Soviet Union, which again excludes the possibility of a “bloody massacre” committed by the Bolsheviks against Polish prisoners of war in the spring of 1940. There is nothing to indicate the existence of a historical situation that could provide an incentive for the Soviet side to carry out such an action.

At the same time, the Germans had such an incentive in August–September 1941 after the Soviet ambassador in London Ivan Maisky concluded an agreement of friendship between the two governments with the Poles on July 30, 1941, according to which General Sikorsky was to form prisoners of war compatriots in the Russian army under the command of the Polish prisoner of war General Anders to participate in hostilities against Germany. This was the incentive for Hitler to liquidate Polish prisoners of war as enemies of the German nation, who, as he knew, had already been amnestied by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of August 12, 1941 - 389 thousand 41 Poles, including future victims of Nazi atrocities, shot in the Katyn Forest.

The process of forming the National Polish Army under the command of General Anders was in full swing in the Soviet Union, and in quantitative terms it reached 76 thousand 110 people in six months.

However, as it turned out later, Anders received instructions from Sikorsky: “Do not help Russia under any circumstances, but use the situation with maximum benefit for the Polish nation.” At the same time, Sikorsky convinces Churchill of the advisability of transferring Anders’ army to the Middle East, about which the English prime minister writes to I.V. Stalin, and the leader gives his go-ahead, and not only for the evacuation of Anders’ army itself to Iran, but also members of the families of military personnel in the amount of 43 thousand 755 people. It was clear to both Stalin and Hitler that Sikorsky was playing a double game. As tensions between Stalin and Sikorski increased, there was a thaw between Hitler and Sikorski. The Soviet-Polish “friendship” ended with an openly anti-Soviet statement by the head of the Polish émigré government on February 25, 1943, which stated that it did not want to recognize the historical rights of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples to unite in their national states.” In other words, there was a clear fact of the impudent claims of the Polish emigrant government to Soviet lands - Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. In response to this statement I.V. Stalin formed the Tadeusz Kosciuszko Division of 15 thousand people from Poles loyal to the Soviet Union. In October 1943, she already fought shoulder to shoulder with the Red Army.

For Hitler, this statement was a signal to take revenge for the Leipzig trial he lost to the communists in the case of the Reichstag fire, and he intensified the activities of the police and the Gestapo of the Smolensk region to organize the Katyn provocation.

Already on April 15, the German Information Bureau reported on Berlin radio that the German occupation authorities had discovered in Katyn near Smolensk the graves of 11 thousand Polish officers shot by Jewish commissars. The next day, the Soviet Information Bureau exposed the bloody fraud of Hitler’s executioners, and on April 19, the Pravda newspaper wrote in an editorial: “The Nazis are inventing some kind of Jewish commissars who allegedly participated in the murder of 11 thousand Polish officers. It is not difficult for experienced masters of provocation to come up with several names of people who have never existed. Such “commissars” as Lev Rybak, Abraham Borisovich, Pavel Brodninsky, Chaim Finberg, named by the German information bureau, were simply invented by the German fascist swindlers, since there were no such “commissars” either in the Smolensk branch of the GPU or in the NKVD bodies at all. No".

On April 28, 1943, Pravda published “a note from the Soviet government on the decision to break off relations with the Polish government,” which, in particular, stated that “this hostile campaign against the Soviet state was undertaken by the Polish government in order to, through the use of Hitler’s slanderous fakes to put pressure on the Soviet government in order to wrest territorial concessions from it at the expense of the interests of Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Belarus and Soviet Lithuania.”

Immediately after the expulsion of the Nazi invaders from Smolensk (September 25, 1943), I.V. Stalin sends a special commission to the crime scene to establish and investigate the circumstances of the execution of Polish officers prisoners of war by the Nazi invaders in the Katyn Forest. The commission included: a member of the Extraordinary State Commission (the ChGK was investigating the atrocities of the Nazis in the occupied territories of the USSR and scrupulously calculated the damage caused by them - L.B.), academician N. N. Burdenko (chairman of the Special Commission on Katyn), members of the ChGK: academician Alexei Tolstoy and Metropolitan Nikolai, Chairman of the All-Slavic Committee, Lieutenant General A.S. Gundorov, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Union of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies S.A. Kolesnikov, People's Commissar of Education of the USSR, Academician V.P. Potemkin, Head of the Main Military Sanitary Directorate of the Red Army, Colonel General E.I. Smirnov, Chairman of the Smolensk Regional Executive Committee R.E. Melnikov. To accomplish the task assigned to it, the commission attracted the best forensic experts country: chief forensic expert of the People's Commissariat of Health of the USSR, director of the Research Institute of Forensic Medicine V.I. Prozorovsky, head. Department of Forensic Medicine of the 2nd Moscow Medical Institute V.M. Smolyaninov, senior researchers at the Research Institute of Forensic Medicine P.S. Semenovsky and M.D. Shvaikov, chief pathologist of the front, major of the medical service, professor D.N. Vyropaeva.

Day and night, tirelessly, for four months, an authoritative commission conscientiously examined the details of the “Katyn case.” On January 26, 1944, a most convincing message from the special commission was published in all central newspapers, which left no stone unturned from the Hitler myth of Katyn and revealed to the whole world the true picture of the atrocities of the Nazi invaders against Polish prisoners of war officers.

However, at the height of the Cold War, the US Congress is again attempting to revive the Katyn issue, even creating the so-called. “The commission to investigate the Katyn Affair, headed by Congressman Madden.

On March 3, 1952, Pravda published a note to the US State Department dated February 29, 1952, which, in particular, said: “...raising the question of the Katyn crime eight years after the conclusion of the official commission can only pursue the goal of slandering the Soviet Union and rehabilitating thus, generally recognized Hitlerite criminals (it is characteristic that the special “Katyn” commission of the US Congress was created simultaneously with the approval of the appropriation of 100 million dollars for sabotage and espionage activities in the People’s Republic of Poland - L.B.).

Attached to the note was the full text of the message of the Burdenko commission, which was again published in Pravda on March 3, 1952, which collected extensive material obtained as a result of a detailed study of the corpses extracted from the graves and those documents and material evidence that were found on the corpses and in the graves. At the same time, Burdenko’s special commission interviewed numerous witnesses from the local population, whose testimony accurately established the time and circumstances of the crimes committed by the German occupiers.

First of all, the message provides information about what the Katyn Forest is.

“For a long time, the Katyn Forest was a favorite place where the population of Smolensk usually spent holidays. The surrounding population grazed livestock in the Katyn Forest and prepared fuel for themselves. There were no prohibitions or restrictions on access to the Katyn Forest.

Back in the summer of 1941, in this forest there was a pioneer camp of Promstrakhkassy, ​​which was closed only in July 1941 with the capture of Smolensk by the German occupiers, the forest began to be guarded by reinforced patrols, inscriptions appeared in many places warning that persons entering the forest without a special pass would be subject to shot on the spot.

Particularly strictly guarded was that part of the Katyn Forest, which was called the “Goat Mountains,” as well as the territory on the banks of the Dnieper, where, at a distance of 700 meters from the discovered graves of Polish prisoners of war, there was a dacha - a rest house of the Smolensk NKVD department. Upon the arrival of the Germans, a German military establishment was located at this dacha, hiding under the code name “Headquarters of the 537th Construction Battalion” (which also appeared in the documents of the Nuremberg trials - L.B.).

From the testimony of the peasant Kiselyov, born in 1870: “The officer stated that, according to information available to the Gestapo, NKVD officers shot Polish officers in the “Goat Mountains” section in 1940, and asked me what testimony I could give on this matter. I replied that I had never heard of the NKVD carrying out executions in the “Goat Mountains”, and it was hardly possible at all, I explained to the officer, since the “Goat Mountains” was a completely open, crowded place and, if they were shooting there, then about The entire population of nearby villages would know this...”

Kiselyov and others told how they were literally beaten out of them with rubber truncheons and threats of execution for false testimony, which later appeared in a book superbly published by the German Foreign Ministry, which contained materials fabricated by the Germans on the “Katyn Affair.” In addition to Kiselev, Godezov (aka Godunov), Silverstov, Andreev, Zhigulev, Krivozertsev, Zakharov were named as witnesses in this book.

The Burdenko Commission established that Godezov and Silverstov died in 1943, before the liberation of the Smolensk region by the Red Army. Andreev, Zhigulev and Krivozertsev left with the Germans. The last of the “witnesses” named by the Germans, Zakharov, who worked under the Germans as a headman in the village of Novye Bateki, told Burdenko’s commission that he was first beaten until he lost consciousness, and then, when he came to his senses, the officer demanded to sign the interrogation report and he, faint-hearted, under the influence of beatings and threats of execution, he gave false testimony and signed the protocol.

Hitler’s command understood that there were clearly not enough “witnesses” for such a large-scale provocation. And it distributed among the residents of Smolensk and surrounding villages an “Appeal to the Population”, which was published in the newspaper “New Way” published by the Germans in Smolensk (No. 35 (157) dated May 6, 1943: “You can give information about the mass murder, committed by the Bolsheviks in 1940 over captured Polish officers and priests (? - this is something new - L.B.) in the Goat Mountains forest, near the Gnezdovo-Katyn highway. Who observed the vehicles from Gnezdovo to the Goat Mountains or. who saw or heard the shootings? Who knows the residents who can tell about this? Every message will be rewarded.”

To the credit of Soviet citizens, no one fell for the reward for giving the false testimony the Germans needed in the Katyn case.

Of the documents discovered by forensic experts relating to the second half of 1940 and the spring-summer of 1941, they deserve Special attention the following:

1. On corpse No. 92.
Letter from Warsaw addressed to the Red Cross in the Central Bank of Prisoners of War, Moscow, st. Kuibysheva, 12. The letter is written in Russian. In this letter, Sofia Zygon asks to know the whereabouts of her husband, Tomasz Zygon. The letter is dated 12.09. 1940. The envelope is stamped “Warsaw. 09.1940" and the stamp - "Moscow, post office, 9th expedition, 8.10. 1940”, as well as a resolution in red ink “Uch. set up a camp and send it for delivery - 11/15/40.” (Signature illegible).

2. On corpse No. 4
Postcard, registered No. 0112 from Tarnopol with the postmark “Tarnopol 12.11.40” Handwritten text and address are discolored.

3. On corpse No. 101.
Receipt No. 10293 dated 12/19/39, issued by the Kozelsky camp on the receipt of a gold watch from Eduard Adamovich Levandovsky. On the back of the receipt there is an entry dated March 14, 1941 about the sale of this watch to Yuvelirtorg.

4. On corpse No. 53.

Unsent postcard in Polish with the address: Warsaw, Bagatela 15, apt. 47, Irina Kuchinskaya. Dated June 20, 1941.

It must be said that in preparation for their provocation, the German occupation authorities used up to 500 Russian prisoners of war to dig up graves in the Katyn Forest and extract incriminating documents and material evidence from there, who were shot by the Germans after completing this work.

From the message of the “Special Commission to Establish and Investigate the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of War by Nazi Invaders in the Katyn Forest”: “Conclusions from witness testimony and forensic examinations about the execution of Polish prisoners of war by the Germans in the fall of 1941 are fully confirmed by material evidence and documents extracted from "Katyn Graves".

This is the truth about Katyn. The irrefutable truth of the fact.