What was the Katyn tragedy? YU
On March 5, 1940, the USSR authorities decided to apply to Polish prisoners of war highest form punishment - execution. This marked the beginning of the Katyn tragedy, one of the main stumbling blocks in Russian-Polish relations.
Missing officers
On August 8, 1941, against the backdrop of the outbreak of war with Germany, Stalin entered into diplomatic relations with his newfound ally, the Polish government in exile. As part of the new treaty, all Polish prisoners of war, especially those captured in 1939 on the territory of the Soviet Union, were granted an amnesty and the right to free movement throughout the territory of the Union. The formation of Anders' army began. However, the Polish government was missing about 15,000 officers who, according to documents, were supposed to be in the Kozelsky, Starobelsky and Yukhnovsky camps. To all the accusations of the Polish General Sikorski and General Anders of violating the amnesty agreement, Stalin replied that all the prisoners were released, but could escape to Manchuria.
Subsequently, one of Anders’ subordinates described his alarm: “Despite the “amnesty”, Stalin’s own firm promise to return prisoners of war to us, despite his assurances that prisoners from Starobelsk, Kozelsk and Ostashkov were found and released, we did not receive a single call for help from prisoners of war from the above-mentioned camps. Questioning thousands of colleagues returning from camps and prisons, we have never heard any reliable confirmation of the whereabouts of the prisoners taken from those three camps.” He also owned the words spoken several years later: “Only in the spring of 1943 did it open to the world terrible secret, the world heard a word that still emanates horror: Katyn.”
re-enactment
As you know, the Katyn burial site was discovered by the Germans in 1943, when these areas were under occupation. It was the fascists who contributed to the “promotion” of the Katyn case. Many specialists were involved, the exhumation was carefully carried out, they even took local residents on excursions there. The unexpected discovery in the occupied territory gave rise to a version of a deliberate staging, which was supposed to serve as propaganda against the USSR during the Second World War. This became an important argument in accusing the German side. Moreover, there were many Jews on the list of identified ones.
The details also attracted attention. V.V. Kolturovich from Daugavpils outlined his conversation with a woman who, together with fellow villagers, went to look at the opened graves: “I asked her: “Vera, what did people say to each other while looking at the graves?” The answer was the following: “Our careless slobs can’t do that - it’s too neat a job.” Indeed, the ditches were perfectly dug under the cord, the corpses were laid out in perfect stacks. The argument, of course, is ambiguous, but we should not forget that according to the documents, the execution of such a huge number of people was carried out in the shortest possible time. The performers simply did not have enough time for this.
Double jeopardy
At the famous Nuremberg Trials on July 1-3, 1946, the Katyn massacre was blamed on Germany and appeared in the indictment of the International Tribunal (IT) in Nuremberg, section III “War Crimes”, for cruel treatment of prisoners of war and military personnel of other countries. Friedrich Ahlens, commander of the 537th regiment, was declared the main organizer of the execution. He also acted as a witness in the retaliatory accusation against the USSR. The tribunal did not support the Soviet accusation, and the Katyn episode is absent from the tribunal’s verdict. All over the world this was perceived as a “tacit admission” by the USSR of its guilt.
The preparation and progress of the Nuremberg trials were accompanied by at least two events that compromised the USSR. On March 30, 1946, the Polish prosecutor Roman Martin, who allegedly had documents proving the guilt of the NKVD, died. Soviet prosecutor Nikolai Zorya also fell victim, who died suddenly right in Nuremberg in his hotel room. The day before, he told his immediate superior, Prosecutor General Gorshenin, that he had discovered inaccuracies in the Katyn documents and that he could not speak with them. The next morning he “shot himself.” There were rumors among the Soviet delegation that Stalin ordered “to bury him like a dog!”
After Gorbachev admitted the guilt of the USSR, researcher on the Katyn issue Vladimir Abarinov in his work cites the following monologue from the daughter of an NKVD officer: “I’ll tell you what. The order regarding the Polish officers came directly from Stalin. My father said that he saw an authentic document with Stalin’s signature, what should he do? Put yourself under arrest? Or shoot yourself? My father was made a scapegoat for decisions made by others.”
Party of Lavrentiy Beria
The Katyn massacre cannot be blamed on just one person. Nevertheless, the greatest role in this, according to archival documents, was played by Lavrentiy Beria, “ right hand Stalin." The leader’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, noted the extraordinary influence that this “scoundrel” had on her father. In her memoirs, she said that one word from Beria and a couple of forged documents was enough to determine the fate of future victims. The Katyn massacre was no exception. On March 3, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Beria suggested that Stalin consider the cases of Polish officers "in a special manner, with the application of capital punishment to them - execution." Reason: “All of them are sworn enemies of the Soviet regime, filled with hatred of the Soviet system.” Two days later, the Politburo issued a decree on the transport of prisoners of war and preparations for execution.
There is a theory about the forgery of Beria’s “Note”. Linguistic analyzes give different results; the official version does not deny Beria’s involvement. However, statements about the falsification of the “note” are still being made.
Frustrated hopes
At the beginning of 1940, the most optimistic mood was in the air among Polish prisoners of war in Soviet camps. Kozelsky and Yukhnovsky camps were no exception. The convoy treated foreign prisoners of war somewhat more leniently than its own fellow citizens. It was announced that the prisoners would be transferred to neutral countries. In the worst case, the Poles believed, they would be handed over to the Germans. Meanwhile, NKVD officers arrived from Moscow and began work.
Before departure, the prisoners, who truly believed they were being sent to a safe place, were given vaccinations against typhoid fever and cholera, presumably to reassure them. Everyone received a packed lunch. But in Smolensk everyone was ordered to prepare to leave: “We have been standing on a siding in Smolensk since 12 o’clock. April 9, getting up in the prison cars and getting ready to leave. We are being transported somewhere in cars, what next? Transportation in “crow” boxes (scary). We were taken somewhere in the forest, it looked like a summer cottage…” - this is the last entry in the diary of Major Solsky, who rests today in the Katyn forest. The diary was found during exhumation.
The downside of recognition
On February 22, 1990, the head of the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee, V. Falin, informed Gorbachev about new archival documents found that confirm the guilt of the NKVD in the Katyn execution. Falin proposed urgently forming a new position of the Soviet leadership in relation to this case and informing the President of the Polish Republic, Wladimir Jaruzelski, about new discoveries in the matter of the terrible tragedy.
On April 13, 1990, TASS published an official statement admitting the guilt of the Soviet Union in the Katyn tragedy. Jaruzelski received from Mikhail Gorbachev lists of prisoners being transferred from three camps: Kozelsk, Ostashkov and Starobelsk. The main military prosecutor's office opened a case on the fact of the Katyn tragedy. The question arose of what to do with the surviving participants of the Katyn tragedy.
This is what Valentin Alekseevich Alexandrov, a senior official of the CPSU Central Committee, told Nicholas Bethell: “We do not exclude the possibility of a judicial investigation or even a trial. But you must understand that the Soviet public opinion does not fully support Gorbachev’s policy regarding Katyn. We are in Central Committee We have received many letters from veterans’ organizations asking why we are defaming the names of those who were only doing their duty against the enemies of socialism.” As a result, the investigation against those found guilty was terminated due to their death or lack of evidence.
Unresolved issue
The Katyn issue became the main stumbling block between Poland and Russia. When a new investigation into the Katyn tragedy began under Gorbachev, the Polish authorities hoped for a confession of guilt in the murder of all the missing officers, the total number of which was about fifteen thousand. The main attention was paid to the issue of the role of genocide in the Katyn tragedy. However, following the results of the case in 2004, it was announced that it was possible to establish the deaths of 1,803 officers, of whom 22 were identified.
The Soviet leadership completely denied the genocide against the Poles. Prosecutor General Savenkov commented on this as follows: “during the preliminary investigation, at the initiative of the Polish side, the version of genocide was checked, and my firm statement is that there is no basis to talk about this legal phenomenon.” The Polish government was dissatisfied with the results of the investigation. In March 2005, in response to a statement by the Main Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation, the Polish Sejm demanded recognition of the Katyn events as an act of genocide. Members of the Polish Parliament sent a resolution to Russian authorities, which demanded that Russia “recognize the murder of Polish prisoners of war as genocide” based on Stalin’s personal hostility towards the Poles due to defeat in the 1920 war. In 2006, relatives of the dead Polish officers filed a lawsuit in the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights, with the aim of obtaining recognition of Russia in the genocide. The end to this pressing issue for Russian-Polish relations has not yet been reached.
On March 5, 1940, the USSR authorities decided to apply the highest form of punishment to Polish prisoners of war - execution. This marked the beginning of the Katyn tragedy, one of the main stumbling blocks in Russian-Polish relations.
Missing officers
On August 8, 1941, against the backdrop of the outbreak of war with Germany, Stalin entered into diplomatic relations with his newfound ally, the Polish government in exile. As part of the new treaty, all Polish prisoners of war, especially those captured in 1939 on the territory of the Soviet Union, were granted an amnesty and the right to free movement throughout the territory of the Union. The formation of Anders' army began. However, the Polish government was missing about 15,000 officers who, according to documents, were supposed to be in the Kozelsky, Starobelsky and Yukhnovsky camps. To all the accusations of the Polish General Sikorski and General Anders of violating the amnesty agreement, Stalin replied that all the prisoners were released, but could escape to Manchuria.
Subsequently, one of Anders’ subordinates described his alarm: “Despite the “amnesty”, Stalin’s own firm promise to return prisoners of war to us, despite his assurances that prisoners from Starobelsk, Kozelsk and Ostashkov were found and released, we did not receive a single call for help from prisoners of war from the above-mentioned camps. Questioning thousands of colleagues returning from camps and prisons, we have never heard any reliable confirmation of the whereabouts of the prisoners taken from those three camps.” He also owned the words spoken a few years later: “Only in the spring of 1943 a terrible secret was revealed to the world, the world heard a word that still emanates horror: Katyn.”
re-enactment
As you know, the Katyn burial site was discovered by the Germans in 1943, when these areas were under occupation. It was the fascists who contributed to the “promotion” of the Katyn case. Many specialists were involved, the exhumation was carefully carried out, they even took local residents on excursions there. The unexpected discovery in the occupied territory gave rise to a version of a deliberate staging, which was supposed to serve as propaganda against the USSR during the Second World War. This became an important argument in accusing the German side. Moreover, there were many Jews on the list of identified ones.
The details also attracted attention. V.V. Kolturovich from Daugavpils outlined his conversation with a woman who, together with fellow villagers, went to look at the opened graves: “I asked her: “Vera, what did people say to each other while looking at the graves?” The answer was the following: “Our careless slobs can’t do that - it’s too neat a job.” Indeed, the ditches were perfectly dug under the cord, the corpses were laid out in perfect stacks. The argument, of course, is ambiguous, but we should not forget that according to the documents, the execution of such a huge number of people was carried out in the shortest possible time. The performers simply did not have enough time for this.
Double jeopardy
At the famous Nuremberg Trials on July 1-3, 1946, the Katyn massacre was blamed on Germany and appeared in the indictment of the International Tribunal (IT) in Nuremberg, section III “War Crimes”, for cruel treatment of prisoners of war and military personnel of other countries. Friedrich Ahlens, commander of the 537th regiment, was declared the main organizer of the execution. He also acted as a witness in the retaliatory accusation against the USSR. The tribunal did not support the Soviet accusation, and the Katyn episode is absent from the tribunal’s verdict. All over the world this was perceived as a “tacit admission” by the USSR of its guilt.
The preparation and progress of the Nuremberg trials were accompanied by at least two events that compromised the USSR. On March 30, 1946, the Polish prosecutor Roman Martin, who allegedly had documents proving the guilt of the NKVD, died. Soviet prosecutor Nikolai Zorya also fell victim, who died suddenly right in Nuremberg in his hotel room. The day before, he told his immediate superior, Prosecutor General Gorshenin, that he had discovered inaccuracies in the Katyn documents and that he could not speak with them. The next morning he “shot himself.” There were rumors among the Soviet delegation that Stalin ordered “to bury him like a dog!”
After Gorbachev admitted the guilt of the USSR, researcher on the Katyn issue Vladimir Abarinov in his work cites the following monologue from the daughter of an NKVD officer: “I’ll tell you what. The order regarding the Polish officers came directly from Stalin. My father said that he saw an authentic document with Stalin’s signature, what should he do? Put yourself under arrest? Or shoot yourself? My father was made a scapegoat for decisions made by others.”
Party of Lavrentiy Beria
The Katyn massacre cannot be blamed on just one person. Nevertheless, the greatest role in this, according to archival documents, was played by Lavrentiy Beria, “Stalin’s right hand.” The leader’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, noted the extraordinary influence that this “scoundrel” had on her father. In her memoirs, she said that one word from Beria and a couple of forged documents was enough to determine the fate of future victims. The Katyn massacre was no exception. On March 3, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Beria suggested that Stalin consider the cases of Polish officers "in a special manner, with the application of capital punishment to them - execution." Reason: “All of them are sworn enemies of the Soviet regime, filled with hatred of the Soviet system.” Two days later, the Politburo issued a decree on the transport of prisoners of war and preparations for execution.
There is a theory about the forgery of Beria’s “Note”. Linguistic analyzes give different results; the official version does not deny Beria’s involvement. However, statements about the falsification of the “note” are still being made.
Frustrated hopes
At the beginning of 1940, the most optimistic mood was in the air among Polish prisoners of war in Soviet camps. Kozelsky and Yukhnovsky camps were no exception. The convoy treated foreign prisoners of war somewhat more leniently than its own fellow citizens. It was announced that the prisoners would be transferred to neutral countries. In the worst case, the Poles believed, they would be handed over to the Germans. Meanwhile, NKVD officers arrived from Moscow and began work.
Before departure, the prisoners, who sincerely believed they were being sent to a safe place, were given vaccinations against typhoid fever and cholera - presumably to reassure them. Everyone received a packed lunch. But in Smolensk everyone was ordered to prepare to leave: “We have been standing on a siding in Smolensk since 12 o’clock. April 9, getting up in the prison cars and getting ready to leave. We are being transported somewhere in cars, what next? Transportation in “crow” boxes (scary). We were taken somewhere in the forest, it looked like a summer cottage…” - this is the last entry in the diary of Major Solsky, who rests today in the Katyn forest. The diary was found during exhumation.
The downside of recognition
On February 22, 1990, the head of the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee, V. Falin, informed Gorbachev about new archival documents found that confirm the guilt of the NKVD in the Katyn execution. Falin proposed to urgently formulate a new position of the Soviet leadership in relation to this matter and inform the President of the Polish Republic Wojciech Jaruzelski about new discoveries in the matter of the terrible tragedy.
On April 13, 1990, TASS published an official statement admitting the guilt of the Soviet Union in the Katyn tragedy. Jaruzelski received from Mikhail Gorbachev lists of prisoners being transferred from three camps: Kozelsk, Ostashkov and Starobelsk. The main military prosecutor's office opened a case on the fact of the Katyn tragedy. The question arose of what to do with the surviving participants of the Katyn tragedy.
This is what Valentin Alekseevich Alexandrov, a senior official of the CPSU Central Committee, told Nicholas Bethell: “We do not exclude the possibility of a judicial investigation or even a trial. But you must understand that Soviet public opinion does not entirely support Gorbachev's policy regarding Katyn. We in the Central Committee have received many letters from veterans’ organizations in which we are asked why we are defaming the names of those who were only doing their duty in relation to the enemies of socialism.” As a result, the investigation against those found guilty was terminated due to their death or lack of evidence.
Unresolved issue
The Katyn issue became the main stumbling block between Poland and Russia. When a new investigation into the Katyn tragedy began under Gorbachev, the Polish authorities hoped for a confession of guilt in the murder of all the missing officers, the total number of which was about fifteen thousand. The main attention was paid to the issue of the role of genocide in the Katyn tragedy. However, following the results of the case in 2004, it was announced that it was possible to establish the deaths of 1,803 officers, of whom 22 were identified.
The Soviet leadership completely denied the genocide against the Poles. Prosecutor General Savenkov commented on this as follows: “during the preliminary investigation, at the initiative of the Polish side, the version of genocide was checked, and my firm statement is that there is no basis to talk about this legal phenomenon.” The Polish government was dissatisfied with the results of the investigation. In March 2005, in response to a statement by the Main Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation, the Polish Sejm demanded recognition of the Katyn events as an act of genocide. Members of the Polish parliament sent a resolution to the Russian authorities, in which they demanded that Russia “recognize the murder of Polish prisoners of war as genocide” based on Stalin’s personal hostility towards the Poles due to defeat in the 1920 war. In 2006, relatives of the dead Polish officers filed a lawsuit in the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights, with the aim of obtaining recognition of Russia in the genocide. The end to this pressing issue for Russian-Polish relations has not yet been reached.
The question of who is responsible for the death of Polish military------captives in Katyn (more precisely, in the Kozyi 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. Data cited by a number of experts - primarily Polish - about the internment of 180 or even 220-250 thousand Poles are 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. In the Kozelsky camp (in 1940 - Western, now Kaluga region) there were 4,500 Polish prisoners of war, 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 burial places in large quantities. In the fall of 1941, the Germans themselves could leave documents with those executed: then, in their opinion, they had nothing to fear. Back in 1940, the Nazis, without hiding, destroyed several thousand representatives of the Polish elite. For example, in the Palmyra Forest near Warsaw.
It is noteworthy that the Polish authorities rarely remember these victims.
- So it won’t be possible to declare them victims of the NKVD. 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.
- 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 (ECtHR) in connection with the consideration in 2010-2013 of the “Case of Yanovets and others against Russia”. The memorandums of the Ministry of Justice - and they reflect our official position - clearly indicate that during the exhumation carried out in 1991 in Medny, the remains of only 243 Polish military personnel were discovered. Of these, 16 people were identified (identified by badges).
- To put it mildly, significant differences.
We must say frankly: this is obvious and unprincipled manipulation. Despite this, the Poles erected a memorial in Mednoye and hung signs with the names of the 6,300 Poles allegedly shot and buried there. The figures I have mentioned allow us to imagine the scale of cynicism and falsification that the Poles have resorted to and continue to resort to. It's sad that they have like-minded people in our country. We won’t speculate about their motives. But they have no arguments! This is the jesuitical and shameless position of the current Warsaw: to reject and ignore inconvenient facts and talk about its position as the only correct one and not subject to doubt.
- There is a lot of controversy in this regard in the so-called “Katyn No. 3” - Kyiv Bykivna.
In 2012, in Bykivna, the then presidents of Poland and Ukraine, Komorowski and Yanukovych, opened a memorial in memory of the three and a half thousand Polish officers allegedly shot there (please note: again, it was the officers). However, this has not been confirmed by anything. There are not even milestone lists that exist in the “Katyn case”. It is unfoundedly alleged that 3,500 Polish officers were kept in prisons in Western Ukraine. And supposedly they were all shot in Bykovnya.
The opponents' method of conducting discussions is amazing. We are used to presenting facts and arguments. And they give us figures taken from the ceiling, not supported by documents, and present them as indisputable evidence.
Have you ever personally had a discussion with those domestic historians who adhere to the Polish position?
I would be glad! We are always open for discussion. But our opponents avoid discussions and contacts. They operate on the principle of “a scorpion under a stone.” He usually sits for a long time, and at some point he crawls out, bites and hides again.
At the beginning of the year, the Polish Sejm received a bill from Deputy Zielinski. He proposed declaring July 12 as the Day of Remembrance for the victims of the 1945 “August Raid.” In Poland it is called Little 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.
- If we sum up the conversation, what issues are among the unresolved?
I have already said most of it. The main thing is that the collected facts and evidence confirming the guilt of the Germans in the execution of Poles in Katyn are ignored by Warsaw and somehow “shamefully” kept silent by our authorities. It’s time to finally understand that the Polish side in the “Katyn issue” has long been not only biased, but also incapable of negotiating. Warsaw does not accept and will not accept any “inconvenient” arguments. The Poles will continue to call white black. They have driven themselves into the Katyn dead end, from which they cannot and do not want to get out. Russia must show political will here.
What is meant by the term “Katyn crime”? The term is collective. We are talking about the execution of about twenty-two thousand Poles who had previously been in different prisons and NKVD camps of the USSR. The tragedy happened in April-May 1940. Polish policemen and officers who were captured by the Red Army in September 1939 were shot.
The prisoners of the Starobelsky camp were killed and buried in Kharkov; prisoners of the Ostashkovsky camp were shot in Kalinin and buried in Medny; and the prisoners of the Kozelsky camp were shot and buried in Katyn forest(near Smolensk, at a distance of two km from Gnezdovo station). As for the prisoners from prisons in the western regions of Belarus and Ukraine, there is reason to believe that they were shot in Kharkov, Kyiv, Kherson, and Minsk. Probably in other places of the Ukrainian SSR and BSSR, which have not yet been established.
Katyn is considered one of the execution sites. This is a symbol of the execution to which the above-mentioned groups of Poles were subjected, since the graves of Polish officers were discovered in Katyn (in 1943). For the next 47 years Katyn was the one designated place, where a mass grave of victims was found.
What preceded the shooting
The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact (non-aggression pact between Germany and the USSR) was concluded on August 23, 1939. The presence of a secret protocol in the pact indicated that these two countries had delimited their spheres of interest. For example, the USSR was supposed to get the eastern part of pre-war Poland. And Hitler, with the help of this pact, got rid of the last obstacle before attacking Poland.
On September 1, 1939, the Second World War began World War with the attack of Nazi Germany on Poland. During the bloody battles of the Polish army with the aggressor, the Red Army invaded (September 17, 1939). Although Poland signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR. The Red Army operation was declared by Soviet propaganda as a “liberation campaign in Western Belarus and Western Ukraine.”
The Poles could not have foreseen that the Red Army would also attack them. Some even thought that Soviet troops were introduced to fight against the Germans. Because of Poland's hopeless position in that situation, the Polish commander-in-chief had no choice but to issue an order not to fight the Soviet army, but to resist only when the enemy tried to disarm Polish units.
As a result, only a few Polish units fought the Red Army. At the end of September 1939, Soviet soldiers captured 240-250 thousand Poles (among them officers, soldiers, border guards, police, gendarmes, prison guards, and so on). It was impossible to provide so many prisoners with food. For this reason, after disarmament took place, some non-commissioned officers and privates were released home, and the rest were transferred to prisoner of war camps of the NKVD of the USSR.
But there were too many prisoners in these camps. Therefore, many privates and non-commissioned officers left the camp. Those who lived in territories captured by the USSR were sent home. And those who were from the territories occupied by the Germans, according to the agreements, were transferred to Germany. Polish military personnel captured by the German army were transferred to the USSR: Belarusians, Ukrainians, residents of the territory that was transferred to the USSR.
The exchange agreement also affected civilian refugees who ended up in territories occupied by the USSR. People could turn to the German commission (they operated in the spring of 1940 on the Soviet side). And refugees were allowed to return to permanent residence in Polish territory, which was occupied by Germany.
Non-commissioned officers and privates (approximately 25,000 Poles) remained in captivity of the Red Army. However, NKVD prisoners included not only prisoners of war. Mass arrests were carried out due to political motives. Members injured public organizations, political parties, large landowners, industrialists, businessmen, border violators and other “enemies of Soviet power.” Before the sentences were passed, those arrested spent months in prisons in the western BSSR and Ukrainian SSR.
On March 5, 1940, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks decided to shoot 14,700 people. This number included officials, Polish officers, landowners, police officers, intelligence officers, gendarmes, jailers and siege officers. It was also decided to destroy 11,000 prisoners from the western regions of Belarus and Ukraine, who were allegedly counter-revolutionary spies and saboteurs, although in fact this was not the case.
Beria, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR, wrote a note to Stalin that all these people should be shot, because they are “inveterate, incorrigible enemies of Soviet power.” This was the final decision of the Politburo .
Execution of prisoners
Polish prisoners of war and prisoners were executed in April-May 1940. Prisoners from the Ostashkovsky, Kozelsky and Starobelsky camps were sent in stages of 100 people under the command of the NKVD departments in the Kalinin, Smolensk and Kharkov regions, respectively. People were shot as new stages arrived.
At the same time, prisoners of prisons in the western regions of Belarus and Ukraine were shot.
Those 395 prisoners who were not included in the execution order were sent to the Yukhnovsky camp (Smolensk region). Later they were transferred to the Gryazovets camp (Vologda region). At the end of August 1941, prisoners formed the Polish Army in the USSR.
A short time after the execution of prisoners of war, the NKVD carried out an operation: the families of those repressed were deported to Kazakhstan.
Consequences of the tragedy
Throughout the entire time after the terrible crime occurred, the USSR tried to do everything possible to shift the blame onto the German army. Allegedly, it was German soldiers who shot Polish prisoners and prisoners. Propaganda worked with all its might, there was even “evidence” of this. At the end of March 1943, the Germans, together with the Technical Commission of the Polish Red Cross, exhumed the remains of 4,243 killed. The commission was able to establish the names of half of the dead.
However, the “Katyn lie” of the USSR is not only its efforts to impose its version of what happened on all countries of the world. The communist leadership of the then Poland, which brought to power Soviet Union, also pursued this internal policy.
Only after half a century did the USSR take the blame upon itself. On April 13, 1990, a TASS statement was published, which spoke of “direct responsibility for the atrocities in the Katyn Forest of Beria, Merkulov and their henchmen.”
In 1991, Polish specialists and the Main Military Prosecutor's Office (GVP) carried out a partial exhumation. The burial places of prisoners of war were finally established.
On October 14, 1992, B. N. Yeltsin published and handed over to Poland evidence confirming the guilt of the USSR leadership in the “Katyn crime.” Much of the investigation materials still remain classified.
On November 26, 2010, the State Duma, despite the opposition of the Communist Party faction, decided to adopt a statement on the “Katyn tragedy and its victims.” This incident was recognized in history as a crime, the commission of which was directly ordered by Stalin and other leaders of the USSR.
In 2011, Russian officials made a statement about their readiness to consider the issue of rehabilitation of victims of the tragedy.
During perestroika, Gorbachev did not blame any sins on the Soviet Government. One of them is the execution of Polish officers near Katyn by allegedly Soviet secret services. In reality, the Poles were shot by the Germans, and the myth about the USSR’s involvement in the execution of Polish prisoners of war was put into circulation by Nikita Khrushchev, based on his own selfish considerations.
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, in to a greater extent– Hungary, to a lesser extent – Bulgaria. In the end, Polish anti-Soviet activists, 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 to 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 Polish People’s Republic, 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 " 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 the 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 Lavrentiy 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 bag (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 correctly stated that 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, policemen, 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 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 single “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, to bourgeois Poland from Soviet Russia According to the Riga Peace Treaty of 1921, the western lands of Ukraine and Belarus were ceded, and this soon led to the forced Polization of the population of the territories so unexpectedly acquired for free: to the closure of 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 investigated 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, in the midst of cold war» The US Congress is again attempting to revive the “Katyn Question”, 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.