The Katyn Massacre
On Stalin's orders, the NKVD shoots about 22,000 Polish officers, police and members of the elite; Moscow blames the Nazis for half a century.
- Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment — Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva and Wojciech Materski (eds), Yale University Press (2007)
- Katyn: elementary exhibition — Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), Instytut Pamięci Narodowej
- Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin — Timothy Snyder, Basic Books (2010)
On 5 March 1940 the Soviet Politburo, with Stalin’s signature first, approved a proposal by NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria to shoot Polish prisoners held as “hardened, irreconcilable enemies of Soviet power”. In April and May the NKVD killed about 22,000 people: army officers, many of them reservists who were doctors, lawyers, teachers and engineers in civilian life, as well as police, border guards, priests and officials. They were shot in the back of the head in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, in Kalinin (Tver) and Kharkiv, and in prisons in occupied Ukraine and Belarus.
- Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment — Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva and Wojciech Materski (eds), Yale University Press (2007)
- Katyn: elementary exhibition — Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), Instytut Pamięci Narodowej
Germany announced the discovery of the graves at Katyn in April 1943. When the Polish government in London asked for a Red Cross investigation, Stalin broke off relations. After the war, the Soviets blamed the Nazis, and Western allies, wary of offending Moscow, went along. In communist Poland the truth could be whispered but not printed. Only in April 1990 did Gorbachev’s government admit NKVD guilt, and in 1992 Russia handed Poland copies of the 1940 order.
- Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment — Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva and Wojciech Materski (eds), Yale University Press (2007)
- Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin — Timothy Snyder, Basic Books (2010)
A deliberate act to wipe out Poland's leadership class, which Poland's Institute of National Remembrance investigates as genocide, followed by fifty years of official lies that Poles were forced to repeat.
- Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment — Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva and Wojciech Materski (eds), Yale University Press (2007)
- Katyn: elementary exhibition — Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), Instytut Pamięci Narodowej
In 1990 the Soviet Union admitted NKVD responsibility, and in 2010 Russia's Duma condemned Stalin's crime. But a Russian investigation closed in 2004 refused to classify it as genocide and kept most of its files secret, and some Russian politicians have revived the old denials.
- Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment — Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva and Wojciech Materski (eds), Yale University Press (2007)
- The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia — Masha Gessen, Riverhead Books (2017)
Why it matters today
Katyn stands for both a crime and a lie. Poles who knew the truth could not say it publicly until 1989, and the Soviet admission in 1990 was followed by Russian reluctance to call it genocide or open all the files. "Katyn" is shorthand in Poland for Soviet murder and for the struggle for historical truth.