Execution in Katyn official documents. Katyn massacre

On April 16, 2012, the European Court of Human Rights will deliver its final verdict on the so-called Katyn case. One of the Polish radio stations, citing the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Mr. Kaminski, reports that the ECHR meeting will be held in an open manner, and therefore the whole world will finally learn about the real truth regarding Katyn. In principle, you don’t even have to guess much about what the court’s verdict will be. One can only guess what kind of mine he will put under the further development of the Russian Federation and the attitude towards it on the part of the international community. Russia, by the way, recognizes at the state level that the execution of Polish officers was the work of NKVD soldiers acting on the orders of Stalin and Beria, as even President Medvedev once stated.

The essence of the question is to blame the Soviet authorities of the 40s for the fact that, on their orders, in the territory of the Smolensk region alone, according to one source, about 4.5 thousand, and according to another - 20 thousand, Polish military personnel were shot. Moreover, if such a verdict is accepted (which there is no doubt about), then, as often happens, the blame will automatically transfer to modern Russia.

Let us recall that the first conversations about the tragedy in the Katyn Forest were started in 1943 by Nazi occupation forces. Then German soldiers discovered (this word could, in principle, be written in quotation marks) near Smolensk in the area of ​​Katyn and Gnezdovo station a mass grave of Polish (precisely Polish) officers. This was immediately presented as a fact of mass extermination of Polish prisoners by representatives of the NKVD. At the same time, the Germans stated that they conducted a thorough investigation and established that the execution took place in the spring of 1940, which once again proves the “Stalinist trace” in this case. The NKVD allegedly specifically used Walter and Browning pistols with German-made Geko bullets to carry out mass executions in order to cast a shadow over the “most humane” Nazi army in the world. The Soviet Union, for obvious reasons, subjected all the conclusions of the German commission to complete obstruction.

However, in 1944, when Soviet troops drove the Nazis out of the territory of the Smolensk region, an investigation into this fact was already carried out by Moscow. According to the findings of the Moscow commission, which included public figures, military experts, doctors of medical sciences and even representatives of the clergy, it turned out that along with the Poles, the bodies of several hundred Soviet soldiers and officers also rest in the huge graves of the Katyn Forest. The Soviet commission pointed out that the murders of thousands of prisoners of war were committed by the Nazis in the fall of 1941. Of course, the conclusions of the Soviet commission of 1944 also cannot be taken unambiguously, but our task is to approach the consideration of the so-called Katyn issue from an objective point of view, based on facts and not unfounded accusations. This story has too many pitfalls, but trying not to pay attention to them means trying to distance yourself from Russian history.

The 1944 commission’s point of view on the Katyn tragedy in the Soviet Union persisted for several decades, until in 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev handed over the so-called “new materials” on the Katyn case to the hands of Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski, after which the whole world started talking about the crimes of Stalinism against Polish officers. What were these “new materials”? They were based on secret documents allegedly signed by I.V. Stalin, L.P. Beria and other high-ranking officials of the Soviet state. Even during the transfer of these documents into the hands of M.S. Gorbachev himself, experts told him not to rush to draw conclusions from these materials, because these documents do not provide direct evidence of the executions of Poles by NKVD units and need to be verified for authenticity. However, Mr. Gorbachev did not wait for the end of the examination of the documents and further conclusions of the commission on this difficult case, and decided to make public the “terrible secret” about the atrocities of the Soviet regime.

In this regard, the first inconsistency arises, indicating that it is too early to draw an end to the Katyn issue. Why did these secret documents surface in February 1990? But even before this, they could have been made public at least twice.

The first publicity about the execution of Polish officers at the hands of Soviet security officers could have appeared during the famous 20th Congress of the CPSU Central Committee, when the cult of personality of J.V. Stalin was debunked by N.S. Khrushchev. In principle, in 1956, Khrushchev could not only condemn Stalin’s crimes on the territory of the USSR, but also receive simply huge foreign policy dividends from “revealing the Katyn secret,” because shortly before this, a commission of the American Congress was also involved in the Katyn case. But Khrushchev did not take advantage of this opportunity. And could he have used it? Were these “documents” available at that time? And to say that he knew nothing about the real situation in the early 40s with Polish prisoners of war is naive...

Publicity could have taken place during the initial period of Gorbachev’s own stay in power, but for some reason it did not happen. Why did it take place in February 1990? Perhaps the secret is that all these “new materials”, about which strangely nothing was known until 1990, were simply fabricated, and such systematic falsification was carried out precisely in the late 80s, when the Soviet Union has already set a course towards rapprochement with the West. What was needed were real “historical bombs.”

By the way, this point of view can be questioned as much as you like, but there are results of a documentary examination of those very “new materials” of the Katyn case. It turned out that the documents bearing the signatures of Stalin and other persons demanding that the cases of Polish prisoners of war be considered in a special manner were typed on one typewriter, and the sheets with Beria’s final signature were printed on another. In addition, on one of the extracts of the final decision adopted at a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in March 1940, strangely there was a stamp with attributes and the name of the CPSU. It’s strange, because the Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself appeared only in 1952. This kind of inconsistency was also announced during the so-called Round Table on the Katyn issue, organized in the State Duma in 2010.

But the inconsistencies regarding the Katyn tragedy, in which recently they have only seen the obvious guilt of NKVD employees, do not end there. In the case materials that have already been transferred to the Polish side, and this is more than fifty volumes, there are several documents that cast doubt on the date of the mass execution at Katyn - April-May 1940. These documents are letters from Polish military personnel, which were dated in the summer and autumn of 1941 - the time when Hitler’s troops were already in control of the Smolensk land.

If you believe that the NKVD decided to specifically shoot Poles with German weapons and German bullets, then why did this even need to be done? After all, in Moscow at that time there was no way they could have known that in just over a year, fascist Germany would attack the Soviet Union...

The German commission that worked at the scene of the tragedy found that the hands of those shot were tied with special cotton laces made in Germany. All this again suggests that the perspicacious NKVD officers already knew then that Germany would attack the USSR and, apparently, ordered not only Brownings from Berlin, but also these twines in order to cast a shadow on Germany.
The same commission discovered a large amount of foliage in mass (spontaneous) graves near Katyn, which clearly could not have fallen from the trees in April, but this indirectly confirms that the massacres of Polish and Soviet prisoners of war could have been committed precisely in the fall of 1941.

It turns out that in the Katyn case there are a large number of questions that still do not find clear answers, if we are firmly convinced that the execution was the work of the NKVD. In fact, the entire evidence base declaring the Soviet Union guilty is built on the very documents whose authenticity is clearly in doubt. The appearance of these documents in 1990 only indicates that the Katyn affair was in fact being prepared as another blow to the integrity of the USSR, which at that time was already experiencing enormous difficulties.

Now it’s worth turning to the so-called eyewitness accounts. In the late 30s - early 40s, on the territory located 400-500 meters from the place where the mass executions were subsequently carried out, there was a so-called government dacha. According to the testimony of the employees of this dacha, such famous people as Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Shvernik liked to come here on vacation. The documents, which were “declassified” in the 90s, directly state that these visits took place when mass executions of Polish officers took place in the forest near the Goat Mountains (the former name of Katyn). It turns out that high-ranking officials were going on vacation to the site of a giant cemetery... They could simply not know about its existence - an argument that is difficult to take seriously. If the executions took place precisely in April-May 1940 in the immediate vicinity of that very government dacha, then it turns out that the NKVD decided to violate the unshakable instructions on the order of executions. This instruction clearly states that mass executions should be carried out in places located no closer than 10 km from cities - at night. And here - 400 meters and not even from the city, but from the place where the political elite came to fish and get some fresh air. It’s hard to imagine how Klim Voroshilov was fishing when bulldozers were working a few hundred meters away from him, burying thousands of corpses in the ground. At the same time, they buried it lightly. It was established that the bodies of some of those shot were barely covered with sand, and therefore the hellish smell of numerous corpses must have spread through the forest. This is the government dacha... All this looks a little intelligible, taking into account the thoroughness of the NKVD’s approach to this kind of matter.

In 1991, the former head of the NKVD department P. Soprunenko stated that in March 1940 he held in his hands a paper with a Politburo resolution signed by Joseph Stalin on the execution of Polish officers. This is another reason to doubt the materials of the case, since it is known for certain that Comrade Soprunenko could in no way hold such a document in his hands, since his powers did not extend that far. It is difficult to assume that this document was “given to him to hold” by L. Beria himself in March 1940, because just a month before, ex-People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Nikolai Yezhov, arrested on charges of attempting to commit a coup, was shot. Did Beria really feel so free that he could walk around the offices with the secret decisions of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party and give them to “hold in the hands” of anyone he wanted... Naive thoughts...

As Vyacheslav Shved says in the comments to his book “The Secret of Katyn,” falsification of historical materials took place at different times and in different countries. One of the most striking examples of falsification in the United States is the accusation that Oswald single-handedly decided to kill President Kennedy. Only more than 40 years later it turned out that a multi-stage conspiracy with a large number of actors was planned against John Kennedy.

It is quite possible that they are trying to present the Katyn tragedy in a way that is beneficial to certain political circles. Instead of conducting a truly objective investigation and complete declassification of documentary data, the information war continues around the mass murder of Polish and Soviet military personnel, which deals another blow to the authority of Russia.

In this regard, it is interesting to pay attention to the recent decision of the Tver court in the lawsuit of E.Ya. Dzhugashvili, defending the honor and dignity of his grandfather I.V. Dzhugashvili (Stalin), accused of shooting Polish prisoners of war. Stalin's grandson demands that the State Duma remove the phrase from the parliamentary statement that the Katyn execution took place on the direct orders of J.V. Stalin. Let me note that this is the second such claim against the State Duma by Stalin’s grandson (the first was left unsatisfied by the court).

Despite the fact that the Tverskoy court left the second claim unsatisfied, its decision cannot be called unambiguous. In her final ruling, Judge Fedosova stated that “Stalin was one of the leaders of the USSR during the Katyn tragedy in September 1941" With just these words, the Tver court, clearly unwillingly, managed to emphasize that all the documents in the case of the executed Polish officers are possibly a gross falsification, which still needs to be seriously studied, and then real independent conclusions can be drawn on its basis. This once again suggests that whatever decision the ECHR makes, it will clearly not be based on all the historical facts of that tragedy, which still causes conflicting feelings.

Of course, the execution of thousands of Polish officers is a huge national tragedy for Poland, and most people in Russia understand this tragedy and share Polish grief. And at the same time, we must not forget that in addition to the Polish officers, tens of millions of other people perished in that great war, whose descendants also dream of a worthy attitude towards the memory of their dead ancestors on the part of the state and the public. You can exaggerate the Katyn tragedy as much as you like, but there is no need to deliberately keep silent about the thousands and thousands of other victims of the Second World War, about how today nationalist movements are actively raising their heads in the Baltic countries, towards which Poland for some reason has a very warm attitude. History, as we know, does not know the subjunctive mood, so history must be treated objectively. At every historical stage in the development of any state there is a very controversial period, and if all these historical disputes are used to escalate new conflicts, this will lead to a grandiose catastrophe that will simply crush civilization.

The small village near Smolensk Katyn went down in history as a symbol of the massacre in the spring of 1940 of Polish soldiers held in various Soviet concentration camps and prisons. The secret action of the NKVD to liquidate Polish officers in the Katyn Forest began on April 8.

German troops cross the German-Polish border. September 1, 1939

In the 1953 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the Katyn execution is described as “a mass execution by Nazi invaders of prisoners of war of Polish officers, committed in the fall of 1941 on Soviet territory temporarily occupied by Nazi troops,” supporters of this version, despite documentary evidence of Soviet “authorship,” are still We are sure that this is how it all happened.

A little history: how it all happened

At the end of August 1939, the USSR and Germany signed a non-aggression pact, accompanied by a secret protocol on the division of Eastern Europe into spheres of influence between Moscow and Berlin. A week later, Germany entered Poland, and after another 17 days the Red Army crossed the Soviet-Polish border. As provided for in the agreements, Poland was divided between the USSR and Germany. On August 31, mobilization began in Poland. The Polish army desperately resisted, all the newspapers in the world circulated a photograph in which the Polish cavalry rushed to attack German tanks.

The forces were unequal, and German units reached the suburbs of Warsaw on September 9. On the same day, Molotov sent congratulations to Schulenberg: “I received your message that German troops have entered Warsaw. Please convey my congratulations and greetings to the government of the German Empire."

After the first news of the Red Army crossing the Polish border, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Armed Forces, Marshal Rydz-Smigly, gave the order: “Do not engage in battles with the Soviets, resist only if they attempt to disarm our units that came into contact with Soviet troops. Continue to fight the Germans. The surrounded cities must fight. If Soviet troops approach, negotiate with them in order to achieve the withdrawal of our garrisons to Romania and Hungary.”

As a result of the defeat of the almost million-strong Polish army in September-October 1939, Hitler's troops captured more than 18 thousand officers and 400 thousand soldiers. Part of the Polish army was able to leave for Romania, Hungary, Lithuania, and Latvia. The other part surrendered to the Red Army, which carried out the so-called operation to liberate Western Ukraine and Belarus. Different sources give different figures for Polish prisoners of war on the territory of the USSR; in 1939, at a session of the Supreme Council, Molotov reported 250 thousand captured Poles.

Polish prisoners of war were kept in prisons and camps, the most famous of them being Kozelsky, Starobelsky and Ostashkovsky. Almost all the prisoners in these camps were exterminated.

On September 18, 1939, a German-Soviet communique was published in Pravda: “In order to avoid all kinds of unfounded rumors about the tasks of the Soviet and German troops operating in Poland, the government of the USSR and the government of Germany declare that the actions of these troops do not pursue any goal , contrary to the interests of Germany or the Soviet Union and contrary to the spirit and letter of the non-aggression pact concluded between Germany and the USSR. The task of these troops, on the contrary, is to restore order and tranquility in Poland, disturbed by the collapse of the Polish state, and to help the population of Poland reorganize the conditions of their state existence.”

The population joyfully greeted the Soviet troops - for almost 20 years Belarusians and Ukrainians were part of Poland, where they were subjected to forced Polishization (Belarusian and Ukrainian schools were closed, Orthodox churches were turned into churches, the best lands were taken away from local peasants, transferring them to the Poles). However, with the Soviet army and Soviet power came Stalinist orders. Mass repressions began against new “enemies of the people” from among the local residents of the western regions.

From November 1939 until the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, until June 20, 1940, trains with deportees went east to “remote areas of the USSR.” Polish army officers from the Starobelsky (Voroshilovgrad region), Ostashkovsky (Stolbny Island, Lake Seliger) and Kozelsky (Smolensk region) camps were initially supposed to be transferred to the Germans, but the opinion prevailed in the USSR leadership that the prisoners should be destroyed. The authorities rightly judged: if these people were free, they would certainly become organizers and activists of anti-fascist and anti-communist resistance. The sanction for destruction was given in 1940 by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, and the verdict itself was passed by a Special Meeting of the NKVD of the USSR.

"Ministry of Truth" at work

The first indications of the disappearance of approximately 15 thousand Polish prisoners of war appeared in the early autumn of 1941. The formation of the Polish army began in the USSR, the main part of which was recruited from former prisoners of war - after the establishment of diplomatic relations between the USSR and the Polish émigré government in London, they were declared an amnesty. At the same time, it was discovered that among the arriving recruits there were no former prisoners of the Kozelsky, Starobelsky and Ostashkovsky camps.

The command of the Polish army repeatedly turned to the Soviet authorities with requests about their fate, but no definite answers were given to these requests. On April 13, 1943, the Germans announced that 12 thousand corpses of Polish military officers - officers captured by the Soviets in September 1939 and killed by the NKVD - had been found in the Katyn Forest. (Further research did not confirm this figure - almost three times fewer corpses were found in Katyn).

On April 15, Moscow radio broadcast the TASS Statement, which placed the blame on the Germans. On April 17, the same text was published in Pravda with the addition of the presence of ancient burials in those places: “In their clumsy and hastily concocted nonsense about numerous graves allegedly discovered by the Germans near Smolensk, Goebbels’ liars mention the village of Gnezdovaya, but they are silent about that , that it is near the village of Gnezdova that archaeological excavations of the historical “Gnezdovsky burial ground” are located.”

The place of execution of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest was located one and a half kilometers from the NKVD dacha (a comfortable cottage with a garage and a sauna), where the authorities from the center rested.

Expertise

The Katyn graves were first opened and examined in the spring of 1943 by the German doctor Gerhard Butz, who headed the forensic laboratory of Army Group Center. That same spring, burials in the Katyn Forest were examined by a commission of the Polish Red Cross. On April 28-30, an international commission consisting of 12 experts from European countries worked in Katyn. After the liberation of Smolensk, the Soviet “Special Commission to Establish and Investigate the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of Prisoners of War in the Katyn Forest” arrived in Katyn in January 1944, headed by Burdenko.

The conclusions of Dr. Butz and the international commission directly blamed the USSR. The Polish Red Cross Commission was more cautious, but the facts recorded in its report also implied the guilt of the USSR. The Burdenko Commission, naturally, blamed the Germans for everything.

François Naville, a professor of forensic medicine at the University of Geneva, who headed an international commission of 12 experts that examined the Katyn graves in the spring of 1943, was ready to appear in Nuremberg as a defense witness in 1946. After the meeting on Katyn, he stated that he and his colleagues did not receive “gold, money, gifts, awards, valuables” from anyone and all conclusions were made by them objectively and without any pressure. Subsequently, Professor Naville wrote: “If a country caught between two powerful neighbors learns about the destruction of almost 10,000 of its officers, prisoners of war, whose only guilt was that they defended their homeland, if this country tries to find out how it all happened, a decent person will not can accept a reward for going to the place and trying to lift the edge of the veil that hid, and still hides, the circumstances under which this action was carried out, caused by disgusting cowardice, contrary to the customs of war.”

In 1973, a member of the 1943 international commission, Professor Palmeri, testified: “There were no doubts among any of the twelve members of our commission, there was not a single reservation. The conclusion is irrefutable. It was willingly signed by Prof. Markov (Sofia), and prof. Gajek (Prague). It should not be surprising that they subsequently retracted their testimony. Maybe I would have done the same thing if Naples had been “liberated” by the Soviet Army... No, there was no pressure put on us from the German side. The crime is the work of Soviet hands; there can be no two opinions about it. To this day, before my eyes, there are Polish officers on their knees, with their arms twisted behind them, kicking their legs into the grave after being shot in the back of the head...”

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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, thousands of captured Polish citizens, mostly officers, were shot by the Soviet NKVD over the course of several weeks. 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 of “former officers of the 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 They are subject to the highest penalty - 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 provide 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 by 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, in part, read: “The identified archival materials taken together allow us to conclude that Beria and Merkulov were directly responsible for the atrocities in the Katyn forest ( 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, clearly 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. The head of the Russian government is 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 starting World War II. On September 17, 1939, in the midst of the bloody battles of the Polish Army, which was desperately trying to stop the rapid advance of the German army inland, the Red Army, in agreement with Germany, 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 Ostashkovsky prisoner of war camp in the Kalinin (now Tver) region.

Not only prisoners of war became prisoners of the NKVD. One of the main means of “Sovietization” of the occupied territories was a campaign of continuous mass arrests for political reasons, directed primarily against officials of the Polish state apparatus (including officers and police officers who escaped captivity), members of Polish political parties and public organizations, industrialists, large landowners, and businessmen , border violators and other “enemies of Soviet power.” Before the verdict was passed, those arrested were kept for months in prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and BSSR, formed in the occupied territories of the pre-war Polish state.

On March 5, 1940, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (Bolsheviks) decided to shoot “14,700 Polish officers, officials, landowners, policemen, intelligence officers, gendarmes, siege guards and jailers in prisoner-of-war camps,” as well as 11,000 arrested and held in Western prisons. regions of Ukraine and Belarus "members of various counter-revolutionary espionage and sabotage organizations, former landowners, factory owners, former Polish officers, officials and defectors."

The basis for the Politburo’s decision was a note from the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR Beria to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks to Stalin, in which the execution of the listed categories of Polish prisoners and prisoners was proposed “based on the fact that they are all inveterate, incorrigible enemies of Soviet power.” At the same time, as a solution, the final part of Beria’s note was reproduced verbatim in the minutes of the Politburo meeting.

Execution

The execution of Polish prisoners of war and prisoners belonging to the categories listed in the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of March 5, 1940, was carried out in April and May of the same year.

All prisoners of the Kozelsky, Ostashkovsky and Starobelsky prisoner of war camps (except for 395 people) were sent in stages of approximately 100 people to the disposal of the NKVD Directorates for the Smolensk, Kalinin and Kharkov regions, respectively, which carried out executions as the stages arrived.

At the same time, executions of prisoners in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus took place.

395 prisoners of war, not included in the execution orders, were sent to the Yukhnovsky prisoner of war camp in the Smolensk region. They were then transferred to the Gryazovets prisoner of war camp in the Vologda region, from which at the end of August 1941 they were transferred to form the Polish Army in the USSR.

On April 13, 1940, shortly after the start of executions of Polish prisoners of war and prison inmates, an NKVD operation was carried out to deport their families (as well as the families of other repressed persons) living in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and BSSR to settlement in Kazakhstan.

Subsequent events

On June 22, 1941, Germany attacked the USSR. Soon, on July 30, an agreement was concluded between the Soviet government and the Polish government in exile (located in London) to invalidate the Soviet-German treaties of 1939 concerning “territorial changes in Poland”, to restore diplomatic relations between the USSR and Poland, to establish territory of the USSR of the Polish army to participate in the war against Germany and the liberation of all Polish citizens who were imprisoned in the USSR as prisoners of war, arrested or convicted, and also held in a special settlement.

This agreement was followed by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of August 12, 1941 on granting amnesty to Polish citizens who were imprisoned or in a special settlement (by that time there were about 390 thousand of them), and the Soviet-Polish military agreement of August 14, 1941 on the organization Polish army on the territory of the USSR. The army was planned to be formed from amnestied Polish prisoners and special settlers, primarily from former prisoners of war; General Vladislav Anders, who was urgently released from the internal NKVD prison at Lubyanka, was appointed its commander.

In the 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 for detailed study to the Institute of Forensic Medicine and Criminalistics in Krakow. (In the summer of 1944, all of these materials, except for a small part of them, secretly hidden by employees of the Krakow Institute, were taken by the Germans from Krakow to Germany, where, according to rumors, they were burned during one of the bombings.)

On September 25, 1943, the Red Army liberated Smolensk. Only on January 12, 1944, the Soviet “Special Commission to Establish and Investigate the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of Prisoners of War in the Katyn Forest” by the Nazi invaders was created, the chairman of which was appointed Academician N.N. Burdenko. Moreover, already from October 1943, specially seconded employees of the NKVD-NKGB of the USSR were preparing falsified “evidence” of the responsibility of the German authorities for the execution of Polish officers near Smolensk. According to the official report, the Soviet exhumation in Katyn was carried out from January 16 to 26, 1944, at the direction of the “Burdenko Commission”. From the secondary graves remaining 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, having heard the testimony of witnesses for the defense (represented by German lawyers) and prosecution (represented by the Soviet side) on July 1–3, 1946, 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.

On March 3, 1959, Chairman of the KGB under the Council of Ministers of the USSR A.N. Shelepin sent to the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee N.S. Khrushchev received a top secret note confirming that 14,552 prisoners - officers, gendarmes, policemen, etc. persons of the former bourgeois Poland,” as well as 7,305 prisoners in prisons in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus were shot in 1940 based on the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of March 5, 1940 (including 4,421 people in the Katyn Forest). The note proposed to destroy all records of those executed.

At the same time, throughout 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 sought out witnesses and participants in the German exhumation and forced them to make statements “exposing” the Germans as the perpetrators of the execution.
The Soviet Union admitted guilt only half a century after the execution of captured Polish officers - on April 13, 1990, an official TASS statement was published about “direct responsibility for the atrocities in the Katyn Forest of Beria, Merkulov and their henchmen,” and the atrocities themselves were qualified in it as “one of the gravest crimes of Stalinism." At the same time, USSR President M.S. Gorbachev handed over to the President of Poland W. Jaruzelski the lists of executed Polish prisoners of war (formally these were lists of orders to send convoys from the Kozelsky and Ostashkovsky camps to the NKVD in the Smolensk and Kalinin regions, as well as a list of records of former prisoners of war of the Starobelsky camp) and some other NKVD documents .

In the same year, the prosecutor's office of the Kharkov region opened criminal cases: on March 22 - on the discovery of burials in the forest park area of ​​​​Kharkov, and on August 20 - against Beria, Merkulov, Soprunenko (who was in 1939-1943 the head of the USSR NKVD Directorate for Prisoners of War and internees), Berezhkov (chief of the Starobelsky prisoner of war camp of the NKVD of the USSR) and other NKVD employees. On June 6, 1990, the prosecutor's office of the Kalinin region opened another case - about the fate of Polish prisoners of war who were held in the Ostashkov camp and disappeared without a trace in May 1940. These cases were transferred to the Main Military Prosecutor's Office (GVP) of the USSR and on September 27, 1990 they were combined and accepted for proceedings under No. 159. The GVP formed an investigation team headed by A.V. Tretetsky.

In 1991, the investigative group of the Main Prosecutor General's Office, together with Polish specialists, carried out partial exhumations in the 6th quarter of the forest park zone of Kharkov, on the territory of the holiday village of the KGB in the Tver region, 2 km from the village of Mednoye and in the Katyn forest. The main result of these exhumations was the final procedural establishment of the burial places of the executed Polish prisoners of the Starobelsky and Ostashkovsky prisoner of war camps.

A year later, on October 14, 1992, by order of Russian President B.N. Yeltsin, documents were made public and transferred to Poland, exposing the leadership of the USSR in committing the “Katyn crime” - the above-mentioned decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940 on the execution of Polish prisoners, Beria’s “staged” note to this decision, addressed to Stalin (with handwritten signatures of Politburo members Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and Mikoyan, as well as marks of voting “for” Kalinin and Kaganovich), a note from Shelepin to Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959 and other documents from the Presidential Archive. Thus, documentary evidence became available to the public that the victims of the “Katyn crime” were executed for political reasons - as “inveterate, incorrigible enemies of the Soviet regime.” At the same time, it became known for the first time that not only prisoners of war were shot, but also prisoners in prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and BSSR. The Politburo decision of March 5, 1940 ordered, as already mentioned, the execution of 14,700 prisoners of war and 11 thousand prisoners. From Shelepin’s note to Khrushchev it follows that approximately the same number of prisoners of war were shot, but fewer prisoners were shot - 7,305 people. The reason for the "underfulfillment" is unknown.

On August 25, 1993, Russian President B.N. Yeltsin, with the words “Forgive us...”, laid a wreath at the monument to the victims of Katyn at the Powązki memorial cemetery in Warsaw.

On May 5, 1994, the Deputy Head of the Security Service of Ukraine, General A. Khomich, handed over to 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. Yablokov (who replaced A.V. Tretetsky) issued a resolution to terminate the criminal case on the basis of paragraph 8 of Article 5 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR (due to the death of the perpetrators), and in the resolution Stalin, members of the Politburo Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Kalinin and Kaganovich, Beria and other leaders and NKVD employees, as well as the perpetrators of the executions, were found guilty of committing crimes under paragraphs “a”, “b”, “c” of Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity). It was precisely this qualification of the “Katyn affair” (but in relation to the Nazis) that was already given by the Soviet side in 1945–1946 when it was submitted to the IMT for consideration. Three days later, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office and the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation canceled Yablokov's decision, and further investigation was assigned to another prosecutor.

In 2000, Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Russian memorial complexes were opened at the burial sites of executed prisoners of war: June 17 in Kharkov, July 28 in Katyn, September 2 in Medny.

On September 21, 2004, the Main Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation terminated criminal case No. 159 on the basis of paragraph 4 of part 1 of Article 24 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation (due to the death of the perpetrators). Having informed the public about this only a few months later, the then Chief Military Prosecutor A.N. Savenkov, at his press conference on March 11, 2005, declared secret not only most of the investigation materials, but also the resolution itself to terminate the “Katyn case.” Thus, the personal composition of the perpetrators contained in the resolution was also classified.

From the response of the Main Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation to 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 took important steps towards recognizing the truth in the “Katyn case”. The Memorial Society believes that now we need to return to this path. It is necessary to resume and complete the investigation of the “Katyn crime”, give it an adequate legal assessment, make public the names of all those responsible (from decision-makers to ordinary executors), declassify and make public all investigation materials, establish the names and burial places of all executed Polish citizens, recognize executed by victims of political repression and rehabilitate them in accordance with the Russian Law “On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression.”

The information was prepared by the International Society "Memorial".

Information from the brochure “Katyn”, released for the presentation of the film of the same name by Andrzej Wajda in Moscow in 2007.
Illustrations in the text: made during the German exhumation in 1943 in Katyn (published in books: Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn. Berlin, 1943; Katyń: Zbrodnia i propaganda: niemieckie fotografie dokumentacyjne ze zbiorów Instytutu Za-chodniego. Poznań, 2003), photographs taken by Aleksey Pamyatnykh during the exhumation carried out by the GVP in 1991 in Medny.

In the application:

• Order No. 794/B dated March 5, 1940, signed by L. Beria, with a resolution by I. Stalin, K. Voroshilov, V. Molotov, A. Mikoyan;
• Note from A. Shelepin to N. Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959

The Katyn massacre was a mass murder of Polish citizens (mostly captured officers of the Polish army), carried out in the spring of 1940 by members of the NKVD of the USSR. As evidenced by documents published in 1992, the executions were carried out by decision of the troika of the NKVD of the USSR in accordance with the resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940. According to published archival documents, a total of 21,857 Polish prisoners were shot.

During the partition of Poland, up to half a million Polish citizens were captured by the Red Army. Most of them were soon released, and 130,242 people were taken into NKVD camps, including both members of the Polish army and others whom the leadership of the Soviet Union considered “suspicious” because of their desire to restore Polish independence. The military personnel of the Polish army were divided: the senior officers were concentrated in three camps: Ostashkovsky, Kozelsky and Starobelsky.

And on March 3, 1940, the head of the NKVD Lavrentiy Beria proposed to the Politburo of the Central Committee to destroy all these people, since “They are all sworn enemies of the Soviet government, filled with hatred of the Soviet system.” In fact, according to the ideology that existed in the USSR at that time, all nobles and representatives of wealthy circles were declared class enemies and subject to destruction. Therefore, a death sentence was signed for the entire officer corps of the Polish army, which was soon carried out.

Then the war between the USSR and Germany began and Polish units began to form in the USSR. Then the question arose about the officers who were in these camps. Soviet officials responded vaguely and evasively. And in 1943, the Germans found the burial places of “missing” Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. The USSR accused the Germans of lying and after the liberation of this area, a Soviet commission headed by N.N. Burdenko worked in the Katyn Forest. The conclusions of this commission were predictable: they blamed the Germans for everything.

Subsequently, Katyn more than once became the subject of international scandals and high-profile accusations. In the early 90s, documents were published that confirmed that the execution in Katyn was carried out by decision of the highest Soviet leadership. And on November 26, 2010, the State Duma of the Russian Federation, by its decision, admitted the guilt of the USSR in the Katyn massacre. Seems like enough has been said. But it’s too early to draw a conclusion. Until a full assessment of these atrocities is given, until all the executioners and their victims are named, until the Stalinist legacy is overcome, until then we will not be able to say that the case of the execution in the Katyn Forest, which occurred in the spring of 1940, is closed.

Resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940, which determined the fate of the Poles. It states that “the cases of 14,700 former Polish officers, officials, landowners, police officers, intelligence officers, gendarmes, siege officers and jailers in prisoner-of-war camps, as well as the cases of 11 people arrested and in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus 000 people, members of various espionage and sabotage organizations, former landowners, factory owners, former Polish officers, officials and defectors - to be considered in a special manner, with the death penalty applied to them - execution.”

The remains of General M. Smoravinsky.

Representatives of the Polish Catholic Church and the Polish Red Cross examine the corpses recovered for identification.

A delegation of the Polish Red Cross examines documents found on the corpses.

Identity card of chaplain (military priest) Zelkowski, killed in Katyn.

Members of the International Commission interview the local population.

Local resident Parfen Gavrilovich Kiselev talks with a delegation of the Polish Red Cross.

N. N. Burdenko

The commission headed by N.N. Burdenko.

The executioners who “distinguished themselves” during the Katyn execution.

Chief Katyn executioner: V. I. Blokhin.

Hands tied with rope.

A memo from Beria to Stalin, with a proposal to destroy Polish officers. It has paintings of all members of the Politburo.

Polish prisoners of war.

An international commission examines the corpses.

Note from KGB chief Shelepin to N.S. Khrushchev, which states: “Any unforeseen accident could lead to the unraveling of the operation with all the undesirable consequences for our state. Moreover, regarding those executed in the Katyn Forest, there is an official version: all the Poles liquidated there are considered killed by the German occupiers. Based on the above, it seems advisable to destroy all records of executed Polish officers.”

Polish Order on the found remains.

British and American prisoners attend the autopsy performed by a German doctor.

An excavated common grave.

The corpses were stacked in stacks.

The remains of a major in the Polish army (Pilsudski brigade).

The place in the Katyn forest where the burials were discovered.

Based on materials from http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%8B%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9_ %D1%80%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BB

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