Two 'Stabs in the Back'.
Posted on 03/05/2005 3:45:07 PM PST by lizol
Poles Mark Stalin's Katyn Forest Massacre By ELA KASPRZYCKA ASSOCIATED PRESS
WARSAW, Poland (AP) -
Poles on Saturday attended a Mass, sang patriotic songs and lay flowers on a monument to more than 21,000 military officers and intellectuals massacred by Soviet agents in Katyn Forest, marking the day 65 years ago that dictator Josef Stalin ordered the killings.
Along with the homage at Warsaw's St. Ann's Church, the Katyn Committee, an organization of relatives of those killed in Katyn Forest in western Russia and at other sites in 1940, demanded more Russian attention to the massacre.
A recent Russian investigation failed to produce any new names of surviving perpetrators among the secret police force that carried out the killing, largely by shots to the back of the head, over several nights.
"We are calling on the authorities of the Russian Federation to reveal the names of those who were responsible for the genocide in the spring of 1940," said Stefan Melak, the head of the group. "We are calling on Russian authorities to accept this crime as genocide," Melak said.
"Katyn will always remain a symbol of a death sentence passed on Poland," he said.
Krystyna Balcer, a 62-year-old retiree whose uncle was killed in Katyn, remained angry about the massacre and the Soviet invasion of Poland prior to World War II, carried out under a secret agreement between Stalin and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
"They betrayed us - they stuck a knife in our backs," she said of the Soviets invading Poland from the east in 1939, 17 days after Germans entered from the west. The massacre "was unimaginable cruelty, it was genocide."
The March 5, 1940, order for the massacre was signed by Stalin among others. Soviet agents shot 21,768 Polish military officers, intellectuals and priests who had been taken prisoner during the invasion.
Historians in Poland believe Stalin was seeking to liquidate Poland's elite to prevent the rebirth of a sovereign Polish state.
The massacre is still an irritant to relations between Poland and Russia. Polish war crimes prosecutors opened their own investigation into the massacre in December.
Until the fall of communism in 1989, any mention of the massacre was forbidden in Poland. The following year, the Soviet government accepted responsibility for the murders, but refused to refer to them as a genocide attempt, calling it a war crime on which the statute of limitations has passed.
The slaughter became known to the world when 4,100 bodies were discovered by German forces in 1943 after they overran the area near the Russian city of Smolensk, and the event was widely broadcast by the Nazi propaganda machine.
If you're familiar with Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago," you'll know that this was just the tip of the iceberg (and a pretty big iceberg at that) for the Soviets. They murdered at the very least 20,000,000 of their own people in the name of ideology. We can hardly expect that they'd have spared anyone else.
..and Putin, Was the head of the KGB ("the Sword and Shield of the Soviet Communist Party") prior to the collapse of the USSR.
Bump.
I read that book years ago, and it's one of many books I want to buy again. Outstanding account of the hell dissidents went through in the Soviet Union.
Was he actually the 'head of the KGB'?
I think that he was a chief of the KGB in East Germany.
The fact that he spoke both German and Russian freaked out the Soviets, and the Lt spent the next year in prison and then a year or so in the Siberian Gulag before he and six others escaped by walking from Siberia to India in the mid '40's..
They walked from Siberia to India? Good Lord. Sounds like a very good book. Thanks for the tip.
A chief or just one of regular agents in East Germany?
*smack to forehead*..My mistake..He was a Lt. Col. within the Organization under Gorby. He has many frm. KGB officers as Sr. advisers. One of his claims to fame is: He opposed the war in southern Russia/helped run down "the Rebels" in the years prior the 2000 elections. Many political foes were wary of him during the elections b/c of his connections to the KGB.
Sorry, not a chief, but not only a regular agent, besides in 98-99 he had been a chief of FSB before he became a PM.
That was It, Thanks.
Geez! You're kidding, is this an actual picture????
What ?
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