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Posted on 10/13/2003 4:15:26 AM PDT by snippy_about_it
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 are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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 Polish deaths at Soviet hands Katyn Forest is a wooded area near Gneizdovo village, a short distance from Smolensk in Russia where, in 1940 on Stalin's orders, the NKVD shot and buried over 4000 Polish service personnel that had been taken prisoner when the Soviet Union invaded Poland in September 1939 in WW2 in support of the Nazis.  Memorandum on NKVD letterhead from L. Beria to "Comrade Stalin" proposing to execute captured Polish officers, soldiers, and other prisoners by shooting. Stalin's handwritten signature appears on top, followed by signatures of Politburo members K. Voroshilov, V. Molotov, and A. Mikoyan. Signatures in left margin are M. Kalinin and L. Kaganovich, both favoring execution. In 1940 over 4,000 prisoners of war were taken out into a forest in small groups where they were methodically murdered.  The victims, encumbered in greatcoats and with their hands tied behind their backs, were forced face down onto the fresh corpses of their comrades, to be likewise shot through the back of the head.  A younger few who attempted to resist had self-strangulation knots tied from their hands to their necks.  Sawdust was rammed down the gullets of those who screamed and struggled, or their overcoats were tied down around their heads. The small groups became vast, neat stacks of human refuse. At the time, these men and 11,000 others who suffered the same fate at similar killing sites were only known to be missing.  The victims were Polish officers and cadets, about half of whom were reservists from key civilian professions: doctors, lawyers, teachers, clergymen, and the like. They represented the leading, educated elements--"the best and the brightest"--of Polish society. The place and time of their slaughter was the Russian forest village of Katyn near Smolensk in the Spring of 1940.  At that time, their families' contact with them (by mail, to the Soviet internment camps where they were being detained) ceased with no explanation. They simply disappeared, until their mass graves were discovered and publicized by the Nazi government, whose troops occupied the area in April 1943. Documents found in 1992, have certified the identity of those who ordered the Katyn Massacre of April-May 1940. They point the finger of guilt to the collective membership of the Soviet Politburo, dominated by Communist dictator Iosif Vissarianovich Stalin. The killings resulted from the recommendation of Politburo member Lavrenti Beria, the dreaded chief of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. There were a number of motives for the killings. Foremost was the "liquidation"--the Communist euphemism for extermination--of the social and intellectual leadership elites of Poland, as the initial step to eliminating that independent, anti-Soviet (and, historically, frequently anti-Russian) nation, permanently. In 1939, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov had gloated, "One swift blow to Poland, first by the German Army and then by the Red Army, and nothing was left of this bastard of the Versailles Treaty."  Specifically, Beria suggested to the Soviet Politburo that the Polish officers be exterminated, since they were ". . . involved in anti-Soviet propaganda. Each of them is only waiting for his release from imprisonment in order to enter into a struggle against Soviet power." Indeed, the Poles were hardly model prisoners and imprudently ridiculed their Soviet guards and indoctrination cadre members to their faces. Their attitude now seems incredibly naive--even arrogantly stupid, considering that the Bolsheviks' record of atrocities was well known to them. Yet, the Poles apparently believed that the West--specifically, the British and French--were actively concerned about them, being interested in their future usefulness, and would not abandon them.  A "white paper" submitted to the 1952 U.S. Congressional hearings on Katyn by the Polish Government-in-Exile describes this misassumption: With a few exceptions, the morale of the prisoners at Kozielsk appeared to be good. Firmly believing in the ultimate victory of justice and trusting implicitly in Poland's Western Allies, the prisoners hoped for a quick release from Soviet captivity and the granting of facilities either to return to Poland or to make their way through a neutral state to join the forces fighting in the West.  A rumour circulated in the camp that General Zarubin himself had said to one of the prisoners. "You have too many protectors, so you cannot go". The prisoners interpreted this remark as meaning that Britain and France did not want them to be returned to German-occupied Poland, as they were anxious to get them to the West. It was even said that Britain had asked the Soviets to send the Poles to the West and had offered to pay the expenses of their detention in Russia and that the Soviets were bargaining over the price. Rumours of this kind, which made the prisoners feel that they were an object of concern to the outside world helped considerably to keep up morale in the camp.  Their faith in the West proved to be pathetically ill-advised. Although the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941--"Operation Barbarossa"--forced Stalin to obtain material assistance from the West and concede the reestablishment of a postwar Poland independent in name (if not in fact), the extermination of the Polish intelligentsia facilitated another motive for the Soviet crime, the intended (and eventual) Soviet subjugation of Poland. As former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1960, "The Nazi and Soviet extermination policies, which had decimated the Polish intelligentsia, the usual source of the political elite, had badly weakened the nation as a whole, decreasing its capacity for resistance." Stalin himself had a deep grudge against Poland and its intelligentsia. It stemmed in part from that nation's military victories over Bolshevik armies, to which Stalin was attached as a political commissar, in the Russo-Polish War of 1919-20.  Another motive for the extermination of the Polish officers was Stalin's effort to appease his Nazi ally, Hitler. The second, secret protocol of the Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact of 23 August 1939 had provided for the fourth partition of Poland, dividing it between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. While the Germans invaded Poland, in defiance of the British and French, and effectively began the Second World War on 1 September 1939, the Soviets did not attack the Poles until 6:00 AM, 17 September 1939. Although the Poles were by then already collapsing under the weight of the German onslaught, Polish Army units in the East fought, and in a few cases won, some pitched battles with the Red Army units advancing from the East. Against such overwhelming military odds, though, there obviously could be only one result, and Poland surrendered on 27 September 1939. The Katyn Massacre occurred in the context of a Polish holocaust on a par with the Jewish Holocaust. It is estimated that 5,384,000 Poles, including Polish Jews, died during the German occupation through slave labor exhaustion, disease and starvation, repression of resistance, or outright extermination. The first victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp were Polish. The first gassing at Auschwitz was performed upon 300 Polish and 700 Soviet prisoners of war. An estimated total of 6,028,000 Poles--22 percent of Poland's population--died in the Second World War. Half of the victims were Jewish.  The Nazis launched a calculated campaign to exterminate the educated elite of Polish society and racially undesirable elements. The German Army perpetrated this massacre, as well as the more intently genocidal Nazi SS. There were plans to exterminate the Poles entirely, after they had outlived their usefulness and the Jews had already been annihilated. Polish children were not allowed to go to high school or college. The Catholic Church in Poland was suppressed. Ironically, though, many of the Polish officers who were Jewish did avoid the Holocaust and survive the war, having been in the custody of the regular German Army Wehrmacht, rather than that of the Nazi SS.  The method of capture, detention, and extermination of Poles by the Soviets is also important to consider. These victims were not just Polish officers and cadets who had surrendered to the Red Army in the field. They also included reservists and other officials who had been arrested in their homes in the Soviet-occupied zone of Poland. As it was, many Polish officers had been murdered immediately upon their capture, in spite of Soviet assurances of good treatment, particularly when their units had successfully battled against the Soviet invasion. Polish civilians suffered many Red Army atrocities as well.  Conditions in the Soviet-held territories were so ghastly that some resident Jews actually petitioned--a few successfully, tragically--to be transferred to the German-occupied zone. In the Ukraine during the confusion of the changeover, Ukrainian nationalists occasionally took revenge on the ethnic Poles in their region. In time, these killings were investigated and punished by the Soviets who had as little use for Ukrainian nationalists as for Poles. Later, during the German occupation, the Ukrainians and Poles fought pitched battles against each other. There were approximately 15,000 Polish officers and cadets captured by the Soviets in September-October 1939. Many of them were reservists who in civilian life were professionals such as doctors, lawyers, college professors, etc. They were incarcerated in three internment camps: Kozielsk (southwest of Moscow), Ostashkov (between Moscow and Leningrad), and Starobielsk (southeast of Kharkov). At the Kozielsk camp there were 262 Poles of Jewish descent. There was also one woman, Polish aviatrix Janina Lewandowski.  Of the captive Poles, only 448 seemed to the Soviets to be receptive to political collaboration. Initially, and during the winter (of 1939/40), the NKVD appeared to be trying to convert the Poles to Stalinist Communism. However, the interrogation and indoctrination sessions were too crude, dogmatic, and alien for most of the loyal, sophisticated Poles to accept. Eventually, the NKVD separated the potential collaborators from the thousands of loyal Poles. Then, in April-May 1940, having been given food and assurances that they were to be repatriated home, the Poles were shipped out by train, in groups of a hundred or so at a time. The destinations of most of these prisoners were three separate killing sites. Katyn was the terminus for the Kozielsk inmates. The other points were similarly railheads, near Kalinin for the Ostashkov prisoners and near Kharkov for the Starobielsk captives. Only recently have the locations of these other mass graves been verified. The 448 potential collaborators were transported by train to Pawlishtchev Bor, located between Kozielsk and Smolensk.  The NKVD executioners were brutally efficient, having refined their methods on many thousands of Russian social, political, and military purge victims in the previous decades. It was simply an occupational routine for the killers, and some wore special attire, similar to that of butchers. Apparently, there were also a few especially vicious or fanatical thugs who took delight in sadistically abusing these members of the Polish elite, as they murdered them.  Until Spring 1940, some of these officers' families had been corresponding with them. Thereafter, the families' mail was returned as undeliverable. Inquiries about the missing officer prisoners from the Polish Government-in-Exile, in London, and from the British government went unanswered by the Soviet government. In December 1940 (after the German overrunning of France in the Summer of 1940) at a reception for the leaders of the pro-Soviet Polish officers, NKVD chief Beria and his deputy, Vsevolod N. Merkulov, both enigmatically admitted that a "great mistake" had been made in the case of the other Polish officers. There had been meetings in March 1940, during which the Soviet NKVD shared its well-practiced terror and extermination technology with the Nazi SS. (The only Nazi "improvement" over Soviet extermination methods was the use of poison gas.) Professor George Watson has concluded that the fate of the interned Polish officers may have been decided at this conference, which according to him was held in Cracow. In his 1991 book, Stalin: Breaker of Nations, historian Robert Conquest stated that the conference had taken place at Zakopane in the Winter of 1939/40.  According to Watson, the fate of the Polish officers in Soviet custody was probably discussed during the conference. This would have been a significant factor in Stalin's decision to exterminate them, considering how slavishly he adhered to his pact with Hitler. (In spite of warnings from the British and Americans of imminent Nazi attack, trainloads of Russian raw materials were being faithfully sent to the Germans, right until the very moment of Hitler's 22 June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. The NKVD even turned over, to the German Gestapo, German Communists who had been living in the Soviet Union.)  However, considering Stalin's predilection for mass murder as a political tool and his hatred of the Poles, he certainly would have had no hesitation about annihilating them, anyway. Even Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, noted his peculiar obsession with a much earlier forest death of Polish officers in the Russian folk opera, "Ivan Susanin." From Soviet-occupied Poland, Poles considered potentially subversive--including women and children--were shipped off in the 1940-41 period to live in primitive camps in the Soviet Union. According to Polish sources, these captives numbered over a million. The categories of Poles considered potentially subversive even included stamp collectors and Esperantists. Two or three-hundred-thousand Poles, an estimated quarter of the number exiled to the Soviet Union, perished in the Soviet Union. According to data in the possession of the Polish government-in-exile, in early 1940 the Soviet Union held as many as 15,000 Polish prisoners of war, of whom 8,300 were officers. Taken prisoner by the Red Army in the second half of September 1939, they were interned in three camps: Kozelsk, Starobelsk, and Ostaszkow. Late that year, there were reports that the three camps had been disbanded. In 1941 and 1942, the Polish government-in-exile repeatedly asked the Soviet Union for information on the prisoners’ fate, but to no avail. On April 13, 1943, the Germans announced that mass graves had been discovered in the Katyn Forest, in their area of occupation, containing the bodies of thousands of Polish officers who had been shot in the back of the head. The Germans charged the Soviet authorities with the murder and appointed a multinational medical commission to probe the matter. The Nazis exhumed the Polish dead and blamed the Soviets.  In May 1943, the commission reported that the graves contained the bodies of 4,143 officers, of whom 2,914 were identified by documents in their uniforms. It was the commission’s opinion that the men had been shot to death in the spring of 1940. The Soviet authorities flatly rejected the accusations of the German-appointed commission, arguing that the Germans themselves had committed the deed when they had occupied the area in July 1941. In mid-April 1943, when the Polish government-in-exile demanded that an investigation of the Katyn killings be made by the International Red Cross, the Soviet Union reacted on April 25 by severing relations with the government-in-exile. This step would have far-reaching effects on relations between the Soviet Union and Poland. In November of that year, several months after the Red Army had liberated the area, the Soviet Union appointed a commission of inquiry of its own, which blamed the Germans for the Katyn murders. A United States congressional inquiry in the early 1950s found the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) responsible, and most Western historians now believe that the massacre was committed at the behest of the Soviet authorities. In 1944, having retaken the Katyn area from the Nazis, the Soviets exhumed the Polish dead again and blamed the Nazis. The rest of the world took its usual sides in such arguments.  On March 8, 1989, the Polish government officially accused the NKVD of perpetrating the slaughter. In 1989, with the collapse of Soviet Power, Gorbachev finally admitted that the Soviet NKVD had executed the Poles, and confirmed two other burial sites similar to the site at Katyn. Stalin's order of March 1940 to execute by shooting some 25,700 Poles, including those found at the three sites, was also disclosed with the collapse of Soviet Power. Following Michael Gorbochov’s Glasnost policy, the Soviet Union released documents indicating that it was responsible for the massacre at Katyn. This particular second world war slaughter of Poles is often referred to as the "Katyn Massacre" or the "Katyn Forest Massacre".      |
Now its been revamped to read: "We will buy U.S. dollars and guide you into a U.N. trap...you will fall in so deep..you will call for a rope..which we have [Purchased over the internet]..and we will use it to lower a bomb down to you at the bottom of the well."
You're welcome. It was something I didn't know a lot about and thanks to SAMWolf and Matthew Paul for their encouragement and assistance we were able to bring it here to Foxhole.
They Shall Not Be Forgotten:
Remembering the Victims of Katyn
by Michael Whitcraft
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| Whittaker Chambers recounts feeling that Communism had crushed his will. |
Reflecting on the sad state to which Communism had reduced him one cold autumn evening in 1948, Whittaker Chambers describes feeling that he no long had the will to continue his struggles against the Communist party. “It was that death of the will which Communism, with great cunning, always tries to induce in its victims.”1
To bring this reality to the forefront, over 100 Polish Americans gathered at the National Katyn Memorial in Baltimore, Md. on April 24, 2005 to remember a massacre, in which 20,000 Polish military officers (mostly reservists) were brutally killed in and around Russia’s Katyn Forest in 1940. These included priests, doctors, professors, school teachers, lawyers, judges, civil servants and others.
The massacre was directed against Poland’s religious, cultural and intellectual elite, exemplifying Mr. Chamber’s words with one important difference. The Katyn Massacre was not only an attempt to kill the will of an individual, but that of an entire nation.
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| The National Katyn Memorial in Baltimore stands at the intersection of President and Aliceanna Streets. |
A Yearly Remembrance
This year’s event was the fifth annual remembrance at the National Katyn Memorial in Baltimore. The day’s events began with a Mass at Holy Rosary Parish in downtown Baltimore. After coffee and doughnuts, attendees went to the nearby National Katyn Memorial at the intersection of President and Aliceanna Streets.
The monument consists of a large gold-colored flame, a symbol of rebirth or transformation. Amid the flames stand statues of great personages from Poland’s history, including: Boleslaw Chrobry, the first crowned king of Poland and King Jan Sobieski, who led his winged hussars to defeat the Turks and lift the siege of Vienna.
Despite a frigid wind, the attendees remained committed to carry on to the end. One jovial middle-aged man commented: “Every time we plan an event at the memorial, we can be sure there will be bad weather. At least it did not rain this year.”
The impressive list of guest speakers included a representative from Gov. Robert Erlich’s office and U.S. Senator Paul S. Sarbanes (D).
Fifteen young girls, dressed in beautiful traditional Polish dresses, added life to the event by dancing national folk dances.
After the memorial at the monument, attendees were invited for a meal at the Polish National Alliance building a few blocks away. During the meal two aluminum plaques were unveiled: one explaining the Katyn Massacre and another describing the monument were unveiled. These will be placed at the base of the monument to explain its significance to passers-by.
During the meal, members of the National Katyn Memorial Foundation spoke on the importance of remembering the Katyn Massacre and spreading awareness so that such a tragedy never occurs again.
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| The bodies of 20,000 Polish officers were thrown into mass graves, in Russia's Katyn Forest and nearby areas. |
The Massacre
To fully understand the significance of the Katyn Massacre, it helps to look back to the beginning of World War II. On September 11, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west, an event which sparked the outbreak of the war. A couple of weeks later, the Soviet Union, at that time allied with the Nazis, invaded from the east. Sandwiched by this Soviet-Nazi alliance, Poland fought valiantly before falling to the two invaders.
The Soviets rulers terrorized Poland, sending 1.5 million citizens to Siberia, capturing 250,000 military personnel and sending over 20,000 border-guard officers to three Soviet prison camps.
These 20,000 (most of them reservists) were composed of priests, professors, judges, civil servants and others. In the words inscribed on the Katyn monument’s new plaque, “They were Poland’s leaders and thinkers, the flower of Polish intelligentsia…to hardened Communists they were class enemies and, therefore, enemies of the Soviet Union.”
After months of interrogations and attempted indoctrination, they were put on trains under the false impression that they were being returned to Poland. From the trains, they were transferred to prison buses which drove them into remote areas of the Russian forest, where they were bound, shot in the back of the head and thrown into mass graves.
In 1941, Nazi Germany turned against its Communist ally and invaded the Soviet Union. Subsequently, the Soviet Union attempted to blame the Katyn Massacre on the Germans.
The Soviet Union only admitted guilt in 1989 after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
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| The body of a Polish officer pulled from a mass grave in Katyn. |
Almost Worse Than Genocide
During the memorial, one young man said: “The massacre at Katyn was a crime that was almost worse than genocide. Rather than trying to exterminate all the Polish, they tried to destroy their cultural and intellectual elite, thus facilitating the imposition of an anti-natural lifestyle that is at the core of communist ideology.”
His point calls to mind a fact that after the fall of the Iron Curtain is not popular to vocalize. Communism is a parasitic evil that saps the life blood from the civilizations upon which it preys. The history of communism in Cambodia, Russia and China demonstrate the extent of this truth.
Unfortunately, the world has never publicly acknowledged this evil. There was never a Nuremberg trial to call the perpetrators of Communism to task. Therefore, it is important that events like this memorial take place.
When memorials are forgotten, history threatens to repeat itself. Is this happening today? Far from dying, Communism continues to live. A large part of the world still lives under its yoke and Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to lament the fall of the Soviet Empire.2
This is incomprehensible. Communism should not be lamented, but publicly repudiated as one of the greatest errors of modern history. Only then will its rebound be certainly averted.
This is the true value of the Katyn Memorial in Baltimore. As the event’s organizers stated, by spreading awareness of these tragedies, the risk of their recurring is lessened. Therefore, the victims of Katyn must not be forgotten. Their remembrance strengthens the will to resist and neutralizes Communism’s desire to kill that will in individuals and nations.
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1. Whittaker Chambers, Witness (Regenery Gateway, Washington, D.C. 1980) p. 21.
2. http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2005/04/26/
in_remarks_putin_laments_soviet_fall/
Brian Crozier
In Soviet documents recently obtained by the Hoover Institution, the details of one of the bloodiest crimes of Stalin's reign of terror have come to light.
For those who lived through World War II, and for many who did not, the Katyn Massacre carries a sinister resonance. The most notorious of Stalin's wartime atrocities, the massacre was falsely attributed to Hitler through a scarcely credible but widely believed piece of Soviet disinformation.
In April 1940, nearly twenty-two thousand Polish prisoners were rounded up, transported to Katyn and various other sites, and executed. They included army officers, civil servants, landowners, policemen, ordinary soldiers, and prison officers. They were lined up, made to dig their own mass graves, and shot in the back of the neck. The victims were never tried or presented with any charges. The executions were ordered personally by Stalin in a memorandum dated March 5, 1940, to Lavrenti Beria, the head of the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB). Per Stalin's instructions, the prisoners were to receive the "supreme measure of punishment—shooting."
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The full facts became widely accessible to researchers with the acquisition of millions of sheets of Soviet secret documents by the Hoover Institution, known as Fond 89. Many of these documents were made available to me while I was at work on The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire. The full story is worth telling.
The mass grave in Katyn Forest was discovered by the occupying Nazi forces in 1943. The disinterment of more than four thousand corpses was an unexpected gift to Goebbels's propaganda machine, which broadcast the story to the outside world—to the embarrassment not only of Stalin but of his wartime allies Roosevelt and Churchill. Roosevelt dismissed the Nazi claims as "German propaganda and a German plot." Churchill was less explicit: "The less said about that the better."
There the matter lay—until March 3, 1959, when Aleksandr Shelepin, then head of the KGB, gave full details in a secret memo to Krushchev of the numbers executed. The total was 21,857 killed:
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A curious but related episode deserves notice. In 1972, a private group in London resolved to build a monument to the victims of Katyn. The original plan was to place the monument in Kensington, one of London's best-known tourist areas. At first, the Council of the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea gave permission for the plan to go ahead. Permission was withdrawn, however, under pressure from the Foreign Office.
It is now known, through the Hoover Institution's Soviet archives, that the Foreign Office pressure was itself the outcome of pressure from Moscow. There was an exchange of telegrams on September 7, 1972, between the Soviet Politburo and the Soviet ambassador in London. The Kremlin's message started as follows:
Reactionary circles in England are again undertaking attempts for anti-Soviet purposes to stir up the so-called "Katyn Affair." To this end the campaign to collect funds for the construction of a "Memorial to the Victims of Katyn" in London is being made use of.
In his reply, the Soviet ambassador stated that the attention of the British government had already been drawn to attempts to whip up an anti-Soviet campaign based on "the inventions—long ago exposed—of the Goebbels propaganda machine concerning the so-called 'Katyn affair.'"
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Stalin's orders were unambiguous. The Polish prisoners were to receive the "supreme measure of punishment—shooting." |
On September 8 the Politburo drafted a further statement, which contained the following passage:
The above-mentioned anti-Soviet campaign cannot but arouse justified feelings of profound indignation in the Soviet Union, whose people made enormous sacrifices for the sake of saving Europe from fascist enslavement.
Foreign Office pressure on the borough resulted and permission was withdrawn. Four years later—in 1976—the Katyn memorial was in fact built, in the cemetery at Gunnersbury on the outskirts of London. The project was supervised by the National Association for Freedom (later, the Freedom Association). Presumably under pressure from the Foreign Office, the British Defense Ministry forbade former members of the British armed forces to don their uniforms for the launching ceremony. This negative order was ignored by several ex-servicemen, without further consequences.
On April 13, 1990, the Soviet authorities at last admitted responsibility for the massacres at Katyn and elsewhere, although the figure cited in the relevant statement—"around 15,000"—fell short of the real total by more than 6,000. The admission came in a statement by the Tass news agency, with the personal authority of then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The statement referred to only three of the prison camps involved: Smolensk, Voroshilovgrad, and Kalinin. It claimed that the authorities had knowledge of the killings through "recently discovered documents." "Direct responsibility for the crime" was ascribed to Beria. The statement ended "The Soviet side, expressing profound regret over the Katyn tragedy, declares that this was one of the gravest crimes of Stalinism."
At a meeting in Moscow that day, Gorbachev presented Polish president General Wojciech Jaruzelski with copies of the NKVD's lists of names of Polish internees in the three camps mentioned. The Polish government issued a statement declaring that the question of responsibility for the massacre had "weighed particularly painfully" on Polish-Soviet relations and that the "long-awaited" Soviet admission made possible a relationship based on "partnership and true friendship." The statement went on: "Reconciliation can only be built on truth." It is surely fair to add that the Tass statement—although useful for relations between the ailing Soviet Union and its Polish satellite—was true but not the whole truth. Only three of the localities involved were named, and the total given fell short of the true figure.
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In 1990, fifty years after the fact, the Kremlin finally admitted Soviet complicity in the killings in the Katyn Forest. |
The Polish statement was striking not only for its content but because it had been drafted under the authority of Jaruzelski—a communist leader installed under Soviet protection. In September of that year, he was forced to resign and in December he was replaced as president by the elected anticommunist leader Lech Walesa.
Postscript
In his 1959 memo to Krushchev, KGB head Shelepin noted that Soviet propaganda efforts to blame the Katyn massacre on the Germans had "taken firm root in international public opinion." To keep the truth from coming out, Shelepin recommended that all records pertaining to the murdered Poles be destroyed. In other words, "We did it, but the world believes the Germans did. Therefore, leave the story as its stands." Thankfully, the documents were not destroyed and we now know the truth about Katyn.
Uncovering the Past: Supplementary material from the Hoover Institution Archives.
Timely and painful post. May should be the time for mourning in Russia, not ugly Soviet-nostalgia triumphalism.
Thanks for remembering our Foxhole thread on Katyn.
Thank you. Katyn was a tough thread to put together.
...in a lawful society, even petty offenses are subject to investigation, judgment, and punishment, and serious offenses all the more so. War crimes? The embers in Bosnia had not yet cooled before an international tribunal was established to look into the atrocities committed in that conflict.Only the USSR has been given a special dispensation. What happened there was a catastrophe that affected practically every country in the world, wasted hundreds of billions of dollars, took scores of millions of lives, and nearly brought about global destruction, and yet no one, no one, has been brought to account. Communism has collapsed, but the man (for example) who was in charge of executing thousands of captive Polish officers in the Katyn forest during World War II is in Moscow, living out his years on a pension.
Thanks vox_PL. Very moving pictures.
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