Katyn massacre. History reference. Katyn case - new facts, or Katyn lie What happened in Katyn

Katyn: Chronicle of events

The term "Katyn crime" is collective, it means 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 policemen taken prisoner by the Red Army in September 1939 and held in three NKVD POW camps, including -

4421 prisoners of the Kozelsky camp (shot and buried in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, 2 km from the Gnezdovo station);

6311 prisoners of the Ostashkov 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 (shot, apparently, in Kyiv, Kharkov, Kherson and Minsk, and possibly in other unidentified places on the territory of the BSSR and the Ukrainian SSR).

Katyn - only one of a number of places of executions - has become a symbol of the execution of all the above groups of Polish citizens, since it was in Katyn in 1943 that the graves of murdered Polish officers were first discovered. Over the next 47 years, Katyn remained the only reliably known burial place for the victims of this "operation".

background

On August 23, 1939, the USSR and Germany signed 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 assigned to the Soviet Union. For Hitler, the pact meant the removal of the last obstacle before an attack on Poland.

September 1, 1939 Nazi Germany attacked Poland, thereby unleashing the Second world war. On September 17, 1939, in the midst of bloody battles of the Polish Army, desperately trying to stop the rapid advance of the German army deep into the country, the Red Army invaded Poland in collusion with Germany - without a declaration of war by the Soviet Union and contrary to the non-aggression pact between the USSR and Poland. Soviet propaganda declared the operation of the Red Army "a liberation campaign in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus."

The offensive of the Red Army came as a complete surprise to the Poles. Some did not even rule out that the introduction of Soviet troops was directed against German aggression. Realizing the doom of Poland in a war on two fronts, the Polish commander in chief issued an order not to engage in battle with the Soviet troops and to resist only when trying to disarm the Polish units. As a result, only a few Polish units offered resistance to the Red Army. Until the end of September 1939, 240-250 thousand Polish soldiers and officers, as well as border guards, police officers, gendarmerie, prison guards, etc. were taken prisoner by the Red Army. 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, most of the privates and non-commissioned officers left the prisoner of war camps: the inhabitants of the territories captured by the Soviet Union were sent home, and the inhabitants of the territories occupied by the Germans, by agreement on the exchange of prisoners, were transferred to Germany (Germany, in return, transferred the captured to the Soviet Union German troops Polish military personnel - Ukrainians and Belarusians, residents of the territories that went to the USSR).

The exchange agreements also applied to civilian refugees who ended up on the territory occupied by the USSR. They could apply to the German commissions operating in the spring of 1940 on the Soviet side for permission to return to their permanent places of residence in the 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 at home or transfer to Germany. police officers, gendarmes, prison guards, etc. (about 6.5 thousand people), who were gathered in the Ostashkov POW 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 the campaign of incessant mass arrests for political reasons, directed primarily against officials of the Polish state apparatus (including officers and policemen who escaped captivity), members of Polish political parties and public organizations, industrialists, large landowners, merchants, border violators and other "enemies of Soviet power." Before the verdict was passed, those arrested were kept for months in the prisons of the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR, 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 decided to execute “14,700 Polish officers, officials, landowners, policemen, intelligence agents, gendarmes, siegemen and jailers located 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, manufacturers, former Polish officers, officials and defectors."

The basis for the decision of the Politburo was a note by 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 decision in the minutes of the meeting of the Politburo, the final part of Beria's note was verbatim reproduced.

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 of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940, was carried out in April and May of the same year.

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

In parallel, there were executions of prisoners in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus.

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 Gryazovetsky prisoner of war camp in the Vologda Oblast, from which, at the end of August 1941, they were transferred to the formation of the Polish Army in the USSR.

On April 13, 1940, shortly after the start of executions of Polish prisoners of war and prison inmates, the NKVD operation was carried out to deport their families (as well as the families of other repressed people) living in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR to a 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 (who was 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 form a the territory of the USSR of the Polish army to participate in the war against Germany and the release of all Polish citizens who were imprisoned in the USSR as prisoners of war, arrested or convicted, and also kept 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; its commander was General Vladislav Anders, who was urgently released from the inner prison of the NKVD in the Lubyanka.

In the autumn of 1941 - spring of 1942, Polish officials repeatedly turned to the Soviet authorities with inquiries about the fate of thousands of captured officers who had not arrived at the places where Anders' army was formed. Soviet side replied that there was no information about them. On December 3, 1941, at a personal meeting in the Kremlin with Polish Prime Minister General Wladyslaw Sikorsky and General Anders, Stalin suggested that these officers might have fled to Manchuria. (By the end of the summer of 1942, Anders' army was evacuated from the USSR to Iran, and later it participated in the Allied operations to liberate Italy from the Nazis.)

On April 13, 1943, German radio officially announced the discovery in Katyn near Smolensk of the graves of Polish officers shot by the Soviet authorities. By order of the German authorities, the identified names of the dead began to be read out over loudspeakers in the streets and squares of the occupied Polish cities. On April 15, 1943, an official refutation of the Soviet Information Bureau followed, according to which Polish prisoners of war in the summer of 1941 were employed 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 names and surnames of 2,730 of them were established from the discovered personal documents. The corpses were reburied in mass graves next to the original burials, and the results of the exhumation were published in Berlin in the summer of that year 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 burned down during one of the bombings.)

On September 25, 1943, the Red Army liberated Smolensk. Only on January 12, 1944, the Soviet “Special Commission for Establishing and Investigating the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of War by the Nazi Invaders in the Katyn Forest” was created, chaired by Academician N.N. Burdenko. At the same time, since 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 at Katyn was carried out from 16 to 26 January 1944 at the direction of the "Burdenko Commission". From the secondary graves left after the German exhumation, and one primary grave, which the Germans did not have time to explore, the remains of 1380 people were recovered, according to the documents found, the commission established the personal data of 22 people. On January 26, 1944, the Izvestia newspaper published an official statement from the Burdenko Commission, according to which the Polish prisoners of war, who were in three camps west of Smolensk in the summer of 1941 and remained there after the German troops invaded Smolensk, were shot by the Germans in the autumn 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 on July 1-3, 1946, the testimony of witnesses for the defense (represented by German lawyers) and the prosecution (represented by the Soviet side), in view of the obvious unconvincingness of the Soviet version, the IMT decided not to include the Katyn execution in its verdict as one of the crimes of Nazi Germany.

On March 3, 1959, the chairman of the KGB under the Council of Ministers of the USSR A.N. Shelepin sent the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU N.S. Khrushchev, a top secret note confirming that 14,552 prisoners - officers, gendarmes, policemen, “etc. persons of the former bourgeois Poland", as well as 7305 prisoners of the prisons of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus were shot in 1940 on the basis of the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940 (including 4421 people in the Katyn Forest). The note suggested destroying all records of the executed.

At the same time, throughout all the post-war years, until the 1980s, the USSR Foreign Ministry repeatedly made official demarches with a statement about the established responsibility of the Nazis for the execution of Polish soldiers buried in the Katyn Forest.

But the "Katyn lie" is not only the attempts of the USSR to impose on the world community the Soviet version of the execution in the Katyn forest. This is one of the elements domestic policy the communist leadership of Poland, brought to power by the Soviet Union after the liberation of the country. Another direction of this policy was the large-scale persecution and attempts to denigrate the members of the Home Army (AK) - a massive anti-Hitler armed underground, subordinate during the war years to the Polish "London" government in exile (with which the USSR severed relations in April 1943, after it turned to the International Red Cross with a request to investigate the murder of Polish officers whose remains were found in the Katyn Forest). The symbol of the smear campaign against AK after the war was the posting on the streets of Polish cities of a poster with the mocking slogan "AK is a spitting dwarf of the reaction." At the same time, any statements or actions that directly or indirectly cast doubt on the Soviet version of the death of captured Polish officers were punished, including attempts by relatives to install memorial plates 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, the relatives were forced to hide the fact that a member of their family had died in Katyn. The Polish state security agencies searched for 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 pleaded guilty only half a century after the execution of the captured Polish officers - on April 13, 1990, an official TASS statement was published about "the 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 grave crimes of Stalinism. At the same time, the President of the USSR M.S. Gorbachev handed over to President of Poland V. Jaruzelsky the lists of executed Polish prisoners of war (formally, these were lists of instructions for sending stages from the Kozelsky and Ostashkovsky camps to the NKVD for the Smolensk and Kalinin regions, as well as a list of records of the departed prisoners of war from the Starobelsky camp) and some other documents of the NKVD .

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

In 1991, the GVP investigation team, together with Polish specialists, carried out partial exhumations in the 6th quarter of the forest park zone of Kharkov, on the territory of the dacha 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 establishment in the procedural order of the burial places of the executed Polish prisoners of the Starobilsk and Ostashkovsky prisoner of war camps.

A year later, on October 14, 1992, by order of the President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin, documents were made public and handed over 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), Shelepin's note to Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959 and other documents from the Presidential Archive. Thus, documentary evidence became public that the victims of the "Katyn crime" were executed for political reasons - as "hardened, incorrigible enemies of the Soviet regime." At the same time, for the first time, it became known that not only prisoners of war, but also prisoners of prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR were shot. The decision of the Politburo of March 5, 1940, ordered, as already mentioned, to shoot 14,700 prisoners of war and 11,000 prisoners. From Shelepin's note to Khrushchev it follows that about the same number of prisoners of war were shot, but fewer prisoners were shot - 7305 people. The reason for the "underperformance" 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 Warsaw memorial cemetery "Powazki".

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, an alphabetical list of 3,435 inmates in prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR, indicating the numbers of orders, which, as it has been known since 1990, meant being sent to execution. The list, immediately published in Poland, became conditionally referred to as the “Ukrainian list”.

The "Belarusian list" is still unknown. If the "Shelepin" number of executed prisoners is correct, and if the published "Ukrainian list" is complete, then the "Belarusian list" should include 3,870 people. Thus, by now we know the names of 17,987 victims of the "Katyn crime", and 3,870 victims (prisoners in the western regions of the BSSR) remain nameless. Burial places are reliably known only for 14,552 executed prisoners of war.

On July 13, 1994, the head of the GVP investigation group A.Yu. Yablokov (who replaced A.V. Tretetsky) issued a decision to dismiss the criminal case on the basis of paragraph 8 of Article 5 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR (for the death of the perpetrators), and in the decision Stalin, members of the Politburo Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Kalinin and Kaganovich, Beria and other leaders and employees of the NKVD, as well as the executioners, 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 case” (but in relation to the Nazis) that was already given by the Soviet side in 1945-1946 when it was submitted for consideration by the MVT. The Chief Military Prosecutor's Office and the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation canceled Yablokov's decision three days later, and another prosecutor was entrusted with further investigation.

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

On September 21, 2004, the GVP of the Russian Federation terminated criminal case No. 159 on the basis of clause 4 of part 1 of Article 24 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation (due to the death of the perpetrators). Notifying 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 materials of the investigation, but also the very decision to terminate the "Katyn case". Thus, the personal composition of the perpetrators contained in the decision was also classified.

From the response of the GVP of the Russian Federation to the ensuing request from Memorial, it can be seen that “a number of specific high-ranking officials of the USSR” were found guilty, whose actions are 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 marked "secret" and "top secret", and in 80 volumes - documents marked "for official use". On this basis, access to 116 out of 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 of 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", to give it an adequate legal assessment, to make public the names of all those responsible (from those who made decisions to ordinary executors), to declassify and make public all the materials of the investigation, to establish the names and burial places of all the executed Polish citizens, to recognize executed as victims of political repression and rehabilitate them in accordance with the Russian Law “On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression”.

Information prepared by the International Society "Memorial".

Information from the brochure "Katyn", issued 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 Zachodniego. 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 by A. Shelepin to N. Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959

The place was not chosen by chance, there is fertile sandy soil, which means that it will not be so difficult for soldiers to bury corpses in the ground. However, the graves were not always dug by soldiers, sometimes they were dug by the condemned themselves, realizing the doom of their situation. Now there is a forest here, but earlier, during the executions, there were almost no trees, pines were planted only later, so that they would tear and destroy the remains of the bodies with their roots in the ground.

The burial itself is divided into 2 parts: Polish and Russian. The Polish memorial was made by designers on a special project. At the entrance he meets a small wagon, it was in such short railway wagons that people went to exile. 30 or even 50 people were placed in this car for shipment.

At both ends of the car there were three tiers of bunks, and in the middle there was a stove for heating. In summer, instead of a toilet for prisoners, there was just a hole in the floor, and in winter, an ordinary bucket, which was poured either at the stations, or directly “overboard”, having previously broken the boards in the back of the car.

The prisoners were fed mainly with herring, because it was very salty and did not rot. In fact, this was one salt, from which one really wanted to drink, and water was practically not given to the repressed.

In a confined space, people got sick, fought each other for the best places, and even killed each other. The corpses were filmed only at stops, and often people traveled for several hours in the car next to the corpses. This is despite the fact that the windows were not in every such car. This car is now a gift to the Katyn memorial from the Moscow Railway.
After entering the territory of the complex, the road "forks" to the right - the Polish military cemetery, and to the left - the Soviet one.

Memorial stone at the entrance.

A little history of the execution of the Poles in Katyn. On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany entered the territory of Poland; on September 17, 1939, the Red Army also entered Polish lands "in order to protect the rights of the Ukrainian and Belarusian population." Germany was then at war with Poland, and the USSR did not officially declare war on the Poles. According to the secret "non-aggression pact", the USSR was to keep the Polish army on its territory until the war between Germany and Poland ended.
However, in the USSR, internment performed its function poorly and released most of the ordinary soldiers after disarmament, but mostly Polish officers remained in captivity.
It should also be noted that in November 1939 the Polish government in exile officially declared war on the USSR. The reason for this was the transfer of the city of Vilnius to Lithuania. In this regard, the status of Polish officers who were on the territory of the USSR was changed: they turned from internees into prisoners of war. However, letters from them to relatives continued to arrive regularly until the spring of 1940. Of particular importance is the fact that, according to Geneva Convention, it was forbidden to force prisoners of war to work. And this condition was met.
On March 31, 1940, Polish prisoners of war began to be taken out of the camps in batches of 200-300 people. But where were they taken? Opinions on this issue differ.

Plan of the Polish cemetery.

As in any mystery, there are several versions of what happened next. According to the German version, on March 5, 1940, Lavrenty Beria wrote a letter to Stalin, in which he proposed "the cases of former Polish officers arrested in the amount of 11,000 should be considered in a special manner, with the application of capital punishment to them - execution." On the same day, the note was signed by I. V. Stalin, comrades Kalinin, Kaganovich, Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, and approved by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the VKB (b).

The prisoners were taken to the city of Kalinin, to Kharkov, to the Katyn forest. In Kalinin, they were shot in the buildings of the NKVD and buried in a cemetery near the village of Mednoye. In Kharkov, executions were also carried out in the basements of the regional department of the NKVD.

At the entrance to the Polish part there are copies of the Polish border pillars of 1939 and an inscription in Polish Polish military cemetery Katyn.

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So, according to the German version, the prisoners were put into prison cars and taken to the Gnezdovo station, located west of Smolensk. In the cellars of this station, immediately after the arrival of the train, Polish generals were shot.
The rest of the prisoners at the station were loaded into buses with closed windows and taken to the rest house of the NKVD in the forest. The time was calculated in such a way that they would arrive there in the evening.

At the dacha they were searched, confiscated piercing and cutting objects, watches and locked in the cells located in the building. Then, one by one, they were taken to a room where an NKVD officer sat and checked the full name and year of birth of the convict. After that, the officer was led to a basement with walls lined with soundproofing material. The executioner took a German pistol "Walter" and fired a shot in the back of the head. The corpse was taken out into the street and thrown into the back of a truck. The executions lasted all night, during which time 200-300 corpses were recruited in the back. In the morning they were taken to Katyn forest dumped into already dug graves.

The most honorary order among the Poles is Militari Virtuti or the Order of Military Valor.

12.

Often the NKVD officers changed tactics and, having completed the search of prisoners of war at the NKVD dacha, took them to the previously excavated graves. They were taken out of the bus one by one, their hands were tied with German paper twine, and they were led to the moat. The executioner fired a shot in the back of the head again from the same "Walter". Sometimes prisoners, those who panicked, pulled up their uniforms and covered their faces with them, tightened a noose around their neck, tying their hands with the other end of the twine. In some cases, the space between the face and clothes was filled with sawdust in order to deliver the greatest torment to the doomed. Actively resisting prisoners were stabbed with a bayonet. Leading to the moat, they shot in the back of the head in the same way.

This cross shows the dates symbolic for Poland in 1939. On September 1, Nazi troops entered its territory, and on September 17, the Red Army.

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The fact that the prisoners were shot with German weapons is considered one of the proofs of the Germans' guilt in the tragedy. But supporters of the German version answer them that Walther pistols were imported from Germany by the Soviet Union before the war, and until 1933 German 7.65 caliber bullets were also imported. However, the fact of the discovery in the graves of German paper twine, which was not imported and was not produced on the territory of the USSR, has not yet found an explanation within the German theory. In addition, photographs of 7.65 caliber bullet casings taken by the Germans show rust. According to A. Wasserman, this indicates that they are made of steel. The brass bullets imported before 1933 could not rust. But steel bullets of this caliber in Germany began to be produced only at the beginning of 1941!

On the territory of the Polish cemetery there are 8 execution pits, these are the places where the bodies of the executed Poles were massively buried. The largest pit was the first, about 2000 bodies were buried in it. They buried them like this: bodies, a layer of lime, again bodies, again a layer of lime, and so on until the hole is completely filled. Lime was needed for the speedy decomposition of corpses. Now all the bodies of those killed from the execution pits have been exhumed, and the contours of the pits are now lined with cast-iron slabs.

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During April-May 1940, all the prisoners were destroyed in this way. This crime remained unknown until April 13, 1943, when the Germans announced that in the occupied Soviet territory discovered Katyn graves in which Polish officers who were shot by the NKVD of the USSR in the spring of 1940 are buried.
To study the circumstances of the tragedy, the Germans formed an "international" commission of representatives of the allied countries of Germany and the states occupied by it.

On April 28, 1943, she began work, and completed it on April 30. The final document states that, based on the documents found in the graves, it can be concluded that executions were carried out in the spring of 1940. We are talking about all kinds of notes, newspapers, diaries, among which the German commission did not find those dated later than the spring of 1940.

The main color of the Polish memorial is rust, which, according to the designers, is the color of gore. Below the bell - if you shake it, the ringing comes as if "from under the ground."

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Starting from May 1943, the excavations were stopped. By this time, 4143 bodies from 7 graves had been exhumed, while 4 more remained unopened, more than half of the corpses were identified from the documents found. In September 1943, the Red Army liberated Smolensk. Retreating, the Germans destroyed or took material evidence with them. In January 1944, a commission began to work under the leadership of doctor Burdenko, which, according to supporters of the German version, was instructed to prove at all costs the guilt of the Germans in the execution of the Poles in Katyn.

Separate graves of Polish generals Smoravinsky and Bogatyrevich. The granddaughter of General Smoravinsky in 2010 was on the ill-fated plane that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski.

18.

The Commission of the Soviets unearthed the remaining 4 graves, removed 925 bodies from the ground. Documents dated later than the spring of 1940, including those dated 1941, were found in the clothes of the dead. Supporters of the German version believe that all these papers are falsified. In addition, in the final report of the commission, errors were found in the spelling of the names and initials of the German soldiers and witnesses accused of the execution, incorrect indication military ranks suspects. All this, according to supporters of the German version, only indicates that the Burdenko commission was fulfilling the political order of the Soviet leadership, and did not conduct unbiased research.

One way or another, the conclusion of the commission became the official version of the USSR on the Katyn issue and remained so until perestroika. He remained until M. Gorbachev questioned him, stating in 1990 that “documents were found that indirectly but convincingly indicate that thousands of Polish citizens who died in the Smolensk forests exactly half a century ago became victims of Beria and his henchmen.

Now Polish officers are buried in such mass graves just a hundred meters from the places of execution. All the graves are fraternal and Russia now does not allow the transportation of bodies to the territory of Poland. An exception was made only for the only woman shot in Katyn - the pilot Antonina Levandovskaya.

Speaking about the motives for committing a crime, opponents of the Soviet version do not come to a common opinion. Some believe that the execution of the Poles is a continuation of the Stalinist policy of repression, therefore it is impossible to give an unequivocal answer to this question, because the murders of "millions of innocent citizens" are also inexplicable. That is, repression for the sake of repression. Other adherents believe that the execution was carried out out of revenge for the murder of tens or even hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers who were captured by the Poles in 1920.

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Thus, from the point of view of the supporters of the German version, the point in the Katyn case has been put, the guilt of the NKVD of the USSR has been unambiguously proven.

The Poles listed all those killed by name. Everyone has their own memorial plaque, where relatives come and honor the memory, put flags, stick photos.

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Pilot Antonina Lewandowska is already buried in Warsaw, but nevertheless, a memorial plaque about her remains.

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Commemorative plaques were made at the level of graves, i.e. visitors walk from below, and from above, as it were, a decorative layer of soil.

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This story also has a Soviet version. What is true has not yet been fully clarified. As a rule, most people visiting the memorial hear 2 versions from the guides, and they accept one or the other, depending, for example, on their personal attitude towards the Stalin regime. But it is better to build your own opinion, without personal emotions, because. the Soviet version also has a sufficient number of facts.

According to it, in late February or early March, the leadership of the USSR decided to send the cases of Polish officers prisoners of war for consideration to the Special Conference of the NKVD, which sentenced the prisoners to imprisonment for terms of 3 to 8 years in labor camps for special purposes. It should be noted that forcing prisoners of war officers to work is a violation of the Geneva Convention, so all this took place in secrecy. Captured Poles were taken to camps near Smolensk for the construction of roads between Smolensk and Minsk.

The Poles who were shot in Katyn were delivered to the Gnezdovo station by rail, where they were loaded into covered buses and taken to the NKVD dacha.

There is also a "valley of death" in the Katyn memorial. This is a graveyard Soviet people- "enemies of the people" and other "counter-revolutionary scum" (Earlier, this word could often be found in quite official documents, because the level of education of the "people's commissars" left much to be desired) innocent killed by the "communists". A cemetery without graves, just land on which excavations were not carried out, and the corpses were not exhumed. It is located behind such a small gate.

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Here, people simply put crosses anywhere, knowing that their relative was shot here, but no one knows exactly where the body is in the ground.

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But back to the Soviet version of the execution of the Poles. In special purpose camps, a stricter regime is observed, in particular, it is forbidden to correspond with relatives. This, according to supporters of the Soviet version, can explain why letters from Polish officers stopped reaching Poland. In August 1941, Smolensk was surrendered to the Nazi invaders, the Poles did not want to retreat with the Red Army, but hoped to return to their homeland with the arrival of the Germans, and thus the Poles fell into the hands of the Nazis. First, the Poles worked for the Germans, and then they shot them.

The technology of execution is the binding of hands with German twine (this is a recognized fact, but the question is why the NKVD needed to use German twine instead of the Russian rope. The German version explains this by “compromising” the Germans, but in 1940 Germany had not yet violated the Molotov Pact - Ribbentrop did not declare war on Russia. Then the NKVD had to predict a future war with Germany, the capture of Smolensk by the Germans and the discovery of the Katyn burials by them ... ..), a shot in the back of the head directly at the dug ditch, sometimes with raising the uniform, throwing a noose around the neck, using sawdust, inflicting wounds with a bayonet. Neither before nor after the assassination were Polish officers searched.

The Russian cemetery in Katyn is less equipped than the Polish one, and the memorial here is still only in the project. Here, only bulk wooden floorings have been made - paths along which visitors walk, and under them there may still be unexhumed burials.

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Memorial at the Russian cemetery - the fence was made according to the designers' idea in such a way that its borders could be expanded. It seems to symbolize the infinity of these crimes.

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Orthodox cross at the Russian cemetery.

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After the Red Army liberated Smolensk, a commission led by physician Nikolai Burdenko began to investigate the Katyn murders. According to the Soviet version, graves untouched by the Nazis were excavated in Katyn, where documents dated later than the spring of 1940 were found.

The result of the work of the Burdenko Commission was a document that blames the German occupiers for the execution of Polish officers in Katyn. The Germans, in 1943, attracted an entire international commission for the exhumation of bodies, one of the participants of which, the Czech Frantchisek Gaek, later wrote a whole article “Katyn Evidence”, where he refers to the fact that the state of the corpses, things of the dead indicates a later period of execution, t .e. not about the spring of 1940, but about the fall of 1941 or even later.

Now the main document for the recognition of the German version of the tragedy is Beria's note to Stalin.

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There, too, the Soviet version cites many inaccuracies, for example, the phrase “the NKVD of the USSR considers it necessary to propose the NKVD of the USSR”, the absence of signatures of Kalinin and Kaganovich, and a host of other inconsistencies.

Speaking about the motives for the crime, supporters of the Soviet version believe that the Germans shot Polish officers due to the fact that peace was concluded between the USSR and the Polish government in exile in August 1941, and the Polish army of General Anders began to be formed in concert from among the amnestied Polish prisoners of war (amnestied all Polish citizens who were on the territory of the USSR).

Accordingly, Polish prisoners of war who fell into the hands of the Nazis could escape and take part in the war against Nazi Germany.

At the exit from the memorial there are 2 small expositions. The first one is a museum political history Russia. It is small, but some of the exhibits are quite interesting.

These are real drawings of Soviet children who, instead of the sun, the sea or the apple tree, painted portraits of tyrants, God save all subsequent generations of children from this.

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An excerpt from the Pionerskaya Pravda newspaper, you read and see how much "propaganda garbage" Soviet propaganda pushed into the heads of teenagers using the press.

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The words "scoundrel" and "scum" were quite often used in the official Soviet press, because it was necessary to clearly form an opinion among the masses - white or black and without any shades of gray. And propaganda also formed hatred for negative heroes, in the next clipping of the entire paragraph of the text and for “counter-revolutionary agitation” - the meaning of the phrase is difficult to understand, the workers are already demanding to SHOOT PEOPLE.

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The only thing left for the wives was to write letters to Comrade Stalin, which hardly any of the top leadership read at all.

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And here, in general, everything is simple and clear without further ado - after all, "brevity is the sister of talent."

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And this is the Seliger forum of that time.

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The second museum is also small, it presents some things of the Poles that were not taken to Warsaw to the Katyn Museum. Personal belongings - on the right are tongs, with which the captives pulled out their teeth.

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Military uniform of Polish officers of that time.

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Now, next to the memorial, a chapel has been built in memory of the people who found their death here.

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You can argue for a long time and give a bunch of facts about who is to blame for this tragedy. The only thing that is certain is that both Stalin and Hitler could have done it. The latter was ruthless and guilty of a heap of deaths of innocent civilian Jews, Russians, Poles and others, while the former even destroyed his own people in exiles and camps. About the German version, the Polish director Andrzej Wajda shot the film "Katyn" in 2007, it is generally not bad, although it smacks of propaganda, and of course not such an obvious propaganda din as the Russian "August 8" about the events in Georgia in 2008.

The following facts seem very strange to me personally: 1). The murder of Poles with German weapons (why would the NKVDists not use regular Nagans, and in general it is unlikely that the NKVD officers were armed with German "Walters"). 2). Why use a German tourniquet for the same reason. 3). If the Russians wanted to hide the truth like that, then why shoot officers in clothes, it would be more logical to do it in underwear and without documents, then it would be much easier to hide it.

Well, it's unlikely that anyone will ever know the truth. After all, this is the difference between “real truth” and “political” truth. "Political truth" is always written to please the interests of the current government. Well, everyone draws conclusions for himself.

Katyn massacre - massacres of Polish citizens (mainly captured officers of the Polish army), carried out in the spring of 1940 by 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, the Red Army captured up to half a million Polish citizens. Most of them were soon released, and 130,242 people ended up in the 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 Poland's independence. The servicemen of the Polish army were divided: the highest officers were concentrated in three camps: Ostashkovsky, Kozelsky and Starobelsky.

And on March 3, 1940, the head of the NKVD, Lavrenty Beria, proposed to the Politburo of the Central Committee to destroy all these people, since "All of them are sworn enemies of the Soviet regime, full of hatred for 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 were subject to destruction. Therefore, everything officers the Polish army was signed a death sentence, 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 the “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.

In the future, Katyn has repeatedly become 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 top Soviet leadership. And on November 26, 2010, the State Duma Russian Federation by its decision, it recognized the guilt of the USSR in the Katyn massacre. Seems like enough has been said. But it's too early to make a point. 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 took place 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, policemen, intelligence officers, gendarmes, siegemen and jailers who are in the camps of prisoners of war, as well as cases of 11 arrested and in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus 000 members various to-r espionage and sabotage organizations, former landlords, manufacturers, former Polish officers, officials and defectors - to be considered in a special order, with the application of capital punishment to them - execution.

The remains of General M. Smoravinsky.

Representatives of the Polish Catholic Church and the Polish Red Cross inspect the corpses removed for identification.

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

Identity card of the chaplain (military priest) Zelkovsky, who was 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

Commission headed by N.N. Burdenko.

Executioners who "distinguished themselves" during the Katyn execution.

Chief Katyn executioner: V. I. Blokhin.

Hands tied with rope.

A memorandum from Beria to Stalin, with a proposal to destroy the Polish officers. On it are the paintings of all members of the Politburo.

Polish prisoners of war.

The international commission examines the corpses.

Note from the head of the KGB Shelepin to N.S. Khrushchev, which says: “Any unforeseen accident can lead to the disclosure of the operation, with all the consequences that are undesirable for our state. Moreover, with regard to those shot in the Katyn Forest, there is an official version: all the Poles liquidated there are considered to be destroyed by the German invaders. Based on the foregoing, it seems appropriate to destroy all records of the executed Polish officers.

Polish order on the found remains.

Captured British and Americans are present at the autopsy, which is performed by a German doctor.

Excavated common grave.

The bodies were piled up.

The remains of a major of the Polish army (Brigade named after Pilsudski).

A place in the Katyn forest where burials were discovered.

Adapted 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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How was the myth of the Katyn tragedy created?

The 20th Congress had devastating consequences not only within the USSR, but also for the entire world communist movement, because Moscow lost its role as a cementing ideological center, and each of the people's democracies (with the exception of China and Albania) began to look for its own path to socialism, and under this actually took the path of eliminating the dictatorship of the proletariat and restoring capitalism.

The first serious international reaction to Khrushchev's "secret" report was the anti-Soviet speeches in Poznan, the historical center of Wielkopolska chauvinism, that followed shortly after the death of the leader of the Polish communists Bolesław Bierut. Soon, the turmoil began to spread to other cities in Poland and even spread to other Eastern European countries, to a greater extent - Hungary, to a lesser extent - Bulgaria. In the end, the Polish anti-Sovietists, under the smokescreen of “the fight against Stalin’s personality cult,” managed not only to free the right-wing nationalist deviator Vladislav Gomulka and his associates from prison, but also to bring them to power.

And although Khrushchev tried at first to somehow oppose, in the end, he was forced to accept the Polish demands in order to defuse the current situation, which was ready to get out of control. These demands contained such unpleasant moments as the unconditional recognition of the new leadership, the dissolution of collective farms, some liberalization of the economy, guarantees of freedom of speech, meetings and demonstrations, the abolition of censorship, and, most importantly, the official recognition of the vile Nazi lie about the involvement of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the Katyn execution of Polish prisoners of war. officers. In the heat of giving such guarantees, Khrushchev recalled the Soviet Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, a Pole by origin, who served as Minister of Defense of Poland, and all Soviet military and political advisers.

Perhaps the most unpleasant for Khrushchev was the demand to recognize the involvement of his party in the Katyn massacre, but he agreed to this only in connection with the promise of V. Gomulka to put on the trail of Stepan Bandera, the worst enemy of the Soviet government, the head of the paramilitary formations of Ukrainian nationalists who fought against the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War and continued their terrorist activities in the Lviv region until the 50s of the twentieth century.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), headed by S. Bandera, relied on cooperation with the intelligence agencies of the USA, England, Germany, on permanent contacts with various underground circles and groups in Ukraine. To do this, its emissaries penetrated there illegally, with the goal of creating an underground network and transporting anti-Soviet and nationalist literature.

It is possible that during his unofficial visit to Moscow in February 1959, Gomulka reported that his secret services had discovered Bandera in Munich, and hurried with the recognition of "Katyn's guilt." One way or another, but on the instructions of Khrushchev on October 15, 1959, the KGB officer Bogdan Stashinsky finally eliminates Bandera in Munich, and the trial that took place over Stashinsky in Karlsruhe (Germany) will find it possible to determine the killer with a relatively mild punishment - only a few years in prison, since the main blame will be placed on the organizers of the crime - the Khrushchev leadership.

Fulfilling his obligation, Khrushchev, an experienced ripper of secret archives, gives the appropriate orders to the KGB chairman Shelepin, who moved to this chair a year ago from the post of first secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee, and he begins feverishly "working" on creating a material justification for the Hitlerite version of the Katyn myth.

First of all, Shelepin starts a “special folder” “On the involvement of the CPSU (this one puncture already speaks of the fact of gross falsification - until 1952 the CPSU was called the CPSU (b) - L.B.) to the Katyn execution, where, as he believes, should be stored four main documents: a) lists of executed Polish officers; b) Beria's report to Stalin; c) Resolution of the Central Committee of the Party of March 5, 1940; d) Shelepin's letter to Khrushchev (the motherland must know its "heroes"!)

It was this “special folder”, created by Khrushchev on the order of the new Polish leadership, that spurred on all the anti-people forces of the PPR, inspired by Pope John Paul II (former Archbishop of Krakow and Cardinal of Poland), as well as Assistant to US President Jimmy Carter for National Security, permanent director " research center called the "Stalin Institute" at the University of California, a Pole by birth, Zbigniew Brzezinski to more and more brazen ideological diversions.

In the end, after another three decades, the story of the visit of the leader of Poland to the Soviet Union repeated itself, only this time in April 1990 the President of the Republic of Poland V. Jaruzelsky arrived in the USSR on an official state visit demanding repentance for the "Katyn atrocity" and forced Gorbachev to make the following statement: “Recently, documents have been found (meaning Khrushchev’s “special folder” - L.B.), which indirectly but convincingly indicate that thousands of Polish citizens who died in the Smolensk forests exactly half a century ago, became victims of Beria and his henchmen. The graves of Polish officers are next to the graves of Soviet people who fell from the same evil hand.

If we take into account that the "special folder" is a fake, then Gorbachev's statement was not worth a penny. Having achieved from the incompetent Gorbachev leadership in April 1990 shameful public repentance for Hitler's sins, that is, the publication of the TASS Report that “the Soviet side, expressing deep regret over the Katyn tragedy, declares that it represents one of the grave crimes of Stalinism ”, counter-revolutionaries of all stripes safely took advantage of this explosion of the “Khrushchev time bomb” - false documents about Katyn - for their base subversive purposes.

The leader of the notorious "Solidarity" Lech Walesa was the first to "respond" to Gorbachev's "repentance" (they put a finger in his mouth - he bit his hand - L.B.). He proposed to resolve other important problems: to reconsider the assessment of post-war Polish-Soviet relations, including the role of the Polish Committee for National Liberation, created in July 1944, the treaties concluded with the USSR, because they were allegedly based on criminal principles, to punish the perpetrators of genocide, to allow free access to the burial places of Polish officers, and most importantly, of course, to compensate for material damage to the families and relatives of the victims. On April 28, 1990, a representative of the government spoke in the Sejm of Poland with information that negotiations with the government of the USSR on the issue of monetary compensation were already underway and that in this moment it is important to compile a list of all those claiming such payments (according to official figures, there were up to 800,000 such "relatives").

And the vile action of Khrushchev-Gorbachev ended with the dispersal of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the dissolution of the military union of the Warsaw Pact countries, and the liquidation of the Eastern European socialist camp. Moreover, it was believed: the West would dissolve NATO in response, but - “figs to you”: NATO is doing “drang nah Osten”, brazenly absorbing the countries of the former Eastern European socialist camp.

However, back to the kitchen of creating a “special folder”. A. Shelepin began by breaking the seal and entering the sealed room where records of 21,857 prisoners and internees of Polish nationality were kept since September 1939. In a letter to Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959, justifying the futility of this archival material the fact that “all accounting cases are of neither operational interest nor historical value”, the newly minted “chekist” comes to the conclusion: “Based on the foregoing, it seems appropriate destroy all accounting files on persons (attention!!!), shot in 1940 for the said operation. So there were "lists of executed Polish officers" in Katyn. Subsequently, the son of Lavrenty Beria will reasonably remark: “During Jaruzelsky’s official visit to Moscow, Gorbachev handed him only copies of those found in Soviet archives lists of the former Main Directorate for Prisoners of War and Internees of the NKVD of the USSR. The copies contain the names of Polish citizens, who were in 1939 - 1940 in the Kozelsky, Ostashkovsky and Starobelsky camps of the NKVD. None of these documents talk about the participation of the NKVD does not go to the execution of prisoners of war».

The second "document" from the Khrushchev-Shelepin "special folder" was not at all difficult to fabricate, since there was a detailed digital report of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs USSR L. Beria

I.V. Stalin "About the Polish prisoners of war". Shelepin had only one thing left to do - to come up with and print out the “operative part”, where Beria allegedly demands execution for all prisoners of war from the camps and prisoners held in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus “without summoning those arrested and without bringing charges” - the benefit of typewriters in the former NKVD The USSR has not yet been decommissioned. However, Shelepin did not dare to forge Beria's signature, leaving this "document" in a cheap anonymous letter. But his “operative part”, copied word for word, will fall into the next “document”, which the “literate” Shelepin will call in his letter to Khrushchev “Decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU (?) of March 5, 1940”, and this lapsus calami, this a mistake in the “letter” still sticks out like an awl from a bag (and, indeed, how can “archival documents” be corrected, even if they were invented two decades after the event? - L.B.).

True, this main “document” on the involvement of the party itself is designated as “an extract from the minutes of the meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee. Decision dated 5.03.40.” (The Central Committee of which party? In all party documents, without exception, the entire abbreviation was always indicated in full - Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks - L.B.). Most surprising of all, this “document” was left unsigned. And on this anonymous letter, instead of a signature, there are only two words - "Secretary of the Central Committee." And that's it!

This is how Khrushchev paid off the Polish leadership for the head of his worst personal enemy Stepan Bandera, who spoiled him a lot of blood when Nikita Sergeevich was the first leader of Ukraine.

Khrushchev did not understand another thing: that the price he had to pay Poland for this, in general, irrelevant by that time, terrorist attack was immeasurably higher - in fact, it was equal to the revision of the decisions of the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences on the post-war structure of the statehood of Poland and other Eastern European countries .

Nevertheless, the false “special folder” fabricated by Khrushchev and Shelepin, covered with archival dust, waited in the wings three decades later. Gorbachev, the enemy of the Soviet people, pecked at her, as we have already seen. The ardent enemy of the Soviet people, Yeltsin, also pecked at her. The latter tried to use the Katyn fakes at the meetings of the Constitutional Court of the RSFSR, dedicated to the “case of the CPSU” initiated by him. These fakes were presented by the notorious "figures" of the Yeltsin era - Shakhrai and Makarov. However, even the complaisant Constitutional Court could not recognize these forgeries as genuine documents and did not mention them anywhere in its decisions. Khrushchev and Shelepin did a dirty job!

A paradoxical position on the Katyn "case" was taken by Sergo Beria. His book “My father is Lavrenty Beria” was signed for publication on April 18, 1994, and the “documents” from the “special folder” were, as we already know, made public in January 1993. It is unlikely that Beria's son was not aware of this, although he makes a similar appearance. But his "awl from the bag" is an almost exact reproduction of the figure of the Khrushchev number of prisoners of war shot in Katyn - 21 thousand 857 (Khrushchev) and 20 thousand 857 (S. Beria).

In his attempt to whitewash his father, he recognizes the “fact” of the Katyn massacre by the Soviet side, but at the same time he blames the “system” and agrees that his father was allegedly ordered to hand over the captured Polish officers of the Red Army within a week, and the execution itself was allegedly ordered hold the leadership of the People’s Commissariat of Defense, that is, Klim Voroshilov, and adds that “this is the truth that is carefully hidden to this day ... The fact remains: the father refused to participate in the crime, although he knew that saving these 20 thousand 857 lives already unable to ... I know for sure that my father motivated his fundamental disagreement with the execution of Polish officers in writing. Where are these documents?

The late Sergo Lavrentievich correctly stated that these documents do not exist. Because there never was. Instead of proving the inconsistency of recognizing the involvement of the Soviet side in the Hitler-Goebbels provocation on " Katyn case"And expose Khrushchev's cheap stuff, Sergo Beria saw this as a selfish chance to take revenge on the party, which, in his words, "always knew how to have a hand in dirty things and, if possible, shift the responsibility to anyone, but not to the top party leadership." That is, Sergo Beria also contributed to the big lie about Katyn, as we see.

A careful reading of the “Report of the head of the NKVD Lavrenty Beria” draws attention to the following absurdity: the “Report” gives digital calculations about 14 thousand 700 people from among the former Polish officers, officials, landowners, policemen, intelligence officers, gendarmes, who are in prisoner of war camps , siegemen and jailers (hence - Gorbachev's figure - "about 15 thousand executed Polish officers" - L.B.), as well as about 11 thousand people arrested and in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus - members of various counter-revolutionary and sabotage organizations , former landowners, manufacturers and defectors.

In total, therefore, 25 thousand 700. The same figure also appears in the allegedly mentioned above “Extract from the meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee”, since it was rewritten into a fake document without proper critical reflection. But in this regard, it is difficult to understand Shelepin's statement that 21,857 records were kept in the "secret sealed room" and that all 21,857 Polish officers were shot.

First, as we have seen, not all of them were officers. According to Lavrenty Beria's estimates, in general there were only a little over 4 thousand army officers proper (generals, colonels and lieutenant colonels - 295, majors and captains - 2080, lieutenants, second lieutenants and cornets - 604). This is in prisoner of war camps, and there were 1207 former Polish prisoners of war in prisons. In total, therefore, 4,186 people. In the Big encyclopedic dictionary”The 1998 edition of the year is written like this: “In the spring of 1940, the NKVD destroyed over 4 thousand Polish officers in Katyn.” And then: "Executions on the territory of Katyn were carried out during the occupation of the Smolensk region by Nazi troops."

So who, in the end, carried out these ill-fated executions - the Nazis, the NKVD, or, as the son of Lavrenty Beria claims, parts of the regular Red Army?

Secondly, there is a clear discrepancy between the number of "shot" - 21 thousand 857 and the number of people who were "ordered" to be shot - 25 thousand 700. It is permissible to ask how it could happen that 3843 Polish officers turned out to be unaccounted for, which department fed them during their lifetime, on what means did they live? And who dared to spare them if the "bloodthirsty" "Secretary of the Central Committee" ordered to shoot all the "officers" to the last?

And the last. In the materials fabricated in 1959 on the Katyn case, it is stated that the “troika” was the court for the unfortunate. Khrushchev "forgot" that in accordance with the Decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of November 17, 1938 "On Arrests, Prosecutorial Supervision and the Conduct of Investigations", judicial "troikas" were liquidated. This happened a year and a half before the Katyn massacre, which was incriminated to the Soviet authorities.

The truth about Katyn

After the shamefully failed campaign against Warsaw, undertaken by Tukhachevsky, obsessed with the Trotskyist idea of a world revolutionary fire, to bourgeois Poland from Soviet Russia according to the Riga Peace Treaty of 1921, the western lands of Ukraine and Belarus were ceded, and this soon led to the forced Polonization of the population of the territories so unexpectedly acquired for free for free: to the closure of Ukrainian and Belarusian schools; to the transformation Orthodox churches in Catholic churches; to the expropriation of fertile lands from the peasants and their transfer to the Polish landowners; to lawlessness and arbitrariness; to persecution on national and religious grounds; to the brutal suppression of any manifestations of popular discontent.

That is why Western Ukrainians and Belarusians, having drunk on the bourgeois Greater Poland lawlessness, longing for Bolshevik social justice and true freedom, as their liberators and deliverers, as relatives, met the Red Army when it came to their region on September 17, 1939, and all its actions to liberate the Western Ukraine and Western Belarus lasted 12 days.

Polish military units and formations of troops, with almost no resistance, surrendered. The Polish government of Kozlovsky, who fled to Romania on the eve of the capture of Warsaw by Hitler, actually betrayed his people, and the new Polish government in exile, headed by General V. Sikorsky, was formed in London on September 30, 1939, i.e. two weeks after the national catastrophe.

By the time of the perfidious attack of fascist Germany on the USSR, 389 thousand 382 Poles were kept in Soviet prisons, camps and places of exile. From London, the fate of Polish prisoners of war, who were used mainly for road construction work, was very closely followed, so that if they were shot by the Soviet authorities in the spring of 1940, as the false Goebbels propaganda trumpeted to the whole world, it would be timely known through diplomatic channels and would cause a great international outcry.

In addition, Sikorsky, seeking rapprochement with I.V. Stalin, sought to present himself in the best possible light, played the role of a friend of the Soviet Union, which again excludes the possibility of a "massacre" "perpetrated" by the Bolsheviks over Polish prisoners of war in the spring of 1940. Nothing indicates the presence of a historical situation that could be an incentive for such an action by the Soviet side.

At the same time, the Germans had such an incentive in August - September 1941 after the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, concluded a friendship treaty between the two governments with the Poles on July 30, 1941, according to which General Sikorsky was to form from prisoners of war compatriots in the Russian army under the command of a prisoner of war Polish General Anders to participate in hostilities against Germany. This was precisely the incentive for Hitler to liquidate Poles as enemies of the German nation, who, as he knew, had already been amnestied by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of August 12, 1941 - 389 thousand 41 Poles, including future victims of Nazi atrocities, shot in the Katyn forest.

The process of forming the National Polish Army under the command of General Anders was in full swing in the Soviet Union, and in quantitative terms it reached 76 thousand 110 people in six months.

However, as it turned out later, Anders received instructions from Sikorsky: “In no case should Russia be helped, but use the situation to the maximum advantage for the Polish nation.” At the same time, Sikorsky convinces Churchill of the expediency of transferring Anders' army to the Middle East, about which the British Prime Minister writes to I.V. Stalin, and the leader gives his go-ahead, and not only for the evacuation to Iran of the Anders army itself, but also for family members of military personnel in the amount of 43 thousand 755 people. It was clear to both Stalin and Hitler that Sikorsky was playing a double game. As tensions increased between Stalin and Sikorsky, there was a thaw between Hitler and Sikorsky. The Soviet-Polish "friendship" ended with a frank anti-Soviet statement by the head of the Polish government in exile on February 25, 1943, which said that it did not want to recognize the historical rights of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples to unite in their nation-states. In other words, there was the fact of the brazen claims of the Polish émigré government to the Soviet lands - Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. In response to this statement, I.V. Stalin formed from the Poles loyal to the Soviet Union, the Tadeusz Kosciuszko division of 15 thousand people. In October 1943, she was already fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Red Army.

For Hitler, this statement was a signal to take revenge for the Leipzig trial he lost to the communists in the case of the Reichstag fire, and he intensifies the activities of the police and the Gestapo of the Smolensk region to organize the Katyn provocation.

Already on April 15, the German Information Bureau reported on the Berlin radio that the German occupation authorities had discovered in Katyn, near Smolensk, the graves of 11,000 Polish officers shot by Jewish commissars. The next day, the Soviet Information Bureau exposed the bloody machinations of the Nazi executioners, and on April 19, the Pravda newspaper wrote in an editorial: “The Nazis invent some kind of Jewish commissars who allegedly participated in the murder of 11,000 Polish officers. It is not difficult for experienced masters of provocation to come up with several names of people who never existed. Such "commissars" as Lev Rybak, Avraam Borisovich, Pavel Brodninsky, Chaim Finberg, named by the German information bureau, were simply invented by the Nazi swindlers, since there were no such "commissars" either in the Smolensk branch of the GPU, or in general in the NKVD bodies and No".

On April 28, 1943, Pravda published "a note from the Soviet government on the decision to break off relations with the Polish government", which, in particular, stated that "this hostile campaign against Soviet state undertaken by the Polish government in order to put pressure on the Soviet government in order to wrest territorial concessions from him at the expense of the interests of Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Belarus and Soviet Lithuania.

Immediately after the expulsion of the Nazi invaders from Smolensk (September 25, 1943), I.V. Stalin sends a special commission to the crime scene to establish and investigate the circumstances of the shooting of Polish officers of war by the Nazi invaders in the Katyn forest. The commission included: a member of the Extraordinary State Commission(ChGK was investigating the atrocities of the Nazis in the occupied territories of the USSR and scrupulously calculated the damage caused by them - L.B.), Academician N.N. , Lieutenant General A.S. Gundorov, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Union of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies S.A. Kolesnikov, People's Commissar of Education of the USSR, Academician V.P. Potemkin, head of the Main Military Sanitary Directorate of the Red Army, Colonel-General E.I. Smirnov, Chairman of the Smolensk Regional Executive Committee R.E. Melnikov. To fulfill the task assigned to it, the commission attracted the best forensic experts in the country: the chief forensic expert of the People's Commissariat of Health of the USSR, director of the Research Institute of Forensic Medicine V.I. Prozorovsky, head. Department of Forensic Medicine of the 2nd Moscow Medical Institute V.M. Smolyaninov, senior scientific staff Research Institute of Forensic Medicine P.S. Semenovsky and M.D. Shvaikov, chief pathologist of the front, major of the medical service, professor D.N. Vyropayeva.

Day and night, tirelessly, for four months, the authoritative commission conscientiously investigated the details of the Katyn case. On January 26, 1944, the most convincing report of a special commission was published in all the central newspapers, which left no stone unturned from the Hitler myth of Katyn and revealed to the whole world a true picture of the atrocities of the Nazi invaders against Polish prisoners of war officers.

However, in the midst of the Cold War, the US Congress again makes an attempt to revive the Katyn issue, even creating the so-called. “A commission to investigate the Katyn case, headed by Congressman Madden.

On March 3, 1952, Pravda published a note to the US Department of State dated February 29, 1952, which, in particular, stated: thus generally recognized Hitlerite criminals (it is characteristic that the special "Katyn" commission of the US Congress was created simultaneously with the approval of the appropriation of 100 million dollars for sabotage and espionage activities in Poland - L.B.).

The note was accompanied by the republished in Pravda on March 3, 1952, the full text of the message of the Burdenko commission, which collected extensive material obtained as a result of a detailed study of the corpses recovered from the graves and those documents and material evidence that were found on the corpses and in the graves. At the same time, the Burdenko special commission interviewed numerous witnesses from the local population, whose testimony accurately established the time and circumstances of the crimes committed by the German invaders.

First of all, the message gives information about what constitutes the Katyn forest.

“For a long time, the Katyn forest has been a favorite place where the people of Smolensk usually spent their holidays. The local population grazed cattle in the Katyn forest and procured fuel for themselves. There were no prohibitions or restrictions on access to the Katyn Forest.

Back in the summer of 1941, the Promstrakhkassy pioneer camp was located in this forest, which was closed only in July 1941 with the capture of Smolensk by the German invaders, the forest began to be guarded by reinforced patrols, in many places there were inscriptions warning that persons entering the forest without a special pass were subject to shooting on the spot.

Particularly strictly guarded was that part of the Katyn forest, which was called "Goat Mountains", as well as the territory on the banks of the Dnieper, where at a distance of 700 meters from the discovered graves of Polish prisoners of war there was a summer house - a rest house of the Smolensk department of the NKVD. Upon the arrival of the Germans, a German military establishment, hiding under the code name "Headquarters of the 537th construction battalion" (which also appeared in the documents of the Nuremberg trials - L.B.).

From the testimony of the peasant Kiselyov, born in 1870: “The officer said that, according to the information available to the Gestapo, the NKVD officers shot Polish officers in the Kozy Gory section in 1940, and asked me what evidence I could give about this. I replied that I had never heard of the NKVD carrying out executions in the Kozy Gory, and it was hardly possible at all, I explained to the officer, since the Goat Gory is a completely open crowded place and if they were shot there, then about the entire population of the nearby villages would know this ... ".

Kiselyov and others told how false testimony was literally knocked out of them with rubber truncheons and threats of execution, which later appeared in a book superbly published by the German Foreign Ministry, in which materials fabricated by the Germans on the “Katyn case” were placed. In addition to Kiselyov, Godezov (aka Godunov), Silverstov, Andreev, Zhigulev, Krivozertsev, Zakharov were named as witnesses in this book.

The Burdenko Commission found that Godezov and Silverstov died in 1943, before the liberation of the Smolensk region by the Red Army. Andreev, Zhigulev and Krivozertsev left with the Germans. The last of the “witnesses” named by the Germans, Zakharov, who worked under the Germans as a headman in the village of Novye Batek, told the Burdenko commission that he was first beaten until he lost consciousness, and then, when he came to, the officer demanded to sign the protocol of interrogation, and he, faint-hearted, under the influence of beatings and threats of execution, he gave false testimony and signed the protocol.

The Nazi command understood that for such a large-scale provocation "witnesses" were clearly not enough. And it distributed among the inhabitants of Smolensk and the surrounding villages "Appeal to the population", which was placed in the newspaper published by the Germans in Smolensk " New way" (No. 35 (157) of May 6, 1943: "Can you give data about the mass murder committed by the Bolsheviks in 1940 over captured Polish officers and priests (? - this is something new - L.B.) in "Kozy Gory" forest, near the Gnezdovo-Katyn highway. Who observed the vehicles from Gnezdovo to "Kozy Gory" or who saw or heard the executions? Who knows the inhabitants who can tell about this? Every message will be rewarded."

To the credit of the Soviet citizens, no one pecked at the reward for giving the false testimony needed by the Germans in the Katyn case.

Of the documents discovered by forensic experts relating to the second half of 1940 and the spring - summer of 1941, the following deserve special attention:

1. On corpse No. 92.
Letter from Warsaw addressed to the Red Cross in the Central Bank of Prisoners of War - Moscow, st. Kuibysheva, 12. The letter is written in Russian. In this letter Sophia Zygon asks for the whereabouts of her husband, Tomasz Zygon. The letter is dated 12.09. 1940. On the envelope there is a stamp - “Warsaw. 09.1940" and a stamp - "Moscow, Post Office, Expedition 9, 8.10. 1940”, as well as a resolution in red ink “Uch. set up a camp and send for delivery - 11/15/40. (Signature is illegible).

2. On corpse #4
Postcard, order No. 0112 from Tarnopol with a postmark "Tarnopol 12. 11.40" The handwriting and address are discolored.

3. On corpse no. 101.
Receipt No. 10293 dated 19.12.39, issued by the Kozelsky camp about the acceptance of a gold watch from Lewandovsky Eduard Adamovich. On the back of the receipt there is an entry dated March 14, 1941 about the sale of this watch to Yuvelirtorg.

4. On corpse no. 53.
Unsent postcard in Polish with the address: Warsaw, Bagatela 15, apt. 47, Irina Kuchinskaya. Dated June 20, 1941.

It must be said that in preparation for their provocation, the German occupation authorities used up to 500 Russian prisoners of war to work on digging graves in the Katyn forest, extracting documents and material evidence incriminating them, who, after doing this work, were shot by the Germans.

From the report of the “Special Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of War by the Nazi Invaders in the Katyn Forest”: “The conclusions from the testimonies and forensic medical examination about the execution of Polish prisoners of war by the Germans in the autumn of 1941 are fully confirmed by material evidence and documents extracted from the Katyn graves.

This is the truth about Katyn. The irrefutable truth of the fact.

The source of information- http://www.stalin.su/book.php?action=header&id=17 (From the book: Lev Balayan. Stalin and Khrushchev- http://www.stalin.su/book.php?text=author)

"The case of Katyn massacre"For a very long time, it will dominate Russian-Polish relations, cause serious passions among historians, and even ordinary citizens.

In Russia itself, adherence to one or another version of the “Katyn massacre” determines a person’s belonging to one or another political camp.

Establishing the truth in the Katyn story requires a cool head and prudence, but our contemporaries often have neither one nor the other.

Relations between Russia and Poland have not been smooth and good neighborly for centuries. Decay Russian Empire, which allowed Poland to regain state independence, did not change the situation in any way. New Poland immediately entered into an armed conflict with the RSFSR, in which it succeeded. By 1921, the Poles managed not only to take control of the territories of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, but also to capture up to 200,000 Soviet soldiers.

Pro further fate prisoners in modern Poland do not like to talk. Meanwhile, according to various estimates, from 80 to 140 thousand Soviet prisoners of war died in captivity from the horrific conditions of detention and bullying of the Poles.

Unfriendly relations between the Soviet Union and Poland ended in September 1939, when, after the German attack on Poland, the Red Army occupied the territories of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, reaching the so-called "Curzon Line" - the border, which was to become the line of separation of the Soviet and Polish states according to offer British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon.

Polish prisoners taken by the Red Army. Photo: Public Domain

Missing

It should be noted that this liberation campaign The Red Army in September 1939 was launched at a time when the Polish government left the country, and the Polish army was defeated by the Nazis.

In the territories occupied by Soviet troops, up to half a million Poles were captured, most of whom were soon released. About 130 thousand people remained in the camps of the NKVD, recognized Soviet authorities representing a danger.

However, by October 3, 1939, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks decided to disband the privates and non-commissioned officers of the Polish army who lived in the territories that had ceded to the Soviet Union. Ordinary and non-commissioned officers who lived in Western and Central Poland returned to these territories, controlled by German troops.

As a result, in Soviet camps there remained a little less than 42,000 soldiers and officers of the Polish army, policemen, gendarmes, who were regarded as "hardened enemies of the Soviet regime."

Most of these enemies, from 26 to 28 thousand people, were employed in the construction of roads, and then sent to Siberia for special settlements. Many of them would later join the “Anders Army” that was being formed in the USSR, while the other part would become the founders of the Polish Army.

The fate of approximately 14,700 Polish officers and gendarmes held in the Ostashkovsky, Kozelsky and Starobelsky camps remained unclear.

With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War the question of these Poles hung in the air.

The cunning plan of Dr. Goebbels

The Nazis were the first to break the silence, in April 1943 they informed the world about the "unprecedented crime of the Bolsheviks" - the execution of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn forest.

The German investigation began in February 1943, based on the testimony of local residents who witnessed how, in March-April 1940, NKVD officers brought captured Poles to the Katyn Forest, who were never seen alive again.

The Nazis assembled an international commission, consisting of doctors from the countries under their control, as well as Switzerland, after which they exhumed the corpses in mass graves. In total, the remains of more than 4,000 Poles were recovered from eight mass graves, who, according to the conclusions of the German commission, were killed no later than May 1940. Evidence of this was declared that the dead had no things that could indicate a later date of death. The Hitler commission also considered it proved that the executions were carried out according to the scheme adopted by the NKVD.

The beginning of Hitler's investigation of the "Katyn massacre" coincided with the end of Battle of Stalingrad- the Nazis needed a reason to divert attention from their military catastrophe. It was for this that the investigation of the "bloody crime of the Bolsheviks" was started.

Calculation at Joseph Goebbels was not only to cause, as they say now, damage to the image of the USSR. The news of the destruction of Polish officers by the NKVD was bound to cause a break in relations between the Soviet Union and the Polish government-in-exile in London.

Employees of the UNKVD of the USSR in the Smolensk region, witnesses and / or participants in the Katyn massacre in the spring of 1940. Photo: commons.wikimedia.org

And since behind the Polish government in exile stood official London, then the Nazis cherished the hope of quarreling not only the Poles and Russians, but also Churchill co Stalin.

The plan of the Nazis was partly justified. Head of the Polish government in exile Wladyslaw Sikorsky really went into a rage, severed relations with Moscow and demanded a similar step from Churchill. However, on July 4, 1943, Sikorsky died in a plane crash near Gibraltar. Later, a version will appear in Poland that the death of Sikorsky was the work of the British themselves, who did not want to quarrel with Stalin.

The guilt of the Nazis in Nuremberg could not be proved

In October 1943, when the territory of the Smolensk region came under the control of Soviet troops, a Soviet commission began to work on the spot to investigate the circumstances of the Katyn massacre. The official investigation was launched in January 1944 by the "Special Commission to Establish and Investigate the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of War by the Nazi Invaders in the Katyn Forest (near Smolensk)," which was headed by chief surgeon of the Red Army Nikolai Burdenko.

The commission came to the following conclusion: the Polish officers who were in special camps on the territory of the Smolensk region were not evacuated in the summer of 1941 due to the rapid advance of the Germans. The captured Poles ended up in the hands of the Nazis, who carried out the massacre in the Katyn Forest. To prove this version, the "Burdenko Commission" cited the results of an examination, which testified that the Poles were shot from German weapons. In addition, Soviet investigators found belongings and objects from the dead, indicating that the Poles were alive at least until the summer of 1941.

The guilt of the Nazis was also confirmed by local residents, who testified that they saw how the Nazis brought the Poles to the Katyn forest in 1941.

In February 1946, the "Katyn massacre" became one of the episodes considered by the Nuremberg Tribunal. The Soviet side, blaming the Nazis for the execution, nevertheless failed to prove its case in court. Adherents of the “NKVD crime” version are inclined to consider such a verdict in their favor, but their opponents categorically disagree with them.

Photos and personal belongings of those shot near Katyn. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

Package number 1

Over the next 40 years, no new arguments were presented by the parties, and everyone remained in their previous positions, depending on their political views.

A change in the Soviet position occurred in 1989, when documents were allegedly found in the Soviet archives, indicating that the execution of the Poles was carried out by the NKVD with the personal sanction of Stalin.

On April 13, 1990, a TASS statement was released in which the Soviet Union admitted guilt for the execution, declaring it "one of the grave crimes of Stalinism."

The main evidence of the guilt of the USSR is now considered to be the so-called “packet number 1”, which was stored in the secret Special folder of the Archive of the Central Committee of the CPSU.

Meanwhile, the researchers draw attention to the fact that the documents from the "package number 1" have a huge number of inconsistencies, allowing them to be considered fake. A lot of such documents, allegedly testifying to the crimes of Stalinism, appeared at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, but most of them were exposed as fakes.

For 14 years from 1990 to 2004, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office investigated the "Katyn massacre" and eventually came to the conclusion that the Soviet leaders were guilty of the death of Polish officers. During the investigation, the surviving witnesses who testified in 1944 were again interrogated, and they stated that their testimonies were false, given under pressure from the NKVD.

However, supporters of the “guilt of the Nazis” version reasonably note that the investigation of the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office was carried out in years when the thesis about “Soviet guilt for Katyn” was supported by the leaders of the Russian Federation, and therefore, it is not necessary to talk about an impartial investigation.

Excavations in Katyn. Photo: www.globallookpress.com

"Katyn-2010" "hang" on Putin?

The situation has not changed today. Because the Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev in one form or another spoke out in support of the version of the "guilt of Stalin and the NKVD", their opponents believe that an objective consideration of the "Katyn case" in modern Russia impossible.

In November 2010, the State Duma adopted a statement “On the Katyn tragedy and its victims”, in which it recognizes the Katyn massacre as a crime committed on the direct orders of Stalin and other Soviet leaders, and expresses sympathy for the Polish people.

Despite this, the ranks of opponents of this version are not shrinking. Opponents of the State Duma's decision of 2010 believe that it was caused not so much by objective facts as by political expediency, by the desire to improve relations with Poland through this step.

International Memorial to the Victims of Political Repressions. Brotherly grave. Photo: www.russianlook.com

Moreover, this happened six months after the topic of Katyn received a new sound in Russian-Polish relations.

On the morning of April 10, 2010, the Tu-154M aircraft, on board of which was Polish President Lech Kaczynski, as well as 88 more political, public and military figures of this country, at the Smolensk airport. The Polish delegation flew to the mourning events dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Katyn tragedy.

Despite the fact that the investigation showed that the main cause of the plane crash was the erroneous decision of the pilots to land in bad weather, caused by pressure from high-ranking officials on the crew, there are still many in Poland who are convinced that the Russians deliberately destroyed the Polish elite.

No one can guarantee that in half a century another “special folder” will not suddenly pop up, which will contain documents allegedly indicating that the plane of the President of Poland was destroyed by FSB agents on the orders of Vladimir Putin.

In the case of the “Katyn massacre”, all the “i” are still not dotted. Perhaps the next generation of Russian and Polish researchers, free from political bias, will be able to establish the truth.