Katyn tragedy brief. Who shot the Polish officers? Katyn case at the Nuremberg trials

What happened in Katyn
In the spring of 1940, in the forest near the village of Katyn, 18 km west of Smolensk, as well as in a number of prisons and camps throughout the country, thousands of captured Polish citizens, mostly officers, were shot by the Soviet NKVD over the course of several weeks. The executions, the decision of which was made by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in March 1940, took place not only near Katyn, but the term “Katyn execution” is applied to them in general, since the executions in the Smolensk region became known first.

In total, according to data declassified in the 1990s, NKVD officers shot 21,857 Polish prisoners in April-May 1940. According to the Russian Main Military Prosecutor's Office, released in 2004 in connection with the closure of the official investigation, the NKVD opened cases against 14,542 Poles, while the deaths of 1,803 people were documented.

The Poles, executed in the spring of 1940, were captured or arrested a year earlier among (according to various sources) from 125 to 250 thousand Polish military personnel and civilians, whom the Soviet authorities, after the occupation of the eastern territories of Poland in the fall of 1939, considered “unreliable” and were moved to 8 specially created camps on the territory of the USSR. Most of them were soon either released home, or sent to the Gulag or to settlement in Siberia and Northern Kazakhstan, or (in the case of residents of the western regions of Poland) transferred to Germany.

However, thousands of "former officers of the Polish army, former employees Polish police and intelligence agencies, members of Polish nationalist counter-revolutionary parties, participants in uncovered counter-revolutionary insurgent organizations, defectors, etc.”, the head of the NKVD Lavrentiy Beria proposed to be considered “inveterate, incorrigible enemies of Soviet power” and to apply the highest penalty to them - execution.

Polish prisoners were executed in many prisons throughout the USSR. According to the KGB of the USSR, 4,421 people were shot in the Katyn Forest, in the Starobelsky camp near Kharkov - 3,820, in the Ostashkovsky camp (Kalinin, now Tver region) - 6,311 people, in other camps and prisons in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus - 7 305 people.

Investigations
The name of the village near Smolensk became a symbol of the crimes of the Stalinist regime against the Poles also because it was from Katyn that the investigation into the executions began. The fact that the German field police were the first to present evidence of the guilt of the NKVD in 1943 predetermined the attitude towards this investigation in the USSR. Moscow decided that it would be most plausible to blame the fascists themselves for the execution, especially since during the execution the NKVD officers used Walthers and other weapons that fired German-made cartridges.

After the liberation of the Smolensk region by Soviet troops, a special commission conducted an investigation, which established that the captured Poles were shot by the Germans in 1941. This version became official in the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries until 1990. The Soviet side also brought charges regarding Katyn after the end of the war as part of the Nuremberg trials, but it was not possible to provide convincing evidence of the Germans’ guilt; as a result, this episode was not included in the indictment.

Confessions and apologies
In April 1990, Polish leader Wojciech Jaruzelski came to Moscow on an official visit. In connection with the discovery of new archival documents indirectly proving the guilt of the NKVD, the Soviet leadership decided to change its position and admit that the Poles were shot by Soviet state security officers. On April 13, 1990, TASS published a statement that, in part, read: “The identified archival materials taken together allow us to conclude that Beria and Merkulov were directly responsible for the atrocities in the Katyn forest ( Vsevolod Merkulov, who in 1940 headed the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD - Vesti.Ru) and their henchmen. The Soviet side, expressing deep regret in connection with the Katyn tragedy, declares that it represents one of serious crimes Stalinism".

Mikhail Gorbachev gave Jaruzelski lists of officers sent to the stage - in fact, to the place of execution, from the camps in Kozelsk. Ostashkov and Starobelsk, and the Soviet Prosecutor General's Office soon began an official investigation. In the early 90s, during a visit to Warsaw, Russian President Boris Yeltsin apologized to the Poles. Representatives Russian authorities have repeatedly stated that they share the grief of the Polish people for those killed in Katyn.

In 2000, a memorial to the victims of repression was opened in Katyn, common not only to the Poles, but also to Soviet citizens who were shot by the NKVD in the same Katyn forest.

At the end of 2004, the investigation opened in 1990 was terminated by the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation on the basis of clause 4 of part 1 of Art. 24 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation - in connection with the death of suspects or accused. Moreover, out of 183 volumes of the case, 67 were transferred to the Polish side, since the remaining 116, according to the military prosecutor, contain state secret. Supreme Court of the Russian Federation in 2009.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in an article published in the Polish Gazeta Wyborcza on the eve of a working visit in August 2009: “Shadows of the past can no longer darken today, and especially tomorrow, cooperation. Our duty to the departed, to history itself, is to do everything “In order to rid Russian-Polish relations of the burden of mistrust and prejudice that we inherited, turn the page and start writing a new one.”

According to Putin, “to the people of Russia, whose fate was distorted by totalitarian regime, the heightened feelings of Poles associated with Katyn, where thousands of Polish military personnel are buried, are well understood." “We must together preserve the memory of the victims of this crime,” the Russian Prime Minister urged. The head of the Russian government is confident that “the Katyn and Mednoe memorials" , as well as tragic fate Russian soldiers taken prisoner by Poland during the war of 1920 should become symbols of common grief and mutual forgiveness."

In February 2010, Vladimir Putin visited his Polish colleague Donald Tusk on April 7, where memorial events dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre will be held. Tusk accepted the invitation, and Lech Walesa, the first prime minister of post-communist Poland Tadeusz Mazowiecki, as well as family members of the victims of NKVD executions will come to Russia with him.

It is noteworthy that on the eve of the meeting of the prime ministers of Russia and Poland in Katyn channel "Russia Culture" showed a film that and.

Rehabilitation requirements
Poland demands that the Poles executed in 1940 in Russia be recognized as victims of political repression. In addition, many there would like to hear from Russian officials an apology and recognition of the Katyn massacre as an act of genocide, and not references to the fact that the current authorities are not responsible for the crimes of the Stalinist regime. The termination of the case, and especially the fact that the resolution to terminate it, along with other documents, was considered secret and was not made public, only added fuel to the fire.

After the decision of the GVP, Poland began its own prosecutorial investigation into the “mass murder of Polish citizens committed in the Soviet Union in March 1940.” The investigation is headed by Professor Leon Keres, head of the Institute of National Remembrance. The Poles still want to find out who gave the order for the execution, the names of the executioners, and also give a legal assessment of the actions of the Stalinist regime.

Relatives of some officers who died in the Katyn Forest appealed to the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation in 2008 with a demand to consider the possibility of rehabilitating those executed. The GVP refused, and later the Khamovnichesky Court rejected the complaint against its actions. Now the demands of the Poles are being considered by the European Court of Human Rights.

The location 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 the condemned themselves dug them for themselves, realizing the doom of their situation. Now there is a forest here, but before at the time of the executions there were almost no trees; pines were planted only later so that with their roots in the ground they would tear up and destroy the remains of bodies.

The burial itself is divided into 2 parts: Polish and Russian. The Polish memorial was made by designers according to a special project. At the entrance you are greeted by a small carriage; it was in such short railway carriages that people traveled to exile. 30 or even 50 people were placed in this carriage for transfer.

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

The prisoners were fed mainly with herring, because it was very salted and did not rot. In fact, it was just salt, which made you very thirsty, and the repressed were practically not given water.

In a confined space, people were sick, fighting each other for best places and even killed each other. The corpses were removed only at stops, and often people rode for several hours in the carriage next to the corpses. This is despite the fact that not every such carriage had windows. This carriage is now a gift to the Katyn memorial from the Moscow Railway.
After entering the territory of the complex, the road “splits” into a Polish military cemetery to the right, and a Soviet cemetery to the left.

Memorial stone at the entrance.

A little history of the execution of 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 supposed 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 the majority of ordinary soldiers after disarmament, while 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: from internees they turned into prisoners of war. However, letters from them to relatives continued to arrive regularly until the spring of 1940. Of certain importance is the fact that, according to the 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 differ on this issue.

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, Lavrentiy Beria wrote a letter to Stalin, in which he proposed “the cases of 11,000 former Polish officers arrested in the amount of 11,000 people should be considered in a special manner, with the death penalty applied 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 All-Russian Design Bureau of Bolsheviks (Bolsheviks).

Prisoners were taken to the city of Kalinin, to Kharkov, to the Katyn Forest. In Kalinin, they were shot in the NKVD buildings and buried in a cemetery near the village of Mednoe. In Kharkov, executions were also carried out in the basements of the regional NKVD headquarters.

At the entrance to the Polish part there are copies of Polish border posts from 1939 and an inscription on Polish language 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 basements of this station, immediately after the arrival of the train, Polish generals were shot.
The remaining prisoners at the station were loaded into buses with closed windows and taken to the rest house of the NKVD officers in the forest. The time was calculated so that they would arrive there in the evening.

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

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

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Often, NKVD officers changed tactics and, having completed the search of prisoners of war at the NKVD dacha, took them to 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 ditch. The executioner fired a shot to the back of the head again from the same Walter. Sometimes prisoners, those who panicked, had their uniforms lifted up and covered their faces, a noose was tightened around their necks, their hands tied with the other end of the twine. In some cases, the space between the face and clothing was filled with sawdust in order to cause the greatest torment to the doomed person. The prisoners who actively resisted were inflicted with puncture wounds with a bayonet. Having led to the ditch, they shot in the back of the head in the same way.

This cross shows symbolic dates 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 before the war, Walther pistols were imported from Germany by the Soviet Union, and until 1933, German 7.65 caliber bullets were also imported. However, the fact of the discovery of German paper twine in the graves, which was not imported or produced on the territory of the USSR, has not yet found an explanation within the framework of 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. Brass bullets imported before 1933 could not rust. But steel bullets of this caliber began to be produced in Germany only at the beginning of 1941!

There are 8 execution pits on the territory of the Polish cemetery; these are the places where the bodies of executed Poles were buried en masse. The largest pit was the first one; 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 was completely filled. Lime was needed to speed up the 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 prisoners were destroyed in this way. This crime remained unknown until April 13, 1943, when the Germans announced that they had discovered Katyn graves in occupied Soviet territory, in which rested Polish officers shot by the NKVD of the USSR in the spring of 1940.
To study the circumstances of the tragedy, the Germans formed an “international” commission of representatives of Germany’s allied countries and the states it occupied.

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 the executions took place in the spring of 1940. We are talking about all kinds of notes, newspapers, diaries, among which the German commission did not find any that were dated later than the spring of 1940.

The main color of the Polish memorial is rust; according to the designers, it is the color of dried blood. There is a bell below - if you swing it, the ringing comes as if “from underground”.

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Beginning in May 1943, excavations were stopped. By this time, 4,143 bodies had been exhumed from 7 graves, 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. While retreating, the Germans destroyed or took with them material evidence. In January 1944, a commission began work under the leadership of doctor Burdenko, which, according to supporters of the German version, was tasked with proving at all costs the guilt of the Germans in the execution of Poles in Katyn.

Separate graves of Polish generals Smoravinsky and Bogatyrevich. In 2010, the granddaughter of General Smorawinski was on the ill-fated plane on which Polish President Lech Kaczynski died.

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

One way or another, the commission's conclusion was official version The USSR on the Katyn issue remained so until perestroika. It remained until it was questioned by M. Gorbachev, who stated in 1990 that “documents have been 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 these mass graves and only a hundred meters from the execution sites. All graves are mass graves and Russia now does not allow bodies to be transported to Polish territory. An exception was made only for the only woman shot in Katyn - pilot Antonina Lewandowska.

When talking 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 Poles is a continuation of Stalin’s policy of repression, so it is impossible to voice a clear 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 in 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 supporters of the German version, the end has been set in the Katyn affair, the guilt of the NKVD of the USSR has been clearly proven.

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

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

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Memorial plaques are made at the burial level, i.e. visitors walk from below, and on top there is, as it were, a decorative layer of soil.

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

According to it, at the end of February or beginning of March, the leadership of the USSR decided to send the cases of Polish officers prisoners of war to a Special Meeting under the NKVD, which sentenced the prisoners to imprisonment for periods of 3 to 8 years in special-purpose labor camps. 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 taken 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” at the Katyn Memorial. This is a cemetery Soviet people- “enemies of the people” and other “counter-revolutionary scum” (Previously, this word could very often be found in quite official documents, because the level of education of “ people's commissars"left much to be desired) innocently killed by the "communists". A cemetery without graves, just land where excavations were not carried out and 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 where exactly in the ground the body is located.

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But let's return to the Soviet version of the execution of the Poles. In special purpose camps, a stricter regime is observed, in particular, prohibiting correspondence 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 fascist invaders; the Poles did not want to retreat along 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 fascists. At first the Poles worked for the Germans, and then they shot them.

The execution technology is tying hands with German twine (this is a recognized fact, but the question is why the NKVD needed to use German twine instead of Russian rope. The German version explains this by “discrediting” 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 their discovery of the Katyn burials .....), a shot in the back of the head directly at the dug ditch, sometimes with lifting up the uniform, throwing a noose around the neck, using sawdust, inflicting wounds with a bayonet. Neither before nor after the murder were the Polish officers searched.

The Russian cemetery in Katyn is less equipped than the Polish one and the memorial here is still only in design. 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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A memorial at a Russian cemetery - the fence was made according to the designers' plans in such a way that its boundaries could be expanded. This seems to symbolize the limitlessness of these crimes.

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Orthodox cross at a Russian cemetery.

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After the Red Army liberated Smolensk, a commission led by doctor Nikolai Burdenko began to investigate the Katyn massacres. According to the Soviet version, graves untouched by the Nazis were excavated in Katyn, where documents dating back to a later date than the spring of 1940 were discovered.

The result of the work of the Burdenko commission was a document that places the blame for the execution of Polish officers in Katyn on the German occupiers. The Germans, in 1943, attracted an entire international commission to exhume the bodies, one of the participants of which, the Czech Francishek Hajek, later wrote an entire article “Katyn Evidence”, where he refers to the fact that the condition of the corpses and belongings of the murdered people speaks of a later period of execution, i.e. .e. not about the spring of 40, but about the autumn of 41 or even later.

Now the main document recognizing the German version of the tragedy is Beria’s note to Stalin.

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There, too, the Soviet version contains many inaccuracies, for example the phrase “The NKVD of the USSR considers it necessary to propose to the NKVD of the USSR,” the absence of the 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 in August 1941 peace was concluded between the USSR and the Polish government in exile, and the Polish army of General Anders began to be formed in concert from among the amnestied Polish prisoners of war (all Polish citizens who were on the territory of the USSR were amnestied).

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 exhibitions. The first of them 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, sea or apple tree, painted portraits of tyrants, God save all subsequent generations of children from this.

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An excerpt from the newspaper “Pionerskaya Pravda”, 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 used quite often in the official Soviet press, because it was necessary to clearly formulate an opinion among the masses - white or black and without any shades of gray. And propaganda also created hatred towards negative heroes; in the next clipping there is only a paragraph of 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 wives only had to write letters to Comrade Stalin, which were hardly read by anyone from the top leadership.

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But here, in general, everything is simple and clear without unnecessary words- 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 displays some things of the Poles that were not taken to Warsaw to the Katyn Museum. Personal belongings - on the right are tongs that prisoners used to pull out their teeth.

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Military uniform of Polish officers of that time.

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Now a chapel has been built next to the memorial in memory of the people who met 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. What is certain is that both Stalin and Hitler could have done this. The latter was merciless and guilty of a lot of deaths of innocent civilian Jews, Russians, Poles and others, and the former even destroyed his own people in exile and camps. About the German version, Polish director Andrzej Wajda made the film “Katyn” in 2007, it is generally not bad, although it smacks of propaganda, and of course not such an obvious propaganda crap as the Russian “August the Eighth” about the events in Georgia in 2008.

Personally, the following facts seem very strange to me: 1). The murder of Poles with German weapons (why shouldn’t the NKVD officers use standard 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 this, then why shoot officers in their clothes, it would be more logical to do it in their 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”. “Political truth” is always written to serve the interests of the current government. Well, everyone draws their own conclusions.

In September 1939 Soviet troops entered Polish territory. The Red Army occupied those territories that were entitled to it according to the secret additional protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, that is, the current western Ukraine and Belarus. During the march, the troops captured almost half a million Polish residents, most of whom were later released or handed over to Germany. According to the official note, about 42 thousand people remained in Soviet camps.

Autumn 1939. (Pinterest)

On March 3, 1940, in a note to Stalin, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Beria wrote that in the camps on Polish territory a large number of former officers of the Polish army, former employees of the Polish police and intelligence agencies, members of Polish nationalist counter-revolutionary parties, members of uncovered counter-revolutionary insurgent organizations and defectors are detained.

He branded them “incorrigible enemies of Soviet power” and proposed: “Cases about prisoners of war in camps - 14,700 former Polish officers, officials, landowners, police officers, intelligence officers, gendarmes, siege officers and jailers, as well as cases about those arrested and in prison western regions of Ukraine and Belarus in the amount of 11,000 people members of various spy class and sabotage organizations, former landowners, factory owners, former Polish officers, officials and defectors - to be considered in a special manner, with the application of capital punishment to them - execution." Already on March 5, the Politburo made a corresponding decision.

Note to Stalin. (Pinterest)

Execution near Katyn

By the beginning of April, everything was ready for the destruction of prisoners of war: prisons were liberated, graves were dug. The condemned were taken away for execution in groups of 300-400 people. In Kalinin and Kharkov, prisoners were shot in prisons. In Katyn, those who were especially dangerous were tied up, an overcoat thrown over their heads, taken to a ditch and shot in the back of the head.

As subsequent exhumation showed, the shots were fired from Walter and Browning pistols, using German-made bullets. The Soviet authorities later used this fact as an argument when they tried to blame German troops for the execution of the Polish population at the Nuremberg Tribunal. The tribunal rejected the charge, which was, in essence, an admission of Soviet guilt for the Katyn massacre.

German investigation

The events of 1940 have been investigated several times. German troops were the first to investigate in 1943. They discovered burials in Katyn. The exhumation began in the spring. It was possible to approximately establish the time of burial: the spring of 1940, since many of the victims had scraps of newspapers from April-May 1940 in their pockets. It was not difficult to establish the identities of many of the executed prisoners: some of them kept documents, letters, snuff boxes and cigarette cases with carved monograms.

The Poles were shot with German bullets, but they were supplied in large quantities to the Baltic states and the Soviet Union. Local residents also confirmed that the trains with captured Polish officers were unloaded at a station nearby, and no one ever saw them again. One of the participants in the Polish commission in Katyn, Jozef Mackiewicz, described in several books how it was no secret to any of the locals that the Bolsheviks shot Poles here.

Remains of Poles. (Pinterest)

In the fall of 1943, another commission operated in the Smolensk region, this time a Soviet one. Her report states that there were actually three work camps for prisoners in Poland. The Polish population was employed in road construction. In 1941, there was no time to evacuate the prisoners, and the camps came under German leadership, which authorized the executions. According to members of the Soviet commission, in 1943 the Germans dug up the graves, seized all newspapers and documents indicating dates later than the spring of 1940, and forced locals to testify. The famous “Burdenko Commission” largely relied on the data from this report.

Crimes of the Stalinist regime

In April 1990, the USSR admitted responsibility for the Katyn massacre. One of the main arguments was the discovery of documents indicating that Polish prisoners were transported by order of the NKVD and were no longer listed in statistical documents. Historian Yuri Zorya found out that the same people were on the exhumation lists from Katyn and on the lists of those leaving the Kozel camp. It is interesting that the order of the lists for the stages coincided with the order of those lying in the graves, according to the German investigation.

Excavated grave in Katyn. (Pinterest)

Today in Russia the Katyn massacre is officially considered a “crime of the Stalinist regime.” However, there are still people who support the position of the Burdenko Commission and view the results of the German investigation as an attempt to distort Stalin’s role in world history.

The question of who is responsible for the death of Polish military prisoners in Katyn (more precisely, in the Kozya Gory tract) has been discussed for more than 70 years. “LG” has addressed this topic more than once. There are also official estimates from the authorities. But many dark places remain. Professor of the Moscow State Linguistic University (MSLU), Doctor of Historical Sciences Alexey PLOTNIKOV shares his vision of the situation.

- Alexey Yuryevich, what was the total number of Polish prisoners of war?

There are several sources, and there are discrepancies between them. According to various estimates, 450-480 thousand Polish soldiers were captured by the Germans in 1939. In the USSR there were 120-150 thousand of them. The data cited by a number of experts - primarily Polish - about the internment of 180 or even 220-250 thousand Poles is not supported by documents. It should be emphasized that at first these people - from a legal point of view - were in the position of internees. This is explained by the fact that there was no war between the Soviet Union and Poland. But after the Polish government in exile declared on December 18, 1939 Soviet Union war (the so-called Angers Declaration) due to the transfer of Vilna and the Vilna region to Lithuania, internees automatically turned into prisoners of war. In other words, legally, and then actually, prisoners of war, they were made by their own emigrant government.

- How did their destinies turn out?

Differently. Natives of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, privates and sergeants, were sent home even before the emigrant government declared war on the USSR. It is not known exactly how many there were. Then the USSR and Germany entered into an agreement under which all prisoners of war conscripted Polish army from the territory ceded to the USSR, but captured by the Germans, were transferred to the Soviet Union, and vice versa. As a result of the exchange in October and November 1939, about 25 thousand prisoners of war were transferred to the USSR - citizens of the former Poland, natives of territories ceded to the Soviet Union, and more than 40 thousand to Germany. Most of them, privates and sergeants, were sent home. The officers were not released. Employees of the border service, police and punitive structures were also detained - those who were suspected of involvement in sabotage and espionage activities against the USSR. Indeed, in the 1920-1930s, Polish intelligence was very active in the western regions of the Soviet Union.
By the beginning of 1940, no more than 30 thousand Polish prisoners of war remained in the USSR. Of these, approximately 10 thousand are officers. They were distributed to specially created camps. There were 4,500 Polish prisoners of war in the Kozelsky camp (in 1940 - Western, now Kaluga region), 6,300 in Ostashkovsky (Kalinin, now Tver region), and 3,800 in the Starobelsky camp (Voroshilovgrad, now Lugansk region). At the same time, captured officers were kept mainly in the Starobelsky and Kozelsky camps. Ostashkovsky was predominantly “soldiers”, there were no more than 400 officers. Some Poles were in camps in Western Belarus and Western Ukraine. These are the original numbers.

On July 30, 1941, the Kremlin and the Sikorsky government signed a political agreement and an additional protocol to it. It provided for the provision of an amnesty to all Polish prisoners of war. These allegedly turned out to be 391,545 people. How does this compare with the numbers you provided?

Indeed, about 390 thousand Poles were included in the amnesty in August 1941. There is no contradiction here, since along with prisoners of war in 1939-1940, civilians were also interned. This is a separate topic. We are talking about prisoners of war - former Polish soldiers of the Polish Army.

- Where and how much, except Katyn, during the Great Patriotic War shot Polish prisoners of war?

It’s unlikely that anyone will name it exactly. If only because some of the archival documents are still classified. I will only say about two burials not far from Katyn (Goat Mountains). The first was located in Serebryanka (Dubrovenka) near Krasny Bor, the second - not yet documented - to the west of the village of Katyn. Information about him is contained in the memoirs of the daughter of one of the dead Poles, Shchiradlovskaya-Petsa.

Your opponents claim that Polish prisoners of war in Katyn were shot on the orders of Stalin. Why don't you agree with them?

Supporters of the Polish (it would be more honest to say - Goebbels) version do not explain, but ignore or openly suppress facts that are inconvenient for themselves.
I will list the main ones. First of all, it has been proven: German-made cartridges of 6.35 and 7.65 mm caliber (GECO and RWS) were found at the scene of the execution. This indicates that the Poles were killed with German pistols. The Red Army and the NKVD troops did not have weapons of such calibers. Attempts by the Polish side to prove the purchase of such pistols in Germany specifically for the execution of Polish prisoners of war are untenable. The NKVD used its own standard weapons. These are revolvers, and the officers have TT pistols. Both are 7.62 mm caliber.
In addition, and this is also documented, the hands of some of those executed were tied with paper twine. This was not produced in the USSR at that time, but it was produced in Europe, including Germany.
Another important fact: documents on the execution of the sentence were not found in the archives, just as the execution sentence itself was not found, without which no execution would be possible in principle.
Finally, documents were found on individual corpses. Moreover, both by the Germans during the exhumation in February-May 1943, and by the Burdenko commission in 1944: officer IDs, passports, and other identification documents. This also indicates that the USSR was not involved in the execution. The NKVD would not have left such evidence - it was strictly prohibited by the relevant instructions. There would be no newspapers left that were printed in the spring of 1940, but they were “found” by the Germans in large quantities at burial sites. In the fall of 1941, the Germans themselves could leave documents with those executed: then, in their opinion, they had nothing to fear. Back in 1940, the Nazis, without hiding, destroyed several thousand representatives of the Polish elite. For example, in the Palmyra Forest near Warsaw. It is noteworthy that the Polish authorities rarely remember these victims.

- So it won’t be possible to declare them victims of the NKVD.

Will not work. The Polish version is untenable for a number of reasons. It is known that many witnesses saw the Poles alive in 1940-1941.
Archival documents have also been preserved about the transfer of cases against Polish prisoners of war to the Special Meeting (OSO) of the NKVD of the USSR, which did not have the right to sentence them to death, but could sentence them to a maximum of eight years in the camps. In addition, the USSR never carried out mass executions of foreign prisoners of war, especially officers. Especially in an out-of-court manner without completing the relevant procedures provided for by law. Warsaw stubbornly ignores this. And one more thing. Until the fall of 1941, in the Kozyi Gory tract there was no technical possibility of quietly shooting several thousand people. This tract is located 17 kilometers from Smolensk not far from the Gnezdovo station and until the war it remained an open recreation area for townspeople. There were pioneer camps here, an NKVD dacha burned by the Germans during their retreat in 1943. It was located 700 meters from the busy Vitebsk highway. And the burial sites themselves are located 200 meters from the highway. It was the Germans who surrounded this place with barbed wire and set up guards.

- Mass graves in Medny, Tver region... There is no complete clarity here either?

Tver (more precisely, the village of Mednoe near Tver) is the second point on the “Katyn map”, where Polish prisoners of war were allegedly buried. Recently the local community started talking about this loudly. Everyone is tired of the lies that the Poles and some of our fellow citizens are spreading. It is believed that Polish prisoners of war who were previously held in the Ostashkov camp are buried in Mednoye. Let me remind you that there were no more than 400 officers out of a total of 6,300 Polish prisoners of war. The Polish side categorically claims that they all lie in Medny. This contradicts the data contained in the memorandums of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation. They were sent to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in connection with the consideration in 2010-2013 of the “Case of Yanovets and others against Russia”. The memorandums of the Ministry of Justice - and they reflect our official position - clearly indicate that during the exhumation carried out in 1991 in Medny, the remains of only 243 Polish military personnel were discovered. Of these, 16 people were identified (identified by badges).

- To put it mildly, significant differences.

We must say frankly: this is obvious and unprincipled manipulation. Despite this, the Poles erected a memorial in Mednoye and hung signs with the names of the 6,300 Poles allegedly shot and buried there. The figures I have mentioned allow us to imagine the scale of cynicism and falsification that the Poles have resorted to and continue to resort to. It's sad that they have like-minded people in our country. We won’t speculate about their motives. But they have no arguments! This is the jesuitism and shamelessness of the position of the current Warsaw: to reject and ignore inconvenient facts and talk about its position as the only correct one and not subject to doubt.

- There is a lot of controversy in this regard in the so-called “Katyn No. 3” - Kyiv Bykivna.

In 2012, in Bykivna, the then presidents of Poland and Ukraine, Komorowski and Yanukovych, opened a memorial in memory of the three and a half thousand Polish officers allegedly shot there (please note: again, it was the officers). However, this has not been confirmed by anything. There are not even milestone lists that are in “ Katyn case" It is unfoundedly alleged that 3,500 Polish officers were kept in prisons in Western Ukraine. And supposedly they were all shot in Bykovnya.
The opponents' method of conducting discussions is amazing. We are used to presenting facts and arguments. And they give us figures taken from the ceiling, not supported by documents, and present them as indisputable evidence.

Have you ever personally had a discussion with those domestic historians who adhere to the Polish position?

I would be glad! We are always open for discussion. But our opponents avoid discussions and contacts. They operate on the principle of “a scorpion under a stone.” He usually sits for a long time, and at some point he crawls out, bites and hides again.

At the beginning of the year, the Polish Sejm received a bill from Deputy Zielinski. He proposed declaring July 12 as the Day of Remembrance for the victims of the 1945 “August Raid.” In Poland it is called Lesser Katyn or New Katyn. The feeling that the Poles bake their “Katyn” like pancakes...

This once again confirms that « Katyn” as such has long been a tool and at the same time a “source” of the information war against Russia. For some reason this is underestimated here. But in vain.
On July 9, the Polish Sejm adopted the law proposed by Zelinsky on “Remembrance Day on July 12.” So now official Warsaw has another “anti-Russian bogeyman”...
The history of “Little Katyn” is as follows. In July 1945, a military and security operation was carried out against gangs that committed murders and sabotage in the rear of the 1st Belorussian Front. During the operation, more than seven thousand armed people were detained. Approximately 600 of them turned out to be associated with the Home Army (AK). The Polish side claims that everyone was shot immediately. In Warsaw, they refer to one document - a coded telegram from the head of Smersh, Viktor Abakumov, to the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR, Lavrenty Beria, No. 25212 dated July 21, 1945. It allegedly talks about the liquidation of anti-Soviet formations and contains a “proposal to shoot” the mentioned 592 Poles. But in the USSR, I repeat once again, such extrajudicial executions have never been carried out - especially foreign prisoners of war.
At that time, the employees of the GUKR “Smersh” NGO of the USSR did not have any legal grounds for shooting the Poles. Order of the NKVD of the USSR No. 0061 of February 6, 1945, which introduced at the final stage of the war in the front line the right to shoot bandits and saboteurs captured at the scene of a crime, became invalid after the end of hostilities. It was officially canceled even before the start of the “August Operation”. This alone calls into question the reliability of the encryption provided by the Poles.
The indiscriminate, “equalizing” nature of the application of mass execution to all 592 arrested “Akovites” without exception, and only to them, also raises great doubts. The usual practice of law enforcement agencies of the USSR at that time was to divide those arrested according to contingents, categories and other criteria with individual application of appropriate measures.
It is noteworthy that the above encryption was compiled in gross violation of the norms of official subordination. GUKR "Smersh" was not subordinate to the NKVD of the USSR and for this reason its chief, Colonel General Viktor Abakumov, who reported directly to Stalin, in principle should not have asked for "instructions" from the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs. Moreover, instructions about execution.
A recent examination of the “cipher telegram” clearly shows that we are dealing with a fake. If only because part of the document was printed on one typewriter, and part on another. The publication of the data from this examination, I hope, will put an end to Polish myth-making on these events. However, there is no doubt that “Malye”, “New” and other Katyns will be followed by others. Polish falsifiers of history have lost their sense of reality and are unlikely to stop.

- What can you say about the so-called grave No. 9, discovered in Katyn in the spring of 2000?

Indeed, in 2000, during the construction of a transformer station in Katyn, a previously unknown burial place was discovered. Based on their uniforms and other signs, they established that there were Polish military personnel there. At least two hundred remains. Poland responded to the news of the discovery of a new grave by saying that the wife of then Polish President Kwasniewski arrived in Katyn and laid flowers. But the Polish side did not respond to the proposal to carry out joint exhumation work. Since then, “Grave No. 9” has been a figure of “silence” for the Polish media.

- What, there are “other” Poles lying there?

It’s a paradox, but official Warsaw does not need the remains of “unverified” compatriots. She only needs “correct” burials, which confirm the Polish version of the execution by the “evil NKVD”. After all, during the exhumation of the “unknown grave”, there is almost no doubt that further evidence will be discovered pointing to German perpetrators. To complete the picture, it is necessary to say something about the actions of our authorities. Instead of initiating exhumation, they classified all materials. Russian researchers have not been allowed to visit “Grave No. 9” for sixteen years now. But I am sure: the truth will triumph sooner or later.

- If we summarize the conversation, what issues are among the unresolved?

I have already said most of it. The main thing is that the collected facts and evidence confirming the guilt of the Germans in the execution of Poles in Katyn are ignored by Warsaw and somehow “shamefully” kept silent by our authorities. It’s time to finally understand that the Polish side in the “Katyn issue” has long been not only biased, but also incapable of negotiating. Warsaw does not accept and will not accept any “inconvenient” arguments. The Poles will continue to call white black. They have driven themselves into the Katyn dead end, from which they cannot and do not want to get out. Russia must show political will here.

During World War II, both sides of the conflict committed many crimes against humanity. Millions died civilians and military personnel. One of the controversial pages of that history is the execution of Polish officers near Katyn. We will try to find out the truth, which was hidden for a long time by blaming others for this crime.

For more than half a century, the real events in Katyn were hidden from the world community. Today, information on the case is not secret, although opinions on this matter are ambiguous among historians and politicians, as well as among ordinary citizens who participated in the conflict between the countries.

Katyn massacre

For many, Katyn became a symbol of brutal murders. The shooting of Polish officers cannot be justified or understood. It was here, in the Katyn Forest in the spring of 1940, that thousands of Polish officers were killed. The mass murder of Polish citizens was not limited to this place. Documents were made public according to which, during April-May 1940, more than 20 thousand Polish citizens were exterminated in various NKVD camps.

The shooting in Katyn has long complicated Polish-Russian relations. Since 2010, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and the State Duma have recognized that the mass murder of Polish citizens in the Katyn Forest was the activity of the Stalinist regime. This was made public in the statement “On the Katyn tragedy and its victims.” However, not all public and political figures in the Russian Federation agree with this statement.

Captivity of Polish officers

The Second World War for Poland began on September 1, 1939, when Germany entered its territory. England and France did not enter into conflict, waiting for a resolution further developments. Already on September 10, 1939, USSR troops entered Poland with the official goal of protecting the Ukrainian and Belarusian population of Poland. Modern historiography calls such actions of aggressor countries the “fourth partition of Poland.” Red Army troops occupied the territory of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. By decision, these lands became part of Poland.

The Polish military, defending their lands, could not resist the two armies. They were quickly defeated. Eight camps for Polish prisoners of war were created locally under the NKVD. They are directly related to the tragic event, called the “execution in Katyn”.

In total, up to half a million Polish citizens were captured by the Red Army, most of whom were eventually released, and about 130 thousand people ended up in camps. After a while, some of the ordinary military, natives of Poland, were sent home, more than 40 thousand were transported to Germany, the rest (about 40 thousand) were distributed among five camps:

Starobelsky (Lugansk) - 4 thousand officers.
Kozelsky (Kaluga) - 5 thousand officers.
Ostashkovsky (Tver) - gendarmes and police officers in the amount of 4,700 people.
allocated for road construction - 18 thousand privates.
10 thousand ordinary soldiers were sent to work in the Krivoy Rog basin.

By the spring of 1940, letters to relatives, which had previously been regularly transmitted through the Red Cross, stopped coming from prisoners of war in three camps. The reason for the silence of the prisoners of war was Katyn, the history of the tragedy of which connected the fates of tens of thousands of Poles.

Execution of prisoners

In 1992, a proposal document dated August 3, 1940 from L. Beria to the Politburo was made public, which discussed the issue of shooting Polish prisoners of war. The decision on capital punishment was made on March 5, 1940.

At the end of March, the NKVD completed the development of the plan. Prisoners of war from the Starobelsky and Kozelsky camps were taken to Kharkov and Minsk. Former gendarmes and police officers from the Ostashkovsky camp were transported to the Kalinin prison, from which ordinary prisoners were taken in advance. Huge pits were dug not far from the prison (Mednoye village).

In April, prisoners began to be taken out for execution in groups of 350-400. Those sentenced to death assumed that they would be released. Many left in the carriages in high spirits, not even realizing that they would soon die.

How the execution at Katyn took place:

the prisoners were tied up;
they threw an overcoat over their heads (not always, only for those who were especially strong and young);
led to a dug ditch;
killed with a shot in the back of the head from a Walther or Browning.

It was the latter fact that for a long time indicated that German troops were guilty of crimes against Polish citizens.

Prisoners from the Kalinin prison were killed right in their cells.

From April to May 1940 the following were shot:

in Katyn - 4421 prisoners;
in the Starobelsky and Ostashkovsky camps - 10,131;
in other camps - 7305.

Who was shot in Katyn? Not only career officers were executed, but also lawyers, teachers, engineers, doctors, professors and other representatives of the intelligentsia mobilized during the war.

"Missing" officers

When Germany attacked the USSR, negotiations began between the Polish and Soviet governments regarding joining forces against the enemy. Then they began to search for the officers taken to Soviet camps. But the truth about Katyn was still unknown.

None of the missing officers could be found, and the assumption that they escaped from the camps was unfounded. There was no news or mention of those who ended up in the camps mentioned above.

The officers, or rather their bodies, were found only in 1943. They were discovered in Katyn mass graves executed Polish citizens.

Investigation of the German side

German troops were the first to discover mass graves in the Katyn Forest. They exhumed the excavated bodies and conducted their investigation.

The exhumation of the bodies was carried out by Gerhard Butz. International commissions were brought in to work in the village of Katyn, which included doctors from German-controlled European countries, as well as representatives of Switzerland and Poles from the Red Cross (Polish). Representatives of the International Red Cross were not present due to a ban by the USSR government.

The German report included the following information about Katyn (the execution of Polish officers):

As a result of the excavations, eight mass graves were discovered, from which 4,143 people were removed and reburied. Most of the dead were identified. In graves No. 1-7 people were buried in winter clothes (fur jackets, overcoats, sweaters, scarves), and in grave No. 8 - in summer clothes. Also in graves No. 1-7 were found newspaper scraps dating from April-March 1940, and there were no traces of insects on the corpses. This indicated that the execution of Poles in Katyn took place in the cool season, that is, in the spring.
Many personal belongings were found with the dead; they indicated that the victims were in the Kozelsk camp. For example, letters from home addressed to Kozelsk. Many also had snuff boxes and other items with the inscription “Kozelsk”.
Tree cuttings showed that they were planted on the graves about three years ago from the time of discovery. This indicated that the pits were filled in in 1940. At this time, the territory was under the control of Soviet troops.
All Polish officers in Katyn were shot in the back of the head with German-made bullets. However, they were produced in the 20-30s of the 20th century and were exported in large quantities to the Soviet Union.
The hands of those executed were tied with a cord in such a way that when trying to separate them, the noose was tightened even more. The victims from grave No. 5 had their heads wrapped so that when they tried to make any movement, the noose would strangle the future victim. In other graves, the heads were also tied, but only of those who stood out with sufficient physical strength. On the bodies of some of the dead, traces of a tetrahedral bayonet, like a Soviet weapon, were found. The Germans used flat bayonets.
The commission interviewed local residents and found that in the spring of 1940, a large number of Polish prisoners of war arrived at the Gnezdovo station, who were loaded into trucks and taken towards the forest. The local residents never saw these people again.

The Polish commission, which was present during the exhumation and investigation, confirmed all German conclusions in this case, without finding any obvious traces of document fraud. The only thing the Germans tried to hide about Katyn (the execution of Polish officers) was the origin of the bullets used to carry out the killings. However, the Poles understood that representatives of the NKVD could also have similar weapons.

Since the autumn of 1943, representatives of the NKVD took up the investigation of the Katyn tragedy. According to their version, Polish prisoners of war were engaged in road work, and with the arrival in the summer of 1941 Smolensk region The Germans did not have time to evacuate them.

According to the NKVD, in August-September of the same year, the remaining prisoners were shot by the Germans. To hide traces of their crimes, representatives of the Wehrmacht opened the graves in 1943 and removed from them all documents dating from after 1940.

The Soviet authorities prepared a large number of witnesses to their version of events, but in 1990 the surviving witnesses retracted their testimony for 1943.

The Soviet commission, which carried out repeated excavations, falsified some documents, and completely destroyed some of the graves. But Katyn, the history of the tragedy of which haunted Polish citizens, nevertheless revealed its secrets.

Katyn case at the Nuremberg trials

After the war from 1945 to 1946. The so-called Nuremberg trials took place, the purpose of which was to punish war criminals. The Katyn issue was also raised at the trial. The Soviet side blamed German troops for the execution of Polish prisoners of war.

Many witnesses in this case changed their testimony; they refused to support the conclusions of the German commission, although they themselves took part in it. Despite all the attempts of the USSR, the Tribunal did not support the prosecution on the Katyn issue, which actually gave rise to the idea that Soviet troops were guilty of the Katyn massacre.

Official recognition of responsibility for Katyn

Katyn (the shooting of Polish officers) and what happened there has been reviewed by different countries many times. The United States conducted its investigation in 1951-1952; at the end of the 20th century, a Soviet-Polish commission worked on this case; since 1991, the Institute of National Remembrance was opened in Poland.

After the collapse of the USSR in Russian Federation We also took up this issue again. Since 1990, a criminal investigation by the military prosecutor's office began. It received #159. In 2004, the criminal case was dropped due to the death of the accused.

The Polish side put forward a version of the genocide of the Polish people, but the Russian side did not confirm it. The criminal case on the fact of genocide was discontinued.

Today, the process of declassifying many volumes of the Katyn case continues. Copies of these volumes are transferred to the Polish side. The first important documents on prisoners of war in Soviet camps were handed over in 1990 by M. Gorbachev. The Russian side admitted that behind the crime in Katyn was Soviet authority represented by Beria, Merkulov and others.

In 1992, documents on the Katyn massacre were made public, which were stored in the so-called Presidential Archive. Modern scientific literature recognizes their authenticity.

Polish-Russian relations

The issue of the Katyn massacre appears from time to time in Polish and Russian media. For Poles, it has significant significance in the national historical memory.

In 2008, a Moscow court rejected a complaint about the execution of Polish officers by their relatives. As a result of the refusal, they filed a complaint against the Russian Federation with the European Court. Russia was accused of ineffective investigations, as well as of neglecting the close relatives of the victims. In April 2012, he qualified the execution of prisoners as a war crime, and ordered Russia to pay 10 of the 15 plaintiffs (relatives of 12 officers killed in Katyn) 5 thousand euros each. This was compensation for the plaintiffs' legal costs. It is difficult to say whether the Poles, for whom Katyn has become a symbol of family and national tragedy, achieved their goal.

Official position of the Russian authorities

Modern leaders of the Russian Federation, V.V. Putin and D.A. Medvedev, share the same point of view on the Katyn massacre. They made statements several times condemning the crimes of the Stalinist regime. Vladimir Putin even expressed his assumption, which explained Stalin's role in the murder of Polish officers. In his opinion, the Russian dictator thus took revenge for the defeat in 1920 in the Soviet-Polish war.

In 2010, D. A. Medvedev initiated the publication of classified documents Soviet time documents from “package No. 1” on the Rosarkhiv website. The Katyn massacre, the official documents of which are available for discussion, is still not fully resolved. Some volumes of this case still remain classified, but D. A. Medvedev told the Polish media that he condemns those who doubt the authenticity of the documents presented.

On November 26, 2010, the State Duma of the Russian Federation adopted the document “On the Katyn Tragedy...”. This was opposed by representatives of the Communist Party faction. According to the accepted statement, the Katyn massacre was recognized as a crime that was committed on the direct orders of Stalin. The document also expresses sympathy for the Polish people.

In 2011, official representatives of the Russian Federation began to declare their readiness to consider the issue of rehabilitation of victims of the Katyn massacre.

Memory of Katyn

Among the Polish population, the memory of the Katyn massacre has always remained part of history. In 1972, a committee was created in London by Poles in exile, which began collecting funds for the construction of a monument to the victims of the massacre of Polish officers in 1940. These efforts were not supported by the British government, as they were afraid of the reaction of the Soviet government.

By September 1976, a monument was opened at the Gunnersberg cemetery, which is located west of London. The monument is a low obelisk with inscriptions on the pedestal. The inscriptions are made in two languages - Polish and English. They say that the monument was built in memory of more than 10 thousand Polish prisoners in Kozelsk, Starobelsk, Ostashkov. They went missing in 1940, and part of them (4,500 people) were exhumed in 1943 near Katyn.

Similar monuments to the victims of Katyn were erected in other countries of the world:

in Toronto (Canada);
in Johannesburg (South Africa);
in New Britain (USA);
at the Military Cemetery in Warsaw (Poland).

The fate of the 1981 monument at the Military Cemetery was tragic. After installation, it was removed at night by unknown people using a construction crane and machines. The monument was in the form of a cross with the date “1940” and the inscription “Katyn”. Adjoining the cross were two pillars with the inscriptions “Starobelsk” and “Ostashkovo”. At the foot of the monument were the letters “V. P.”, meaning “Eternal Memory”, as well as the coat of arms of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the form of an eagle with a crown.

The memory of the tragedy of the Polish people was well illuminated in his film “Katyn” by Andrzej Wajda (2007). The director himself is the son of Jakub Wajda, a career officer who was executed in 1940.

The film was shown in different countries, including in Russia, and in 2008 he was in the top five of the international Oscar award in the category for best foreign film.

The plot of the film is based on a story by Andrzej Mularczyk. The period from September 1939 to the autumn of 1945 is described. The film tells the story of the fate of four officers who ended up in a Soviet camp, as well as their close relatives who do not know the truth about them, although they guess the worst. Through the fate of several people, the author conveyed to everyone what the real story was.

“Katyn” cannot leave the viewer indifferent, regardless of nationality.