80 years ago, the Soviet authorities set the stage for mass executions of Polish citizens, mainly captive army officers, in the spring of 1940. The crime got worldwide notoriety as the Katyn massacre.
According to archival documents, a total of 21,857 persons were shot down, many lost their lives in Katyn Forest in Russia’s Smolensk region.
On the back of the treacherous attack upon Poland in 1939, about 15,000 Polish officers and soldiers were taken prisoner by the USSR. NKVD Chairman Lavrentiy Beria talked to Josef Stalin and suggested that the captives should be executed. On 5 March 1940, a corresponding resolution was approved by the Politburo the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of the Bolsheviks.
Graves of Polish nationals were found in many NKVD camps. Officers were executed in bulk in Kozelsk, Starobelsk, Ostashkov prison camps as well as in jails in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus.
In 1990, the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office of the USSR opened a criminal case over the Katyn crime, but it was dismissed in 2004. Only 67 of 183 volumes of the case were sent to the Polish side; the remaining ones contain highly classified information, the Russian authorities state.
In 1990, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev handed over the list of 14,552 Polish officers murdered and buried in the territory of the USSR (Katyn, Kalinin, Mednoye in Russia and Kharkiv in Ukraine) to Poland. In 1994, Poland received the list with the names of 3,435 victims of repressions from the Ukrainian authorities.
The killed people have never been recognised as victims of political repression; the process of their rehabilitation was suspended.
About 3,800 Polish citizens (including Belarusian-borns) might have been killed in the territory of Belarus, a number of historians believe. In 2013, the Centre for Polish-Russian Dialogue and Understanding published the fragment of the so-called Belarusian Katyn list, a document containing 98 names of Poles murdered by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the Soviet secret police, in April and May 1940.
The fragment was composed in the result of comparing two lists: one of Polish citizens who disappeared in the north-east regions of The Second Commonwealth of Poland in 1939-1949 and the other including names of people who were transferred to Minsk prison by the NKVD in the above period.
Notably, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka saw no reason for making such a list, saying that ‘not a single Pole had been executed in Belarus’.
