Katyn. A word that was taboo for 45 years of communist rule. A word that chills the hearts of Poles, bringing back horrific memories. A word that can open a can of worms even today.
Katyn forest, near the town of Smolensk in present day Belarus, was discovered to be a site of mass executions where as many as 20,000 Poles were shot to death and buried by the secret police of the Soviet Union in 1940. These mass killings came to light only when German armies invading Russia in 1943 came across mass of Polish officers in the Katyn forest in 1943. Upon carrying out an introductory exhumation, it was found that the buried bodies belonged to several thousand Polish officers and civilians who had been interned at a Soviet prison camp near Smolensk and investigators accused the Soviet Union of carrying out mass executions in May1940. In response, the Soviet Union denied all responsibility and put the blame on Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union claimed that the Poles had been working on a construction site when German troops invaded the site and carried out the massacre. However, subsequent forensic analysis estimated the killings to be in early 1940, when the area was still under Soviet control. Despite hard evidence, the Soviet Union continued to deny responsibility of the killings, which led to the severing of the political relationship between Stalin’s government and the Polish government in exile. The Soviet Union then set about trying to establish a government for Poland made up of Polish communists.
The Katyn Massacre wedged a permanent divide in all Polish-Soviet relations for the remainder of the war and the years of communist rule that came after. For the Polish people, Katyn became a symbol of Polish suffering under Stalin, leaving a permanent undercurrent of hostility towards the Soviet Union. Despite various independent inquiries into Katyn identifying the Soviet Union as being responsible, the Soviet government denied it for decades, pushing the blame onto Nazi Germany. The communist government in power in Poland accepted this explanation without protest and Katyn became a taboo topic in Poland during the years of communist rule. It was only after the non-communist coalition government came into power in Poland in1989 that the Polish government officially shifted the blame for Katyn from the Nazis to the Soviet Secret police, the NKVD.
After six decades, in 1992, the Russian government released documents which proved that Soviet Politburo and the NKVD had been responsible for the massacre and cover-up and revealing that there may have been more than 20,000 victims. In a crucial move in improving diplomatic relations, the Russian government acknowledged the tragedy at Katyn and opened a memorial at the site of the killings in the year 2000. On April 7, 2010, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin joined Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk at a ceremony commemorating the massacre, marking the first time that a Russian leader had taken part in such a commemoration. Later that year, the lower house of the Russian Federal Assembly, the State Duma, officially declared that Joseph Stalin and other Soviet leaders were responsible for ordering the execution of the Polish officers in Katyn. Over the years, several other sites of mass execution were also discovered, including the Starobelsk and Ostashkov camps, the NKVD headquarters in Smolensk, and at prisons in Kalinin (Tver), Kharkiv, Moscow, and other Soviet cities. All these executions have since been attributed to Stalin and the then Soviet government.
In a bitter irony, Stalin’s brutal massacre of Polish officers and civilians came back to haunt him when Germany broke the non-aggression pact, and invaded the Soviet Union. When the Polish government in exile and Soviet government agreed to combine their efforts against the Nazi Army, the Polish government asked for the tens of thousands of Polish Army officials taken prisoner by the Soviet Union to be released In order to join the War effort. By then, of course, Stalin had already carried out the executions, losing what would have been a crucial support in the War against Germany.
For the millions who lost friends and family in this display of complete human depravity however, this small piece of what has been called ‘poetic justice’, is in fact, no justice at all. Due to the strategic targeting of Stalin and his officers, Poland lost almost an entire generation of its top-level government officials, Army officials and intelligentsia including teachers, doctors, scientists and lawyers, in a very small amount of time. In one swift blow, much of the driving power and the leadership of the country had been eliminated.
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