Katyn massacre

What happened

In September 1939 the Red Army occupied eastern Poland and took roughly 230,000 Polish servicemen prisoner. Most rank-and-file soldiers were released or handed over to Germany, but officers and policemen were filtered out and concentrated in three special camps: about 4,500 army officers at Kozelsk, about 3,900 men at Starobelsk (including officers captured at the surrender of Lwow), and about 6,300 policemen, gendarmes and border guards at Ostashkov. Poland was a country of reserve officers, so a large share of the captives were mobilized doctors, teachers, lawyers, engineers and university professors.

From 3 April to mid-May 1940 the three camps were "unloaded." Prisoners were taken away according to transport lists issued every few days. Those from Kozelsk were shot in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, those from Ostashkov in the inner prison of the Kalinin (now Tver) NKVD, and those from Starobelsk in the Kharkov NKVD prison, and were buried nearby. Under the same decision more than 7,300 inmates of the prisons of Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia were shot in Kiev, Minsk and other cities. The total reported to Khrushchev in 1959 by KGB chairman Shelepin was 21,857. About 395 prisoners survived.

Who decided, and how

The decision documents survive. Beria's note No. 794/B of 5 March 1940 describes the prisoners and inmates as "hardened, irremediable enemies of Soviet power" and proposes that their cases be examined by special procedure, "without summoning those arrested and without presenting charges, without a decision on the conclusion of the investigation or an indictment," applying "the supreme penalty: shooting." The first page carries the slanting signatures of Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and Mikoyan, with the assent of Kalinin and Kaganovich noted in the margin. The Politburo adopted the proposal as its decision the same day.

Implementation took the form of a special NKVD three-man commission (Merkulov, Kobulov, Bashtakov) reviewing the lists. In 1959 Shelepin, proposing to Khrushchev that the individual files of the executed be destroyed, restated the totals and the sites. These two documents are the core of "Packet No. 1," made public in 1992.

Why did the Soviet Union deny it, and how did the truth come out

When the German invasion of 1941 pushed the USSR back into alliance with the Polish government-in-exile, the Poles kept asking after their thousands of missing officers. In December 1941 Stalin told Sikorski and Anders that they must have "fled to Manchuria." In April 1943 the Germans, then occupying Smolensk, exhumed and publicized the Katyn graves. Moscow declared the affair a German provocation, and when the exile government asked the International Red Cross to investigate, used the request as grounds for breaking off relations. In 1944 the Soviet Burdenko commission attributed the massacre to the Germans in 1941, and at Nuremberg the Soviet prosecution tried to include Katyn among the German crimes; the tribunal left it out of the judgment.

That official version held for half a century, and collapsed when glasnost opened the archives and a joint Soviet-Polish historians' commission went to work. On 13 April 1990 a TASS statement officially acknowledged the responsibility of the NKVD, and Gorbachev handed the transport lists to Jaruzelski. In October 1992 the Yeltsin government delivered the originals of Beria's note and the Politburo decision to Poland. In 2010 the Russian State Duma adopted a declaration stating that the massacre had been "committed on the direct orders of Stalin and other Soviet leaders."

What remains disputed

Responsibility is no longer in dispute. The Russian state itself opened the files and acknowledged the crime, so present-day denial belongs to politics rather than to source criticism. What remains debated are motive and legal qualification. On motive, the strongest reading is the elimination of the occupied territory's capacity for resistance: the destruction of the elite that could have led a reconstituted Polish state, which is the logic of Beria's own note. The hypothesis of revenge for the Red Army prisoners who died in Polish camps after the war of 1920 has been raised, but the documentary support for it is weak. On legal qualification there is little disagreement that this was a war crime and a crime against humanity, but the official positions of Poland and Russia diverge over the label of genocide. The Russian military prosecutor's office closed its investigation in 2004, denied the applicability of genocide, and left much of the file classified, which keeps the question alive in the memory politics of both countries.