Last April, I wrote the following blog about the 81st anniversary of the Katyn Massacre, in which the Soviet Army murdered 20,000 Polish military officers, politicians, doctors, lawyers, priests and intellectuals, leaving them in shallow graves. Who would have thought that on the 82d anniversary of the Katyn Massacre we would be horrified at another Russian massacre. This time, with the use of aerial photography, we can see that up to 10,000 men, women and children have been left in a shallow grave in the outskirts of Mariupol–to say nothing of the hundreds of others who have been killed in Buchi, Irpin, and too many other towns.
Why? Initially President Putin told his people that it was because Russia wanted to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine (interesting when you remember that President Zelenskyy is Jewish.) Then it was to free Ukraine from oppression. (There’s plenty of oppression in Russia–maybe deal with that first? Just a thought.) Finally this week a Russian general in charge of the southern front made it clear that the goal of the Russian government is to take all of southern Ukraine–from Crimea, Donbas and Luhansk to Odessa and on toward Moldova. I have the horrible feeling that we are headed to World War II 2.0 being played out in Ukraine. It’s worth rereading the Katyn Massacre to remember what happens in this magnitude of warfare.
(Because of the graphic photos, there will be not pictures in the blog.)
Most of us know that Germany attacked Poland from the east on September 1, 1939. Just 16 days later, because of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviet Union attacked Poland from the west. It’s difficult to know how many Poles were initially captured by the Soviets–estimates go between 250,000 and 455,000 men. In a relatively short time, many escaped and others were allowed to leave after interrogations, but by November 1939, Laeventia Beria, head of the Russian NKVD (precurser of the KGB) held about 40,000 men in prisons around Kozelsk and Karkiv,(sound familiar?) inside the USSR. On March 5, 1940, Stalin agreed with Beria, and they, with six other members of the Politburo, signed execution orders for over 25,000 “counter-revolutionaries.” During April and May, members of the Polish military, pilots, government officials, police, lawyers, doctors, engineers, professors, writers, journalists, large landowners and priests were killed, and thrown into unmarked graves, most of them in the Katyn Forest. Stalin hoped to get rid of individuals who could oppose the Soviet Union at the end of the war.
The “fog of war” regarding the missing Poles continued until June 1941, when Germany turned on its “friend” with Operation Barbarossa–the attempt to take over the Soviet Union. Despite their recent war with the Soviets, the Polish government-in-exile in London headed by President Wladyslaw Sikorski, signed the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement against Germany. The government-in-exile expected that the Polish POWs held in Russians would be released and fight with the Polish government. Sikorski asked Stalin where they were. The answer was that they had escapes, and the Russians had “lost track” of them, but they were probably in Manchuria. No one believed that, but the Soviets insisted that they simply didn’t know anything else.
However, when Germany pushed deep into the USSR around Smolensk in April 1943 they found a mass grave of thousands of men. Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and closed confident, was thrilled. He could tell the British, French, Poles in exile, and Americans that their ally, Stalin, had killed thousands of Poles. He brought in members of the “Katyn Commission” of the International Red Cross (IRC), with 12 forensic examiners, and even a number of Allied POWs, to examine the site. Now Sikorski demanded an explanation. Stalin replied that the Germans had actually massacred the Poles, and then cut all diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile. Throughout the rest of the war, Stalin maintained that it was Germany which had massacred the Poles, regardless of the IRC’s extensive information.
In 1952, the US conducted a congressional enquiry about Katyn. It, too, found that the massacre had be done by the Soviets, but very little was said or done about it. And after the war, when Poland came under the controlled by the Kremlin, little more was said about it . . . in public. But behind closed doors, and among the Polish diaspora people continued to ask questions about what happened in the Katyn forest.
Over the decades, the questions of the massacre festered under the surface. In the 1970s, the Flying University in Poland, and the Workers Defense Committee started openly asking questions. Despite arrests and beatings, more and more people demanded that the documents be unsealed. In 1981, Solidarity took a significant step when it set up a Katyn memorial. The Polish Communist Party took it down, but every Zaduszki Day (All Souls Day) Poles would set up crosses with the same silent questions. Not until 1989, when real cracks appeared throughout the Warsaw Pact, did the USSR admit that Stalin had authorized the massacre. The following years, Mikhail Gorbachov explained that Stalin had agreed with Beria and had authorized the NKVD to exterminate so many of Poland’s elite. That year, the Kremlin also turned over a number of formerly top-secret documents to the Polish President, Lech Walesa.
Even so, it was another 20 years before Russia finally provided Poland with 81 volumes of material, though they still hold 35 more volumes of classified documents. On the 70th anniversary of the Massacre, the Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, and the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin attended a memorial service near the actual site. Yet, to this day, there are still many, many questions to be answered
Historical Lense 