Did the USSR shoot Polish officers in the Katyn forest? Katyn massacre. Historical reference

Katyn: Chronicle of events

The term “Katyn crime” is a collective one; it refers to the execution in April–May 1940 of almost 22 thousand Polish citizens held in various camps and prisons of the NKVD of the USSR:

– 14,552 Polish officers and police captured by the Red Army in September 1939 and held in three NKVD prisoner of war camps, including –

– 4421 prisoners of the Kozelsky camp (shot and buried in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, 2 km from Gnezdovo station);

– 6311 prisoners of the Ostashkovsky camp (shot in Kalinin and buried in Medny);

– 3820 prisoners of the Starobelsky camp (shot and buried in Kharkov);

– 7,305 arrested, held in prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSR (apparently shot in Kyiv, Kharkov, Kherson and Minsk, possibly in other unspecified places on the territory of the BSSR and Ukrainian SSR).

Katyn - just one of a number of execution sites - became a symbol of the execution of all of the above groups of Polish citizens, since it was in Katyn in 1943 that the burials of murdered Polish officers were first discovered. Over the next 47 years, Katyn remained the only reliably known burial site for the victims of this “operation.”

Background

On August 23, 1939, the USSR and Germany entered into a non-aggression pact - the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. The pact included a secret protocol on the delimitation of spheres of interest, according to which, in particular, the eastern half of the territory of the pre-war Polish state was given to the Soviet Union. For Hitler, the pact meant the removal of the last obstacle before attacking Poland.

On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany attacked Poland, thereby unleashing the Second world war. On September 17, 1939, in the midst of the bloody battles of the Polish Army, which was desperately trying to stop the rapid advance of the German army deep into the country, in agreement with Germany, the Red Army invaded Poland - without a declaration of war by the Soviet Union and contrary to the non-aggression treaty in force between the USSR and Poland. Soviet propaganda declared the Red Army operation a “liberation campaign in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus.”

The advance of the Red Army came as a complete surprise to the Poles. Some did not even rule out that the entry of Soviet troops was directed against German aggression. Realizing that Poland was doomed in a war on two fronts, the Polish commander-in-chief issued an order not to engage in battle with Soviet troops and to resist only when attempting to disarm Polish units. As a result, only a few Polish units resisted the Red Army. Until the end of September 1939, the Red Army captured 240–250 thousand Polish soldiers and officers, as well as border guards, police, gendarmerie, prison guards, etc. Unable to contain such a huge mass of prisoners, immediately after disarmament, half of the privates and non-commissioned officers were sent home, and the rest were transferred by the Red Army to a dozen specially created prisoner of war camps of the NKVD of the USSR.

However, these NKVD camps were also overloaded. Therefore, in October - November 1939, the majority of privates and non-commissioned officers left the prisoner of war camps: the inhabitants of the territories occupied by the Soviet Union were sent home, and the inhabitants of the territories occupied by the Germans were handed over to Germany under an agreement on the exchange of prisoners (Germany in return handed over to the Soviet Union those captured German troops of Polish military personnel - Ukrainians and Belarusians, residents of territories ceded to the USSR).

The exchange agreements also concerned civilian refugees who found themselves in territory occupied by the USSR. They could apply to the German commissions operating on the Soviet side in the spring of 1940 for permission to return to permanent residence in Polish territories occupied by Germany.

About 25 thousand Polish privates and non-commissioned officers were left in Soviet captivity. In addition to them, army officers (about 8.5 thousand people), who were concentrated in two prisoner of war camps - Starobelsky in the Voroshilovgrad (now Lugansk) region and Kozelsky in the Smolensk (now Kaluga) region, as well as border guards, were not subject to dissolution to their homes or transfer to Germany. police officers, gendarmes, prison guards, etc. (about 6.5 thousand people), who were gathered in the Ostashkovo prisoner of war camp in the Kalinin (now Tver) region.

Not only prisoners of war became prisoners of the NKVD. One of the main means of “Sovietization” of the occupied territories was a campaign of continuous mass arrests for political reasons, directed primarily against officials of the Polish state apparatus (including officers and police officers who escaped captivity), members of the Polish political parties and public organizations, industrialists, large landowners, businessmen, border violators and other “enemies of Soviet power.” Before the verdict was passed, those arrested were kept for months in prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and BSSR, formed in the occupied territories of the pre-war Polish state.

On March 5, 1940, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (Bolsheviks) decided to shoot “14,700 Polish officers, officials, landowners, policemen, intelligence officers, gendarmes, siege guards and jailers in prisoner-of-war camps,” as well as 11,000 arrested and held in Western prisons. regions of Ukraine and Belarus "members of various counter-revolutionary espionage and sabotage organizations, former landowners, factory owners, former Polish officers, officials and defectors."

The basis for the Politburo’s decision was a note from the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR Beria to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks to Stalin, in which the execution of the listed categories of Polish prisoners and prisoners was proposed “based on the fact that they are all inveterate, incorrigible enemies of Soviet power.” At the same time, as a solution, the final part of Beria’s note was reproduced verbatim in the minutes of the Politburo meeting.

Execution

The execution of Polish prisoners of war and prisoners belonging to the categories listed in the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of March 5, 1940, was carried out in April and May of the same year.

All prisoners of the Kozelsky, Ostashkovsky and Starobelsky prisoner of war camps (except for 395 people) were sent in stages of approximately 100 people to the disposal of the NKVD Directorates for the Smolensk, Kalinin and Kharkov regions, respectively, which carried out executions as the stages arrived.

At the same time, executions of prisoners in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus took place.

395 prisoners of war, not included in the execution orders, were sent to the Yukhnovsky prisoner of war camp in the Smolensk region. Then they were transferred to the Gryazovets prisoner of war camp in Vologda region, from which at the end of August 1941 they were transferred to form the Polish Army in the USSR.

On April 13, 1940, shortly after the start of executions of Polish prisoners of war and prison inmates, an NKVD operation was carried out to deport their families (as well as the families of other repressed persons) living in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and BSSR to settlement in Kazakhstan.

Subsequent events

On June 22, 1941, Germany attacked the USSR. Soon, on July 30, an agreement was concluded between the Soviet government and the Polish government in exile (located in London) to invalidate the Soviet-German treaties of 1939 concerning “territorial changes in Poland”, to restore diplomatic relations between the USSR and Poland, to establish territory of the USSR of the Polish army to participate in the war against Germany and the liberation of all Polish citizens who were imprisoned in the USSR as prisoners of war, arrested or convicted, and also held in a special settlement.

This agreement was followed by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of August 12, 1941 on granting amnesty to Polish citizens who were imprisoned or in a special settlement (by that time there were about 390 thousand of them), and the Soviet-Polish military agreement of August 14, 1941 on the organization Polish army on the territory of the USSR. The army was planned to be formed from amnestied Polish prisoners and special settlers, primarily from former prisoners of war; General Vladislav Anders, who was urgently released from internal prison NKVD on Lubyanka.

In the autumn of 1941 - spring of 1942, the Polish officials repeatedly turned to the Soviet authorities with requests about the fate of thousands of captured officers who did not arrive at the places where Anders’ army was formed. The Soviet side replied that there was no information about them. On December 3, 1941, in a personal meeting in the Kremlin with Polish Prime Minister General Wladislaw Sikorski and General Anders, Stalin suggested that these officers may have fled to Manchuria. (By the end of the summer of 1942, Anders’ army was evacuated from the USSR to Iran, and later it took part in Allied operations to liberate Italy from the Nazis.)

On April 13, 1943, German radio officially reported the discovery of burials of Polish officers executed by Soviet authorities in Katyn near Smolensk. By order of the German authorities, the identified names of those killed began to be read out over loudspeakers in the streets and squares of occupied Polish cities. On April 15, 1943, there was an official denial by the Sovinformburo, according to which Polish prisoners of war in the summer of 1941 were engaged in construction work west of Smolensk, fell into the hands of the Germans and were shot by them.

From the end of March to the beginning of June 1943, the German side, with the participation of the Technical Commission of the Polish Red Cross, carried out an exhumation in Katyn. The remains of 4,243 Polish officers were recovered, and the first and last names of 2,730 of them were established from personal documents discovered. The corpses were reburied in mass graves next to the original burials, and the results of the exhumation in the summer of the same year were published in Berlin in the book “Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn”. The Germans handed over the documents and objects found on the corpses to detailed study at the Institute of Forensic Medicine and Criminalistics in Krakow. (In the summer of 1944, all of these materials, except for a small part of them, secretly hidden by employees of the Krakow Institute, were taken by the Germans from Krakow to Germany, where, according to rumors, they were burned during one of the bombings.)

On September 25, 1943, the Red Army liberated Smolensk. Only on January 12, 1944, the Soviet “Special Commission to establish and investigate the circumstances of the execution” was created German fascist invaders prisoners of war of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest,” the chairman of which was appointed academician N.N. Burdenko. Moreover, already from October 1943, specially seconded employees of the NKVD-NKGB of the USSR were preparing falsified “evidence” of the responsibility of the German authorities for the execution of Polish officers near Smolensk. According to the official report, the Soviet exhumation in Katyn was carried out from January 16 to 26, 1944, at the direction of the “Burdenko Commission”. From the secondary graves left after the German exhumation, and one primary grave, which the Germans did not have time to explore, the remains of 1,380 people were extracted; from the documents found, the commission established the personal data of 22 people. On January 26, 1944, the Izvestia newspaper published an official report from the “Burdenko Commission”, according to which Polish prisoners of war, who were in three camps west of Smolensk in the summer of 1941 and remained there after the invasion of German troops in Smolensk, were shot by the Germans in the fall of 1941.

To “legalize” this version on the world stage, the USSR tried to use the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which tried the main Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg in 1945–1946. However, having heard the testimony of witnesses for the defense (represented by German lawyers) and prosecution (represented by the Soviet side) on July 1–3, 1946, due to the obvious unconvincingness of the Soviet version, the IMT decided not to include the Katyn massacre in its verdict as one of the crimes of Nazi Germany.

On March 3, 1959, Chairman of the KGB under the Council of Ministers of the USSR A.N. Shelepin sent to the First Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee N.S. Khrushchev received a top secret note confirming that 14,552 prisoners - officers, gendarmes, policemen, etc. persons of the former bourgeois Poland,” as well as 7,305 prisoners in prisons in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus were shot in 1940 based on the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of March 5, 1940 (including 4,421 people in the Katyn Forest). The note proposed to destroy all records of those executed.

At the same time, throughout the post-war years, right up to the 1980s, the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs repeatedly made official demarches with the statement that the Nazis were established as responsible for the execution of Polish soldiers buried in the Katyn Forest.

But the “Katyn lie” is not only the USSR’s attempts to impose on the world community the Soviet version of the execution in the Katyn Forest. This is one of the elements domestic policy the communist leadership of Poland, brought to power by the Soviet Union after the liberation of the country. Another direction of this policy was large-scale persecution and attempts to denigrate members of the Home Army (AK) - a massive anti-Hitler armed underground subordinated during the war to the Polish "London" government in exile (with which the USSR broke off relations in April 1943, after it appealed to the International Red Cross with a request to investigate the murder of Polish officers whose remains were discovered in the Katyn Forest). A symbol of the slander campaign against AK after the war was the posting of posters on the streets of Polish cities with the mocking slogan “AK is a spit-stained dwarf of reaction.” At the same time, any statements or actions that directly or indirectly questioned the Soviet version of the death of captured Polish officers were punished, including attempts by relatives to install memorial plaques in cemeteries and churches indicating 1940 as the time of death of their loved ones. In order not to lose their jobs, in order to be able to study at the institute, relatives were forced to hide the fact that a member of their family died in Katyn. Polish state security agencies were looking for witnesses and participants in the German exhumation and forced them to make statements “exposing” the Germans as the perpetrators of the execution.
The Soviet Union admitted guilt only half a century after the execution of captured Polish officers - on April 13, 1990, an official TASS statement was published about “direct responsibility for the atrocities in the Katyn Forest of Beria, Merkulov and their henchmen,” and the atrocities themselves were qualified in it as “one of the gravest crimes of Stalinism." At the same time, USSR President M.S. Gorbachev handed over to the President of Poland W. Jaruzelski the lists of executed Polish prisoners of war (formally these were lists of orders to send convoys from the Kozelsky and Ostashkovsky camps to the NKVD in the Smolensk and Kalinin regions, as well as a list of records of former prisoners of war of the Starobelsky camp) and some other NKVD documents .

In the same year, the prosecutor's office of the Kharkov region opened criminal cases: on March 22 - on the discovery of burials in the forest park area of ​​​​Kharkov, and on August 20 - against Beria, Merkulov, Soprunenko (who was in 1939-1943 the head of the USSR NKVD Directorate for Prisoners of War and internees), Berezhkov (chief of the Starobelsky prisoner of war camp of the NKVD of the USSR) and other NKVD employees. On June 6, 1990, the prosecutor's office of the Kalinin region opened another case - about the fate of Polish prisoners of war who were held in the Ostashkov camp and disappeared without a trace in May 1940. These cases were transferred to the Main Military Prosecutor's Office (GVP) of the USSR and on September 27, 1990 they were combined and accepted for proceedings under No. 159. The GVP formed an investigation team headed by A.V. Tretetsky.

In 1991, the investigative group of the Main Prosecutor General's Office, together with Polish specialists, carried out partial exhumations in the 6th quarter of the forest park zone of Kharkov, on the territory of the dacha village of the KGB in the Tver region, 2 km from the village of Mednoye and in the Katyn forest. The main result of these exhumations was the final procedural establishment of the burial places of the executed Polish prisoners of the Starobelsky and Ostashkovsky prisoner of war camps.

A year later, on October 14, 1992, by order of Russian President B.N. Yeltsin, documents were made public and transferred to Poland, exposing the leadership of the USSR in committing the “Katyn crime” - the above-mentioned decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940 on the execution of Polish prisoners, Beria’s “staged” note to this decision, addressed to Stalin (with handwritten signatures of Politburo members Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and Mikoyan, as well as marks of voting “for” Kalinin and Kaganovich), a note from Shelepin to Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959 and other documents from the Presidential Archives. Thus, documentary evidence became available to the public that the victims of the “Katyn crime” were executed for political reasons - as “inveterate, incorrigible enemies of the Soviet regime.” At the same time, it became known for the first time that not only prisoners of war were shot, but also prisoners in prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and BSSR. The Politburo decision of March 5, 1940 ordered, as already mentioned, the execution of 14,700 prisoners of war and 11 thousand prisoners. From Shelepin’s note to Khrushchev it follows that approximately the same number of prisoners of war were shot, but fewer prisoners were shot - 7,305 people. The reason for the "underfulfillment" is unknown.

On August 25, 1993, Russian President B.N. Yeltsin, with the words “Forgive us...”, laid a wreath at the monument to the victims of Katyn at the Powązki memorial cemetery in Warsaw.

On May 5, 1994, the Deputy Head of the Security Service of Ukraine, General A. Khomich, handed over the name to the Deputy Prosecutor General of Poland S. Snezhko alphabetical list 3,435 prisoners in prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR, indicating the numbers of orders, which, as has been known since 1990, meant being sent to death. The list, immediately published in Poland, became conventionally called the “Ukrainian list.”

The “Belarusian list” is still unknown. If the “Shelepinsky” number of executed prisoners is correct and if the published “Ukrainian list” is complete, then in “ Belarusian list» should be listed as 3870 people. Thus, to date we know the names of 17,987 victims of the “Katyn crime”, and 3,870 victims (prisoners of prisons in the western regions of the BSSR) remain nameless. The burial places are reliably known only for 14,552 executed prisoners of war.

On July 13, 1994, the head of the investigative group of the Main Prosecutor’s Office A.Yu. Yablokov (who replaced A.V. Tretetsky) issued a resolution to terminate the criminal case on the basis of paragraph 8 of Article 5 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR (due to the death of the perpetrators), and in the resolution Stalin, members of the Politburo Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Kalinin and Kaganovich, Beria and other leaders and NKVD employees, as well as the perpetrators of the executions, were found guilty of committing crimes under paragraphs “a”, “b”, “c” of Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity). It was precisely this qualification of the “Katyn affair” (but in relation to the Nazis) that was already given by the Soviet side in 1945–1946 when it was submitted to the IMT for consideration. Three days later, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office and the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation canceled Yablokov's decision, and further investigation was assigned to another prosecutor.

In 2000, Polish-Ukrainian and Polish-Russian memorial complexes were opened at the burial sites of executed prisoners of war: June 17 in Kharkov, July 28 in Katyn, September 2 in Medny.

On September 21, 2004, the Main Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation terminated criminal case No. 159 on the basis of paragraph 4 of part 1 of Article 24 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation (due to the death of the perpetrators). Having informed the public about this only a few months later, the then Chief Military Prosecutor A.N. Savenkov, at his press conference on March 11, 2005, declared secret not only most of the investigation materials, but also the resolution itself to terminate the “Katyn case.” Thus, the personal composition of the perpetrators contained in the resolution was also classified.

From the response of the Main Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation to Memorial’s subsequent request, it is clear that “a number of specific high-ranking officials of the USSR” were found guilty, whose actions were qualified under paragraph “b” of Article 193-17 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR in force in 1926–1958 (abuse of power by a person in command composition of the Red Army, which had serious consequences in the presence of particularly aggravating circumstances).

The GVP also reported that in 36 volumes of the criminal case there are documents classified as “secret” and “top secret,” and in 80 volumes there are documents classified “for official use.” On this basis, access to 116 of the 183 volumes is closed.

In the fall of 2005, Polish prosecutors were familiarized with the remaining 67 volumes, “not containing information constituting state secrets.”

In 2005–2006, the Main Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation refused to consider applications submitted by relatives and Memorial for rehabilitation as victims political repression a number of specific executed Polish prisoners of war, and in 2007 the Khamovnichesky District Court of Moscow and the Moscow City Court confirmed these refusals of the GVP.
In the first half of the 1990s, our country took important steps towards recognizing the truth in the “Katyn case”. The Memorial Society believes that now we need to return to this path. It is necessary to resume and complete the investigation of the “Katyn crime”, give it an adequate legal assessment, make public the names of all those responsible (from decision-makers to ordinary executors), declassify and make public all investigation materials, establish the names and burial places of all executed Polish citizens, recognize executed by victims of political repression and rehabilitate them in accordance with the Russian Law “On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression.”

The information was prepared by the International Society "Memorial".

Information from the brochure “Katyn”, released for the presentation of the film of the same name by Andrzej Wajda in Moscow in 2007.
Illustrations in the text: made during the German exhumation in 1943 in Katyn (published in books: Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn. Berlin, 1943; Katyń: Zbrodnia i propaganda: niemieckie fotografie dokumentacyjne ze zbiorów Instytutu Za-chodniego. Poznań, 2003), photographs taken by Aleksey Pamyatnykh during the exhumation carried out by the GVP in 1991 in Medny.

In the application:

• Order No. 794/B dated March 5, 1940, signed by L. Beria, with a resolution by I. Stalin, K. Voroshilov, V. Molotov, A. Mikoyan;
• Note from A. Shelepin to N. Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959

During perestroika, Gorbachev did not blame any sins on the Soviet Government. One of them is the execution of Polish officers near Katyn by allegedly Soviet secret services. In reality, the Poles were shot by the Germans, and the myth about the USSR’s involvement in the execution of Polish prisoners of war was put into circulation by Nikita Khrushchev, based on his own selfish considerations.

The 20th Congress had devastating consequences not only within the USSR, but also for the entire world communist movement, because Moscow lost its role as a cementing ideological center, and each of the people's democracies (with the exception of the PRC and Albania) began to look for its own path to socialism, and under this actually took the path of eliminating the dictatorship of the proletariat and restoring capitalism.

The first serious international reaction to Khrushchev’s “secret” report was the anti-Soviet protests in Poznan, the historical center of Greater Poland chauvinism, that followed soon after the death of the Polish communist leader Boleslaw Bierut. Soon the unrest began to spread to other cities in Poland and even spread to other Eastern European countries, to a greater extent - Hungary, to a lesser extent - Bulgaria. In the end, Polish anti-Sovietists, under the smokescreen of “the fight against Stalin’s personality cult,” managed not only to free the right-wing nationalist deviationist Wladyslaw Gomulka and his comrades from prison, but also to bring them to power.

And although Khrushchev tried to somehow resist at first, in the end he was forced to accept Polish demands in order to defuse the current situation, which was ready to get out of control. These demands contained such unpleasant aspects as unconditional recognition of the new leadership, the dissolution of collective farms, some liberalization of the economy, guarantees of freedom of speech, meetings and demonstrations, the abolition of censorship, and, most importantly, the official recognition of the vile Hitlerite lie about the involvement of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the Katyn execution of Polish prisoners of war officers. Having rashly given such guarantees, Khrushchev recalled Soviet Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, a Pole by birth, who served as Poland's Minister of Defense, and all Soviet military and political advisers.

Perhaps the most unpleasant thing for Khrushchev was the demand to admit his party’s involvement in the Katyn massacre, but he agreed to this only in connection with V. Gomulka’s promise to trace Stepan Bandera, worst enemy Soviet authorities, the leader of the paramilitary forces of Ukrainian nationalists who fought against the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War and continued their terrorist activities in the Lviv region until the 50s of the twentieth century.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), headed by S. Bandera, relied on cooperation with the intelligence services of the USA, England, and Germany, and on permanent connections with various underground circles and groups in Ukraine. To do this, its emissaries penetrated there through illegal means, with the goal of creating an underground network and smuggling anti-Soviet and nationalist literature.

It is possible that during his unofficial visit to Moscow in February 1959, Gomulka announced that his intelligence services had discovered Bandera in Munich, and hastened the recognition of “Katyn guilt.” One way or another, but on the instructions of Khrushchev, on October 15, 1959, KGB officer Bogdan Stashinsky finally eliminates Bandera in Munich, and the trial held over Stashinsky in Karlsruhe (Germany) will find it possible to give the killer a relatively mild punishment - only a few years in prison, since The main blame will be placed on the organizers of the crime - the Khrushchev leadership.

Fulfilling this obligation, Khrushchev, an experienced ripper of secret archives, gives appropriate orders to KGB Chairman Shelepin, who moved to this chair a year ago from the post of First Secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee, and he begins feverishly “working” on creating a material basis for Hitler’s version of the Katyn myth.

First of all, Shelepin creates a “special folder” “On the involvement of the CPSU (this mistake alone indicates the fact of gross falsification - until 1952 the CPSU was called the CPSU (b) - L.B.) in the Katyn execution, where, in his opinion, the four main documents: a) lists of executed Polish officers; b) Beria’s report to Stalin; c) Resolution of the Party Central Committee of March 5, 1940; d) Shelepin’s letter to Khrushchev (the homeland should know its “heroes”!)

It was this “special folder”, created by Khrushchev at the request of the new Polish leadership, that spurred all the anti-people forces of the PPR, inspired by Pope John Paul II (former Archbishop of Krakow and Cardinal of Poland), as well as US President Jimmy Carter’s assistant for national security, permanent director of “ research center, called the “Stalin Institute” at the University of California, a Pole by origin, Zbigniew Brzezinski to more and more brazen ideological sabotage.

In the end, after another three decades, the story of the visit of the leader of Poland to the Soviet Union repeated itself, only this time in April 1990, the President of the Republic of Poland W. Jaruzelski arrived on an official state visit to the USSR demanding repentance for the “Katyn atrocity” and forced Gorbachev to make the following statement: “In Lately documents were found (meaning Khrushchev’s “special folder” - L.B.), which 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. Graves of Polish officers - next to the graves Soviet people who fell from the same evil hand."

Considering that the “special folder” is a fake, then Gorbachev’s statement wasn’t worth a penny. Having achieved from the incompetent Gorbachev leadership in April 1990 a shameful public repentance for Hitler’s sins, that is, the publication of the “TASS Report” that “the Soviet side, expressing deep regret in connection with the Katyn tragedy, declares that it represents one of the grave crimes of Stalinism “, counter-revolutionaries of all stripes successfully took advantage of this explosion of the “Khrushchev time bomb” - false documents about Katyn - for their base subversive purposes.

The first to “respond” to Gorbachev’s “repentance” was the leader of the notorious “Solidarity” Lech Walesa (they put a finger in his mouth - he bit his hand - L.B.). He proposed resolving other important problems: to reconsider assessments of post-war Polish-Soviet relations, including the role of the Polish Committee for National Liberation created in July 1944, treaties concluded with the USSR, because allegedly they were all based on criminal principles, to punish those responsible for genocide, to resolve free access to the burial places of Polish officers, and most importantly, of course, compensation for material damage to the families and loved ones of the victims. On April 28, 1990, a government representative spoke at the Polish Sejm with information that negotiations with the USSR government on the issue of monetary compensation were already underway and that at the moment it was important to compile a list of all those applying for such payments (according to official data, there were up to 800 thousand).

And the vile action of Khrushchev-Gorbachev ended with the dispersal of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the dissolution of the military alliance of the Warsaw Pact countries, and the liquidation of the Eastern European socialist camp. Moreover, it was believed that the West would dissolve NATO in response, but “screw you”: NATO is doing “Drang nach Osten”, brazenly absorbing the countries of the former Eastern European socialist camp.

However, let’s return to the kitchen of creating a “special folder”. A. Shelepin began by breaking the seal and entering the sealed room where the records of 21,857 prisoners and internees of Polish nationality since September 1939 were kept. In a letter to Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959, justifying the uselessness of this archival material by the fact that “all accounting files are of neither operational interest nor historical value,” the newly minted “chekist” comes to the conclusion: “Based on the above, it seems advisable to destroy all accounting records.” cases against persons (attention!!!) executed in 1940 as part of the said operation.” This is how the “lists of executed Polish officers” in Katyn arose. Subsequently, the son of Lavrenty Beria would reasonably note: “During Jaruzelski’s official visit to Moscow, Gorbachev gave him only copies of the lists of the former Main Directorate for Prisoners of War and Internees of the NKVD of the USSR found in the Soviet archives. The copies contain the names of Polish citizens who were in the Kozelsky, Ostashkovsky and Starobelsky NKVD camps in 1939-1940. None of these documents talk about the participation of the NKVD in the execution of prisoners of war.”

The second “document” from the Khrushchev-Shelepin “special folder” was not at all difficult to fabricate, since there was a detailed digital report of the People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR L. Beria

I.V. Stalin "On Polish prisoners of war." Shelepin had only one thing left to do - to come up with and finish printing the “operative part”, where Beria allegedly demands the execution of all prisoners of war from the camps and prisoners held in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus “without calling those arrested and without bringing charges” - fortunately, typewriters in the former NKVD The USSR has not yet been written off. However, Shelepin did not risk forging Beria’s signature, leaving this “document” as a cheap anonymous letter. But its “operative part”, copied word for word, will be included in the next “document”, which Shelepin “literally” will call in his letter to Khrushchev “Resolution of the CPSU Central Committee (?) of March 5, 1940”, and this lapsus calami, this the typo in the “letter” still sticks out like an awl from a sack (and, really, how can you correct “archival documents”, even if they were invented two decades after the event? - L.B.).

True, this main “document” itself about the party’s involvement is designated as “an extract from the minutes of a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee. Decision dated 03/05/40.” (The Central Committee of which party? In all party documents, without exception, the entire abbreviation was always indicated in full - Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) - L.B.). The most surprising thing is that this “document” was left without a signature. And on this anonymous letter, instead of a signature, there are only two words - “Secretary of the Central Committee.” That's all!

This is how Khrushchev paid the Polish leadership for the head of his worst personal enemy Stepan Bandera, who spoiled a lot of blood for him when Nikita Sergeevich was the first leader of Ukraine.

Khrushchev did not understand something else: that the price he had to pay Poland for this, generally irrelevant terrorist attack at that time, was immeasurably higher - in fact, it was equal to the revision of the decisions of the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences on post-war structure statehood of Poland and other Eastern European countries.

However, the fake “special folder” fabricated by Khrushchev and Shelepin, covered in archival dust, waited in the wings three decades later. As we have already seen, the enemy fell for her Soviet people Gorbachev. The ardent enemy of the Soviet people, Yeltsin, also fell for it. The latter tried to use Katyn forgeries at meetings of the Constitutional Court of the RSFSR dedicated to the “CPSU case” initiated by him. These fakes were presented by well-known “figures” of the Yeltsin era – Shakhrai and Makarov. However, even the flexible Constitutional Court could not recognize these forgeries as genuine documents and did not mention them anywhere in its decisions. Khrushchev and Shelepin worked dirty!

Sergo Beria took a paradoxical position on the Katyn “case”. His book “My Father – Lavrentiy Beria” was signed for publication on April 18, 1994, and the “documents” from the “special folder” were, as we already know, made public in January 1993. It is unlikely that Beria's son did not know about this, although he makes a similar appearance. But his “awl from the bag” is an almost exact reproduction of the figure of Khrushchev’s number of prisoners of war executed in Katyn - 21 thousand 857 (Khrushchev) and 20 thousand 857 (S. Beria).

In his attempt to whitewash his father, he admits the “fact” of the Katyn execution by the Soviet side, but at the same time blames the “system” and agrees that his father was allegedly ordered to hand over the captured Polish officers to the Red Army within a week, and the execution itself was supposedly entrusted carry out to the leadership of the People's Commissariat of Defense, that is, Klim Voroshilov, and adds that “this is the truth that is carefully hidden to this day... The fact remains: the father refused to participate in the crime, although he knew that it was already possible to save these 20 thousand 857 lives unable... I know for sure that my father motivated his fundamental disagreement with the execution of Polish officers and in writing. Where are these documents?

The late Sergo Lavrentievich correctly stated that these documents do not exist. Because it never happened. Instead of proving the inconsistency of recognizing the involvement of the Soviet side in the Hitler-Goebbels provocation in the “Katyn Affair” and exposing Khrushchev’s cheapness, Sergo Beria saw in this a selfish chance to take revenge on the party, which, in his words, “always knew how to have a hand in dirty things and when the opportunity arises, shift responsibility to anyone other than the top party leadership.” That is, as we see, Sergo Beria also contributed to the big lie about Katyn.

At careful reading The “Report of the head of the NKVD Lavrentiy Beria” draws attention to the following absurdity: the “Report” gives digital calculations about 14 thousand 700 people from among the former Polish officers, officials, landowners, police officers, intelligence officers, gendarmes, siege soldiers and jailers (hence Gorbachev’s figure - “about 15 thousand executed Polish officers” - L.B.), as well as about 11 thousand people arrested and in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus - members of various counter-revolutionary and sabotage organizations, former landowners , manufacturers and defectors."

In total, therefore, 25 thousand 700. The same figure also appears in the supposedly mentioned above “Extract from a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee,” since it was rewritten into a false document without proper critical understanding. But in this regard, it is difficult to understand Shelepin’s statement that 21 thousand 857 accounting files were kept in the “secret sealed room” and that all 21 thousand 857 Polish officers were shot.

Firstly, as we have seen, not all of them were officers. According to the calculations of Lavrentiy Beria, in general there were only a little over 4 thousand army officers themselves (generals, colonels and lieutenant colonels - 295, majors and captains - 2080, lieutenants, second lieutenants and cornets - 604). This is in prisoner of war camps, and in prisons there were 1207 former Polish prisoners of war. In total, therefore, 4 thousand 186 people. In the 1998 edition of the “Big Encyclopedic Dictionary” it is written: “In the spring of 1940, the NKVD killed over 4 thousand Polish officers in Katyn.” And then: “Executions on the territory of Katyn were carried out during the occupation of the Smolensk region by Nazi troops.”

So who, in the end, carried out these ill-fated executions - the Nazis, the NKVD, or, as the son of Lavrentiy Beria claims, units of the regular Red Army?

Secondly, there is a clear discrepancy between the number of those “shot” – 21 thousand 857 and the number of people who were “ordered” to be shot – 25 thousand 700. It is permissible to ask how it could happen that 3843 Polish officers were unaccounted for, what department fed them During their lifetime, on what means did they live? And who dared to spare them if the “bloodthirsty” “Secretary of the Central Committee” ordered every last “officer” to be shot?

And one last thing. In the materials fabricated in 1959 on the “Katyn case” it is stated that the “troika” was the trial court for the unfortunate. Khrushchev “forgot” that in accordance with the Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of November 17, 1938 “On arrests, prosecutorial supervision and investigation,” the judicial “troikas” were liquidated. This happened a year and a half before the Katyn execution, which was incriminated to the Soviet authorities.

The truth about Katyn

After the shamefully failed campaign against Warsaw, undertaken by Tukhachevsky, obsessed with the Trotskyist idea of ​​a world revolutionary conflagration, the western lands of Ukraine and Belarus were transferred to bourgeois Poland from Soviet Russia according to the Riga Peace Treaty of 1921, and this soon led to the forced Polization of the population of the so unexpectedly freely acquired territories: to close Ukrainian and Belarusian schools; to transformation Orthodox churches to Catholic churches; to the expropriation of fertile lands from peasants and their transfer to Polish landowners; to lawlessness and arbitrariness; to persecution on national and religious grounds; to the brutal suppression of any manifestations of popular discontent.

Therefore, Western Ukrainians and Belarusians, who had imbibed the bourgeois Wielkopolska lawlessness, yearned for Bolshevik social justice and true freedom, as their liberators and deliverers, as relatives, greeted the Red Army when it came to their lands on September 17, 1939, and all its actions to liberate the Western Ukraine and Western Belarus lasted 12 days.

Polish military units and formations of troops, offering almost no resistance, surrendered. The Polish government of Kozlovsky, which fled to Romania on the eve of Hitler’s capture of Warsaw, actually betrayed its people, and the new emigrant government of Poland, led by General W. Sikorsky, was formed in London on September 30, 1939, i.e. two weeks after the national disaster.

By the time of the treacherous attack of Nazi Germany on the USSR, 389 thousand 382 Poles were kept in Soviet prisons, camps and places of exile. From London they closely monitored the fate of Polish prisoners of war, who were used mainly in road construction work, so that if they had been shot by Soviet authorities in the spring of 1940, as Goebbels’s false propaganda trumpeted this to the whole world, it would have been known in a timely manner through diplomatic channels and would cause great international resonance.

In addition, Sikorsky, seeking rapprochement with I.V. Stalin, sought to present himself in the best possible light, played the role of a friend of the Soviet Union, which again eliminates the possibility of a “bloody massacre” committed by the Bolsheviks against Polish prisoners of war in the spring of 1940. There is nothing to indicate the existence of a historical situation that could provide an incentive for the Soviet side to carry out such an action.

At the same time, the Germans had such an incentive in August–September 1941 after the Soviet ambassador in London Ivan Maisky concluded an agreement of friendship between the two governments with the Poles on July 30, 1941, according to which General Sikorsky was to form prisoners of war compatriots in the Russian army under the command of the Polish prisoner of war General Anders to participate in hostilities against Germany. This was the incentive for Hitler to liquidate Polish prisoners of war as enemies of the German nation, who, as he knew, had already been amnestied by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of August 12, 1941 - 389 thousand 41 Poles, including future victims of Nazi atrocities, shot in the Katyn Forest.

The process of forming the National Polish Army under the command of General Anders was in full swing in the Soviet Union, and in quantitative terms it reached 76 thousand 110 people in six months.

However, as it turned out later, Anders received instructions from Sikorsky: “Do not help Russia under any circumstances, but use the situation with maximum benefit for the Polish nation.” At the same time, Sikorsky convinces Churchill of the advisability of transferring Anders’ army to the Middle East, about which the English prime minister writes to I.V. Stalin, and the leader gives his go-ahead, and not only for the evacuation of Anders’ army itself to Iran, but also members of the families of military personnel in the amount of 43 thousand 755 people. It was clear to both Stalin and Hitler that Sikorsky was playing a double game. As tensions between Stalin and Sikorski increased, there was a thaw between Hitler and Sikorski. The Soviet-Polish “friendship” ended with an openly anti-Soviet statement by the head of the Polish emigrant government on February 25, 1943, which stated that it did not want to recognize the historical rights of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples to unite in their own nation states" In other words, there was a clear fact of the impudent claims of the Polish emigrant government to Soviet lands - Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. In response to this statement I.V. Stalin formed the Tadeusz Kosciuszko Division of 15 thousand people from Poles loyal to the Soviet Union. In October 1943, she already fought shoulder to shoulder with the Red Army.

For Hitler, this statement was a signal to take revenge for the Leipzig trial he lost to the communists in the case of the Reichstag fire, and he intensified the activities of the police and the Gestapo of the Smolensk region to organize the Katyn provocation.

Already on April 15, the German Information Bureau reported on Berlin radio that the German occupation authorities had discovered in Katyn near Smolensk the graves of 11 thousand Polish officers shot by Jewish commissars. The next day, the Soviet Information Bureau exposed the bloody fraud of Hitler’s executioners, and on April 19, the Pravda newspaper wrote in an editorial: “The Nazis are inventing some kind of Jewish commissars who allegedly participated in the murder of 11 thousand Polish officers. For experienced craftsmen provocation, it is not difficult to come up with several names of people who have never existed. Such “commissars” as Lev Rybak, Abraham Borisovich, Pavel Brodninsky, Chaim Finberg, named by the German information bureau, were simply invented by the German fascist swindlers, since there were no such “commissars” either in the Smolensk branch of the GPU or in the NKVD bodies at all. No".

On April 28, 1943, Pravda published “a note from the Soviet government on the decision to break off relations with the Polish government,” which, in particular, stated that “this hostile campaign against the Soviet state was undertaken by the Polish government in order to, through the use of Hitler’s slanderous fakes to put pressure on the Soviet government in order to wrest territorial concessions from it at the expense of the interests of Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Belarus and Soviet Lithuania.”

Immediately after the expulsion of the Nazi invaders from Smolensk (September 25, 1943), I.V. Stalin sends a special commission to the crime scene to establish and investigate the circumstances of the execution of Polish officers prisoners of war by the Nazi invaders in the Katyn Forest. The commission included: member of the Extraordinary State Commission(ChGK investigated the atrocities of the Nazis in the occupied territories of the USSR and scrupulously calculated the damage caused by them - L.B.), academician N. N. Burdenko (chairman of the Special Commission on Katyn), members of the CheGK: academician Alexei Tolstoy and Metropolitan Nikolai, chairman of the All-Slavic Committee , Lieutenant General A.S. Gundorov, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Union of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies S.A. Kolesnikov, People's Commissar of Education of the USSR, Academician V.P. Potemkin, Head of the Main Military Sanitary Directorate of the Red Army, Colonel General E.I. Smirnov, Chairman of the Smolensk Regional Executive Committee R.E. Melnikov. To carry out the task assigned to it, the commission attracted the best forensic experts in the country: the chief forensic expert of the People's Commissariat of Health of the USSR, the director of the Research Institute of Forensic Medicine V.I. Prozorovsky, head. Department of Forensic Medicine of the 2nd Moscow Medical Institute V.M. Smolyaninov, senior researchers at the Research Institute of Forensic Medicine P.S. Semenovsky and M.D. Shvaikov, chief pathologist of the front, major of the medical service, professor D.N. Vyropaeva.

Day and night, tirelessly, for four months, an authoritative commission conscientiously examined the details of the “Katyn case.” On January 26, 1944, a most convincing message from the special commission was published in all central newspapers, which left no stone unturned from the Hitler myth of Katyn and revealed to the whole world the true picture of the atrocities of the Nazi invaders against Polish prisoners of war officers.

However, at the height of the Cold War, the US Congress is again attempting to revive the Katyn issue, even creating the so-called. “The commission to investigate the Katyn Affair, headed by Congressman Madden.

On March 3, 1952, Pravda published a note to the US State Department dated February 29, 1952, which, in particular, said: “... raising the issue of the Katyn crime eight years after the imprisonment official commission can only pursue the goal of slandering the Soviet Union and thus rehabilitating generally recognized Nazi criminals (it is characteristic that the special “Katyn” commission of the US Congress was created simultaneously with the approval of the appropriation of 100 million dollars for sabotage and espionage activities in Poland - L.B.).

Attached to the note was a newly published one in Pravda on March 3, 1952. full text reports of the Burdenko commission, which collected extensive material obtained as a result of a detailed study of corpses extracted from graves and those documents and material evidence that were found on corpses and in graves. At the same time, Burdenko’s special commission interviewed numerous witnesses from the local population, whose testimony accurately established the time and circumstances of the crimes committed by the German occupiers.

First of all, the message provides information about what the Katyn Forest is.

“For a long time, the Katyn Forest was a favorite place where the population of Smolensk usually spent holidays. The surrounding population grazed livestock in the Katyn Forest and prepared fuel for themselves. There were no prohibitions or restrictions on access to the Katyn Forest.

Back in the summer of 1941, in this forest there was a pioneer camp of Promstrakhkassy, ​​which was closed only in July 1941 with the capture of Smolensk by the German occupiers, the forest began to be guarded by reinforced patrols, inscriptions appeared in many places warning that persons entering the forest without a special pass would be subject to shot on the spot.

Particularly strictly guarded was that part of the Katyn Forest, which was called the “Goat Mountains,” as well as the territory on the banks of the Dnieper, where, at a distance of 700 meters from the discovered graves of Polish prisoners of war, there was a dacha - a rest house of the Smolensk NKVD department. Upon the arrival of the Germans, a German military establishment was located at this dacha, hiding under the code name “Headquarters of the 537th Construction Battalion” (which also appeared in the documents of the Nuremberg trials - L.B.).

From the testimony of the peasant Kiselyov, born in 1870: “The officer stated that, according to information available to the Gestapo, NKVD officers shot Polish officers in the “Goat Mountains” section in 1940, and asked me what testimony I could give on this matter. I replied that I had never heard of the NKVD carrying out executions in the “Goat Mountains”, and it was hardly possible at all, I explained to the officer, since the “Goat Mountains” was a completely open, crowded place and, if they were shooting there, then about The entire population of nearby villages would know this...”

Kiselyov and others told how they were literally beaten out of them with rubber truncheons and threats of execution for false testimony, which later appeared in a book superbly published by the German Foreign Ministry, which contained materials fabricated by the Germans on the “Katyn Affair.” In addition to Kiselev, Godezov (aka Godunov), Silverstov, Andreev, Zhigulev, Krivozertsev, Zakharov were named as witnesses in this book.

The Burdenko Commission established that Godezov and Silverstov died in 1943, before the liberation of the Smolensk region by the Red Army. Andreev, Zhigulev and Krivozertsev left with the Germans. The last of the “witnesses” named by the Germans, Zakharov, who worked under the Germans as a headman in the village of Novye Bateki, told Burdenko’s commission that he was first beaten until he lost consciousness, and then, when he came to his senses, the officer demanded to sign the interrogation report and he, faint-hearted, under the influence of beatings and threats of execution, he gave false testimony and signed the protocol.

Hitler’s command understood that there were clearly not enough “witnesses” for such a large-scale provocation. And it distributed among the residents of Smolensk and surrounding villages an “Appeal to the Population”, which was published in the newspaper “New Way” published by the Germans in Smolensk (No. 35 (157) dated May 6, 1943: “You can give information about the mass murder, committed by the Bolsheviks in 1940 over captured Polish officers and priests (? - this is something new - L.B.) in the Goat Mountains forest, near the Gnezdovo - Katyn highway. Who observed the vehicles from Gnezdovo to the Goat Mountains or "Who saw or heard the shootings? Who knows residents who can tell about this? Every message will be rewarded."

To the credit of Soviet citizens, no one fell for the reward for giving the false testimony the Germans needed in the Katyn case.

Of the documents discovered by forensic experts relating to the second half of 1940 and the spring-summer of 1941, they deserve Special attention the following:

1. On corpse No. 92.
Letter from Warsaw addressed to the Red Cross in the Central Bank of Prisoners of War, Moscow, st. Kuibysheva, 12. The letter is written in Russian. In this letter, Sofia Zygon asks to know the whereabouts of her husband, Tomasz Zygon. The letter is dated 12.09. 1940. The envelope is stamped “Warsaw. 09.1940" and the stamp - "Moscow, post office, 9th expedition, 8.10. 1940”, as well as a resolution in red ink “Uch. set up a camp and send it for delivery - 11/15/40.” (Signature illegible).

2. On corpse No. 4
Postcard, registered No. 0112 from Tarnopol with the postmark “Tarnopol 12.11.40” Handwritten text and address are discolored.

3. On corpse No. 101.
Receipt No. 10293 dated 12/19/39, issued by the Kozelsky camp on the receipt of a gold watch from Eduard Adamovich Levandovsky. On the back of the receipt there is an entry dated March 14, 1941 about the sale of this watch to Yuvelirtorg.

4. On corpse No. 53.

Unsent postcard on Polish language with the address: Warsaw, Bagatela, 15, apt. 47, Irina Kuchinskaya. Dated June 20, 1941.

It must be said that in preparation for their provocation, the German occupation authorities used up to 500 Russian prisoners of war to dig up graves in the Katyn Forest and extract incriminating documents and material evidence from there, who were shot by the Germans after completing this work.

From the message of the “Special Commission to Establish and Investigate the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of War by Nazi Invaders in the Katyn Forest”: “Conclusions from witness testimony and forensic examinations about the execution of Polish prisoners of war by the Germans in the fall of 1941 are fully confirmed by material evidence and documents extracted from "Katyn Graves".

This is the truth about Katyn. The irrefutable truth of the fact.

So who shot the Poles in Katyn? Our NKVD soldiers in the spring of 1940 - according to the current Russian leadership, or the Germans in the fall of 1941 - as I found out at the turn of 1943-1944. a special commission headed by the chief surgeon of the Red Army N. Burdenko, the results of the examination of which were included in the indictment of the Nuremberg Tribunal?

In the book “Katyn,” published in 2011. A lie that became history,” its authors, Elena Prudnikova and Ivan Chigirin, tried to impartially, on the basis of documents, understand one of the most complex and confusing stories of the last century. And they came to a disappointing conclusion for those who are ready to force Russia to repent for this “crime”.

« If the reader remembers the first part (of the book) - the authors write, in particular - then the Germans easily determined the ranks of those executed. How? And by the insignia! Both Dr. Butz's report and some of the witness statements mention stars on the shoulder straps of those killed. But, according to the Soviet regulations on prisoners of war of 1931, they were prohibited from wearing insignia. So shoulder straps with stars could not have ended up on the uniforms of prisoners shot by the NKVD in 1940. Wearing insignia in captivity was allowed only by the new Regulations adopted on July 1, 1941. It was also permitted by the Geneva Convention».

It turns out that our NKVD members could not shoot in 1940 captured Poles, crowned with military insignia, which were found along with the remains of the dead. This could not have happened simply because these same insignia were torn off from all prisoners of war. Our prisoner of war camps did not contain captured generals, captured officers or captured privates: according to their status, they were all simply prisoners, without insignia.

This means that Poles with “stars” could be executed by the NKVD only after July 1, 1941. But they, as Goebbels’s propaganda announced in the spring of 1943 (a version of which, with minor variations, was later picked up in Poland, and now the Russian leadership agreed with it), were shot back in 1940. Could this happen? In Soviet military camps - definitely not. But in German camps this (the execution of prisoners marked with military insignia) was, one might say, the norm: Germany had already joined (unlike the USSR) to the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War.

The well-known publicist Anatoly Wasserman cites in his blog a remarkable document from Daniil Ivanov’s article “Did the USSR’s failure to sign the Geneva Convention affect the fate of Soviet prisoners of war?”:

“CONCLUSION OF CONSULTANT MALITSKY ON THE DRAFT DECISION OF THE CEC AND SNK OF THE USSR “REGULATIONS ON PRISONERS OF WAR”
Moscow, March 27, 1931

On July 27, 1929, the Geneva Conference developed a convention on the maintenance of prisoners of war. The government of the USSR took no part either in the drafting of this convention or in its ratification. To replace this convention, the present Regulations were developed, the draft of which was adopted by the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR on March 19 this year. G.

The draft of this provision is based on three thoughts:
1) create a regime for prisoners of war that would not be worse than the regime of the Geneva Convention;
2) issue, if possible, a short law that does not reproduce the details of all the guarantees provided by the Geneva Convention, so that these details form the subject of implementing instructions to the law;
3) give the issue of prisoners of war a formulation that corresponds to Soviet principles of law (inadmissibility of benefits for officers, optional involvement of prisoners of war in work, etc.).

Thus, this Regulation is based in general on the same principles as the Geneva Convention, such as: prohibition of ill-treatment of prisoners of war, insults and threats, prohibition of using coercive measures to obtain from them information of a military nature, granting them civil legal capacity and dissemination on them general laws countries, a ban on using them in a war zone, etc.

However, in order to harmonize this Regulation with the general principles of Soviet law, the following differences from the Geneva Convention are introduced in the Regulation:
a) there are no benefits for officers, indicating the possibility of keeping them separately from other prisoners of war (Article 3);
b) the extension of civilian rather than military regime to prisoners of war (Articles 8 and 9);
c) granting political rights to prisoners of war who belong to the working class or the peasantry who do not exploit other people’s labor, to general principles with other foreigners located on the territory of the USSR (Article 10);
d) providing [the opportunity] for prisoners of war of the same nationality to be placed together if they wish;
e) the so-called camp committees receive broader camp competence, having the right to freely communicate with all bodies to represent all general interests of prisoners of war, and not just limited to the receipt and distribution of parcels, the functions of the mutual aid fund (Article 14);
f) prohibition to wear insignia and failure to indicate the rules for saluting (Article 18);
g) prohibition of charlatanism (Article 34);
h) the appointment of salaries not only for officers, but for all prisoners of war (Article 32);
i) engaging prisoners of war to work only with their consent (Article 34) and with the application to them of general legislation on labor protection and conditions (Article 36), as well as extending to them wages in an amount not lower than that existing in the locality for the corresponding category of workers, etc.

Whereas this bill establishes a regime for the maintenance of prisoners of war no worse than the Geneva Convention, that therefore the principle of reciprocity can be extended without prejudice to both the USSR and individual prisoners of war, that the number of articles of the provision is reduced to 45 instead of 97 in the Geneva Convention “that the principles of Soviet law are carried out in the Regulations, there are no objections to the adoption of this bill.”

So, to summarize Anatoly Wasserman, another published one was identified by the Germans themselves material evidence of the impossibility of dating the execution of Polish prisoners in 1940. And since in July-August 1941, the Soviet law enforcement agencies obviously had neither the need nor the technical ability to destroy and bury thousands of Polish prisoners, the obvious was once again confirmed: the Polish prisoners were shot by the Germans themselves no earlier than the fall of 1941.

Let us remember that the mass graves of Poles in the Katyn Forest were first announced in 1943 by the Germans who occupied these territories. An international commission convened by Germany conducted an examination and concluded that the executions were carried out by the NKVD in the spring of 1940.

After the liberation of the Smolensk land from the occupiers in the USSR, the Burdenko Commission was created, which, after conducting its own investigation, came to the conclusion that the Poles were shot in 1941 by the Germans. At the Nuremberg Tribunal, the deputy chief Soviet prosecutor, Colonel Yu.V. Pokrovsky, presented a detailed accusation in the Katyn case, based on the materials of the Burdenko commission and placing the blame for organizing the executions on the German side. True, the Katyn episode was not included in the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal itself, but it is present in the tribunal’s indictment.

And this version of the Katyn execution was official in the USSR until 1990, when Gorbachev accepted and admitted the responsibility of the NKVD for what he had done. And this version of the Katyn events has since become modern Russia official. An investigation conducted in 2004 into the Katyn case by the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation confirmed the imposition of death sentences by the NKVD troika on 14,542 Polish prisoners of war and reliably established the death of 1,803 people and the identity of 22 of them. Russia continues to repent for Katyn and transfers more and more declassified documents on these events to Poland.

True, these “documents,” as it turned out recently, may very well turn out to be fake. Late State Duma deputy Victor Ivanovich Ilyukhin, who was closely involved in restoring the truth in the “Katyn case” (for which, quite possibly, he paid with his life), told KM.RU how an “unnamed source” approached him (however, as Viktor Ivanovich clarified, for him this source is not only “named”, but also credible), personally involved in the falsification of state archival data. Ilyukhin presented KM TV with blank document forms given to him by his source, corresponding to the late 1930s - early 1940s. The source directly stated that he and a group of other people falsified documents dedicated to the Stalinist period of history, and on precisely such forms.

« I can say that these are absolutely real forms, - said Ilyukhin, - including those used by the 9th Directorate of the NKVD/NKGB at that time" Even the corresponding typewriters of the time, which were used in the central party institutions and state security agencies, were provided in this group.

Victor Ilyukhin also presented several samples of impressions of stamps and seals such as “Classified”, “Special folder”, “Keep forever”, etc. Experts confirmed to Ilyukhin that the stamps and seals used to make these impressions were made in the period after 1970- x years " Until the end of the 1970s. The world did not know such a technique for making these counterfeit stamps and seals, and our forensic science did not know either"- noted Ilyukhin. According to him, the opportunity to produce such prints appeared only at the turn of the 1970s-80s. " This is also the Soviet period, but completely different, and they were made, as that stranger explained, in the late 1980s - early 1990s, when the country was already ruled Boris Yeltsin “- noted Ilyukhin.

From the experts’ conclusions it followed that in the production of documents on the “Katyn case” various stamps, cliches, etc. were used. However, according to Ilyukhin, not all stamps and seals were fake; there were also genuine ones, which “got, as they say, inherited when in August 1991 they stormed and entered the Central Committee building, and found a lot there. There were both cliches and cliches; I must say that they found a lot of documents. Documents that were not filed, but were in folders; all this was scattered in a disorderly state. Our source said that then all this was brought into compliance so that later, along with genuine documents, false documents could also be included in the case.”

This, in a nutshell, is the current state of the “Katyn case.” The Poles are demanding more and more “documentary” evidence of the guilt of the then Soviet leadership in the Katyn “crime.” Well, the leadership Russia is coming to meet these wishes, declassifying more and more archival documents. Which, as it turns out, are fakes.

In light of all this, at least two fundamental questions arise.
First directly concerns Katyn and Russian-Polish relations. Why is the voice of those who (very reasoned, by the way) expose the current official version not taken into account by the Russian leadership? Why not conduct an objective investigation of all the circumstances revealed in connection with the investigation of the Katyn case? Moreover, the recognition by Russia, as the legal successor of the USSR, of responsibility for Katyn threatens us with astronomical financial claims.
well and second the problem is even more important. After all, if an objective investigation confirms that state archives (at least the slightest part of them) have been falsified, then this puts an end to the legitimacy of the current Russian government. It turns out that she took the helm of the country in the early 1990s with the help of forgery. How then can you trust her?

As we see, to resolve these issues, it is necessary to conduct an OBJECTIVE investigation of the materials on the Katyn case. But the current Russian government does not intend to conduct such an investigation.

In 1940, more than 20 thousand Polish prisoners of war disappeared without a trace on the territory of the USSR. For a long time it was believed that they were killed by the Nazis. But in 1990, USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev declassified part of the documents about the Katyn massacre and handed them over to Poland. The truth shocked both Russians and Poles.

In 1943, during the occupation of the Smolensk region by German troops, mass graves of people in Polish military uniforms were discovered for the first time in the Katyn Forest.

Tragedy without witnesses In the 1940s, on one of the islands of Lake Seliger there was the so-called Ostashkovsky camp, where more than 5 thousand Polish military and police were kept. The prisoners were taken to the USSR after the outbreak of World War II, when german army And Soviet troops entered Poland, dividing the country. The captured Poles were distributed to several camps: Ostashkovsky, Starobelsky and Kozelsky.

In August 1939, a non-aggression pact was signed in Moscow between the USSR and Germany, which went down in history as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The agreement had a secret annex on the division of Eastern Europe. On September 1, Germany attacked Poland, and already on September 17, units of Soviet troops entered the country. The Polish army ceased to exist.

In the Ostashkovsky camp, mainly police officials and employees of the border troops were kept. The dam they built connecting the island to the mainland is still preserved. The Poles were here for a little over six months. In April 1940, the first batches of prisoners of war began to be sent to an unknown destination.

In 1943, near Smolensk, in the town of Katyn, mass graves were discovered. German military medical experts said: the bodies of more than 4 thousand Polish officers were found in the forest in 7 trenches. The exhumation was led by the famous forensic expert, professor at the University of Breslau Gerhard Butz. He later presented his findings to the International Commission of the Red Cross.

In the spring of 1943, the so-called “Katyn Lists” began to appear in Warsaw. Behind them there were queues at the newsstands. Every day the lists were replenished with the names of Polish prisoners of war identified during the exhumation

At the end of 1943, Soviet troops liberated Smolensk region. Soon a medical commission began working in the Katyn Forest under the leadership of the famous Soviet surgeon Nikolai Burdenko. The duties of the commission included searching for evidence that the captured Poles were destroyed by the Germans after the German attack on the USSR.

According to historian Sergei Alexandrov, “the main argument that the Polish officers were shot by the Germans was the discovery of a German-style Walter pistol. And this was the basis for the version that it was the Nazis who destroyed the Poles.” During the same period, they were looking for those among local residents who believed that the Poles were shot by NKVD units. The fate of these people was sealed.

In 1944, after the end of the work of the Soviet commission, a cross was erected in Katyn with an inscription stating that Polish prisoners of war, shot by the Nazis in 1941, were buried here. The opening ceremony of the memorial was attended by Polish soldiers from the Kosciuszko division, who fought on the side of the USSR.

After the end of World War II, Poland entered the socialist bloc. Any discussion of the Katyn issue was prohibited. At the same time, in contrast to the official Soviet monument in Katyn, Warsaw had its own place in memory of compatriots. Relatives of the victims had to hold memorial services in secret from the authorities for a long time. The silence dragged on for almost half a century. Many relatives of the executed Polish prisoners of war died without waiting for the truth about the tragedy.

The secret becomes clear For many years, access to Soviet archives was limited to selected party officials. Most documents are marked “top secret”. In 1990, on the instructions of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, this package with materials about the executions in Katyn was transferred to the Polish side. The most valuable of the documents is a note from the head of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs, Lavrentiy Beria, addressed to Stalin, dated April 1940. According to the note, Polish prisoners of war “tried to continue counter-revolutionary activities,” which is why the head of the NKVD of the USSR advised Stalin to sentence all Polish officers to death.

Now it was necessary to find the burial places of all Polish prisoners of war. The tracks led to the city of Ostashkov, next to which there was a camp. Here the investigators were helped by surviving witnesses. They confirmed that the Poles were taken from the camp by rail in April 1940. Nobody saw them alive again. Local residents only learned decades later that prisoners of war were taken to Kalinin.

Opposite the Kalinin monument in the city is the former building of the regional NKVD. This is where Polish prisoners were shot. More than 50 years later, the former head of the local NKVD, Dmitry Tokarev, told investigators of the Main Military Prosecutor's Office about this during interrogation.

Overnight, up to 300 people were shot in the basements of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of Kalinin. Everyone was taken to the execution basement one by one, ostensibly for background checks. Personal belongings and valuables were also taken away here. Only at this moment did the prisoners begin to realize that they would never get out of here.

During interrogation in 1991, Dmitry Tokarev agreed to draw a route map to the place where the bodies of the murdered Polish officers were buried. Here, not far from the village of Mednoye, there was a rest house for the leadership of the NKVD, and nearby was the dacha of Tokarev himself.

In the summer of 1991, excavations began on the territory of the former NKVD dachas in the Tver region. A few days later the first terrible discoveries were made. Polish forensic experts took part in the identification along with Soviet investigators.

New disaster 2010 marked 70 years since the execution of Polish prisoners of war. On April 7, a funeral ceremony took place in the Katyn Forest, which was attended by relatives of the victims, as well as the prime ministers of Russia and Poland.

Three days later, a plane crash occurred near Katyn. The plane of Polish President Lech Kaczynski crashed near Smolensk during landing. Along with the president, who was rushing to the funeral ceremony in Katyn, the relatives of the executed prisoners of war also died.

It’s too early to put an end to the Katyn affair. The search for burials is still ongoing.

On March 5, 1940, the USSR authorities decided to apply to Polish prisoners of war highest form punishment - execution. A start has been made Katyn tragedy, one of the main stumbling blocks in Russian-Polish relations.

Missing officers

On August 8, 1941, against the backdrop of the outbreak of war with Germany, Stalin entered into diplomatic relations with his newfound ally, the Polish government in exile. As part of the new treaty, all Polish prisoners of war, especially those captured in 1939 on the territory of the Soviet Union, were granted an amnesty and the right to free movement throughout the territory of the Union. The formation of Anders' army began. However, the Polish government was missing about 15,000 officers who, according to documents, were supposed to be in the Kozelsky, Starobelsky and Yukhnovsky camps. To all the accusations of the Polish General Sikorski and General Anders of violating the amnesty agreement, Stalin replied that all the prisoners were released, but could escape to Manchuria.

Subsequently, one of Anders’ subordinates described his alarm: “Despite the “amnesty”, Stalin’s own firm promise to return prisoners of war to us, despite his assurances that prisoners from Starobelsk, Kozelsk and Ostashkov were found and released, we did not receive a single call for help from prisoners of war from the above-mentioned camps. Questioning thousands of colleagues returning from camps and prisons, we have never heard any reliable confirmation of the whereabouts of the prisoners taken from those three camps.” He also owned the words spoken a few years later: “Only in the spring of 1943 a terrible secret was revealed to the world, the world heard a word that still emanates horror: Katyn.”

re-enactment

As you know, the Katyn burial site was discovered by the Germans in 1943, when these areas were under occupation. It was the fascists who contributed to the “promotion” of the Katyn case. Many specialists were involved, the exhumation was carefully carried out, they even took local residents on excursions there. The unexpected discovery in the occupied territory gave rise to a version of a deliberate staging, which was supposed to serve as propaganda against the USSR during the Second World War. This became an important argument in accusing the German side. Moreover, there were many Jews on the list of those identified.

The details also attracted attention. V.V. Kolturovich from Daugavpils outlined his conversation with a woman who, together with fellow villagers, went to look at the opened graves: “I asked her: “Vera, what did people say to each other while looking at the graves?” The answer was as follows: “Our careless slobs can’t do that - it’s too neat a job.” Indeed, the ditches were perfectly dug under the cord, the corpses were laid out in perfect stacks. The argument, of course, is ambiguous, but we should not forget that according to the documents, the execution of such a huge number of people was carried out in the shortest possible time. The performers simply did not have enough time for this.

Double jeopardy

At the famous Nuremberg Trials on July 1-3, 1946, the Katyn massacre was blamed on Germany and appeared in the indictment of the International Tribunal (IT) in Nuremberg, section III “War Crimes”, about cruel treatment of prisoners of war and military personnel of other countries. Friedrich Ahlens, commander of the 537th regiment, was declared the main organizer of the execution. He also acted as a witness in the retaliatory accusation against the USSR. The tribunal did not support the Soviet accusation, and the Katyn episode is absent from the tribunal’s verdict. All over the world this was perceived as a “tacit admission” by the USSR of its guilt.
The preparation and progress of the Nuremberg trials were accompanied by at least two events that compromised the USSR. On March 30, 1946, the Polish prosecutor Roman Martin, who allegedly had documents proving the guilt of the NKVD, died. Soviet prosecutor Nikolai Zorya also fell victim, who died suddenly right in Nuremberg in his hotel room. The day before, he told his immediate superior, Prosecutor General Gorshenin, that he had discovered inaccuracies in the Katyn documents and that he could not speak with them. The next morning he “shot himself.” There were rumors among the Soviet delegation that Stalin ordered “to bury him like a dog!”

After Gorbachev admitted the guilt of the USSR, researcher on the Katyn issue Vladimir Abarinov in his work cites the following monologue from the daughter of an NKVD officer: “I’ll tell you what. The order regarding the Polish officers came directly from Stalin. My father said that he saw an authentic document with Stalin’s signature, what should he do? Put yourself under arrest? Or shoot yourself? My father was made a scapegoat for decisions made by others.”

Party of Lavrentiy Beria

The Katyn massacre cannot be blamed on just one person. Nevertheless, the greatest role in this, according to archival documents, was played by Lavrentiy Beria, “ right hand Stalin." The leader’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, noted the extraordinary influence that this “scoundrel” had on her father. In her memoirs, she said that one word from Beria and a couple of forged documents was enough to determine the fate of future victims. The Katyn massacre was no exception. March, 3rd people's commissar Internal Affairs Beria suggested that Stalin consider the cases of Polish officers “in a special manner, with the application of capital punishment to them - execution.” Reason: “All of them are sworn enemies of the Soviet regime, filled with hatred of the Soviet system.” Two days later, the Politburo issued a decree on the transport of prisoners of war and preparations for execution.
There is a theory about the forgery of Beria’s “Note”. Linguistic analyzes provide different results, the official version does not deny Beria’s involvement. However, statements about the falsification of the “note” are still being made.

Frustrated hopes

At the beginning of 1940, the most optimistic mood was in the air among Polish prisoners of war in Soviet camps. Kozelsky and Yukhnovsky camps were no exception. The convoy treated foreign prisoners of war somewhat more leniently than its own fellow citizens. It was announced that the prisoners would be transferred to neutral countries. In the worst case, the Poles believed, they would be handed over to the Germans. Meanwhile, NKVD officers arrived from Moscow and began work.
Before departure, the prisoners, who truly believed they were being sent to a safe place, were given vaccinations against typhoid fever and cholera - presumably to reassure them. Everyone received a packed lunch. But in Smolensk everyone was ordered to prepare to leave: “We have been standing on a siding in Smolensk since 12 o’clock. April 9, getting up in the prison cars and preparing to leave. We are being transported somewhere in cars, what next? Transportation in “crow” boxes (scary). We were taken somewhere in the forest, it looked like a summer cottage..." - this last record in the diary of Major Solsky, who rests today in the Katyn forest. The diary was found during exhumation.

The downside of recognition

On February 22, 1990, the head of the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee, V. Falin, informed Gorbachev about new archival documents found that confirm the guilt of the NKVD in the Katyn execution. Falin proposed to urgently formulate a new position of the Soviet leadership in relation to this case and inform the President of the Polish Republic Wojciech Jaruzelski about new discoveries in the matter of the terrible tragedy.

On April 13, 1990, TASS published an official statement admitting the guilt of the Soviet Union in the Katyn tragedy. Jaruzelski received from Mikhail Gorbachev lists of prisoners being transferred from three camps: Kozelsk, Ostashkov and Starobelsk. The main military prosecutor's office opened a case on the fact of the Katyn tragedy. The question arose of what to do with the surviving participants of the Katyn tragedy.

This is what Valentin Alekseevich Alexandrov, a senior official of the CPSU Central Committee, told Nicholas Bethell: “We do not exclude the possibility of a judicial investigation or even a trial. But you must understand that the Soviet public opinion does not fully support Gorbachev’s policy regarding Katyn. We in the Central Committee have received many letters from veterans’ organizations in which we are asked why we are defaming the names of those who were only doing their duty in relation to the enemies of socialism.” As a result, the investigation against those found guilty was terminated due to their death or lack of evidence.

Unresolved issue

The Katyn issue became the main stumbling block between Poland and Russia. When a new investigation into the Katyn tragedy began under Gorbachev, the Polish authorities hoped for a confession of guilt in the murder of all the missing officers, the total number of which was about fifteen thousand. The main attention was paid to the issue of the role of genocide in the Katyn tragedy. However, following the results of the case in 2004, it was announced that it was possible to establish the deaths of 1,803 officers, of whom 22 were identified.

The Soviet leadership completely denied the genocide against the Poles. Prosecutor General Savenkov commented on this as follows: “during the preliminary investigation, at the initiative of the Polish side, the version of genocide was checked, and my firm statement is that there is no basis to talk about this legal phenomenon.” The Polish government was dissatisfied with the results of the investigation. In March 2005, in response to a statement by the Main Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation, the Polish Sejm demanded recognition of the Katyn events as an act of genocide. Members of the Polish Parliament sent a resolution to Russian authorities, which demanded that Russia “recognize the murder of Polish prisoners of war as genocide” based on Stalin’s personal hostility towards the Poles due to defeat in the 1920 war. In 2006, relatives of the dead Polish officers filed a lawsuit in the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights, with the aim of obtaining recognition of Russia in the genocide. The end to this pressing issue for Russian-Polish relations has not yet been reached.