Katyn: the most persistent cover-up in the twentieth century—not only by the Soviets but also by their wartime Western allies.

Katyn: the long cover-up

by Dariusz Tolczyk

Are we finally getting the facts straight about the Soviet massacre?

On April 7, 2010, Vladimir Putin traveled to the Katyn forest in Western Russia, in order to join the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk in commemorating Stalin’s victims shot and buried there seventy years earlier. Three days after this commemoration, the world was shaken as the plane carrying another Polish delegation to Katyn, headed by President Lech Kaczynski, crashed en route, killing everyone aboard. The catastrophe has sent Poland into mourning, and the events that precipitated it need to be remembered as well. In the spring of 1940, the Soviet political police, NKVD, carried out a secret killing of at least 22,436 Polish prisoners; 4,421 of them were executed in Katyn. Among the countless crimes of World War II (some of them much greater in scope), this mass murder has become subject to arguably the most persistent cover-up in the twentieth century—not only by the Soviets but also, initially, by their wartime Western allies.

Yesterday was simply erased from the blackboard and replaced by today.

 The fall of Communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union led Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin to the disclosure of some key archival evidence and admission of the Soviet responsibility. But under Putin, the Kremlin has fallen silent on the issue, reclassified many documents, and halted further investigation. At the same time, the cult of Stalin, encouraged by the government, enjoyed its renaissance in Russia. Does Putin’s long-overdue admission of truth in Katyn mark the end of this charade? Does it indicate the definitive departure from Stalinist nostalgia and initiate a new assessment of Russia’s totalitarian past?

In order to understand better both the Katyn crime and its cover-up, we need first to take a look at the nature of the Soviet regime back in the 1930s—a decade marked by Stalin’s monumental crimes against his own people, such as the Great Famine and Great Terror. Under Stalin, public memory was supposed to resemble a blackboard on which the authorities could write, erase, and write again according to their changing political agendas. By the end of the 1930s, Soviet citizens were so well trained in the Orwellian art of forgetting that they did their best to avoid asking unnecessary questions upon learning, in late August 1939, that their Communist homeland had a new friend and ally: Nazi Germany. The September invasion of Poland by Hitler and Stalin did not raise any public discussion either. Celebrating the successful end of the military operations in Poland,Pravda simply stated on September 30 that “now, the German-Soviet friendship was cemented forever.” Less than two years later, when Hitler violated this friendship by invading the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Soviet public memory was ruptured again. This time, nobody was supposed to remember that Nazi Germany had ever been anything other than a mortal enemy of both the Soviet Union and humanity itself. Once again, yesterday was simply erased from the blackboard and replaced by today.

A phenomenon not entirely unlike the Stalinist rupture of memory occurred during World War II in the countries boasting the greatest freedom of public discourse: Great Britain and the United States. The way in which most Westerners seem inclined to view World War II up to this day—as a morally unambiguous struggle of good against evil—has its sources in a peculiar operation performed on public memory by the British and American governments and most of the media during the war.

In the period of the Soviet alliance with Hitler, from August 23, 1939 to June 22, 1941, the British and American publics followed news of Stalin’s invasions against Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and Romania just as they followed news of Hitler’s aggression against Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, France, Greece, and Yugoslavia. On January 1, 1940, Time magazine put Stalin on its cover, and characterized him as an ominous character who “matched himself with Adolf Hitler as the world’s most hated man.”

But on June 22, 1941, everything changed. In the wake of Hitler’s attack on Russia, yesterday and today became mutually incompatible in much of Western public discourse on the Soviet Union. Stalin became a natural ally of Great Britain and (soon) the United States. In order to construct an unambiguous image of the war, based on a clear moral dichotomy of us (now including the Soviet Union) versusthem, a new image of Stalin and his regime was generated by British and American governments and developed by the media in both countries. And so, The Commonweal described Stalin’s political order as “something like a combination of Washington’s, Jefferson’s, and Lincoln’s, and functioning under a similar constitution,” while Lifeinformed its readers that Soviet people “look like Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans.” Those readers who might have heard horror stories about the NKVD were informed that this was nothing other than “a national police similar to the FBI” and it was concerned simply with catching traitors.

By January 4, 1943, many Americans might have felt déjà vu as they were looking at the cover of Time magazine and seeing the face of Stalin, just like three years earlier. But the new Stalin no longer resembled the old one. The new Stalin was a heroic leader of the free world and a great friend of democracy. By then, the Western black-and-white myth of World War II was so well entrenched in the public discourse that perhaps those who remembered the Stalin of 1940 might have wondered whether their memories were playing tricks on them.

Even President Roosevelt, who played a central role in developing this new image of Stalin, became so attached to it that he seemed genuinely to believe in it. He confessed to his former Ambassador to Moscow, William Bullit: “I just have a hunch that Stalin doesn’t want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for the world of democracy and peace.”

Final del formulario

On April 13, 1943, however, the newly woven cloak of wishful thinking, in which Stalin had just been dressed in the West, suddenly ripped. German radio announced that German soldiers had discovered mass graves in the Katyn forest near Smolensk in western Russia. The graves were filled with the bodies of Polish army officers who surrendered to the Soviets in 1939. Forensic specialists strongly suggested that they were killed in the spring of 1940. The evidence pointed towards the Soviets as the perpetrators of this crime.

The Western public had no clue how to understand this shocking information. The news was reported by the Germans and therefore it was not supposed to be true. Only the Soviet leadership knew exactly the origins of the Katyn mass graves. These origins reached back to the period pushed into oblivion by the new allied myth of World WarII, namely to the time of Stalin’s partnership with Hitler. Only some among these dead officers were professional military men. Most were members of the Polish educated elite mobilized for war and given officer’s ranks—professionals, teachers, doctors, lawyers, civil servants, engineers, scientists, journalists, and artists.

One of the first priorities of both Hitler and Stalin after their joint conquest of Poland was to clear the country of its elites. The Soviets immediately isolated the captured Polish officers in three special camps. On March 5, 1940, Lavrenty Beria, the chief of the Soviet security apparatus, presented to the Politburo of the Communist Party a formal resolution to kill the inhabitants of these camps in conjunction with 11,000 other Polish political prisoners—altogether 25,700 people. Of course, Beria would not have proposed such an important step without an original order or suggestion from Stalin. The Politburo swiftly approved Beria’s resolution. Stalin signed first, followed by Voroshilov, Molotov, and Mikoyan. Kaganovich and Kalinin gave their approval by phone.

The decision was carried out without delay. At that time, before the Holocaust overshadowed all the records of mass murder, the NKVDexecutioners were the most accomplished killers in the world. In the years 1937–1938, the most intensive period of the Great Terror, they managed to execute 689,692 people (according to the most conservative count). Most of the Polish officers were shot in the back of the head and secretly buried in mass graves near Tver, Kharkov, and Katyn. By the end of May 1940, the operation was completed, and in October Beria ordered 124 executioners and organizers of the killings to be paid monetary awards: officers received additional monthly wages, and ordinary NKVD men got 800 rubles each.

When the Germans announced their discovery in Katyn on April 13, 1943, all major Western media waited for the Soviets to comment. It took two days for the Soviet Bureau of Information to come up with its statement: “In launching this monstrous invention the German-Fascist scoundrels did not hesitate at the most unscrupulous and base lies, in their attempts to cover up crimes which, as has now become evident, were perpetrated by themselves.” The American and British leaders must have felt relief. But the Polish government-in-exile based in London and headed by General Wladyslaw Sikorski did not consider the case closed and asked the International Red Cross in Geneva to conduct an investigation of the Katyn massacre. The Germans, eager to exploit the Katyn revelations, filed a similar petition on the same day.

Each party—the Poles, the Germans, the Soviets, and the Western allies—knew that the black-and-white myth of World War II could not survive a confrontation with the truth of Katyn. On April 19,Pravda published an article with a telling title, “The Polish Helpers of Hitler.” In it, the Soviet propagandists stated:

The slander escalates quickly. Before the ink dried on the pens of the German fascist slanderers, the disgusting fabrication of Goebbels and company about the alleged mass murder of Polish officers by the Soviet authorities in 1940 were followed not only by Hitler’s lackeys but, strangely enough, by the circles of the government of General Sikorski… . Those Poles who willingly accepted the Nazi lie and are ready to collaborate with the Nazi executioners of the Polish people will be remembered by history as helpers of the cannibal Hitler.

Two days later, Stalin sent Churchill and Roosevelt a secret wire, in which he concluded that the Polish attempt to let the International Red Cross investigate the Katyn massacre proves that there is “a contact and a collusion between Hitler and the Sikorski Government… . At a time when the peoples of the Soviet Union are shedding their blood in a grim struggle against Hitler’s Germany and bending their energies to defeat the common foe of the freedom-loving democratic countries, the Sikorski Government is striking a treacherous blow at the Soviet Union to help Hitler’s tyranny.”

The Western leaders immediately started playing Stalin’s game. Roosevelt wrote to Stalin: “I fully understand your problem… . Churchill will find ways and means of getting the Polish Government in London to act with more common sense in the future.” Churchill seemed to have little doubt as to who killed the Polish officers in Katyn. In a private conversation with Sikorski, he said: “Unfortunately, the German accusations are probably true. The Bolsheviks are capable of the worst atrocities.” But in an official meeting with Sikorski, Churchill’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Anthony Eden, asked the Polish Prime Minister to issue a statement confirming that the Katyn massacre was a Nazi fabrication. Sikorski refused.

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