Katyn massacre. Historical reference. Katyn. Katyn tragedy

Katyn: Chronicle of events

The term "Katyn crime" is collective, it means 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 officers taken prisoner by the Red Army in September 1939 and held in three NKVD POW camps, including -

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

- 6311 prisoners of the Ostashkov camp (shot in Kalinin and buried in Medny);

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

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

Katyn - only one of a number of places of executions - has become a symbol of the execution of all the above groups of Polish citizens, since it was in Katyn in 1943 that the graves of murdered Polish officers were first discovered. Over the next 47 years, Katyn remained the only reliably known burial place for the victims of this "operation".

background

On August 23, 1939, the USSR and Germany signed 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 pre-war territory was assigned to the Soviet Union. Polish state. For Hitler, the pact meant the removal of the last obstacle before an attack on Poland.

On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany attacked Poland, thus unleashing the Second world war. On September 17, 1939, in the midst of bloody battles of the Polish Army, desperately trying to stop the rapid advance of the German army inland, the Red Army invaded Poland in collusion with Germany - without declaring war by the Soviet Union and contrary to the non-aggression pact between the USSR and Poland. Soviet propaganda declared the operation of the Red Army "a liberation campaign in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus."

The offensive of the Red Army came as a complete surprise to the Poles. Some did not even rule out that the introduction of Soviet troops was directed against German aggression. Realizing the doom of Poland 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 trying to disarm the Polish units. As a result, only a few Polish units offered resistance to 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 officers, gendarmerie, prison guards, etc. Not being able to maintain 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, most of the 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, by agreement on the exchange of prisoners, were transferred to Germany (Germany, in return, transferred the captured to the Soviet Union German troops of Polish military personnel - Ukrainians and Belarusians, residents of the territories that went to the USSR).

The exchange agreements also applied to civilian refugees who ended up on the territory occupied by the USSR. They could apply to the German commissions operating in the spring of 1940 on the Soviet side for permission to return to their permanent places of residence in the 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 at home or transfer to Germany. police officers, gendarmes, prison guards, etc. (about 6.5 thousand people), who were gathered in the Ostashkov POW 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 the campaign of incessant mass arrests for political reasons, directed primarily against officials of the Polish state apparatus (including officers and policemen who escaped captivity), members of Polish political parties And public organizations, industrialists, large landowners, merchants, border violators and other "enemies of Soviet power." Before the verdict was passed, those arrested were kept for months in the prisons of the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR, 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 decided to execute “14,700 Polish officers, officials, landowners, policemen, intelligence officers, gendarmes, siegemen and jailers located 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, manufacturers, former Polish officers, officials and defectors."

The basis for the decision of the Politburo was a note by 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 decision in the minutes of the meeting of the Politburo, the final part of Beria's note was verbatim reproduced.

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 of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940, was carried out in April and May of the same year.

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

In parallel, there were executions of prisoners in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus.

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

On April 13, 1940, shortly after the start of executions of Polish prisoners of war and prison inmates, the NKVD operation was carried out to deport their families (as well as the families of other repressed people) living in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR to a 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 (who was 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 form a the territory of the USSR of the Polish army to participate in the war against Germany and the release of all Polish citizens who were imprisoned in the USSR as prisoners of war, arrested or convicted, and also kept 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; its commander was General Vladislav Anders, who was urgently released from the inner prison of the NKVD in the Lubyanka.

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

On April 13, 1943, German radio officially announced the discovery in Katyn near Smolensk of the graves of Polish officers shot by the Soviet authorities. By order of the German authorities, the identified names of the dead began to be read out over loudspeakers in the streets and squares of the occupied Polish cities. On April 15, 1943, an official refutation of the Soviet Information Bureau followed, according to which Polish prisoners of war in the summer of 1941 were employed 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 names and surnames of 2,730 of them were established from the discovered personal documents. The corpses were reburied in mass graves next to the original burials, and the results of the exhumation were published in Berlin in the summer of that year in the book Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn. The Germans handed over the documents and objects found on the corpses for detailed study to 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 burned down during one of the bombings.)

On September 25, 1943, the Red Army liberated Smolensk. Only on January 12, 1944, was the Soviet “Special Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of War Prisoners of War by the Nazi Invaders in the Katyn Forest” established, whose chairman was Academician N.N. Burdenko. At the same time, since 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 at Katyn was carried out from 16 to 26 January 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 1380 people were recovered, according to the documents found, the commission established the personal data of 22 people. On January 26, 1944, the Izvestiya newspaper published an official statement from the Burdenko Commission, according to which the Polish prisoners of war, who were in three camps west of Smolensk in the summer of 1941 and remained there after the German troops invaded Smolensk, were shot by the Germans in the autumn 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 on July 1–3, 1946, the testimony of witnesses for the defense (represented by German lawyers) and the prosecution (represented by the Soviet side), in view of the obvious unconvincingness of the Soviet version, the IMT decided not to include the Katyn execution in its verdict as one of the crimes of Nazi Germany.

On March 3, 1959, the chairman of the KGB under the Council of Ministers of the USSR A.N. Shelepin sent the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU N.S. Khrushchev, a top secret note confirming that 14,552 prisoners - officers, gendarmes, policemen, “etc. persons of the former bourgeois Poland", as well as 7305 prisoners in Western Ukraine and Western Belarus were shot in 1940 on the basis of the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940 (including 4421 people in the Katyn Forest). The note suggested destroying all records of the executed.

At the same time, throughout the post-war years, until the 1980s, the USSR Foreign Ministry repeatedly made official demarches with the statement about the established responsibility of the Nazis for the execution of Polish soldiers buried in the Katyn forest.

But the “Katyn lie” is not only the attempts of the USSR 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 the large-scale persecution and attempts to denigrate the members of the Home Army (AK) - a massive anti-Hitler armed underground, subordinate to the Polish "London" government-in-exile during the war years (with which the USSR severed relations in April 1943, after it turned to the International Red Cross with a request to investigate the murder of Polish officers whose remains were found in the Katyn Forest). The symbol of the smear campaign against AK after the war was the posting on the streets of Polish cities of a poster with a mocking slogan "AK is a spitting dwarf of the reaction." At the same time, any statements or actions that directly or indirectly cast doubt on the Soviet version of the death of captured Polish officers were punished, including attempts by relatives to install memorial plates 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, the relatives were forced to hide the fact that a member of their family had died in Katyn. The Polish state security agencies searched 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 pleaded guilty only half a century after the execution of the captured Polish officers - on April 13, 1990, an official TASS statement was published about "the 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 grave crimes of Stalinism. At the same time, the President of the USSR M.S. Gorbachev handed over to President of Poland V. Jaruzelsky the lists of executed Polish prisoners of war (formally, these were lists of instructions for sending stages from the Kozelsky and Ostashkovsky camps to the NKVD for the Smolensk and Kalinin regions, as well as a list of records of the departed prisoners of war from the Starobelsky camp) and some other documents of the NKVD .

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

In 1991, the GVP investigation team, together with Polish specialists, carried out partial exhumations in the 6th quarter of the forest park zone of Kharkov, on the territory holiday village 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 establishment in the procedural order of the places of burial of the executed Polish prisoners of the Starobilsk and Ostashkovsky prisoner of war camps.

A year later, on October 14, 1992, by order of the President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin, documents were made public and handed over 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), Shelepin's note to Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959 and other documents from the Presidential Archive. Thus, documentary evidence became public that the victims of the "Katyn crime" were executed for political reasons - as "hardened, incorrigible enemies of the Soviet regime." At the same time, for the first time, it became known that not only prisoners of war, but also prisoners of prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR were shot. The decision of the Politburo of March 5, 1940, ordered, as already mentioned, to shoot 14,700 prisoners of war and 11,000 prisoners. From Shelepin's note to Khrushchev, it follows that about the same number of prisoners of war were shot, but fewer prisoners were shot - 7305 people. The reason for the "underperformance" 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 Warsaw memorial cemetery "Powazki".

On May 5, 1994, the Deputy Head of the Security Service of Ukraine, General A. Khomich, handed over to the Deputy Prosecutor General of Poland, S. Snezhko, by name alphabetical list 3435 prisoners of the prisons of the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR, indicating the numbers of prescriptions, which, as it has been known since 1990, meant being sent to execution. The list, immediately published in Poland, became conditionally referred to as the “Ukrainian list”.

The "Belarusian list" is still unknown. If the "Shelepin" number of executed prisoners is correct, and if the published "Ukrainian list" is complete, then the "Belarusian list" should include 3,870 people. Thus, by now we know the names of 17,987 victims of the "Katyn crime", and 3,870 victims (prisoners in the western regions of the BSSR) remain nameless. Burial places are reliably known only for 14,552 executed prisoners of war.

On July 13, 1994, the head of the GVP investigation group A.Yu. Yablokov (who replaced A.V. Tretetsky) issued a decision to terminate the criminal case on the basis of paragraph 8 of Article 5 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR (for the death of the perpetrators), and in the decision Stalin, members of the Politburo Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Kalinin and Kaganovich, Beria and other leaders and employees of the NKVD, as well as the executioners, 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 case” (but in relation to the Nazis) that was already given by the Soviet side in 1945–1946 when it was submitted for consideration by the MVT. The Chief Military Prosecutor's Office and the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation canceled Yablokov's decision three days later, and another prosecutor was entrusted with further investigation.

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

On September 21, 2004, the GVP of the Russian Federation terminated criminal case No. 159 on the basis of clause 4 of part 1 of Article 24 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation (due to the death of the perpetrators). Notifying 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 materials of the investigation, but also the very decision to terminate the "Katyn case". Thus, the secret contained in the resolution personnel guilty.

From the response of the GVP of the Russian Federation to the ensuing inquiry from Memorial, it can be seen that “a number of specific high-ranking officials of the USSR” were found guilty, whose actions are 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 marked "secret" and "top secret", and in 80 volumes there are documents marked "for official use". On this basis, access to 116 out of 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 RF GVP refused to consider applications submitted by relatives and Memorial for rehabilitation as victims political repression a number of specific shot 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”, to give it an adequate legal assessment, to make public the names of all those responsible (from decision makers to ordinary executors), to declassify and make public all the materials of the investigation, to establish the names and places of burial of all executed Polish citizens, to recognize executed as victims of political repression and rehabilitate them in accordance with the Russian Law “On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression”.

Information prepared by the International Society "Memorial".

Information from the brochure "Katyn", issued 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 Zachodniego. 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 by A. Shelepin to N. Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959

Issues of cultural studies and history

THE IMAGINARY MYSTERY OF THE REASONS FOR THE SHOOTING OF POLISH OFFICERS IN KATYN IN MARCH 19401

I. I. Kaliganov

I was prompted to take up this topic by a TV show about the Katyn tragedy with the participation of such famous personalities as academician A. O. Chubaryan, film director N. S. Mikhalkov, political scientist V. M. Tretyakov, and others. During the conversation between them, a question was raised by N. S. Mikhalkov about the motives for the execution of Polish officers is a question left unanswered. Indeed, why was it necessary to destroy the Polish command staff just on the eve of the war with the Germans? Does this look reasonable if just a little more than a year after the Katyn tragedy in the USSR, entire divisions were created from Polish prisoners of war to fight the Nazi invaders? Why was it necessary to commit such an atrocity in the complete absence of visible reasonable reasons? According to the interlocutors of the program, there is a certain mystery in this ... But, in our opinion, there was nothing mysterious here. Everything becomes immediately clear if you plunge briefly into the events of those years and the political atmosphere of that time, if you analyze the ideology of the totalitarian Bolshevik state of the 20s - mid-50s of the 20th century.

The topic of Katyn is not new for me: in the students I read State Academy Slavic Culture (GASK) lecture course "Introduction to Slavic Studies" includes the section "Painful points of relations between the Slavs", in which the Katyn execution of Polish officers is given an obligatory place. And our students themselves, who have visited Poland, as a rule, ask about Katyn, wanting to know additional details. But most Russians know almost nothing about the Katyn tragedy. Therefore, here, first of all, it is necessary to give a brief historical background on how the Polish officers ended up in Katyn, how many of them were shot there, and when the said egregious crime was committed. Unfortunately, our newspapers, magazines and television often report superficial, very contradictory information, and people often have the erroneous idea that captured Polish officers were imprisoned in the Katyn camp and were executed due to the approach of German troops, moreover total number executed Polish officers amounted to 10 or even 20 thousand people. Until now, there are separate voices that the perpetrators of the death of Polish soldiers have not been finally established and that they could be the Nazis, who then tried to blame the USSR for their own atrocity. That is why we will try to present the materials here sequentially, without violating the sequence of events and operating, if possible, with accurate facts and figures, delving into not only the essence of them, but also the emotional, state and universal meaning that they carry.

After the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the beginning of World War II, unleashed on September 1, 1939 by the German attack on Poland, German troops, having broken the enemy’s heroic resistance in two weeks (more precisely, in 17 days), occupied most of the original Polish lands, then forcing Poles to surrender. The USSR did not come to the aid of Poland: its proposal to the Polish side to conclude a cooperation agreement on the eve of World War II was rejected. Poland was involved in negotiations with Hitler to conclude a treaty directed against the USSR, it had previously stated that it would not allow the transit of Soviet troops through its territory to provide possible assistance to potential Soviet allies in Europe. This partly contributed Munich agreement 1938, the subsequent dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, the absorption of the Czech lands by Germany and the territorial acquisitions of Poland itself. Events of this kind clearly did not contribute to good-neighborly relations between Poland and the USSR, and formed among Russians a feeling of hostility or even hostility towards the Poles. This feeling was fueled by the memories of the recent Soviet-Polish war of 1918-1921, the encirclement of the Red Army near Warsaw, the capture of 130 thousand Red Army soldiers, who were then placed in the terrible camps of Pulawy, Dombio, Schelkovo and Tukholi, from which they went home only slightly more than half of the prisoners returned.

In Soviet propaganda, Poland appeared with stable epithets "bourgeois" or "pansky". The last word almost every Russian was heard: everyone knew and sang a patriotic song with the lines “The chieftain dogs remember, the Polish lords of the cavalry remember our blades.” In the song, "pans" were put on a par with the chieftain dogs, and the word "dogs" in Russia firmly stuck to the German knights of the Teutonic Order, who stubbornly rushed in the 13th - early 15th centuries. to the Slavic east (a stable expression "dog-knights"). In the same way, the word "pan" in Russian does not have, like the Poles, the harmless, respectfully neutral meaning of "master." It has acquired additional, mainly negative connotations, which are attributed to those who are not actually called that, but called names. “Pan” is a person of a specific leaven, possessing a whole range of negative qualities: arrogant, wayward, arrogant, spoiled, pampered, etc. And, of course, this person is not at all poor (it’s hard to imagine a pan in holey trousers), that is, this person is rich, bourgeois, far from the “thin, hunchbacked” working class - a collective image from the poetry of V. Mayakovsky. So in the mind Soviet man 20 - 40s of the XX century. an evaluative cliché unflattering for the Poles was lined up: Poland is pan-style, bourgeois, hostile and aggressive, like dog-atamans and German dog-knights.

No one doubted the aggressiveness of Poland in the then USSR. After all, only about twenty years ago, taking advantage of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the turmoil that occurred in Russia after the Bolshevik coup of 1917, the Poles not only revived their statehood - they then rushed east to Ukraine and Belarus, trying to restore the unrighteous borders of the Polish state in 1772 This caused, as you know, the Soviet-Polish war

1918-1921, during which the Poles captured a significant part of Belarus and right-bank Ukraine along with Kiev, but then were driven back by the Red Army, which drove the interventionists all the way to Warsaw. However, according to the Riga Treaty of 1921, Western Ukraine and Western Belarus remained with Poland, which was perceived by Ukrainians living in the USSR, Belarusians and Russians themselves as a historical injustice. The division of peoples by artificial political borders is always perceived as an unjust and illogical act, as a kind of historical absurdity to be eliminated at the first opportunity. So did the Ukrainians and Byelorussians, so did the Russian people, who felt a sense of class solidarity and were absolutely sure that the Polish bourgeois "pans" were oppressing the unfortunate Ukrainian and Byelorussian poor. Therefore, at 3 o'clock in the morning from September 16 to 17, 1939, after the Germans had almost completely completed their task in Poland, the USSR made its move, starting to send its troops into the territory of Western Ukraine, Western Belarus, and entered the Polish land itself. On the Soviet side, a total of 600 thousand people were involved, about 4 thousand tanks, 2 thousand aircraft and 5,500 guns.

The Polish army offered armed resistance to the Red Army: the fighting took place in Grodno, near Lvov, Lublin, Vilna, Sarna and other settlements3. Moreover, the captured Polish officers were shot. This happened in Augustovets, Boyars, Small and Large Bzhostovitsy, Khorodov, Dobrovitsy, Gayakh, Grabov, Komarov, Lvov, Molodechno, Svisloch, Zlochov and other areas. 13 hours after the start of the process of introducing Soviet troops (that is, at 16:00 on September 17), the commander-in-chief of the Polish armed forces, Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly issued a general directive calling for no resistance to the advancing units of the Red Army4. Some Polish units, however, did not obey the directive and continued to fight until October 1 inclusive. In total, according to the speech of V. M. Molotov on October 31, 1939, 3.5 thousand soldiers died on the Polish side, about 20 thousand people were wounded or missing. Soviet losses amounted to 737 killed and 1,862 wounded5. In some places, Ukrainians and Belarusians greeted the Red Army soldiers with flowers: some people, drugged by Soviet propaganda, hoped for a new, better life.

In Western Ukraine and Western Belarus by September 21 Soviet army captured about 120 thousand soldiers and officers of the Polish Army. About 18 thousand people made their way to Lithuania, more than 70 thousand to Romania and Hungary. Some of the prisoners consisted of Polish soldiers who retreated from Poland under the swift onslaught of the Germans here, to the eastern lands of their then state. According to Polish sources, 240,000-250,000 soldiers and officers of the Polish Army6 were captured by the Russians. Some discrepancies in estimating the number of Polish prisoners of war arise as a result of the use of different methods of counting and the fact that in the future, even before the start of the Great Patriotic War, Germany and the USSR exchanged part of the Polish military and civilians, who, as a result of hostilities, found themselves far from their place of permanent

residence. The Soviet side managed to transfer about 42.5 thousand Poles to Germany, and Germany, in response, three times less: about 14 thousand people.

Naturally, it would be reckless from the point of view of national security. Therefore, the Soviet authorities undertook what any state would have done in such a situation: the dispersal of a mass of prisoners of war through their internment in various regions of the country. At the same time, some of the captured Poles were released after interrogation by the NKVD to their homeland, and representatives of the higher, middle and lower command staff of the Polish Army were sent to various prisoner of war camps. The same thing happened with officers, chiefs and employees of the Polish police, intelligence officers, heads and guards of prisons and some other officials.

The movement of Polish senior, senior and junior officers from the border regions to other regions of the USSR was carried out from October 3, 1939 to January 1940. regional NKVD. About 4.7 thousand Poles were stationed here, among whom were many senior officer ranks and mobilized reserve officers who had purely humanitarian professions of doctors, teachers, engineers, and writers in civilian life. The attitude towards prisoners of war in this camp was rather tolerable: generals and colonels (4 generals, 1 admiral and 24-26 colonels)8 were accommodated several people in rooms separate from the bulk of the camps, they were allowed to have batmen. The diet was quite satisfactory, as was the medical care. The prisoners could send letters to their homeland, and the cessation of their correspondence with relatives and friends in Poland made it possible to date the Katyn tragedy around the end of April 1940. Luhansk, now Kharkov) region. 3.9 thousand Polish prisoners of war were accommodated here (including 8 generals, 57 colonels, 130 lieutenant colonels and other lower-ranking officials1"). The conditions in this camp were somewhat worse compared to the camp in Kozelsk, but also quite tolerable No one mocked the prisoners, no one regularly beat them, no one forced them countless times to fall on their face in the mud on “walks”, and then deprive them of bathing for a whole month, no one deprived them medical care, as it was with the Red Army in the Polish camps in the 20s of the XX century.

Even in the Ostashkovsky camp, located on the territory of the former monastery of the Nilov Pustyn (Stolbny Island on Lake Seliger), where about 6 thousand Polish junior officers of the army, police and gendarmerie, as well as prison guards and privates11 and living conditions were the worst, everything was not so bad. Judging by the Poles' own testimonies,

“administrative staff, especially doctors and nurses, treated the prisoners like human beings”12.

Further, we will not delve into the details of how hard the truth about the terrible Katyn tragedy, about the endless denials of the Soviet side, which continued to blame the Germans for almost half a century, made its way. The motives for these denials are numerous and varied enough to be covered here. We only note that the main of them were at first the unwillingness to darken relations with the allies during the Second World War, then to undermine "fraternal ties with friendly Poland, which moved along the path of building socialism", and subsequently - attempts to rehabilitate the name of Stalin, gradually undertaken, unfortunately , and still. In our case, more important is the fact that Russia officially recognized the guilt of the USSR in the execution of Polish officers in Katyn. To deny the fact of the Katyn execution after April 13, 1990, when the President of the USSR M. S. Gorbachev handed over to the then President of the Republic of Poland V. Jaruzelsky a complete list of the names of the Poles taken from Kozelsk, Ostashkov and Starobilsk to the place of execution, is simply meaningless13. A year and a half later, on October 14, 1992, the Russian side handed over to Poland a new package of documents and a “special folder” that had been kept in the archives of the Central Committee of the CPSU for many decades. It contained information of particular importance under the heading "Top Secret": an extract from Protocol No. 13 of March 5, 1940, drawn up at a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, with flourishes by I. V. Stalin,

V. M. Molotov and K. E. Voroshilov. With these flourishes, the leaders of the USSR approved the "consideration in a special order" of cases of 14,700 former officers the Polish army and other military personnel, i.e., they were sentenced to "execution" at the suggestion of the NKVD. Recently, the Russian government handed over to Poland a new multi-volume package of documents related to the deaths of Poles in the USSR, which certainly contain a lot of new declassified data that could shed additional light on the topic we are considering.

But the essence is no longer in doubt: the Polish officers were shot not by the Nazis, but by the executioners of the Stalin-Beria NKVD. It remains to answer the question of what made Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov give such a monstrous order. There are several versions here.

The first version, supported by Polish radicals and Russophobes: Stalin's genocide of the Polish people. At the same time, attention is especially focused on the fact that among the executed prisoners of the three camps there were more than 400 doctors, several hundred engineers, more than 20 university professors and many teachers. In addition, 11 generals and 1 admiral, 77 colonels and 197 lieutenant colonels, 541 majors, 1,441 captains, 6,061 other junior officers and sub-officers, as well as 18 chaplains were shot14. Thus, the supporters of this version conclude, the Russians destroyed the Polish military and civilian elite.

However, this point of view is untenable, since genocide usually extends to the entire people, and not just to some part of its social elite. In August 1941, Polish pilots and sailors were transferred to England.

At the end of October 1941, the Polish contingent began to form on the territory of the USSR, which had a strength of 41.5 thousand people and increased by March 1942 to almost 74 thousand people. The Polish government in exile in London proposed to increase the strength of the Polish corps to 96,000 people15. At the head of this, in fact, the army was put a Pole, General Vladislav Anders - a graduate of the St. Petersburg Page Corps, who served in the Russian tsarist army in the First World War. However, the Soviet command was in no hurry to give the Poles weapons. Vladislav Anders was captured by the Red Army near Novogrudok, where he offered fierce resistance to the Germans and Russians. long time he was in the prison of the NKVD and how he could behave in the future, having received almost a hundred thousand Polish army under command on the territory of the USSR, it was not entirely clear. Therefore, the army of General Anders was evacuated to Iran by September 1, 1942, from where it was transferred to Africa to fight the British against the Germans.

Version two: the execution of Polish officers is the revenge of the Russians for the defeat near Warsaw and the inhuman treatment of captured Red Army soldiers in Polish camps. It seems that this version was indicated by the Polish colonel Sigmund Berling, who refused to go with Anders to Iran and led the Polish soldiers and officers who remained in the USSR. Later, he wrote in his diary the following: “... hopeless, stupid resistance and irreconcilably hostile attitude towards the USSR, which has its origins in the past ... will become in the future the immediate causes of the decision of the Soviet authorities, which led to the terrible (Katyn) tragedy”16. The following fact, it would seem, speaks of the irritation and feeling of vindictiveness of the Russians towards the Poles. In September 1939, Deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs V.P. Potemkin presented the Polish Ambassador in Moscow

formation of the Polish state as such17. The anger of Stalin and his entourage was probably caused by the data of Soviet intelligence about the formation by the Germans in occupied Poland separate brigade Podhale shooters to send them to Finland and participate in the war against the Red Army. The order to form a Polish brigade appeared on February 9, 1940, and only the truce between the USSR and Finland concluded on March 13 of the same year frustrated these plans18. Let us recall that the order of the Big Three on the execution of Polish officers dates back to March 5, 1940. It is unlikely that this close chronological sequence of the events we mentioned was of a random nature.

The third version that we would like to propose is a totalitarian-class “sanation”. The execution of Polish officers in the Katyn forest, in the inner prison of the Kharkov NKVD and other places was an elementary “cleansing” characteristic of the totalitarian states of that time. Despite the fact that the previous version seems very plausible and emotions during the signing of the "big red three" execution orders for the Poles could play some role, they were by no means the main reason for it. As the main credo of Bolshevik totalitarianism, the postulate "an idea is everything, and a person is nothing" was proclaimed.

In accordance with it, the multi-million human mass is just construction material, a significant part of which must inevitably go to waste. After the October Revolution of 1917, during civil war In Russia, the Bolsheviks led by Lenin exterminated with incredible cruelty 100 thousand Orthodox priests, shot 54 thousand officers, 6 thousand teachers, almost 9 thousand doctors, about 200 thousand workers and over 815 thousand peasants19. In the 30s of the XX century. under Stalin, the terrible "Red Wheel" of terror again rolled through Soviet cities and villages, smearing millions of people like unnecessary insects hindering the movement forward. The edge of this terrible "Red Wheel" walked in 1940 through the Poles who fell within its reach.

The execution of Polish officers in the Katyn forest cannot be regarded as petty revenge for the Red Army soldiers who died in Polish captivity. The Bolsheviks treated them as waste material needed for the construction of the world dictatorship of the proletariat. This shooting had a deliberately class character and was a preventive class "sanation" for the coming unhindered building of socialism in People's Poland. Stalin and his entourage had no doubt that the Red Army would win a quick victory over Nazi Germany. The USSR surpassed Germany in the number of weapons and human resources. The provision that the Red Army would fight with small forces and beat the enemy on foreign territory appeared in its military regulations. And Poland, of course, after the victory of the USSR was to be one of the first to join the future World Communist Community. The reality of the Second World War overturned the sweet Stalinist dreams. The victory over fascism was won, but at the cost of a sea of blood and the lives of tens of millions of Soviet people.

returning to moral lessons Katyn, first of all, it is necessary to pay tribute to the memory of all Poles who were innocently killed there and in other places. This fact is one of the most tragic in the history of Russian-Polish relations. But "Russians"? Unfortunately, many, following the Polish Russophobes, begin to repeat the artificial oppositions they set in motion: “Poland and Russia”, “Polish-Russian war of 1918-1921”, “Poles and Russians”. In these oppositions, the national moment has no right to exist: not "Poland and Russia", but "Poland and Soviet Russia”, not the “Polish-Russian war”, but the “Polish-Soviet war”. The same applies to the execution in Katyn, where the opposition "Poles-Russians" should not take place (it arises in the minds of the Poles and involuntarily, since the Polish word "gs^ashp" (Russian) coincides with the meaning of our word "Russian") , Bolshevik totalitarianism, unlike German fascism, did not have national character. The construction of the giant punitive "Red Wheel" was international. It was attended by the ancestor of "red terrorism", it is not clear who Lenin was by nationality, a kind of Swedish-Jewish-Kalmyk-Russian individual (see the publication about Lenin's national roots in Ogonyok from the time of V. Korotich). In any case, he did not feel like a Russian, because it is impossible to imagine that atheists, Jews, Tatars or Bashkirs, would be able to give a secret order for the destruction of 100,000 Jews.

rabbis or muezzins, of course, if he is not a crazy or pathological maniac killer. The work of Lenin was continued and multiplied by the Georgians Stalin and Beria, under whom the number of those killed and tortured went into the millions. The head of the Cheka and the deputy also showed themselves excellently in this field. Chairman of the Cheka, the Poles F. E. Dzerzhinsky and I. S. Unshlikht2", Jews L. Trotsky and J. Sverdlov, Latvians M. I. Latsis and P. Ya. Peters did not lag behind them. The famous trio of Russian executioners N. I. Yezhov,

V. S. Abakumov and V. N. Merkulov, compared with the previous defendants, are only their miserable followers. We should not forget the fact that it was the Russians who suffered the most numerous losses from the Red Wheel. In the neighborhood of eight Katyn ditches, where the remains of 4,200 Polish officers lie, there are mass graves of Russians, Ukrainians and Jews executed by Beria's executioners. Therefore, Polish Russophobes have no real arguments for accusing the Russians of the genocide of the Poles or Polonophobia. It would be better for Poles and Russians to compete for the construction of a majestic memorial complex in Moscow, dedicated to millions of people and entire nations who suffered from Bolshevik totalitarianism.

2 Kaliganov II. II. Russia and the Slavs Today and Tomorrow (Polish and Czech Perspectives) // Slavic World in the Third Millennium. Slavic identity - new factors of solidarity. M., 2008. S. 75-76.

4 Katyn. Prisoners of an undeclared war. Documents and materials. M., 1997. S. 65.

5 O foreign policy Soviet Union// Bolshevik. 1939. No. 20. S. 5.

6 Katyn. Prisoners of an undeclared war. S. 15.

7 Katyn drama: Kozelsk, Starobelsk, Ostashkov. The fate of the interned Polish soldiers / comp. and general ed. O. V. Yasnova. M., 1991. S. 21-22.

8 Katyn. Prisoners of an undeclared war. S. 435; Yezhevsky L. Katyn, 1940. Riga, 1990.

9 Yezhevsky L. Katyn, 1940. S. 18.

10 Katyn. Prisoners of an undeclared war. S. 437.

11 Ibid. S. 436.

. L., 1962. 8. 15-16; Katyn. Prisoners of an undeclared war. S. 521.

13 Katyn drama: Kozelsk, Starobelsk, Ostashkov. P. 16. The burial places of all the executed Polish officers have not yet been established. As for Katyn, the tragedy occurred near Smolensk in Kozy Gory (according to a different vowel "Kosogory", see: Ezhevsky L. Decree. op. P. 16) in the Katyn forest, which once belonged to Polish landowners, and then came under the jurisdiction of the NKVD , after which it was surrounded by barbed wire and became inaccessible to unauthorized persons. In addition to the three camps mentioned, Polish prisoners of war were held in Putivl, Kozelytsansky (in the Poltava region), Yuzhsky, Yukhnovsky, Vologda (Zaonikeevsky), Gryazovetsky and Oransky

camps. In addition, over 76,000 refugees and defectors from Poland were placed in the Krasnoyarsk and Altai Territories. Arkhangelsk, Vologda, Gorky, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Chelyabinsk and Yakutsk regions, as well as in the Komi ASSR. The vast majority of them survived and returned home at the end of the war (see: Katyn. March 1940 - September 2000. Execution. The fate of the living. Echo of Katyn. Documents. M., 2001. P. 41).

14 Ibid. S. 25; Katyn. Prisoners of an undeclared war. S. 521.

15 Parsadanova V.S. On the history of soldiers and officers of the Polish Army interned in the USSR // Soviet Slavonic Studies. M., 1990. No. 5. S. 25.

16 Berling Z. Wspomnienia. Warszawa, 1990. Vol. 1. Z largow do Andersa. S. 32.

18 Katyn drama: Kozelsk, Starobelsk, Ostashkov. S. 31.

19 Kaliganov II. II. Bolshevik Russia in the Bulgarian Marginal Literature of the 1920s-1940s // Bulgaria and Russia (XVIII-XX centuries). Mutual knowledge. M., 2010. S. 107.

20 The international character of the command staff of the NKVD is well traced in the history of the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, built by the hands of prisoners. See: Stalin's White Sea-Baltic Canal: Construction History, 1931-1934. / ed. M. Gorky, JI. Averbakh, S. Firin. M., 1998. (Reprint of the 1934 edition). pp. 72, 157, 175, 184, 325, 340, 358, 373, etc.

Before the falsifiers, who fabricated an investigative case on the execution of Polish officers by the NKVD troops, at the final stage, two delicate problems arose, in my opinion:

1. How to eliminate the discrepancy between the statement of the Nazis, who announced in 1943 that about 12 thousand Polish officers were shot in Katyn, and the current Russian-Polish "investigation", which determined that 6 thousand Poles were "shot" near Medny, near Kharkov - 4 thousand and in Katyn - a little over 4 thousand people.

2. Which state body of the USSR should be held responsible for the decision to execute Polish officers, if all attempts to drag the Special Conference of the NKVD into this by the ears turned out to be so untenable that only complete cretins and complete scoundrels can insist on them. (However, if the Polish President Kwasniewski is pleased with the "investigation" and radiates joy over its results, then we are dealing with both at the same time).

After the entry of Soviet troops into the territory of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine in September-October 1939 as internees, and after the declaration of a state of war with the USSR by the emigrant government of Poland in November 1939 - as prisoners of war - about 10 thousand officers of the former the Polish army and about the same number of gendarmes, policemen, intelligence officers, prison workers - only about 20 thousand people (not counting privates and non-commissioned officers). By the spring of 1940 they were divided into three categories.

The first category is dangerous criminals exposed in the murders of communists on the territory of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, in sabotage, espionage and other serious crimes against the USSR. After being arrested by the judicial authorities of the USSR, they were sentenced - partly to imprisonment with serving their sentences in labor camps, partly to death. Taking into account the data that, as a result of various kinds of slips and slips, are reported to us by the Russian-Polish Goebbels, the total number of those sentenced to death amounted to about one thousand people. It is impossible to give an exact figure due to the fact that the Russian falsifiers destroyed the files on all the Polish criminals in the archives they got, so that it would be easier for them, together with the Polish accomplices, to build a version about the execution of Polish officers by the “Stalinist regime”.

The second category - persons from among the Polish officers, who for the world community were supposed to designate Polish prisoners of war - about 400 people in total. They were sent to the Gryazovets POW camp in the Vologda region. Most of them were released in 1941 and handed over to General Anders, who began to form the Polish army on the territory of the USSR. This army, numbering several divisions, General Anders, with the consent of the Soviet leadership, who was convinced that the Andersites did not want to fight against the Nazis on Eastern Front together with the Red Army, led through Turkmenistan and Iran to the Anglo-Americans in 1942. By the way, the British, who had Anders’ units at their disposal, did not stand on ceremony with the arrogant Poles and in the spring of 1944 threw them under German machine guns into the mountainous neck of the Italian town of Montecassino, where they died in large numbers.

The third category was the bulk of the Polish army officers, gendarmes and policemen, who could not be released for two reasons. Firstly, they could join the ranks of the Home Army, which was subordinate to the Polish emigrant government and launched semi-partisan military operations against the Red Army and Soviet power structures. Secondly, based on the inevitability of war with Nazi Germany, about which the Soviet leadership had no illusions, the normalization of relations with the Polish government in exile and the subsequent use of the Poles for the joint struggle against fascism were not ruled out.

A painful and painful solution to the fate of the third, main part of the Polish prisoners of war was found in the fact that they were recognized as socially dangerous by the Special Meeting of the NKVD of the USSR, convicted and imprisoned in forced labor camps. Their dispatch from the Kozelsky, Ostashsky and Starobelsky POW camps (prisoner of war camps and forced labor camps are of a completely different nature, since the latter contain only convicts) was carried out in April-May 1940. Convicted Poles were transported to special-purpose labor camps located west of Smolensk, and there were three of them. The Poles kept in these camps were used in the construction and repair of highways until the Nazis invaded the territory of the USSR. The beginning of the war for the Soviet Union was extremely unfavorable. Already on July 16, 1941, German troops captured Smolensk, and the camps with Polish prisoners of war were with them even earlier. In an atmosphere of confusion and elements of panic, it was not possible to evacuate the Poles deep into Soviet territory by rail or road, and they refused to leave on foot to the East along with a few guards. Only a few of the Polish Jewish officers did so. In addition, the most determined and courageous of the officers began to make their way to the West, thanks to which some of them managed to survive.

In the hands of the Nazis was the entire card file on the Poles, which was kept in labor camps. This allowed them to announce in 1943 that the number of those executed was about 12,000. Using the data of the card index, they published "Official materials..." of their investigation, where they included various "documents" in support of their slanderous version of the execution of Polish officers by the Soviets. But, despite German pedantry, among the documents cited were those that testified that their owners were alive as of October 1941. Here is what, for example, he wrote about the "Official materials ..." of the Germans V.N. Pribytkov, who worked as the director of the Central Special Archive of the USSR before it came under the control of the Yeltsinists: "... The decisive document cited is a certificate of citizenship issued to Captain Stefan Alfred Kozlinsky in Warsaw on October 20, 1941. That is, this document contained in the official German edition and extracted from the Katyn grave, completely crosses out the version of the Nazis that the executions were carried out in the spring of 1940, and shows that the executions were carried out after October 20, 1941, that is, by the Germans. The available data convincingly testify that the Germans started shooting Poles in the Katyn Forest in September 1941 and completed the action by December of the same year. In the materials of the investigation conducted by the commission of Academician N.N. Burdenko, there is also evidence that the Germans, before demonstrating the graves in the Katyn Forest in 1943 to various "semi-official" organizations and individuals, opened the graves and brought into them the corpses of the Poles who had been shot by them in other places. Soviet prisoners of war involved in these works in the amount of 500 people were destroyed. Next to the graves of the Poles shot in the Katyn forest, there are mass graves of Russians. In them, dating mainly to 1941 and partly to 1942, the ashes of 25,000 Soviet prisoners of war and civilians rest. It's hard to believe, but "academic experts" and unfortunate investigators suffering from the Smerdyakovism syndrome, having produced mountains of papers over 14 years of "investigation", do not even mention it!

In the story of the Polish prisoners of war, the actions of the then political leadership headed by Stalin do not look legally irreproachable. Some norms of international law were violated, namely the relevant provisions of the 1907 Hague and 1929 Geneva Conventions on the Treatment of Prisoners of War in General and Prisoners of War Officers in Particular. There is no need to deny this, since in this case denial plays into the hands of our enemies, who, with the help of the "Katyn case", want to finally rewrite the history of the Second World War. We must admit that the condemnation of Polish officers by the Special Meeting of the NKVD of the USSR and their sending to forced labor camps with a change in their status from prisoners of war to prisoners, if it can be justified from the standpoint of political and economic expediency, is in no way justified from the standpoint of international law . We must also recognize that the deployment of Polish officers to camps close to western border The USSR deprived us of the opportunity to provide them with proper security in connection with the perfidious attack of Nazi Germany. And it becomes clear why Stalin and Beria in November-December 1941 could not say something definite to Generals Sikorsky, Anders and the Polish Ambassador Kot about the fate of the Polish officers captured by the Red Army in September-October 1939. They really did not know what happened to them after the occupation by the Nazis of a significant part of the territory of the USSR. And to say that at the time of the German invasion, the Poles were in labor camps west of Smolensk, meant an international scandal and would create difficulties in creating anti-Hitler coalition. Meanwhile, in early December 1941, the Polish government in London received reliable information about the execution of Polish officers by the Germans near Katyn. But it did not bring this information to the attention of the Soviet leadership, but mockingly continued to "find out" where their compatriot officers had gone. Why? The first reason is that the Poles in 1941-1942 and even in 1943 were confident that Hitler would defeat the Soviet Union. The second reason, arising from the first, is the desire to blackmail the Soviet leadership for the subsequent refusal to participate in hostilities against the Germans on the Soviet-German front.

Goebbels' falsification of the "Katyn case" was exposed in the course of an investigation conducted between October 5, 1943 and January 10, 1944. State Commission chaired by Academician N.N. Burdenko. The main results of the work of the Commission N.N. Burdenko were included in the indictment of the Nuremberg Tribunal as "Document USSR-48". In the course of the investigation into the case of Polish officers, 95 witnesses were interrogated, 17 statements were checked, the necessary examination was carried out, and the location of the Katyn graves was examined.

As an indirect proof of their version, all modern Goebbels cite the fact that the Nuremberg Tribunal excluded the Katyn episode from the crimes of the leaders of Nazi Germany. The conclusion of the Burdenko commission was presented as a document of the prosecution, which, as an official one, in accordance with Article 21 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, did not require additional evidence. After all, the leaders of fascist Germany were not accused of personally shooting someone or burning them alive in huts. They were accused of pursuing a policy that resulted in such massive crimes that mankind did not know. The accusers showed that the genocide against the Poles, which also manifested itself near Katyn, was the official policy of the Nazis. However, the judges of the Nuremberg Tribunal, not taking into account the conclusions of the Burdenko commission, only imitated the judicial investigation into the execution of Polish officers near Katyn. After all, the coals were already smoldering cold war! Several years later, in 1952, the American member of the Nuremberg Tribunal, Robert H. Jackson, admitted that his position on Katyn was determined by a corresponding instruction from the government of President G. Truman. In 1952, a committee of the US Congress fabricated the version of the Katyn case they wanted and, in its conclusion, recommended that the US government refer the case to the UN for investigation. However, as the Polish Goebbels complain, "...Washington did not consider it possible to do this." Why? Yes, because the question of who killed the Poles has never been a secret for the Americans. And in 1952, Washington found itself in the position of the current Goebbels, who were afraid to take the case to court: it is beneficial for the US government to chew this case in the press, but it could not allow it to be tried. The American government was wise enough not to drag fakes to the UN. But our stupid provincials, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, with any fake rushed to Warsaw to the Polish presidents. But even this is not enough: Yeltsin instructed his oprichniki to lay out fakes before the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation and, together with them, was convicted of forgery. Bottom line: The Constitutional Court did not say a word about the Katyn tragedy, and according to the logic of the Russian-Polish Goebbels, this should be interpreted as an acquittal to the Soviet Union and its leadership. One cannot but agree with Nobel, who once said: "Any democracy very quickly turns into a dictatorship of scum." The current investigation of the Katyn case by two "big democracies" - Russian and Polish - confirms the validity of the words of the famous Swede.

Yuri Slobodkin,
PhD in Law, Associate Professor

The case of the "Katyn massacre" still haunts researchers, despite the admission of the Russian side of its guilt. Experts find in this case a lot of inconsistencies and contradictions that do not allow for an unambiguous verdict.

strange haste

By 1940, up to half a million Poles appeared in the territories of Poland occupied by Soviet troops, most of whom were soon released. But about 42 thousand officers of the Polish army, policemen and gendarmes, who were recognized as enemies of the USSR, continued to remain in the Soviet camps.

A significant part (26 to 28 thousand) of prisoners was employed in the construction of roads, and then transferred to a special settlement in Siberia. Later, many of them will be liberated, some will form the “Anders Army”, others will become the founders of the 1st Army of the Polish Army.

However, the fate of approximately 14,000 Polish prisoners of war held in the Ostashkovsky, Kozelsky and Starobelsky camps remained unclear. The Germans decided to take advantage of the situation, announcing in April 1943 that they had found evidence of the execution of several thousand Polish officers by Soviet troops in the forest near Katyn.

The Nazis promptly assembled an international commission, which included doctors from controlled countries to exhume corpses in mass graves. In total, more than 4,000 remains were recovered, killed according to the conclusion of the German commission no later than May 1940 by the Soviet military, that is, when this area was still in the zone of Soviet occupation.

It should be noted that the German investigation began immediately after the disaster at Stalingrad. According to historians, this was a propaganda ploy to divert public attention from national disgrace and switch to "the bloody atrocity of the Bolsheviks." According to the calculation of Joseph Goebbels, this should not only damage the image of the USSR, but also lead to a break with the Polish authorities in exile and official London.

Not convinced

Of course, the Soviet government did not stand aside and initiated its own investigation. In January 1944, a commission led by Chief Surgeon of the Red Army Nikolai Burdenko came to the conclusion that in the summer of 1941, due to the rapid advance of the German army, Polish prisoners of war did not have time to evacuate and were soon executed. As proof of this version, the "Burdenko Commission" testified that the Poles were shot from German weapons.

In February 1946, the "Katyn tragedy" became one of the cases that was investigated during the Nuremberg Tribunal. The Soviet side, despite the arguments provided in favor of Germany's guilt, nevertheless, could not prove its position.

In 1951, a special commission of the House of Representatives of the Congress on the Katyn issue was convened in the United States. Her conclusion, based only on circumstantial evidence, declared the USSR guilty of the Katyn murder. As justification, in particular, the following signs were cited: the opposition of the USSR to the investigation of the international commission in 1943, the unwillingness to invite neutral observers during the work of the Burdenko Commission, except for correspondents, and the inability to present sufficient evidence of German guilt in Nuremberg.

Confession

For a long time, the controversy around Katyn did not resume, as the parties did not provide new arguments. It was not until the years of Perestroika that the Polish-Soviet commission of historians began to work on this issue. From the very beginning of work, the Polish side began to criticize the results of the Burdenko commission and, referring to the publicity proclaimed in the USSR, demanded that additional materials be provided.

In early 1989, documents were found in the archives, indicating that the cases of the Poles were subject to consideration at a Special Meeting of the NKVD of the USSR. It followed from the materials that the Poles held in all three camps were transferred to the disposal of the regional departments of the NKVD, and then their names did not appear anywhere else.

At the same time, the historian Yuri Zorya, comparing the lists of the NKVD for those leaving the camp in Kozelsk with the exhumation lists from the German "White Book" on Katyn, found that these were the same persons, and the order of the list of persons from the burials coincided with the order of the lists for sending .

Zorya reported this to the head of the KGB, Vladimir Kryuchkov, but he refused further investigation. Only the prospect of publishing these documents forced in April 1990 the leadership of the USSR to admit responsibility for the execution of Polish officers.

“The revealed archival materials in their totality allow us to conclude that Beria, Merkulov and their henchmen were directly responsible for the atrocities in the Katyn forest,” the Soviet government said in a statement.

Secret package

Until now, the main evidence of the guilt of the USSR is the so-called “packet No. 1”, which was stored in the Special Folder of the Archive of the Central Committee of the CPSU. It was not made public during the work of the Polish-Soviet commission. The package containing materials on Katyn was opened during Yeltsin's presidency on September 24, 1992, copies of the documents were handed over to Polish President Lech Walesa and thus saw the light of day.

It must be said that the documents from "package No. 1" do not contain direct evidence of the guilt of the Soviet regime and can only indirectly testify to it. Moreover, some experts, drawing attention to the large number of inconsistencies in these papers, call them fake.

In the period from 1990 to 2004, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation conducted its own investigation into the Katyn massacre and nevertheless found evidence of the guilt of Soviet leaders in the death of Polish officers. During the investigation, the surviving witnesses who testified in 1944 were interviewed. Now they said that their testimony was false, as they were obtained under pressure from the NKVD.

Today the situation has not changed. Both Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev have repeatedly spoken out in support of the official conclusion that Stalin and the NKVD were guilty. “Attempts to question these documents, to say that someone falsified them, is simply not serious. This is done by those who are trying to whitewash the nature of the regime that Stalin created in a certain period in our country,” Dmitry Medvedev said.

Doubts remain

Nevertheless, even after the official recognition of responsibility by the Russian government, many historians and publicists continue to insist on the fairness of the conclusions of the Burdenko commission. In particular, Viktor Ilyukhin, a member of the Communist Party faction, spoke about this. According to the parliamentarian, a former KGB officer told him about the fabrication of documents from “package No. 1”. According to supporters of the "Soviet version", the key documents of the "Katyn case" were falsified in order to distort the role of Joseph Stalin and the USSR in the history of the 20th century.

Chief Researcher of the Institute Russian history Russian Academy of Sciences Yuri Zhukov questions the authenticity of the key document of the "package No. 1" - Beria's note to Stalin, which reports on the plans of the NKVD regarding the captured Poles. “This is not Beria’s personal form,” Zhukov notes. In addition, the historian draws attention to one feature of such documents, with which he has worked for more than 20 years.

“They were written on one page, a maximum of a page and one third. Because no one wanted to read long papers. So I want to talk again about the document that is considered key. It is already on four pages! ”, The scientist sums up.

In 2009, at the initiative of an independent researcher Sergei Strygin, an examination of Beria's note was carried out. The conclusion was: "the font of the first three pages is not found in any of the authentic letters of the NKVD of that period identified so far." At the same time, three pages of Beria's note are printed on one typewriter, and the last page to another.

Zhukov also draws attention to another oddity of the Katyn case. If Beria had received an order to shoot Polish prisoners of war, the historian suggests, he would probably have taken them further to the east, and would not have killed them right here near Katyn, leaving such clear evidence of a crime.

Doctor historical sciences Valentin Sakharov has no doubt that the Katyn massacre was the work of the Germans. He writes: “In order to create graves in the Katyn forest of Polish citizens allegedly shot by the Soviet authorities, they dug up a lot of corpses at the Smolensk civil cemetery and transported these corpses to the Katyn forest, which made the local population very indignant.”

All the testimonies collected by the German commission were extorted from the local population, Sakharov believes. In addition, the Polish residents called to witness signed documents for German which they did not own.

However, some documents that could shed light on the Katyn tragedy are still classified. In 2006, State Duma deputy Andrey Savelyev submitted a request to the archive service of the Armed Forces of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation about the possibility of declassifying such documents.

In response, the deputy was informed that “the expert commission of the Main Directorate of Educational Work of the Armed Forces Russian Federation produced expert assessment documents on Katyn case stored in the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, and made a conclusion about the inappropriateness of their declassification.

Recently, one can often hear the version that both the Soviet and German sides took part in the execution of the Poles, and the executions were carried out separately in different time. This may explain the existence of two mutually exclusive systems of evidence. However, at the moment it is only clear that the "Katyn case" is still far from being resolved.

Katyn massacre - massacres of Polish citizens (mainly captured officers of the Polish army), carried out in the spring of 1940 by the NKVD of the USSR. As evidenced by documents published in 1992, the executions were carried out by decision of the troika of the NKVD of the USSR in accordance with the resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940. According to published archival documents, a total of 21,857 Polish prisoners were shot.

During the partition of Poland, the Red Army captured up to half a million Polish citizens. Most of them were soon released, and 130,242 people ended up in the NKVD camps, including both members of the Polish army and others whom the leadership of the Soviet Union considered "suspicious" because of their desire to restore Poland's independence. The servicemen of the Polish army were divided: the highest officers were concentrated in three camps: Ostashkovsky, Kozelsky and Starobelsky.

And on March 3, 1940, the head of the NKVD, Lavrenty Beria, proposed to the Politburo of the Central Committee to destroy all these people, since "They are all sworn enemies of the Soviet regime, full of hatred for the Soviet system." In fact, according to the ideology that existed in the USSR at that time, all nobles and representatives of wealthy circles were declared class enemies and were subject to destruction. Therefore, the death sentence was signed for the entire officer corps of the Polish army, which was soon carried out.

Then the war between the USSR and Germany began, and Polish units began to form in the USSR. Then the question arose about the officers who were in these camps. Soviet officials responded vaguely and evasively. And in 1943, the Germans found the burial places of the "missing" Polish officers in the Katyn forest. The USSR accused the Germans of lying, and after the liberation of this area, a Soviet commission headed by N. N. Burdenko worked in the Katyn forest. The conclusions of this commission were predictable: they blamed the Germans for everything.

In the future, Katyn has repeatedly become the subject of international scandals and high-profile accusations. In the early 90s, documents were published that confirmed that the execution in Katyn was carried out by decision of the top Soviet leadership. And on November 26, 2010, the State Duma of the Russian Federation, by its decision, recognized the guilt of the USSR in Katyn massacre. Seems like enough has been said. But it's too early to make a point. Until a full assessment of these atrocities is given, until all the executioners and their victims are named, until the Stalinist legacy is overcome, until then we will not be able to say that the case of the shooting in the Katyn Forest, which took place in the spring of 1940, is closed.

Resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940, which determined the fate of the Poles. It states that “cases of 14,700 former Polish officers, officials, landlords, policemen, intelligence officers, gendarmes, siegemen and jailers who are in the camps of prisoners of war, as well as cases of 11 arrested and in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus 000 members various to-r espionage and sabotage organizations, former landowners, manufacturers, former Polish officers, officials and defectors - to be considered in a special order, with the application of capital punishment to them - execution.

The remains of General M. Smoravinsky.

Representatives of the Polish Catholic Church and the Polish Red Cross inspect the corpses removed for identification.

The delegation of the Polish Red Cross examines the documents found on the corpses.

Identity card of the chaplain (military priest) Zelkovsky, who was killed in Katyn.

Members of the International Commission interview the local population.

Local resident Parfen Gavrilovich Kiselev talks with a delegation of the Polish Red Cross.

N. N. Burdenko

Commission headed by N.N. Burdenko.

Executioners who "distinguished themselves" during the Katyn execution.

Chief Katyn executioner: V. I. Blokhin.

Hands tied with rope.

A memorandum from Beria to Stalin, with a proposal to destroy the Polish officers. On it are the paintings of all members of the Politburo.

Polish prisoners of war.

The international commission examines the corpses.

Note from the head of the KGB Shelepin to N.S. Khrushchev, which says: “Any unforeseen accident can lead to the disclosure of the operation, with all the consequences that are undesirable for our state. Moreover, with regard to those shot in the Katyn forest, there is official version: all Poles liquidated there are considered to be destroyed by the German occupiers. Based on the foregoing, it seems appropriate to destroy all records of the executed Polish officers.