Who shot the Polish officers? Katyn case

In perestroika, Gorbachev did not hang any sins on the Soviet Power. One of them is shooting Polish officers near Katyn allegedly by Soviet secret services.

In reality, the Poles were shot by the Germans, and the myth of 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 China 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 demonstrations in Poznan, the historical center of Wielkopolska chauvinism, that followed shortly after the death of the leader of the Polish communists Bolesław Bierut.

Soon, the turmoil 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, the Polish anti-Sovietists, under the smokescreen of “the fight against the cult of Stalin’s personality,” managed not only to free the right-wing nationalist deviator Vladislav Gomulka and his associates from prison, but also to bring them to power.

And although Khrushchev tried at first to somehow oppose, in the end, he was forced to accept the Polish demands in order to defuse the current situation, which was ready to get out of control. These demands contained such unpleasant moments as the 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 Nazi lie about the involvement of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the Katyn execution of Polish prisoners of war. officers.

In the heat of giving such guarantees, Khrushchev recalled the Soviet Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, a Pole by origin, who served as Minister of Defense of Poland, and all Soviet military and political advisers.

Perhaps the most unpleasant for Khrushchev was the demand to recognize the involvement of his party in the Katyn massacre, but he agreed to this only in connection with the promise of V. Gomulka to put on the trail of Stepan Bandera, the worst enemy of the Soviet government, the head of the paramilitary formations of Ukrainian nationalists who fought against the Red Army to 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 agencies of the USA, England, Germany, on permanent contacts with various underground circles and groups in Ukraine. To do this, its emissaries penetrated there illegally, with the goal of creating an underground network and transporting anti-Soviet and nationalist literature.

It is possible that during his unofficial visit to Moscow in February 1959, Gomulka reported that his secret services had discovered Bandera in Munich, and hurried with the recognition of "Katyn's guilt." One way or another, but on the instructions of Khrushchev on October 15, 1959, the KGB officer Bogdan Stashinsky finally eliminates Bandera in Munich, and the trial that took place over Stashinsky in Karlsruhe (Germany) considers it possible to determine the killer with 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 his obligation, Khrushchev, an experienced ripper secret archives, gives appropriate orders to the chairman of the KGB Shelepin, who moved to this chair a year ago from the post of first secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, and he begins feverishly "working" on creating a material justification for the Hitlerite version of the Katyn myth.

First of all, Shelepin starts a “special folder” “On the involvement of the CPSU (this one puncture already speaks of the fact of gross falsification - until 1952 the CPSU was called the CPSU (b) - L.B.) to the Katyn execution, where, as he believes, should be stored four main documents: a) lists of executed Polish officers; b) Beria's report to Stalin; c) Resolution of the Central Committee of the Party of March 5, 1940; d) Shelepin's letter to Khrushchev (the motherland must know its "heroes"!)

It was this “special folder”, created by Khrushchev at the request of the new Polish leadership, that spurred on 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 Presidential Assistant Jimmy Carter national security, the permanent director of the "research center called the" Stalin Institute "at the University of California, a Pole by birth, Zbigniew Brzezinski to more and more brazen ideological sabotage.

Finally, after more three decades, the history of the visit of the leader of Poland to Soviet Union repeated, only this time in April 1990, the President of the Republic of Poland, V. Jaruzelsky, arrived on an official state visit to the USSR demanding repentance for the “Katyn atrocity” and forced Gorbachev to make the following statement: “Recently, documents have been found (meaning Khrushchev’s “ special folder "- L.B.), which indirectly but convincingly indicate that thousands 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 by the same evil hand."

If we take into account that the "special folder" is a fake, then Gorbachev's statement was not worth a penny. Having achieved from the incompetent Gorbachev leadership in April 1990 shameful public repentance for Hitler's sins, that is, the publication of the TASS Report that “the Soviet side, expressing deep regret over the Katyn tragedy, declares that it represents one of the grave crimes of Stalinism ”, counter-revolutionaries of all stripes safely took advantage of this explosion of the “Khrushchev time bomb” - false documents about Katyn - for their base subversive purposes.

The leader of the notorious "Solidarity" Lech Walesa was the first to "respond" to Gorbachev's "repentance" (they put a finger in his mouth - he bit his hand - L.B.). He proposed to resolve other important problems: to reconsider the assessments of post-war Polish-Soviet relations, including the role of the Polish National Liberation Committee created in July 1944, the treaties concluded with the USSR, because they were allegedly based on criminal principles, to punish those responsible for the genocide, to allow free access to the burial places of Polish officers, and most importantly, of course, to compensate for material damage to the families and relatives of the victims. On April 28, 1990, a representative of the government spoke in the Sejm of Poland with information that negotiations with the government of the USSR on the issue of monetary compensation were already underway and that at the moment it was important to compile a list of all those claiming 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 union of the Warsaw Pact countries, and the liquidation of the Eastern European socialist camp. Moreover, it was believed: the West would dissolve NATO in response, but - “figs to you”: NATO is doing “drang nah Osten”, brazenly absorbing the countries of the former Eastern European socialist camp.

So there were "lists of executed Polish officers" in Katyn. Subsequently, the son of Lavrenty Beria reasonably remarks: “During Jaruzelsky’s official visit to Moscow, Gorbachev handed 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 Soviet archives. The copies contain the names of Polish citizens who were in 1939-1940 in the Kozelsky, Ostashkovsky and Starobelsky camps of the NKVD. None of these documents mentions 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 by the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR L. Beria

I.V. Stalin "About the Polish prisoners of war". Shelepin had only one thing to do - to come up with and print out the “operative part”, where Beria allegedly demands execution for all prisoners of war from the camps and prisoners held in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus “without summoning those arrested and without bringing charges” - fortunately typewriters in the former NKVD of the USSR have not yet been decommissioned. However, Shelepin did not dare to forge Beria's signature, leaving this "document" as a cheap anonymous letter.

But his “operative part”, copied word for word, will fall into the next “document”, which the “literate” Shelepin will call in his letter to Khrushchev “Decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU (?) of March 5, 1940”, and this lapsus calami, this a mistake in the “letter” still sticks out like an awl from a bag (and, indeed, how can “archival documents” be corrected, even if they were invented two decades after the event? - L.B.).

True, this main “document” on the involvement of the party itself is designated as “an extract from the minutes of the meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee. Decision dated 5.03.40.” (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 of Bolsheviks - L.B.). Most surprising of all, this “document” was left unsigned. And on this anonymous letter, instead of a signature, there are only two words - "Secretary of the Central Committee." And that's it!

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

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

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

A paradoxical position on the Katyn "case" was taken by Sergo Beria. His book “My father is Lavrenty 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 was not aware of this, although he makes a similar appearance. But his "awl from the bag" is an almost exact reproduction of the figure of the Khrushchev number of prisoners of war shot in Katyn - 21 thousand 857 (Khrushchev) and 20 thousand 857 (S. Beria).

In his attempt to whitewash his father, he recognizes the “fact” of the Katyn massacre by the Soviet side, but at the same time he blames the “system” and agrees that his father was allegedly ordered to hand over the captured Polish officers of the Red Army within a week, and the execution itself was supposedly entrusted hold 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 saving these 20 thousand 857 lives had already unable to ... I know for sure that my father motivated his fundamental disagreement with the execution of Polish officers in writing. Where are these documents?

The late Sergo Lavrentievich correctly stated that these documents do not exist. Because there never was. Instead of proving the inconsistency of recognizing the involvement of the Soviet side in the Hitlerite-Goebbels provocation in the "Katyn case" and exposing Khrushchev's cheap stuff, Sergo Beria saw this as a selfish chance to take revenge on the party, which, in his words, "always knew how to put a hand in dirty things and at an opportunity to shift the responsibility to anyone, but not to the top party leadership. That is, Sergo Beria also contributed to the big lie about Katyn, as we see.

A careful reading of the “Report of the head of the NKVD Lavrenty 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, policemen, intelligence officers, gendarmes who are in prisoner of war camps , siegemen 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 allegedly mentioned above “Extract from the meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee”, since it was rewritten into a fake document without proper critical reflection. But in this regard, it is difficult to understand Shelepin's statement that 21,857 records were kept in the "secret sealed room" and that all 21,857 Polish officers were shot.

First, as we have seen, not all of them were officers. According to Lavrenty Beria's estimates, in general there were only a little over 4 thousand army officers proper (generals, colonels and lieutenant colonels - 295, majors and captains - 2080, lieutenants, second lieutenants and cornets - 604). This is in prisoner of war camps, and there were 1207 former Polish prisoners of war in prisons. In total, therefore, 4,186 people. In big encyclopedic dictionary”The 1998 edition of the year is written like this: “In the spring of 1940, the NKVD destroyed 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 Lavrenty Beria claims, parts of the regular Red Army?

Secondly, there is a clear discrepancy between the number of "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 turned out to be unaccounted for, which 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 to shoot all the "officers" to the last?

And the last. In the materials fabricated in 1959 on the Katyn case, it is stated that the “troika” was the court for the unfortunate. Khrushchev "forgot" that in accordance with the Decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of November 17, 1938 "On Arrests, Prosecutorial Supervision and the Conduct of Investigations", judicial "troikas" were liquidated. This happened a year and a half before the Katyn massacre, 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 fire, to bourgeois Poland from Soviet Russia according to the Riga Peace Treaty of 1921, the western lands of Ukraine and Belarus were ceded, and this soon led to the forced Polonization of the population of the territories so unexpectedly acquired for free for free: to the closure of Ukrainian and Belarusian schools; to the transformation Orthodox churches in Catholic churches; to the expropriation of fertile lands from the peasants and their transfer to the Polish landowners; to lawlessness and arbitrariness; to the persecution of the national and religious grounds; to the brutal suppression of any manifestations of popular discontent.

Therefore, having drunk on bourgeois Greater Poland lawlessness, yearning for Bolshevik social justice and true freedom, Western Ukrainians and Belarusians, as their liberators and deliverers, as relatives, met the Red Army when it came to their region 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, with almost no resistance, surrendered. The Polish government of Kozlovsky, who fled to Romania on the eve of the capture of Warsaw by Hitler, actually betrayed his people, and the new Polish government in exile, headed by General V. Sikorsky, was formed in London on September 30, 1939, i.e. two weeks after the national catastrophe.

By the time of the perfidious attack of fascist Germany on the USSR, 389 thousand 382 Poles were kept in Soviet prisons, camps and places of exile. From London, the fate of Polish prisoners of war, who were used mainly for road construction work, was very closely followed, so that if they were shot by the Soviet authorities in the spring of 1940, as the false Goebbels propaganda trumpeted to the whole world, this would be timely known through diplomatic channels and would cause a great international outcry.

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 excludes the possibility of a "massacre" "perpetrated" by the Bolsheviks over Polish prisoners of war in the spring of 1940. Nothing indicates the presence of a historical situation that could be an incentive for such an action by the Soviet side.

This was precisely 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.

As tensions increased between Stalin and Sikorsky, there was a thaw between Hitler and Sikorsky. The Soviet-Polish “friendship” ended with a frank anti-Soviet statement by the head of the Polish government in exile on February 25, 1943, which said that it did not want to recognize the historical rights of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples to unite in their nation states».

In other words, there was the fact of the brazen claims of the Polish émigré government to the Soviet lands - Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. In response to this statement, I.V. Stalin formed from the Poles loyal to the Soviet Union, the Tadeusz Kosciuszko division of 15 thousand people. In October 1943, she was already fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Red Army.

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

It is not difficult for experienced masters of provocation to come up with several names of people who never existed. Such “commissars” as Lev Rybak, Avraam Borisovich, Pavel Brodninsky, Chaim Finberg, named by the German information bureau, were simply invented by the Nazi swindlers, since there were no such “commissars” either in the Smolensk branch of the GPU, or in general in the NKVD bodies and No".

On April 28, 1943, Pravda published a “note of 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 use Hitler’s slanderous fake 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.

The commission included: a member of the Extraordinary State Commission(ChGK was investigating 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 ChGK: 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 fulfill 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, 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 of 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. Vyropayeva.

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

However, in the midst of cold war» The US Congress again makes an attempt to revive the "Katyn issue", even creates the so-called. “A commission to investigate the Katyn case, headed by Congressman Madden.

On March 3, 1952, Pravda published a note to the US State Department dated February 29, 1952, where, in particular, it was said: “... the initiation of the question of the Katyn crime eight years after the conclusion official commission can only pursue the goal of slandering the Soviet Union and thus rehabilitating the 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.).

The note was accompanied by the republished in Pravda on March 3, 1952, the full text of the message of the Burdenko commission, which collected extensive material obtained as a result of a detailed study of the corpses recovered from the graves and those documents and material evidence that were found on the corpses and in the graves. At the same time, the Burdenko special commission interviewed numerous witnesses from the local population, whose testimony accurately established the time and circumstances of the crimes committed by the German invaders.

First of all, the message gives information about what constitutes the Katyn forest.

“For a long time, the Katyn forest has been a favorite place where the people of Smolensk usually spent their holidays. The local population grazed cattle in the Katyn forest and procured fuel for themselves. There were no prohibitions or restrictions on access to the Katyn Forest.

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

Particularly strictly guarded was that part of the Katyn forest, which was called "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 summer house - a rest house of the Smolensk department of the NKVD. Upon the arrival of the Germans, a German military institution was located in 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 the information available to the Gestapo, the NKVD officers shot Polish officers in 1940 at the Kozy Gory section, and asked me what evidence I could give about this. I replied that I had never heard of the NKVD carrying out executions in Kozy Gory, and it was hardly possible at all, I explained to the officer, since Goat Gory is a completely open, crowded place and if they were shot there, then about This would be known to the entire population of nearby villages ... ".

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

The Burdenko Commission found 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 Batek, told the Burdenko commission that he was first beaten until he lost consciousness, and then, when he came to, the officer demanded to sign the protocol of interrogation, and he, faint-hearted, under the influence of beatings and threats of execution, he gave false testimony and signed the protocol.

The Nazi command understood that for such a large-scale provocation "witnesses" were clearly not enough. And it distributed among the inhabitants of Smolensk and the surrounding villages "Appeal to the population", which was placed in the newspaper published by the Germans in Smolensk " New way" (No. 35 (157) of May 6, 1943: "Can you give data about the mass murder committed by the Bolsheviks in 1940 over captured Polish officers and priests (? - this is something new - L.B.) in "Kozy Gory" forest, near the Gnezdovo-Katyn highway. Who watched the vehicles from Gnezdovo to "Kozy Gory" or who saw or heard the executions? Who knows the inhabitants who can tell about this? Every message will be rewarded."

To the credit of Soviet citizens, no one pecked at the reward for giving the false testimony needed by the Germans 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, Sofya Zygon asks for the whereabouts of her husband, Tomasz Zygon. The letter is dated 12.09. 1940. On the envelope there is a stamp - “Warsaw. 09.1940" and a stamp - "Moscow, post office, expedition 9, 8.10. 1940”, as well as a resolution in red ink “Uch. set up a camp and send for delivery - 11/15/40. (Signature is illegible).

2. On corpse #4
Postcard, order No. 0112 from Tarnopol with a postmark "Tarnopol 12. 11.40" The handwriting and address are discolored.

3. On corpse No. 101.
Receipt No. 10293 dated 19.12.39, issued by the Kozelsky camp about the acceptance of a gold watch from Lewandovsky Eduard Adamovich. 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 in Polish 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 work on digging graves in the Katyn forest, extracting documents and material evidence incriminating them, who, after doing this work, were shot by the Germans.

From the report of the “Special Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of War by the Nazi Invaders in the Katyn Forest”: “Conclusions from the testimonies and forensic medical examination about the execution of Polish prisoners of war by the Germans in the autumn of 1941 are fully confirmed by material evidence and documents extracted from the Katyn graves.

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

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 policemen 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 Poland's doom in a war on two fronts, the Polish commander-in-chief issued an order not to engage in battle with the 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 Yukhnovsky prisoner of war camp in the 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 organs 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

No trial or investigation

In September 1939 Soviet troops entered Poland. The Red Army occupied those territories that were due to it under the secret additional protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, that is, the current west of Ukraine and Belarus. During the march, the troops captured almost half a million inhabitants of Poland, most of whom were later released or handed over to Germany. About 42 thousand people remained in the Soviet camps, according to an official note.

On March 3, 1940, in a note to Stalin, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Beria wrote that a large number of former officers Polish army, former employees of the Polish police and intelligence agencies, members of Polish nationalist counter-revolutionary parties, members of exposed counter-revolutionary insurgent organizations and defectors.

People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Beria ordered the execution of Polish prisoners

He branded them “incorrigible enemies of the Soviet government” and suggested: “The cases of prisoners of war in the camps - 14,700 people of former Polish officers, officials, landowners, policemen, intelligence officers, gendarmes, siegemen and jailers, as well as cases of those arrested and in prison western regions of Ukraine and Belarus in the amount of 11,000 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. Already on March 5, the Politburo made a corresponding decision.

Execution

By the beginning of April, everything was ready for the extermination of prisoners of war: prisons were liberated, graves were dug. The condemned were taken out for execution by 300-400 people. In Kalinin and Kharkov, prisoners were shot in prisons. In Katyn, especially dangerous people were tied up, they threw a greatcoat over their heads, led them to the moat and shot them in the back of the head.

In Katyn, prisoners were tied up and shot in the back of the head.

As the subsequent exhumation showed, the shots were fired from Walther and Browning pistols, using German-made bullets. This fact was later used by the Soviet authorities as an argument when at the Nuremberg Tribunal they tried to accuse German troops of shooting the Polish population. The tribunal dismissed the accusation, which was, in fact, an admission of Soviet guilt for the Katyn massacre.

German investigation

The events of 1940 have been investigated several times. The first to investigate were German troops in 1943. They discovered burials in Katyn. The exhumation began in the spring. It was possible to approximately establish the time of burial: spring 1940, since many of the dead had fragments of newspapers dated April-May 1940 in their pockets. It was not difficult to establish the identity of many executed prisoners: some of them had documents, letters, snuff boxes and cigarette cases with carved monograms.

At the Nuremberg Tribunal, the USSR tried to shift the blame to the Germans

The Poles were shot by German bullets, but they large quantities supplied to the Baltic States and the Soviet Union. Local residents also confirmed that trainloads of captured Polish officers were unloaded at a nearby station and never seen again. One of the members of the Polish commission in Katyn, Józef Matskevich, described in several books how it was no secret to any of the locals that the Bolsheviks shot Poles here.

Soviet investigation

In the autumn of 1943, another commission operated in the Smolensk region, this time a Soviet one. Her report states that there were in fact three prisoner-of-war camps in Poland. The Polish population was employed in the construction of roads. In 1941, the prisoners did not have time to evacuate, and the camps came under the German leadership, which authorized the executions. According to the members of the Soviet commission, in 1943 the Germans dug up the graves, confiscated all newspapers and documents indicating dates later than the spring of 1940, and forced the locals to testify. The famous “Burdenko Commission” was largely based on the data of this report.

The crime of the Stalinist regime

In 1990, the USSR officially admitted its guilt for the Katyn massacre.

In April 1990, the USSR pleaded guilty to the Katyn massacre. One of the main arguments was the discovery of documents that indicated that the Polish prisoners were transferred by order of the NKVD and were no longer listed in the statistical documents. Historian Yuri Zorya found out that the same people were on the exhumation lists from Katyn and on the lists of those leaving the Kozelsk camp. Interestingly, the order of the lists for stages coincided with the order of those lying in the graves, according to the German investigation.

Today in Russia, the Katyn massacre is officially considered a "crime of the Stalinist regime." However, there are still people who support the position of the Burdenko commission and consider the results of the German investigation as an attempt to distort the role of Stalin in world history.

In perestroika, Gorbachev did not hang any sins on the Soviet Power. One of them was the execution of Polish officers near Katyn by supposedly Soviet secret services. In reality, the Poles were shot by the Germans, and the myth of 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 first serious international reaction to Khrushchev's "secret" report was the anti-Soviet speeches in Poznan, the historical center of Wielkopolska chauvinism, that followed shortly after the death of the leader of the Polish communists Bolesław Bierut. Soon, the turmoil 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, the Polish anti-Sovietists, under the smokescreen of “the fight against the cult of Stalin’s personality,” managed not only to free the right-wing nationalist deviator Vladislav Gomulka and his associates from prison, but also to bring them to power.

Perhaps the most unpleasant for Khrushchev was the demand to recognize the involvement of his party in the Katyn massacre, but he agreed to this only in connection with the promise of V. Gomulka to put on the trail of Stepan Bandera, the worst enemy of the Soviet government, the head of the paramilitary formations 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.

It is possible that during his unofficial visit to Moscow in February 1959, Gomulka reported that his secret services had discovered Bandera in Munich, and hurried with the recognition of "Katyn's guilt." One way or another, but on the instructions of Khrushchev on October 15, 1959, the KGB officer Bogdan Stashinsky finally liquidates Bandera in Munich, and the trial that took place over Stashinsky in Karlsruhe (Germany) will find it possible to determine the killer with 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 his obligation, Khrushchev, an experienced ripper of secret archives, gives appropriate orders to the 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 justification for the Hitlerite version of the Katyn myth.

It was this “special folder”, created by Khrushchev on the order of the new Polish leadership, that spurred on 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 Assistant to US President Jimmy Carter for National Security, permanent director " research center called the "Stalin Institute" at the University of California, a Pole by birth, Zbigniew Brzezinski to more and more brazen ideological diversions.

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, V. Jaruzelsky, arrived on an official state visit to the USSR demanding repentance for the "Katyn atrocity" and forced Gorbachev to make the following statement: “Recently, documents have been 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. The graves of Polish officers are next to the graves of Soviet people who fell from the same evil hand.

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

However, back to the kitchen of creating a “special folder”. A. Shelepin began by breaking the seal and entering the sealed room where records of 21,857 prisoners and internees of Polish nationality were kept since September 1939. 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 foregoing, it seems appropriate to destroy all accounting files on persons (attention!!!) who were shot in 1940 in the named operation. So there were "lists of executed Polish officers" in Katyn. Subsequently, the son of Lavrenty Beria reasonably remarks: “During Jaruzelsky’s official visit to Moscow, Gorbachev handed 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 Soviet archives. The copies contain the names of Polish citizens who were in 1939-1940 in the Kozelsky, Ostashkovsky and Starobelsky camps of the NKVD. None of these documents mentions the participation of the NKVD in the execution of prisoners of war.

I.V. Stalin "About the Polish prisoners of war". Shelepin had only one thing left to do - to come up with and print out the “operative part”, where Beria allegedly demands execution for all prisoners of war from the camps and prisoners held in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus “without summoning those arrested and without bringing charges” - the benefit of typewriters in the former NKVD The USSR has not yet been decommissioned. However, Shelepin did not dare to forge Beria's signature, leaving this "document" as a cheap anonymous letter. But his “operative part”, copied word for word, will fall into the next “document”, which the “literate” Shelepin will call in his letter to Khrushchev “Decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU (?) of March 5, 1940”, and this lapsus calami, this a mistake in the “letter” still sticks out like an awl from a bag (and, indeed, how can “archival documents” be corrected, even if they were invented two decades after the event? - L.B.).

True, this main “document” on the involvement of the party itself is designated as “an extract from the minutes of the meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee. Decision dated 5.03.40.” (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 of Bolsheviks - L.B.). Most surprising of all, this “document” was left unsigned. And on this anonymous letter, instead of a signature, there are only two words - "Secretary of the Central Committee." And that's it!

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

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

First, as we have seen, not all of them were officers. According to Lavrenty Beria's estimates, in general there were only a little over 4 thousand army officers proper (generals, colonels and lieutenant colonels - 295, majors and captains - 2080, lieutenants, second lieutenants and cornets - 604). This is in prisoner of war camps, and there were 1207 former Polish prisoners of war in prisons. In total, therefore, 4,186 people. In the "Big Encyclopedic Dictionary" of the 1998 edition, it is written that: "In the spring of 1940, the NKVD destroyed 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 Lavrenty Beria claims, parts of the regular Red Army?

The truth about Katyn

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

At the same time, the Germans had such an incentive in August-September 1941 after the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, concluded a friendship treaty between the two governments with the Poles on July 30, 1941, according to which General Sikorsky was to form from prisoners of war compatriots in the Russian army under the command of a prisoner of war Polish General Anders to participate in hostilities against Germany. This was the incentive for Hitler to liquidate Poles 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: "In no case should Russia be helped, but use the situation to the maximum advantage for the Polish nation." At the same time, Sikorsky convinces Churchill of the expediency of transferring Anders' army to the Middle East, about which the British Prime Minister writes to I.V. Stalin, and the leader gives his go-ahead, not only for the evacuation to Iran of the Anders army itself, but also for the family members 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 increased between Stalin and Sikorsky, there was a thaw between Hitler and Sikorsky. The Soviet-Polish "friendship" ended with a frank anti-Soviet statement by the head of the Polish government in exile on February 25, 1943, which said that it did not want to recognize the historical rights of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples to unite in their national states. In other words, there was the fact of the brazen claims of the Polish émigré government to the Soviet lands - Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. In response to this statement, I.V. Stalin formed from the Poles loyal to the Soviet Union, the Tadeusz Kosciuszko division of 15 thousand people. In October 1943, she was already fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Red Army.

Already on April 15, the German Information Bureau reported on the Berlin radio that the German occupation authorities had discovered in Katyn, near Smolensk, the graves of 11,000 Polish officers shot by Jewish commissars. The next day, the Soviet Information Bureau exposed the bloody machinations of the Nazi executioners, and on April 19, the Pravda newspaper wrote in an editorial: “The Nazis invent some kind of Jewish commissars who allegedly participated in the murder of 11,000 Polish officers. It is not difficult for experienced masters of provocation to come up with several names of people who never existed. Such “commissars” as Lev Rybak, Avraam Borisovich, Pavel Brodninsky, Chaim Finberg, named by the German information bureau, were simply invented by the Nazi swindlers, since there were no such “commissars” either in the Smolensk branch of the GPU, or in general in the NKVD bodies and No".

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 shooting of Polish officers of war by the Nazi invaders in the Katyn forest. The commission included: a member of the Extraordinary State Commission (the ChGK was investigating 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 for Katyn), members of the ChGK: 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 fulfill 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, 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 of 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. Vyropayeva.

However, in the midst of the Cold War, the US Congress again makes an attempt to revive the Katyn issue, even creating the so-called. “A commission to investigate the Katyn case, headed by Congressman Madden.

On March 3, 1952, Pravda published a note to the US State Department dated February 29, 1952, which, in particular, stated: thus generally recognized Hitlerite criminals (it is characteristic that a 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.).

First of all, the message gives information about what constitutes the Katyn forest.

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 summer house - a rest house of the Smolensk department of the NKVD. Upon the arrival of the Germans, a German military establishment was located in 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.).

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

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

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

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, Sofya Zygon asks for the whereabouts of her husband, Tomasz Zygon. The letter is dated 12.09. 1940. The stamp on the envelope is “Warsaw. 09.1940" and a stamp - "Moscow, Post Office, Expedition 9, 8.10. 1940”, as well as a resolution in red ink “Uch. set up a camp and send for delivery - 11/15/40. (Signature is illegible).

2. On corpse #4
Postcard, order No. 0112 from Tarnopol with a postmark "Tarnopol 12. 11.40" The handwriting and address are discolored.

4. On corpse no. 53.

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

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

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, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev declassified part of the documents on 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 first discovered 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 officers were kept. The captives were brought to the USSR after the outbreak of World War II, when the German army and Soviet troops entered Poland, dividing the country. The captured Poles were divided into several camps: Ostashkovsky, Starobelsky and Kozelsky.

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

The Ostashkov camp contained mainly police officers and members of the border troops. Until now, the dam built by them, connecting the island with the mainland, has been preserved. The Poles were here for a little over half a year. In April 1940, the first batches of prisoners of war began to be sent in an unknown direction.

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 a well-known 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 lined up 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 she began to work in the Katyn forest medical board under the guidance of the famous Soviet surgeon Nikolai Burdenko. The responsibilities of the commission included the search 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 of the version that it was the Nazis who destroyed the Poles. In the same period, among the local residents they were looking for those who believed that the Poles were shot by the NKVD units. The fate of these people was sealed.

In 1944, after the end of the work of the Soviet commission in Katyn, a cross was placed with the inscription that Polish prisoners of war, shot by the Nazis in 1941, are buried here. The opening ceremony of the memorial was attended by the Polish military 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 topic was banned. At the same time, contrary to the official Soviet monument in Katyn in Warsaw, a place of memory for compatriots appeared. Relatives of the victims had to hold memorial services for a long time in secret from the authorities. 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 Access to the Soviet archives for many years was open only to selected party officials. Most of the documents are marked "Top Secret". In 1990, at the direction of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, this package with materials about the executions in Katyn was handed over to the Polish side. The most valuable of the documents is a note by the head of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs, Lavrenty Beria, addressed to Stalin, dated April 1940. According to the note, the 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 places of all burials of Polish prisoners of war. Traces led to the city of Ostashkov, next to which the camp was located. Here, the surviving witnesses helped the investigators. They confirmed that the Poles in April 1940 were taken away from the camp along railway. No one else saw them alive. Local residents learned only decades later that prisoners of war were taken to Kalinin.

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

During the night, up to 300 people were shot in the basements of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of Kalinin. Everyone was brought into the execution cellar one by one, supposedly to check the data. Here personal belongings and valuables were taken away. Only at that moment did the prisoners begin to guess that they would not come out of here.

During interrogation in 1991, Dmitry Tokarev agreed to draw a map of the route 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 dachas of the NKVD in the Tver region. A few days later, the first terrible finds were discovered. Polish forensic experts took part in the identification along with Soviet investigators.

New disaster 2010 marked the 70th anniversary of the executions of Polish prisoners of war. On April 7, a mourning ceremony was held 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 while landing. Together with the president, who was hurrying to the funeral ceremony in Katyn, the relatives of the executed prisoners of war also died.

IN " Katyn case"It's too early to put an end to it. The search for graves is still ongoing.

You may be interested