village in Smolensk region, not far from which are the places of mass executions and burials of Polish officers in 1940, as well as Soviet citizens in the late 1930s. The name of Katyn is inextricably linked with the question of the fate of the executed Polish soldiers and the heated discussion around it. Today, the Katyn Memorial Complex is located in the forest, and on its territory there is a military cemetery with the graves of 4415 Polish officers, as well as the graves of 6.5 thousand Soviet citizens repressed in the 1930s and about 500 Soviet prisoners of war executed by the Germans.

History of events

On September 1, 1939, German troops attacked the territory, thereby laying the foundation. On September 3, official Berlin proposed to the Soviet government to oppose Poland and occupy a number of eastern regions Polish state from the "sphere of Soviet interests". The Red Army began preparations for the corresponding operation, and already on September 17, Soviet units crossed the border with Poland and occupied the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus. November 28 Warsaw capitulated, the Polish leadership left the country.

In Moscow, they immediately attended to the problem of Polish prisoners of war. According to Soviet data, the Red Army captured 300,000 soldiers and officers. Most likely, this figure was overestimated, and in reality it was about 240 thousand. On September 19, the NKVD of the USSR submitted to the Soviet government a draft “Regulations on prisoners of war”, and also issued an order “On the organization of prisoner of war camps”. It was prisoners of war, and not internees, who were considered Polish soldiers who voluntarily surrendered to Soviet captivity. According to the above order, eight camps were created on the territory of the USSR for the maintenance of Polish prisoners of war. Later, two more camps were added to them in Vologda region- Vologda and Gryazovets. At the end of October 1939, the USSR and Germany exchanged Polish prisoners of war: people from the regions that were in the zone German occupation, were placed at the disposal of the Germans; immigrants from the eastern regions of Poland - transported to the USSR.

By October 3, there were 8843 Polish military personnel in the Kozelsky camp, 11262 military personnel in Starobelsky camp by November 16, and 12235 military personnel in Ostashkovsky camp by the beginning of November. In these and a number of other camps, the conditions of detention were difficult, and there was not enough space for incoming prisoners of war. The Vologda camp, for example, was designed for only 1,500 people, and almost 3,500 Poles arrived there. Starobelsky and Kozelsky camps eventually received the status of "officers", and in Ostashkovsky it was ordered to contain gendarmes, intelligence officers and counterintelligence officers, policemen and jailers. 8 generals, 57 colonels, 130 lieutenant colonels, 321 majors and about 3.4 thousand other officers were kept in the Starobelsky camp; in Kozelsky - 1 rear admiral, 4 generals, 24 colonels, 29 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, and a total of 4727 people. There was also one woman in the camp - pilot Yanina Levandovskaya, second lieutenant. Polish officers actively protested against the extremely poor conditions of their detention: from the memoirs of the surviving prisoners, it is known that water froze in the cells in cold weather, and torture and bullying by the guards were a common occurrence.

The decision to execute Polish soldiers

On February 21, 1940, Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR Merkulov signed a directive according to which all Polish prisoners of war held in Starobelsky Kozelsky and Ostashkovsky camps of the NKVD of the USSR should be transferred to prisons. In a letter dated March 5, Beria proposed to shoot 25,700 Poles arrested and prisoners of war, arguing that "all of them are sworn enemies of the Soviet regime, filled with hatred for the Soviet system," and "are trying to continue counter-revolutionary work, are conducting anti-Soviet agitation." These statements by Beria were consistent with the testimony of Soviet agents and operatives: most of the Polish officers and policemen who were captured were indeed enthusiastic to fight for the independence of Poland. It was supposed to consider the cases of all Poles without bringing charges, indictments and other documents. The decision on punishment was assigned to the troika in the composition, and Bashtakov. The first on the corresponding paper sent to, signed "for" and signed Stalin, then -, and. and also voted in favour. According to an extract from the minutes of the Politburo meeting, more than 14,000 Polish military personnel, policemen, and civilian "counter-revolutionary elements" who were in camps and 11,000 imprisoned in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus, were sentenced to death. In the Katyn forest, not far from, prisoners of war from the Kozelsky camp were shot. The territory of the Katyn forest was at the disposal of the department of the GPU-NKVD. Back in the early 1930s, a rest house for NKVD officers appeared here, and the forest was fenced off.

German investigation of the Katyn case

As early as the autumn of 1941, the Nazi leadership had information about the burial places of the Poles who were shot in the Katyn forest, near Vinnitsa and in a number of other places. In some of these places, the Germans carried out exhumations, identification with the participation of relatives. These procedures were photographed and documented, including for propaganda purposes. It was only in 1943 that the Nazis decided to deal with the Katyn issue in earnest. Then they published the first information that thousands of Polish officers were shot by the NKVD in the forest near Smolensk. On March 29, 1943, the Germans began to open the graves with the remains of Polish officers in the Katyn forest near Smolensk. The occupiers organized a whole propaganda campaign: the exhumation was widely covered in the press, on the radio and in newsreels, and numerous “tourists” were brought to the scene from Poland and prisoner of war camps, from neutral countries, from among the inhabitants of Smolensk. On April 13, Propaganda Minister J. Goebbels announced on the radio that 10,000 bodies of executed Poles had been found in Katyn. In his diary, he noted that the "Katyn case" was becoming a "colossal political bomb". The International Red Cross refused to consider the case. The Germans formed their own commission, which included specialists from Germany's allies and satellite countries, as well as from neutral countries. But most of them refused to participate in the exhumation. As a result, most of the work under the vigilant supervision of the Germans was carried out by the technical commission of the Polish Red Cross, headed by S. Skarzhinsky. In her conclusions, she was rather cautious, but nevertheless admitted that the Soviet Union was to blame for the deaths of Polish soldiers.

As a result of the exhumation measures, the Germans published "Official Materials on the Katyn Massacres". This publication has been reprinted in most European languages, in all allied countries of Germany and in the territories occupied by her. In the "Official materials ..." were given not the numbers that were established by the experts from the Polish commission, but those that were previously voiced by the Germans (that is, 10-12 thousand instead of 4113 people).

In Poland and among the Polish emigration, the German revelations did not meet with the reaction expected in Berlin. The anti-Soviet rhetoric was reinforced only by right-wing publications. The democratic forces were of the opinion that the Germans were trying to set the Poles against the Russians, and supported the version that the officers were shot by the Germans in the autumn of 1941. The command of the Home Army and the Polish government in exile, although they recognized the accuracy of the information from Germany, called on their supporters to "consider Nazi Germany enemy No. 1." and, who also understood that the conclusions of the Germans were justified, made a choice in favor of the unity of the allies. In April 1943, at a meeting of the British Prime Minister with Sikorski, with the participation of British Foreign Secretary Eden, a draft statement of the Polish government was agreed upon, which emphasized that the Polish government "denies Germany the right to extract from the crimes of which it accuses other countries, arguments for its own benefits." Churchill assured Stalin that he would oppose any investigation into the Katyn events. At the same time, the Polish government in exile at the end of 1941 started talking about the fate of Polish prisoners of war: on December 3, during the visit of V. Sikorsky to Moscow, he and Anders handed over to Stalin a list of names for 3.5 thousand Polish officers who were not found by the Polish command in the USSR. In February 1942, Anders provided a list of already 8,000 names.

Soviet position on the Katyn case

For Stalin, the "Katyn case" was an unpleasant surprise. The Soviet side published counterinformation, stating that the Germans shot the Poles in the autumn of 1941. In 1944, after the liberation of Smolensk, a “Special Commission to Establish and Investigate the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of War by the Nazi Invaders in the Katyn Forest” headed by Academician N. Burdenko worked in Katyn. The commission concluded that the executions were carried out no earlier than 1941, just at the time when the Germans occupied the outskirts of Smolensk. The Soviet side accused the Nazis of the death of Polish prisoners of war, and called the version put forward by them about the execution of Polish officers of the NKVD propaganda, aimed at attracting peoples Western Europe to fight against the USSR.

In the post-war decades, there were no advances in the study of the Katyn case. In the early 1970s, the head of Poland, E. Gierek, first turned to L. I. Brezhnev with a request to clarify this issue, but he did not take any steps. Two years later, Gerek applied the same to the head of the USSR Foreign Ministry A.A. Gromyko, but he said that he had "nothing to add" about Katyn. In 1978, the burial area in Katyn was surrounded by a brick fence, inside two steles were placed with the inscription: "To the victims of fascism - Polish officers shot by the Nazis in 1941."

Only after coming to power and the beginning of perestroika, the dialogue with Poland about the events of the early 1940s was resumed. In 1987, the USSR and Poland signed a declaration on cooperation in the field of ideology, science and culture. Under pressure from the Polish side, the USSR authorities agreed to create a Polish-Soviet commission of historians on relations between countries. The Soviet part of the commission was headed by the director of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU G.L. Smirnov. The main topic of the commission's work was the Katyn tragedy. On April 6, 1989, a funeral ceremony was held for the transfer of symbolic ashes from the burial place of Polish officers in Katyn to be transferred to Warsaw.

In a TASS statement dated April 14, 1990, the execution of Polish prisoners of war was recognized as one of the grave crimes of Stalinism. In the same month, Gorbachev handed over to Polish President W. Jaruzelsky lists of Polish prisoners of war who were transferred from the Kozelsky and Ostashkovsky camps or departed from the Starobelsky camp (the latter were considered shot). Responsibility for the death of the Poles was assigned to the NKVD and its leadership: Beria, Merkulov and others. In the same year, Poland and the USSR signed the "Declaration on Cooperation in the Field of Culture, Science and Education", which opened up access to Russian archives for Polish scientists. On October 13, 1990, the Soviet side handed over to the Polish Embassy in Moscow the first set of documents relating to the death of Polish prisoners of war in the USSR.

In 1989, an Orthodox cross was installed at the burial site, and in 1990, during the visit of V. Jaruzelsky, a Catholic cross was installed.

The Katyn question in modern Russia

In April 1992, a Russian-Polish editorial board was created, which was to publish sources about the fate of Polish prisoners. Since September of the same year, Polish historians, who were members of a specially created Military Archival Commission, have been identifying and copying relevant documents in such archives as the TsKhIDK RF, GARF, TsKhSD, RTSKHIDNI, RGVA. On October 14, 1992, a collection of documents from the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation, including the so-called "package No. 1", was simultaneously made public in Warsaw and Moscow. In November 1992, another batch of documents concerning the fate of the Poles in the USSR in 1939-1941 was officially handed over to Polish archivists who arrived in Moscow.

On February 22, 1994, a Russian-Polish agreement "On burials and places of memory of victims of wars and repressions" was signed in Krakow. On June 4, 1995, a memorial sign was erected in the Katyn forest at the site of the executions of Polish officers. In Poland, 1995 was declared the year of Katyn. In 1994 and 1995, Polish specialists conducted a second study of the burials in Katyn.

On October 19, 1996, the Russian government issued a decree "On the creation of memorial complexes of Soviet and Polish citizens- victims of totalitarian repressions in Katyn (Smolensk region) and Medny (Tver region). In 1998, the directorate of the State Memorial Complex "Katyn" was established, and the following year, the construction of the memorial itself began. On July 28, 2000, it was opened to visitors.

In 2004, the General Military Prosecutor's Office Russian Federation finally closed the criminal case on the murders of Poles in Katyn for the death of the perpetrators. The names of the perpetrators were classified as the case contains documents constituting state secrets. In April 2010, at the mourning events in Katyn, the leaders of the Russian Federation confirmed the conclusions of the late 1980s and early 1990s, calling Stalin the main culprit in the death of Polish citizens.

Some Russian historians, publicists and politicians believe that the Soviet side was not the only culprit in the death of the Poles in Katyn. There is a version that in 1943, about 7.5 thousand corpses of people of different nationalities dressed in Polish uniforms were buried in the Katyn forest, and in fact the NKVD shot not 12 thousand Poles, but 4421. In connection with the Katyn tragedy, Russian historians often mention tragic destinies captured Red Army soldiers in Poland in the early 1920s.

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 about how they ended up in Katyn Polish officers, 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 the captured Polish officers were imprisoned in the Katyn camp and were executed due to the approach of German troops, and the total number of executed Polish officers was 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 participated in negotiations with Hitler on the conclusion of a treaty directed against the USSR, it had previously stated that it would not allow transit 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. Thus, in the minds of the Soviet people of the 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 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.

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 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 Katyn massacre prisoners of war Polish 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 during the Great Patriotic War and continued their terrorist activities in the Lviv region until the 50s of the twentieth century.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), headed by S. Bandera, relied on cooperation with the intelligence 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 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.

Finally, after more 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 in the USSR on an official state visit demanding repentance for the “Katyn atrocity” and forced Gorbachev to make the following statement: “In the last time, documents were found (meaning Khrushchev’s “special folder” - L.B.), which indirectly but convincingly indicate that thousands of Polish citizens who died in the Smolensk forests exactly half a century ago became victims of Beria and his henchmen. The graves of Polish officers are next to the graves of Soviet people who fell from 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.

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.

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 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" in 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 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?

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, 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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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 the 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 grave 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 admit that the dispatch of Polish officers to camps near the western border of the USSR deprived us of the opportunity to provide them with adequate 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 embers of the Cold War were already smoldering! 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

Until now, there are many unclear and contradictory moments in the Katyn events, many inconsistencies that give rise to well-founded questions. But there are no clear and unambiguous answers to these questions.

However, so far the Katyn disputes have not led to anything. Opponents do not hear each other. Therefore, new versions are born. And there are new questions.

This article is about different versions Katyn tragedy and questions that are not answered.

deep roots

The Katyn tragedy has a rich background. The roots of those events lie in the collapse Russian Empire in 1917 and in the subsequent division of her former territories.

Poland, which gained independence, wanted more - the restoration of the state within the historical borders of the Commonwealth of 1772 and the establishment of control over Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania. But Soviet Russia also wanted to control these territories.

Because of these contradictions, the Soviet-Polish war began in 1919, which ended in 1921 with the defeat of the Republic of Soviets. Tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers ended up in Polish captivity, where many of them died in concentration camps. In March 1921, a peace treaty was signed in Riga, according to which Western Ukraine and Western Belarus departed to Poland.

The USSR was able to win back the situation with the borders in 18 years. In August 1939, Germany and the USSR signed a non-aggression pact, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Previously, similar documents were concluded between Nazi Germany and Poland, Great Britain, France, Romania and Japan. The Soviet Union was the last state in Europe to conclude such an agreement.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had an additional secret protocol, which dealt with the new possible borders of the USSR and Poland in the "case of territorial and political reorganization."

On September 1, 1939, the Germans invaded Poland from the west and north. the Soviet Union began fighting against Poland only on 17 September. By that time, the Polish army had been practically annihilated by the Germans. A few pockets of Polish resistance were also eliminated. Under the agreement, Western Ukraine and Western Belarus were again returned to the Soviet Union. And on September 22, Germany and the USSR held a joint military parade in Brest-Litovsk.

Thousands of Poles fell into Soviet captivity, whom it was decided to send to several concentration camps for filtering and identifying them. further fate. So Polish prisoners of war ended up in the USSR. What happened to them next is still debated.

Two truths about Katyn

Historically, there are two main mutually exclusive versions in the case of the execution of Polish officers of war in the Katyn forest near Smolensk. Each of them has its own system of evidence, which opponents cannot ignore and cannot refute. Historians and ordinary citizens have been divided into two irreconcilable camps, which have been arguing with each other to the point of hoarseness for more than 70 years. Each of the parties accuses opponents of juggling the facts and lying.

Katyn, Rosja, 04.1943

The first version was presented by the Nazi occupation authorities in April 1943. An international commission, consisting of 12 forensic doctors, mainly from countries occupied or allied with Germany, came to the conclusion that the Poles were shot even before the war (in March-April 1940) by the Soviet NKVD. This version was voiced personally by the Nazi Minister of Education and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.

The second version was presented by the Soviet side after an investigation by a special commission in 1944, headed by surgeon Nikolai Burdenko. The commission came to the conclusion that the Soviet authorities in 1941 did not have time to evacuate the captured Polish officers due to the rapid advance of the Germans, so the Poles were captured by the Nazis, who shot them. The Soviet side presented this version in February 1946 at the Nuremberg Tribunal. It was this version that was the official Soviet point of view for many years.

But everything changed in the spring of 1990, when Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that the Katyn tragedy was "one of the grave crimes of Stalinism." Then it was stated that the death of Polish officers in Katyn was the work of the NKVD. Then, in 1992, this was confirmed by the first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin.

So the version that the Polish prisoners of war were shot by the NKVD became the second official Russian state point of view on the Katyn tragedy. However, after that, the disputes around the Katyn tragedy did not subside, as there were obvious contradictions and inconsistencies, and there were no answers to many questions.

Third version

However, it is quite possible that the Poles were shot by the Soviet and German sides. Moreover, the executions of the Poles by the USSR and Germany could be carried out separately in different time, or together. And this, quite possibly, explains the existence of two mutually exclusive systems of evidence. Simply, each side was looking for evidence of their innocence. This is the so-called third version, which some researchers have recently adhered to.

There is nothing fantastic in this version. Historians have long known about the secret economic and military-technical cooperation between the USSR and Germany, which developed in the 20-30s and was approved by Lenin.

In August 1922, a cooperation pact was concluded between the Red Army and the German Reichswehr. The German side could create military bases on the territory of the Soviet Republic to test the latest types of weapons and equipment prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles, as well as to educate and train military specialists. Soviet Russia not only received monetary compensation for the use of these bases by Germany, but also received access to all new German military technologies and testing of weapons and equipment.

Thus, joint Soviet-German aviation and tank factories, joint schools for command personnel, and joint ventures for the production of chemical weapons appeared on the territory of the USSR. There are constant trips of delegations for the exchange of experience, studies are organized at the academies of German and Soviet officers, joint field exercises and maneuvers are held, various chemical experiments are set up, and much more.

The German military leadership received academic training in Moscow even after Hitler came to power in 1933. The Soviet commanding staff also studied at German military academies and schools.

In Western historiography, there is an opinion that in August 1939, in addition to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, an agreement was also signed between the NKVD and the Gestapo. In our country, this document is considered a fake. But foreign researchers are sure that such an agreement between the Soviet and German special services really existed, and that this document was signed by Lavrenty Beria and Heinrich Muller. And it was within the framework of this cooperation that the NKVD handed over to the Gestapo the German communists who were in Soviet prisons and camps. In addition, it is known that the NKVD and the Gestapo held several conferences together in Krakow and Zakopane in 1939-1940.

So the Soviet and German secret services could well carry out joint secret actions. It is also known about the punitive "action AB", which was carried out by the Nazis against the Polish intelligentsia at the same time. Perhaps similar joint Soviet-German actions took place in Katyn? There is no answer to this question.

Another oddity: for some reason, the German side does not participate in the disputes about Katyn at all. The Germans keep silent, although it is they who could have stopped all the Polish-Russian Katyn disputes long ago. But they don't. Why? There is no answer to this question either...

"Special Folder"

As already mentioned, in the spring of 1990, the first and only president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, admitted that the Katyn tragedy was “one of the grave crimes of Stalinism,” and that the death of Polish officers in Katyn was the work of the NKVD. Then, in 1992, this was confirmed by the first president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin. Both presidents made such serious conclusions based on the so-called “Package No. 1”, which was kept in the archives of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU and contained at that time only three (!) indirect documents about the Katyn massacre. Until now, there are many questions about the contents of this “Special Folder”.

One of the documents in the folder is a handwritten memorandum to N. S. Khrushchev, which was written in 1959 by the chairman of the KGB of the USSR A. N. Shelepin. He offered to destroy the personal files of Polish officers and other documents. The note stated: “The entire operation to eliminate these persons was carried out on the basis of the Decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU of March 5, 1940. All of them were sentenced to capital punishment in accounting cases ... All these cases are of neither operational interest nor historical value.”

The researchers have several questions to Shelepin's note.

Why was it handwritten? Didn't the KGB chairman have a typewriter? Why did she write in cursive? To hide the real handwriting of the writer, because Shelepin's usual handwriting is known? Why does Shelepin write about the Decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU of March 5, 1940? Didn't the chairman of the KGB know that in 1940 there was no CPSU yet? All these unanswered questions...

In 2009, at the initiative of independent researcher Sergei Strygin, the leading expert of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, Eduard Molokov, examined the typeface used in Beria's note to Stalin from the Special Folder. This note is still the main evidence in the case of the execution of Polish officers.

The examination revealed that three pages of Beria's note were printed on one typewriter, and the last page to another. Moreover, "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." A suspicion arose: is Beria's note genuine? There is no answer to this question.

Doubted the authenticity of the documents from the "Special folder" and State Duma deputy Viktor Ilyukhin. Previously, he was an investigator and criminologist, senior assistant to the Prosecutor General of the USSR.

In 2010, Ilyukhin made a sensational statement that the documents from the Special Folder were a well-made fake. One of the manufacturers of these forgeries personally told Ilyukhin about his participation in the 1990s in a group of specialists in forging documents from the party archives.

“In the early 90s of the last century, a group of high-ranking specialists was created to forge archival documents relating to important events Soviet period. This group worked in the structure of the security service Russian President B. Yeltsin,” Ilyukhin argued based on the story of a former KGB officer.

For obvious reasons, an unnamed witness presented Ilyukhin with blank forms of the CPSU (b), the NKVD of the USSR and the People's Commissariat of Defense of the USSR, other party and Soviet organizations of the Stalin period, a lot of forged seals, stamps and facsimiles, as well as some archival files marked "Top Secret". With the help of these materials it was possible to concoct any documents with the "signatures" of Stalin and Beria.

The witness also presented Ilyukhin with several fakes of the main document of the “Special Folder” - a note by L.P. Beria to the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks dated March 5, 1940, in which it was proposed to shoot more than 20 thousand Polish prisoners of war.

Naturally, Ilyukhin wrote several letters and inquiries about these facts, where he asked many questions. His letters to the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation, the then President of the Russian Federation D. A. Medvedev, the then Chairman of the State Duma of the Russian Federation B. V. Gryzlov are known. But, alas, there was no response to all his appeals.

After Ilyukhin's death in 2011, documents about the falsification of the Katyn case disappeared from his safe. Therefore, all his questions remained unanswered ...

Professor Gaek's evidence

Valuable evidence of Katyn case are also contained in some pamphlets and books published immediately after the war.

F. Gaek

For example, the report of the Czechoslovak professor of forensic medicine Frantisek Gaek, who, as part of an international commission created by the Nazis, personally participated in the examination of corpses in the Katyn Forest in the spring of 1943, is known. His professional analysis of the German exhumations was called The Katyn Evidence and was published in Prague in 1945.

Here is what the Czech professor Gaek wrote in this report: “All the corpses we examined had gunshot wounds in the back of the head, only one had a gunshot wound in the forehead. Shots were fired from a short distance with short-barreled firearms of 7.65 caliber. The hands of a significant number of corpses were tied behind their backs with twine (which was not produced in the USSR at that time - D.T.) ... It is very important and interesting that Polish officers were executed with German-made cartridges ...

Among the 4,143 corpses of executed officers, there were also 221 corpses of executed civilians. The official German report is silent about these corpses and does not even decide whether they were Russians or Poles.

The condition of the corpses indicates that they were there (in the ground - D.T.) for several months, or, taking into account the lower oxygen content from the air and the sluggish oxidation process, that they lay there for at most 1.5 years. An analysis of clothing, its metal parts and cigarettes also speaks against the fact that corpses could lie in the ground for 3 years ...

No insects or their transitional forms, such as testicles, larvae, pupae, or even any of their remains, were found either in corpses, or in clothes or in graves. The lack of transitional forms of insects occurs when the corpse is buried during the absence of insects, i.e. from late autumn to early spring, and when relatively little time passed from burial to exhumation. This circumstance also suggests that the corpses were buried around the fall of 1941.

And again questions arise. Is this a genuine report by Professor Hajek or is it a fake? If the report is real, then why are its conclusions ignored? There are no answers to these questions...

Dead but alive

Interesting information about Katyn is given in the book "Strong in Spirit", which was written in 1952 by the commander of the partisan detachment, Hero of the Soviet Union Dmitry Medvedev. In the book, he talks about a Polish lancer who came to join their partisan detachment. For some reason, the Pole introduced himself to the partisans as Anton Gorbovsky. But his real name was Gorbik. At the same time, Gorbik-Gorbovsky claimed that the Germans brought all his comrades to Katyn and shot him there.

It is established that Anton Yanovich Gorbik was born in 1913. Lived and worked in the city of Bialystok. In 1939, Gorbik-Gorbovsky ended up in the Kozelsky camp for Polish prisoners, and met the war in a camp near Smolensk, where the Germans captured the Poles. The Nazis offered the captured Poles to take an oath to Hitler and fight on the side of Germany. Most of the Poles refused to do so, and then the Germans decided to shoot them.

They were taken out for execution at night, and Gorbik, taking advantage of the fact that the headlights of the car were directed to the ditch where the corpses fell, climbed a tree and thereby escaped death. Then he moved to the Soviet partisans.

Later it turned out that Anton Yanovich Gorbik in 1942-1944 commanded the national Polish partisan detachment, stationed in the Rivne region and part of the partisan association under the command of the Hero of the Soviet Union Dmitry Medvedev. After the liberation of the Rivne region by parts of the Red Army, Anton Gorbik was interned by the Soviet authorities, and in 1944-1945 he was tested in the Ostashkovsky NKVD USSR No. 41 check-filtration camp. In 1945, Gorbik was repatriated and returned to Poland.

Meanwhile, a memorial plaque in the Katyn memorial complex claims that the Polish second lieutenant Anton Gorbik was shot in Katyn in 1940.

By the way, in post-war Poland there were more than a dozen people like Gorbik, who were allegedly “shot in Katyn”. But, for obvious reasons, no one remembers them. Similar stories there is also in Medny near Tver. That is, there are errors in the Katyn execution lists? How many more such "living corpses" are buried in Katyn? There are no answers to these questions...

Testimony of a former cadet

The rapid offensive of the German troops in the summer of 1941 gave rise to panic not only among our troops, but also among the party and Soviet bureaucracy, which, having abandoned all their papers, was in a hurry to evacuate. Then in Smolensk, library and archival funds, museum relics and even the regional party archive were simply forgotten. There is also evidence that the captured Poles were also forgotten. The Red Army quickly retreated, and there was no time for Polish prisoners of war.

From a letter to the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation, retired colonel Ilya Ivanovich Krivoi, October 26, 2004:

“In 1939, I was recalled from the Kyiv Industrial Institute by the district military registration and enlistment office and sent to study in Smolensk at the Smolensk rifle and machine gun school being formed there. This school was formed on the basis of a tank brigade, which departed for western border THE USSR. The military camp of the tank brigade was located on the western outskirts of the city of Smolensk near Shklyana Gora on Moprovskaya Street.

The first time I saw Polish prisoners of war at the beginning of the summer of 1940, then in 1941 I personally saw Polish prisoners several times at the earthworks to repair the Vitebsk highway. The last time I saw them was literally on the eve of the Great Patriotic War on June 15-16, 1941, during the transportation of Polish prisoners of war by car along the Vitebsk highway from Smolensk in the direction of Gnezdovo.

The evacuation of the school began on July 4-5, 1941. Before loading onto the train, the commander of our training company, Captain Safonov, went to the office of the military commandant of the Smolensk station. Arriving from there already in the dark, Captain Safonov told the cadets of our company (including me) that in the office of the military commandant of the station he (Safonov) personally saw a man in the form of a lieutenant of state security who asked the commandant for an echelon to evacuate captured Poles from the camp, but the commandant did not give him the wagons.

Safonov told us about the refusal of the commandant to provide wagons for the evacuation of the Poles, apparently in order to once again emphasize the critical situation in the city. In addition to me, this story was also attended by the platoon commander Chibisov, the platoon commander Katerinich, the commander of my department Dementiev, the commander of the neighboring department Fedorovich Vasily Stakhovich ( former teacher from the village of Studena), cadet Vlasenko, cadet Dyadyun Ivan, and three or four more cadets.

Later, in conversations among themselves, the cadets said that in the place of the commandant they would have done exactly the same, and would also have evacuated their compatriots first of all, and not Polish prisoners.

Therefore, I assert that the Polish prisoners of war officers were still alive on June 22, 1941, contrary to the assertion of the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation that they were all allegedly shot in the Katyn forest by the NKVD of the USSR in April-May 1940.

Why is this testimony of a former military man not taken into account? There is no answer to this question.

Poles, Jews and Hitler's Bunker

There is another interesting evidence related to the executed Poles, Jews and Hitler's bunker, which was built by the Nazis near Katyn and Kozy Gory.

Smolensk local historian and researcher Iosif Tsynman wrote the following in his book “In Memory of the Victims of the Katyn Forest”:

“During the war in Smolensk, more than 2,000 Jews, prisoners of the Warsaw ghetto, and about 200 Jews from the Smolensk ghetto built concrete overground and underground bunkers. Poles of Jewish origin and Jewish prisoners lived in Gnezdovo and in Krasny Bor, where the Headquarters of the commanders-in-chief of the Soviet, and then the German troops, were located.

All prisoners wore Polish military uniform. Since the nationality was not written on the faces of the prisoners, the Smolensk people at that time believed that they were Polish officers who, under the leadership of the Germans, were building a Nazi bunker and other military installations in Krasny Bor, Gnezdovo and other places. The construction sites were secret. After the construction was completed, all the prisoners, together with the Ukrainian, Polish and Czech guards, were shot by the Germans in Kozy Gory.

It turns out that the Germans shot Jews dressed in Polish uniforms? But then whose corpses were exhumed in the spring of 1943 by the Nazis? Polish or Jewish? There are no answers to these questions.

However, other researchers put forward the version that after the construction of Hitler's bunker, Polish officers were still shot.

In the fall of 1941, the construction of a huge secret underground complex began in Krasny Bor, to which the Germans gave the name "Berenhale" - "Bear's Lair". Its dimensions and even its location are still unknown. Hitler's bunker near Smolensk is one of the mysterious mysteries of the Second World War, which for some reason is in no hurry to solve.

According to scattered reports, the bunker was built by Soviet and Polish prisoners of war from concentration camps located on the outskirts of Smolensk. They were later shot in Kozy Gory, another version claims.

Why is this version not being researched? Why is Hitler's Smolensk bunker not being explored? Is there a connection between the construction of the bunker and the execution of the Poles in Katyn? There are no answers to these questions...

GRAVE #9

On March 31, 2000, in Kozy Gory, near the Katyn Memorial, workers were digging a trench for a cable to the building of a transformer substation with an excavator and accidentally hooked on the edge of a burial site that was not previously known. On the edge of the grave, the remains of nine people in Polish military uniforms were found and removed.

How many corpses were there in total is unknown, but, apparently, the burial is large. The workers claimed that spent cartridge cases from Belgian-made pistol cartridges were found in the grave, as well as the Pravda newspaper for 1939. This burial was called "Grave No. 9".

After that, law enforcement agencies were invited. A pre-investigation check by the prosecutor's office began, as a mass grave of people with signs of violent death was discovered. Unfortunately, for unknown reasons, a criminal case was not initiated. Then "grave No. 9" was covered with a large layer of sand, asphalted and fenced with barbed wire. Although earlier the wife of the then President of Poland, Jolanta Kwasniewska, laid flowers at her.

Some researchers believe that "grave No. 9" is the key to unraveling the Katyn tragedy. Why has this burial not been explored for 15 years? Why was “grave No. 9” filled in and paved with asphalt? There is no answer to these questions.

Instead of an epilogue

Unfortunately, the attitude towards the Katyn massacre is still determined not by facts, but by political predilections. Until now, there has not been a single truly independent examination. All studies were conducted by interested parties.

For some reason, decisions on this crime are made by politicians and state authorities, and not by investigators, not by criminalists, not by historians and not by scientific experts. Therefore, it seems that the truth will be established only by the next generations of Russian and Polish researchers, who will be free from modern political bias. Katyn is waiting for objectivity.

So far, one thing is clear - it is still too early to put an end to the Katyn case ...