How many Poles were shot at Katyn? Why were the officers shot in Katyn?

The question of who is responsible for the death of Polish military prisoners in Katyn (more precisely, in the Kozya Gory tract) has been discussed for more than 70 years. “LG” has addressed this topic more than once. There are also official estimates from the authorities. But many dark places remain. Professor of the Moscow State Linguistic University (MSLU), Doctor of Historical Sciences Alexey PLOTNIKOV shares his vision of the situation.

- Alexey Yuryevich, what was the total number of Polish prisoners of war?

There are several sources, and there are discrepancies between them. According to various estimates, 450-480 thousand Polish soldiers were captured by the Germans in 1939. In the USSR there were 120-150 thousand of them. The data cited by a number of experts - primarily Polish - about the internment of 180 or even 220-250 thousand Poles is not supported by documents. It should be emphasized that at first these people - from a legal point of view - were in the position of internees. This is explained by the fact that there was no war between the Soviet Union and Poland. But after the Polish government in exile declared war on the Soviet Union on December 18, 1939 (the so-called Angers Declaration) over the transfer of Vilna and the Vilna region to Lithuania, the internees automatically turned into prisoners of war. In other words, legally, and then actually, prisoners of war, they were made by their own emigrant government.

- How did their destinies turn out?

Differently. Natives of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, privates and sergeants, were sent home even before the emigrant government declared war on the USSR. It is not known exactly how many there were. Then the USSR and Germany entered into an agreement under which all prisoners of war conscripted into the Polish army from territory ceded to the USSR, but captured by the Germans, were transferred to the Soviet Union, and vice versa. As a result of the exchange in October and November 1939, about 25 thousand prisoners of war were transferred to the USSR - citizens of the former Poland, natives of territories ceded to the Soviet Union, and more than 40 thousand to Germany. Most of them, privates and sergeants, were sent home. The officers were not released. Employees of the border service, police and punitive structures were also detained - those who were suspected of involvement in sabotage and espionage activities against the USSR. Indeed, in the 1920-1930s, Polish intelligence was very active in the western regions of the Soviet Union.
By the beginning of 1940, no more than 30 thousand Polish prisoners of war remained in the USSR. Of these, approximately 10 thousand are officers. They were distributed to specially created camps. There were 4,500 Polish prisoners of war in the Kozelsky camp (in 1940 - Western, now Kaluga region), 6,300 in Ostashkovsky (Kalinin, now Tver region), and 3,800 in the Starobelsky camp (Voroshilovgrad, now Lugansk region). At the same time, captured officers were kept mainly in the Starobelsky and Kozelsky camps. Ostashkovsky was predominantly “soldiers”, there were no more than 400 officers. Some Poles were in camps in Western Belarus and Western Ukraine. These are the original numbers.

On July 30, 1941, the Kremlin and the Sikorsky government signed a political agreement and an additional protocol to it. It provided for the provision of an amnesty to all Polish prisoners of war. These allegedly turned out to be 391,545 people. How does this compare with the numbers you provided?

Indeed, about 390 thousand Poles were included in the amnesty in August 1941. There is no contradiction here, since along with prisoners of war in 1939-1940, civilians were also interned. This is a separate topic. We are talking about prisoners of war - former Polish soldiers of the Polish Army.

- Where and how many, besides Katyn, were Polish prisoners of war shot during the Great Patriotic War?

It’s unlikely that anyone will name it exactly. If only because some of the archival documents are still classified. I will only say about two burials not far from Katyn (Goat Mountains). The first was located in Serebryanka (Dubrovenka) near Krasny Bor, the second - not yet documented - to the west of the village of Katyn. Information about him is contained in the memoirs of the daughter of one of the dead Poles, Shchiradlovskaya-Petsa.

Your opponents claim that Polish prisoners of war in Katyn were shot on the orders of Stalin. Why don't you agree with them?

Supporters of the Polish (it would be more honest to say - Goebbels) version do not explain, but ignore or openly suppress facts that are inconvenient for themselves.
I will list the main ones. First of all, it has been proven: German-made cartridges of 6.35 and 7.65 mm caliber (GECO and RWS) were found at the scene of the execution. This indicates that the Poles were killed with German pistols. The Red Army and the NKVD troops did not have weapons of such calibers. Attempts by the Polish side to prove the purchase of such pistols in Germany specifically for the execution of Polish prisoners of war are untenable. The NKVD used its own standard weapons. These are revolvers, and the officers have TT pistols. Both are 7.62 mm caliber.
In addition, and this is also documented, the hands of some of those executed were tied with paper twine. This was not produced in the USSR at that time, but it was produced in Europe, including Germany.
Another important fact: documents on the execution of the sentence were not found in the archives, just as the execution sentence itself was not found, without which no execution would be possible in principle.
Finally, documents were found on individual corpses. Moreover, both by the Germans during the exhumation in February-May 1943, and by the Burdenko commission in 1944: officer IDs, passports, and other identification documents. This also indicates that the USSR was not involved in the execution. The NKVD would not have left such evidence - it was strictly prohibited by the relevant instructions. There would be no newspapers left that were printed in the spring of 1940, but they were “found” by the Germans in large quantities at burial sites. In the fall of 1941, the Germans themselves could leave documents with those executed: then, in their opinion, they had nothing to fear. Back in 1940, the Nazis, without hiding, destroyed several thousand representatives of the Polish elite. For example, in the Palmyra Forest near Warsaw. It is noteworthy that the Polish authorities rarely remember these victims.

- So it won’t be possible to declare them victims of the NKVD.

Will not work. The Polish version is untenable for a number of reasons. It is known that many witnesses saw the Poles alive in 1940-1941.
Archival documents have also been preserved about the transfer of cases against Polish prisoners of war to the Special Meeting (OSO) of the NKVD of the USSR, which did not have the right to sentence them to death, but could sentence them to a maximum of eight years in the camps. In addition, the USSR never carried out mass executions of foreign prisoners of war, especially officers. Especially in an out-of-court manner without completing the relevant procedures provided for by law. Warsaw stubbornly ignores this. And one more thing. Until the fall of 1941, in the Kozyi Gory tract there was no technical possibility of quietly shooting several thousand people. This tract is located 17 kilometers from Smolensk not far from the Gnezdovo station and until the war it remained an open recreation area for townspeople. There were pioneer camps here, an NKVD dacha burned by the Germans during their retreat in 1943. It was located 700 meters from the busy Vitebsk highway. And the burial sites themselves are located 200 meters from the highway. It was the Germans who surrounded this place with barbed wire and set up guards.

- Mass graves in Medny, Tver region... There is no complete clarity here either?

Tver (more precisely, the village of Mednoe near Tver) is the second point on the “Katyn map”, where Polish prisoners of war were allegedly buried. Recently the local community started talking about this loudly. Everyone is tired of the lies that the Poles and some of our fellow citizens are spreading. It is believed that Polish prisoners of war who were previously held in the Ostashkov camp are buried in Mednoye. Let me remind you that there were no more than 400 officers out of a total of 6,300 Polish prisoners of war. The Polish side categorically claims that they all lie in Medny. This contradicts the data contained in the memorandums of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation. They were sent to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in connection with the consideration in 2010-2013 of the “Case of Yanovets and others against Russia”. The memorandums of the Ministry of Justice - and they reflect our official position - clearly indicate that during the exhumation carried out in 1991 in Medny, the remains of only 243 Polish military personnel were discovered. Of these, 16 people were identified (identified by badges).

- To put it mildly, significant differences.

We must say frankly: this is obvious and unprincipled manipulation. Despite this, the Poles erected a memorial in Mednoye and hung signs with the names of the 6,300 Poles allegedly shot and buried there. The figures I have mentioned allow us to imagine the scale of cynicism and falsification that the Poles have resorted to and continue to resort to. It's sad that they have like-minded people in our country. We won’t speculate about their motives. But they have no arguments! This is the jesuitism and shamelessness of the position of the current Warsaw: to reject and ignore inconvenient facts and talk about its position as the only correct one and not subject to doubt.

- There is a lot of controversy in this regard in the so-called “Katyn No. 3” - Kyiv Bykivna.

In 2012, in Bykivna, the then presidents of Poland and Ukraine, Komorowski and Yanukovych, opened a memorial in memory of the three and a half thousand Polish officers allegedly shot there (please note: again, it was the officers). However, this has not been confirmed by anything. There are not even milestone lists that exist in the “Katyn case”. It is unfoundedly alleged that 3,500 Polish officers were kept in prisons in Western Ukraine. And supposedly they were all shot in Bykovnya.
The opponents' method of conducting discussions is amazing. We are used to presenting facts and arguments. And they give us figures taken from the ceiling, not supported by documents, and present them as indisputable evidence.

Have you ever personally had a discussion with those domestic historians who adhere to the Polish position?

I would be glad! We are always open for discussion. But our opponents avoid discussions and contacts. They operate on the principle of “a scorpion under a stone.” He usually sits for a long time, and at some point he crawls out, bites and hides again.

At the beginning of the year, the Polish Sejm received a bill from Deputy Zielinski. He proposed declaring July 12 as the Day of Remembrance for the victims of the 1945 “August Raid.” In Poland it is called Lesser Katyn or New Katyn. The feeling that the Poles bake their “Katyn” like pancakes...

This once again confirms that « Katyn” as such has long been a tool and at the same time a “source” of the information war against Russia. For some reason this is underestimated here. But in vain.
On July 9, the Polish Sejm adopted the law proposed by Zelinsky on “Remembrance Day on July 12.” So now official Warsaw has another “anti-Russian bogeyman”...
The history of “Little Katyn” is as follows. In July 1945, a military and security operation was carried out against gangs that committed murders and sabotage in the rear of the 1st Belorussian Front. During the operation, more than seven thousand armed people were detained. Approximately 600 of them turned out to be associated with the Home Army (AK). The Polish side claims that everyone was shot immediately. In Warsaw, they refer to one document - a coded telegram from the head of Smersh, Viktor Abakumov, to the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR, Lavrenty Beria, No. 25212 dated July 21, 1945. It allegedly talks about the liquidation of anti-Soviet formations and contains a “proposal to shoot” the mentioned 592 Poles. But in the USSR, I repeat once again, such extrajudicial executions have never been carried out - especially foreign prisoners of war.
At that time, the employees of the GUKR “Smersh” NGO of the USSR did not have any legal grounds for shooting the Poles. Order of the NKVD of the USSR No. 0061 of February 6, 1945, which introduced at the final stage of the war in the front line the right to shoot bandits and saboteurs captured at the scene of a crime, became invalid after the end of hostilities. It was officially canceled even before the start of the “August Operation”. This alone calls into question the reliability of the encryption provided by the Poles.
The indiscriminate, “equalizing” nature of the application of mass execution to all 592 arrested “Akovites” without exception, and only to them, also raises great doubts. The usual practice of law enforcement agencies of the USSR at that time was to divide those arrested according to contingents, categories and other criteria with individual application of appropriate measures.
It is noteworthy that the above encryption was compiled in gross violation of the norms of official subordination. GUKR "Smersh" was not subordinate to the NKVD of the USSR and for this reason its chief, Colonel General Viktor Abakumov, who reported directly to Stalin, in principle should not have asked for "instructions" from the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs. Moreover, instructions about execution.
A recent examination of the “cipher telegram” clearly shows that we are dealing with a fake. If only because part of the document was printed on one typewriter, and part on another. The publication of the data from this examination, I hope, will put an end to Polish myth-making on these events. However, there is no doubt that “Malye”, “New” and other Katyns will be followed by others. Polish falsifiers of history have lost their sense of reality and are unlikely to stop.

- What can you say about the so-called grave No. 9, discovered in Katyn in the spring of 2000?

Indeed, in 2000, during the construction of a transformer station in Katyn, a previously unknown burial place was discovered. Based on their uniforms and other signs, they established that there were Polish military personnel there. At least two hundred remains. Poland responded to the news of the discovery of a new grave by saying that the wife of then Polish President Kwasniewski arrived in Katyn and laid flowers. But the Polish side did not respond to the proposal to carry out joint exhumation work. Since then, “Grave No. 9” has been a figure of “silence” for the Polish media.

- What, there are “other” Poles lying there?

It’s a paradox, but official Warsaw does not need the remains of “unverified” compatriots. She only needs “correct” burials, which confirm the Polish version of the execution by the “evil NKVD”. After all, during the exhumation of the “unknown grave”, there is almost no doubt that further evidence will be discovered pointing to German perpetrators. To complete the picture, it is necessary to say something about the actions of our authorities. Instead of initiating exhumation, they classified all materials. Russian researchers have not been allowed to visit “Grave No. 9” for sixteen years now. But I am sure: the truth will triumph sooner or later.

- If we summarize the conversation, what issues are among the unresolved?

I have already said most of it. The main thing is that the collected facts and evidence confirming the guilt of the Germans in the execution of Poles in Katyn are ignored by Warsaw and somehow “shamefully” kept silent by our authorities. It’s time to finally understand that the Polish side in the “Katyn issue” has long been not only biased, but also incapable of negotiating. Warsaw does not accept and will not accept any “inconvenient” arguments. The Poles will continue to call white black. They have driven themselves into the Katyn dead end, from which they cannot and do not want to get out. Russia must show political will here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Issues of cultural studies and history

THE ALLEGED MYSTERY OF THE REASONS FOR THE EXECUTION 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, N.’s question was asked. S. Mikhalkov about the motives for the execution of Polish officers is a question that remains 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 began to be 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 briefly immerse yourself in 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 XX century.

The topic of Katyn is not new for me: the course of lectures “Introduction to Slavic Studies” I read to students of the State Academy of Slavic Culture (GASK) includes a section “Painful points of relations between the Slavs,” in which the Katyn execution of Polish officers is given a mandatory place. And our students themselves, who have visited Poland, as a rule, ask about Katyn, wanting to find out additional details. But most Russians know almost nothing about the Katyn tragedy. Therefore, here, first of all, it is necessary to provide a brief historical background on how Polish officers ended up in Katyn, how many of them were shot there and when the above-mentioned outrageous crime was committed. Unfortunately, our newspapers, magazines and television often report superficial, very contradictory information, and people often have the misconception that captured Polish officers were imprisoned in the Katyn camp and were executed due to the approach of German troops, with the total number of Polish officers executed being 10 or even 20 thousand people. There are still some voices that the perpetrators of the death of the Polish military personnel have not been definitively established and that they could have been the Nazis, who then tried to blame the USSR for their own atrocity. That is why we will try here to present the materials sequentially, without disturbing the order of events and using, if possible, accurate facts and figures, delving not only into the essence of them themselves, but also into the emotional, state and universal meaning that they carry.

After the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the beginning of the Second World War, unleashed on September 1, 1939 by Germany’s attack on Poland, German troops, having broken the heroic resistance of the enemy in two weeks (more precisely, in 17 days), occupied most ancestral Polish lands, then forcing the Poles to capitulate. 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 to conclude a treaty directed against the USSR; earlier it stated that it would not allow the transit of Soviet troops through its territory to provide possible assistance to potential Soviet allies in Europe. This contributed in part to the Munich Agreement of 1938, the subsequent dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, the absorption of Czech lands by Germany, and the territorial gains of Poland itself. Events of this kind clearly did not contribute to good neighborly relations between Poland and the USSR, and formed among the Russians a feeling of hostility or even hostility towards the Poles. This feeling was also fueled by memories that had not yet been erased from the memory of the recent Soviet-Polish war of 1918-1921, the encirclement of the Red Army near Warsaw, the captivity of 130 thousand Red Army soldiers, who were then placed in the terrible camps of Pulawy, Dombio, Shchelkovo and Tucholi, from which home Only a little more than half of the prisoners returned2.

In Soviet propaganda, Poland appeared with stable epithets “bourgeois” or “gentleman”. The last word was heard by almost every Russian: everyone knew and sang a patriotic song with the lines “The chieftain dogs remember, the Polish gentlemen remember our cavalry blades.” In the song, “lords” were placed 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 strived in the 13th - early 15th centuries. to the Slavic east (the stable expression “knight dogs”). In the same way, the word “pan” in Russian does not, like the Poles, have the harmless respectful-neutral meaning “master.” It has acquired additional, mainly negative connotations, which are attributed to those who are not actually called that, but are called names. “Pan” is a person of a specific type, possessing a whole set 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 gentleman in holey trousers), that is, she is a rich, bourgeois person, far from the “thin, hunchbacked” working class - a collective image from the poetry of V. Mayakovsky. Thus, in the consciousness of Soviet people of the 20s - 40s of the XX century. an unflattering evaluative cliché was built up for the Poles: Poland is lordly, bourgeois, hostile and aggressive, like chieftain dogs and German knight dogs.

No one doubted Poland’s aggressiveness in the then USSR. After all, just about twenty years ago, taking advantage of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the turmoil that set 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 unjust borders of the Polish state 1772 d. This caused, as is known, the Soviet-Polish war

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

The Polish army offered armed resistance to the Red Army: battles took place in Grodno, near Lvov, Lublin, Vilno, Sarny and other settlements3. Moreover, captured Polish officers were shot. This happened in Augustovets, Boyars, Maly and Bolshie Brzostovitsy, Khorodov, Dobrovitsy, Gayi, Grabov, Komarov, Lvov, Molodechno, Svisloch, Zlochov and other areas. 13 hours after the start of the process of introducing Soviet troops (i.e. at 16:00 on September 17), the commander-in-chief of the Polish armed forces, Marshal Edward Rydz-Smigly, issued a general directive calling not to resist 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 military personnel were killed on the Polish side, about 20 thousand people were wounded or went 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 of the people, intoxicated by Soviet propaganda, hoped for a new, better life.

In Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, by September 21, the Soviet army captured about 120 thousand soldiers and officers of the Polish Army. About 18 thousand people made their way to Lithuania, over 70 thousand to Romania and Hungary. Some of the prisoners consisted of Polish military personnel who retreated from Poland under the rapid onslaught of the Germans here, to the eastern lands of their then state. According to Polish sources, 240-250 thousand soldiers and officers of the Polish Army were captured by the Russians6. Some discrepancies in estimating the number of Polish prisoners of war arise as a result of the use of different counting methods and the fact that later, 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 origin. permanent

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

Naturally, leaving an impressive number of foreign prisoners of war in its border zone, which actually turned out to be Western Ukraine and Western Belarus for the USSR, 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: dispersing the mass of prisoners of war through their internment in various parts of the country. At the same time, some of the captured Poles were released after interrogation by NKVD officers to their homeland, and representatives of the top, middle and lower command staff of the Polish Army were sent to various prisoner of war camps. The same thing happened to officers, chiefs and employees of the Polish police, intelligence officers, commanders and guards of prisons and some other officials.

The transfer 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 1940.7 The most elite was the prisoner of war camp in Kozelsk, located 250 km southeast of Smolensk and belonging to the department of Smolensk regional NKVD. About 4.7 thousand Poles were stationed here, among whom there were many high-ranking officers and mobilized reserve officers, who in civilian life had purely humanitarian professions of doctors, teachers, engineers, and writers. The attitude towards prisoners of war in this camp was quite tolerable: generals and colonels (4 generals, 1 admiral and 24-26 colonels)8 were housed several people in rooms separate from the bulk of the camp prisoners, they were allowed to have orderlies. The diet was quite satisfactory, as was the medical care. Prisoners could send letters to their homeland, and the cessation of their correspondence with relatives and loved ones in Poland made it possible to date the Katyn tragedy to approximately the end of April 1940.9 The second camp for Polish senior and junior officers was located in the Starobelsk region in a former convent and was subordinate to the NKVD of the then Voroshilovgrad ( Lugansk, now Kharkov) region. 3.9 thousand Polish prisoners of war were stationed here (including 8 generals, 57 colonels, 130 lieutenant colonels and other lower rank officials1"). Conditions in this camp were somewhat worse compared to the camp in Kozelsk, but also quite tolerable No one mocked the prisoners, no one beat them regularly, no one forced them to fall face down in the dirt countless times during “walks” and then deprive them of a bath for a whole month, no one deprived them of medical care, as was the case with the Red Army soldiers in Polish camps in the 20s of the XX century.

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

“The administrative staff, especially doctors and nurses, treated the prisoners humanely”12.

Further, we will not delve into the details of how difficult it was to find the truth about the terrible Katyn tragedy, about the endless denials of the Soviet side, which continued to blame the Germans for everything for almost half a century. The motives for these denials are numerous and varied enough to cover them here. Let us only note that the main ones were, at first, the reluctance to darken relations with the allies during the Second World War, then to undermine “fraternal ties with friendly Poland, which has moved along the path of building socialism,” and subsequently, attempts to rehabilitate the name of Stalin, which, unfortunately, are gradually being undertaken , and to this day. 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 USSR President M. S. Gorbachev handed over to the then President of the Republic of Poland W. Jaruzelski a complete list of the names of the Poles taken from Kozelsk, Ostashkov and Starobelsk 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 stored in the archives of the CPSU Central Committee for many decades. It contained information of particular importance classified as “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 the strokes of I. V. Stalin,

V. M. Molotov and K. E. Voroshilov. With these flourishes, the leaders of the USSR approved the “examination in a special order” of the cases of 14,700 former officers of the Polish army and other military personnel, i.e., they sentenced them 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 death of the Poles in the USSR, which certainly contain a lot of new declassified data that can 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. Particular attention is paid to 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 shot. Thus, supporters of this version conclude, the Russians destroyed the Polish military and civilian elite.

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

At the end of October 1941, a Polish contingent began to form on the territory of the USSR, numbering 41.5 thousand people and increasing by March 1942 to almost 74 thousand people. The Polish emigration government in London proposed increasing the size of the Polish corps to 96 thousand people15. At the head of this, in fact, army was 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 Novo-Grudok, where he offered fierce resistance to the Germans and Russians. For a long time he was in the NKVD prison and how he could behave in the future, having received command of an almost hundred thousand Polish army on the territory of the USSR, was not entirely clear. Therefore, by September 1, 1942, the army of General Anders was evacuated to Iran, from where it was transported to Africa to fight the British against the Germans.

Version two: the execution of Polish officers is Russian revenge for the defeat near Warsaw and the inhumane treatment of captured Red Army soldiers in Polish camps. It seems that this is exactly the version outlined by 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 the following in his diary: “...hopeless, stupid resistance and an irreconcilably hostile attitude towards the USSR, which has its origins in the past... will in the future become the direct causes of the decision of the Soviet authorities, which led to the terrible (Katyn) tragedy”16. The following fact would seem to speak about the Russians’ irritation and sense of vindictiveness towards the Poles. In September 1939, Deputy People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs V.P. Potemkin handed over to the Polish Ambassador in Moscow

formation of the Polish state as such17. The embitterment of Stalin and his entourage was probably caused by Soviet intelligence data about the formation by the Germans in occupied Poland of a separate brigade of the Podhale Riflemen 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 concluded between the USSR and Finland on March 13 of the same year thwarted these plans18. Let us recall that the order of the Big Three to shoot 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 we would like to propose: totalitarian class “sanitation”. The execution of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, in the internal prison of the Kharkov NKVD and other places was an elementary “purge” characteristic of totalitarian states of that time. Despite the fact that the previous version seems very plausible and emotions when the “Big Red Three” signed execution orders for the Poles could have played some role, they were by no means the main reason for it. The postulate “the idea is everything, and man is nothing” was proclaimed as the main credo of Bolshevik totalitarianism.

According to him, the multimillion-dollar human mass is just building material, a significant part of which must inevitably go to waste. After the October Revolution of 1917, during the Civil War in Russia, the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, with incredible cruelty exterminated 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” passed in 1940 among 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 execution was obviously of a class nature and represented a preventive class “sanitation” for the future unhindered construction 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 defeat the enemy on foreign territory appeared in its military regulations. And Poland, of course, after the victory of the USSR should have been one of the first to join the future World Communist Community. The reality of World War II overturned Stalin's sweet dreams. Victory over fascism was won, but at the cost of a sea of ​​blood and the lives of tens of millions of Soviet people.

Returning to the moral lessons of Katyn, first of all it is necessary to pay tribute to the memory of all the 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 are they “Russians”? Unfortunately, many, following the Polish Russophobes, begin to repeat the artificial oppositions they use: “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 “Polish-Russian war”, but “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 a national character. The construction of the giant punitive “Red Wheel” was international. It was attended by the founder of “red terrorism”, it is unclear who Lenin’s nationality was, a kind of Swedish-Jewish-Kalmyk-Russian individual (see the publication about the national roots of Lenin 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, a Jew, a Tatar or a Bashkir, would be capable of giving a secret order to exterminate 100 thousand people.

rabbis or muezzins, of course, if he is not crazy or a pathological murderer-maniac. Lenin's work 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 performed excellently in this field. Chairman of the Cheka, the Poles F.E. Dzerzhinsky and I.S. Unshlikht2", the Jews L. Trotsky and J. Sverdlov, the Latvians M.I. Latsis and P.Ya. Peters did not lag behind them. The famous troika of Russian executioners N.I. Yezhov,

V.S. Abakumov and V.N. Merkulov, in comparison with the previous defendants, are only their pathetic followers. We should not forget the fact that it was the Russians who suffered the most numerous losses from the “Red Wheel”. Next to the eight Katyn ditches, where the remains of 4,200 Polish officers rest, there are mass graves of Russians, Ukrainians and Jews executed by Beria’s executioners. Therefore, Polish Russophobes have no real arguments to accuse the Russians of the genocide of the Poles or Polonophobia. It would be better for Poles and Russians to fight for the construction of a magnificent memorial complex in Moscow, dedicated to the 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. pp. 75-76.

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

5 On the foreign policy of the Soviet Union // Bolshevik. 1939. No. 20. P. 5.

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

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

8 Katyn. Prisoners of an undeclared war. P. 435; Ezhevsky L. Katyn, 1940. Riga, 1990.

9 Ezhevsky L. Katyn, 1940. P. 18.

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

11 Ibid. P. 436.

12 2bgos1sha Kaig^ka \y otstye s1okitep1b\y. L., 1962. 8. 15-16; Katyn. Prisoners of an undeclared war. P. 521.

13 Katyn drama: Kozelsk, Starobelsk, Ostashkov. P. 16. The burial places of all executed Polish officers have not yet been established. As for Katyn, the tragedy occurred near Smolensk in the Goat Mountains (according to another vowel “Kosohory”, see: L. Ezhevsky, op. cit. 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 made inaccessible to unauthorized persons. In addition to the three camps mentioned, Polish prisoners of war were kept in Putivlsky, Kozelytsansky (in the Poltava region), Yuzhsky, Yukhnovsky, Vologda (Zaonikeevsky), Gryazovetsky and Oransky

camps. In addition, over 76 thousand refugees and defectors from Poland were accommodated in the Krasnoyarsk and Altai territories. Arkhangelsk, Vologda, Gorky, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Chelyabinsk and Yakutsk regions, as well as in the Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The vast majority of them remained alive and returned home at the end of the war (see: Katyn. March 1940 - September 2000. Execution. Fates of the living. Echo of Katyn. Documents. M., 2001. P. 41).

14 Ibid. P. 25; Katyn. Prisoners of an undeclared war. P. 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. P. 25.

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

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

19 Kaliganov II. II. Bolshevik Russia in Bulgarian marginal literature of the 20-40s of the XX century. // Bulgaria and Russia (XVIII-XX centuries). Mutual knowledge. M., 2010. P. 107.

20 The international character of the command staff of the NKVD workers is clearly visible in the history of the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, built by the hands of prisoners. See: White Sea-Baltic Canal named after Stalin: History of construction, 1931-1934. / ed. M. Gorky, JI. Averbakh, S. Firina. M., 1998. (Reprint of the 1934 edition). S. 72, 157, 175, 184, 325, 340, 358, 373, etc.

The location was not chosen by chance; there is fertile sandy soil, which means that it will not be so difficult for soldiers to bury corpses in the ground. However, the graves were not always dug by soldiers; sometimes the condemned themselves dug them for themselves, realizing the doom of their situation. Now there is a forest here, but before at the time of the executions there were almost no trees; pines were planted only later so that with their roots in the ground they would tear up and destroy the remains of bodies.

The burial itself is divided into 2 parts: Polish and Russian. The Polish memorial was made by designers according to a special project. At the entrance you are greeted by a small carriage; it was in such short railway carriages that people traveled to exile. 30 or even 50 people were placed in this carriage for transfer.

3.

At both ends of the car there were bunks in three tiers, and in the middle there was a stove for heating. In the summer, instead of a toilet for prisoners, there was simply a hole in the floor, and in the winter, an ordinary bucket, which was poured either at the stations or directly “overboard”, having previously broken out the boards in the back of the car.

4.

5.

The prisoners were fed mainly with herring, because it was very salted and did not rot. In fact, it was just salt, which made you very thirsty, and the repressed were practically not given water.

6.

In a confined space, people got sick, fought each other for the best places, and even killed each other. The corpses were removed only at stops, and often people rode for several hours in the carriage next to the corpses. This is despite the fact that not every such carriage had windows. This carriage is now a gift to the Katyn memorial from the Moscow Railway.
After entering the territory of the complex, the road “splits” into a Polish military cemetery to the right, and a Soviet cemetery to the left.

7.

Memorial stone at the entrance.

8.

A little history of the execution of Poles in Katyn. On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany entered the territory of Poland; on September 17, 1939, the Red Army also entered Polish lands “in order to protect the rights of the Ukrainian and Belarusian population.” Germany was then at war with Poland, and the USSR did not officially declare war on the Poles. According to the secret “non-aggression pact”, the USSR was supposed to keep the Polish army on its territory until the war between Germany and Poland ended.
However, in the USSR, internment performed its function poorly and released the majority of ordinary soldiers after disarmament, while mostly Polish officers remained in captivity.
It should also be noted that in November 1939, the Polish government in exile officially declared war on the USSR. The reason for this was the transfer of the city of Vilnius to Lithuania. In this regard, the status of Polish officers who were on the territory of the USSR was changed: from internees they turned into prisoners of war. However, letters from them to relatives continued to arrive regularly until the spring of 1940. Of certain importance is the fact that, according to the Geneva Convention, it was forbidden to force prisoners of war to work. And this condition was met.
On March 31, 1940, Polish prisoners of war began to be taken out of the camps in batches of 200-300 people. But where were they taken? Opinions differ on this issue.

Plan of the Polish cemetery.

9.

As in any mystery, there are several versions of what happened next. According to the German version, on March 5, 1940, Lavrentiy Beria wrote a letter to Stalin, in which he proposed “the cases of 11,000 former Polish officers arrested in the amount of 11,000 people should be considered in a special manner, with the death penalty applied to them - execution.” On the same day, the note was signed by I.V. Stalin, comrades Kalinin, Kaganovich, Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, and approved by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Russian Design Bureau of Bolsheviks (Bolsheviks).

Prisoners were taken to the city of Kalinin, to Kharkov, to the Katyn Forest. In Kalinin, they were shot in the NKVD buildings and buried in a cemetery near the village of Mednoe. In Kharkov, executions were also carried out in the basements of the regional NKVD headquarters.

At the entrance to the Polish part there are copies of the Polish border posts of 1939 and an inscription in Polish: Polish military cemetery Katyn.

10.

11.

So, according to the German version, the prisoners were put into prison cars and taken to the Gnezdovo station, located west of Smolensk. In the basements of this station, immediately after the arrival of the train, Polish generals were shot.
The remaining prisoners at the station were loaded into buses with closed windows and taken to the rest house of the NKVD officers in the forest. The time was calculated so that they would arrive there in the evening.

At the dacha they were searched, piercing and cutting objects, watches were confiscated and locked in cells located in the building. Then, one by one, they were taken to a room where an NKVD officer sat and checked the convict’s full name and year of birth. After this, the officer was led into a basement with walls lined with soundproofing material. The executioner took a German Walther pistol and fired a shot into the back of the head. The corpse was taken outside and thrown into the back of a truck. The executions lasted all night, during which time 200-300 corpses accumulated in the back. In the morning they were taken to the Katyn Forest and dumped into already dug graves.

The most honorable order among the Poles is Militari Virtuti or Order of Military Valor.

12.

Often, NKVD officers changed tactics and, having completed the search of prisoners of war at the NKVD dacha, took them to previously excavated graves. They were taken out of the bus one by one, their hands were tied with German paper twine, and they were led to the ditch. The executioner fired a shot to the back of the head again from the same Walter. Sometimes prisoners, those who panicked, had their uniforms lifted up and covered their faces, a noose was tightened around their necks, tying their hands with the other end of the twine. In some cases, the space between the face and clothing was filled with sawdust in order to cause the greatest torment to the doomed person. The prisoners who actively resisted were inflicted with puncture wounds with a bayonet. Having led to the ditch, they shot in the back of the head in the same way.

This cross shows symbolic dates for Poland in 1939. On September 1, Nazi troops entered its territory, and on September 17, the Red Army.

13.

The fact that the prisoners were shot with German weapons is considered one of the proofs of the Germans’ guilt in the tragedy. But supporters of the German version answer them that before the war, Walther pistols were imported from Germany by the Soviet Union, and until 1933, German 7.65 caliber bullets were also imported. However, the fact of the discovery of German paper twine in the graves, which was not imported or produced on the territory of the USSR, has not yet found an explanation within the framework of German theory. In addition, photographs of 7.65 caliber bullet casings taken by the Germans show rust. According to A. Wasserman, this indicates that they are made of steel. Brass bullets imported before 1933 could not rust. But steel bullets of this caliber began to be produced in Germany only at the beginning of 1941!

There are 8 execution pits on the territory of the Polish cemetery; these are the places where the bodies of executed Poles were buried en masse. The largest pit was the first one; about 2000 bodies were buried in it. They buried them like this: bodies, a layer of lime, again bodies, again a layer of lime, and so on until the hole was completely filled. Lime was needed to speed up the decomposition of corpses. Now all the bodies of those killed from the execution pits have been exhumed, and the contours of the pits are now lined with cast iron slabs.

14.

15.

During April-May 1940, all prisoners were destroyed in this way. This crime remained unknown until April 13, 1943, when the Germans announced that they had discovered Katyn graves in occupied Soviet territory, in which rested Polish officers shot by the NKVD of the USSR in the spring of 1940.
To study the circumstances of the tragedy, the Germans formed an “international” commission of representatives of Germany’s allied countries and the states it occupied.

On April 28, 1943, she began work and completed it on April 30. The final document states that, based on the documents found in the graves, it can be concluded that the executions took place in the spring of 1940. We are talking about all kinds of notes, newspapers, diaries, among which the German commission did not find any that were dated later than the spring of 1940.

The main color of the Polish memorial is rust; according to the designers, it is the color of dried blood. There is a bell below - if you swing it, the ringing comes as if “from underground”.

16.

Beginning in May 1943, excavations were stopped. By this time, 4,143 bodies had been exhumed from 7 graves, while 4 more remained unopened; more than half of the corpses were identified from the documents found. In September 1943, the Red Army liberated Smolensk. While retreating, the Germans destroyed or took with them material evidence. In January 1944, a commission began work under the leadership of doctor Burdenko, which, according to supporters of the German version, was tasked with proving at all costs the guilt of the Germans in the execution of Poles in Katyn.

Separate graves of Polish generals Smoravinsky and Bogatyrevich. In 2010, the granddaughter of General Smorawinski was on the ill-fated plane on which Polish President Lech Kaczynski died.

18.

The Soviet Commission excavated the remaining 4 graves and removed 925 bodies from the ground. Documents dated later than the spring of 1940, including those from 1941, were found in the clothes of the dead. Supporters of the German version believe that all these papers are falsified. In addition, the final report of the commission found errors in the spelling of the names and initials of those accused of shooting German military personnel and witnesses, and incorrect indication of the military ranks of the suspects. All this, according to supporters of the German version, only indicates that the Burdenko commission carried out the political order of the Soviet leadership, and did not conduct unbiased research.

One way or another, the commission’s conclusion became the official version of the USSR on the Katyn issue and remained so until perestroika. It remained until it was questioned by M. Gorbachev, who stated in 1990 that “documents have been found that 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.

Now Polish officers are buried in such mass graves just a hundred meters from the execution sites. All graves are mass graves and Russia now does not allow bodies to be transported to Polish territory. An exception was made only for the only woman shot in Katyn - pilot Antonina Lewandowska.

When talking about the motives for committing a crime, opponents of the Soviet version do not come to a common opinion. Some believe that the execution of Poles is a continuation of Stalin’s policy of repression, so it is impossible to voice a clear answer to this question, because the murders of “millions of innocent citizens” are also inexplicable. That is, repression for the sake of repression. Other adherents believe that the execution was carried out in revenge for the murder of tens or even hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers who were captured by the Poles in 1920.

19.

20.

Thus, from the point of view of supporters of the German version, the end has been set in the Katyn affair, the guilt of the NKVD of the USSR has been clearly proven.

The Poles listed all those killed by name. Everyone has their own memorial plaque, where relatives come and honor the memory, put up flags, and paste photographs.

21.

22.

23.

Pilot Antonina Lewandowska has already been buried in Warsaw, but nevertheless, a memorial plaque about her remains.

24.

Memorial plaques are made at the burial level, i.e. visitors walk from below, and on top there is, as it were, a decorative layer of soil.

25.

This story also has a Soviet version. What is the truth has not been fully clarified. As a rule, most people visiting the memorial hear two versions from guides, and accept one or the other, depending, for example, on their personal attitude towards Stalin’s regime. But it’s better to form your own opinion, without personal emotions, because... the Soviet version also has a sufficient number of facts.

According to it, at the end of February or beginning of March, the leadership of the USSR decided to send the cases of Polish officers prisoners of war to a Special Meeting under the NKVD, which sentenced the prisoners to imprisonment for periods of 3 to 8 years in special-purpose labor camps. It should be noted that forcing prisoners of war officers to work is a violation of the Geneva Convention, so all this took place in secrecy. Captured Poles were taken to camps near Smolensk for the construction of roads between Smolensk and Minsk.

The Poles who were shot in Katyn were taken to the Gnezdovo station by rail, where they were loaded into covered buses and taken to the NKVD dacha.

There is also a “valley of death” at the Katyn Memorial. This is a cemetery of Soviet people - “enemies of the people” and other “counter-revolutionary scum” (Previously, this word could very often be found in quite official documents, since the level of education of the “people’s commissars” left much to be desired) innocently killed by “communists”. A cemetery without graves, just land where excavations were not carried out and corpses were not exhumed. It is located behind such a small gate.

26.

27.

Here people simply put crosses anywhere, knowing that their relative was shot here, but no one knows where exactly in the ground the body is located.

28.

But let's return to the Soviet version of the execution of the Poles. In special purpose camps, a stricter regime is observed, in particular, prohibiting correspondence with relatives. This, according to supporters of the Soviet version, can explain why letters from Polish officers stopped reaching Poland. In August 1941, Smolensk was surrendered to the fascist invaders; the Poles did not want to retreat along with the Red Army, but hoped to return to their homeland with the arrival of the Germans, and thus the Poles fell into the hands of the fascists. At first the Poles worked for the Germans, and then they shot them.

The execution technology is tying hands with German twine (this is a recognized fact, but the question is why the NKVD needed to use German twine instead of Russian rope. The German version explains this by “discrediting” the Germans, but in 1940 Germany had not yet violated the Molotov Pact - Ribbentrop did not declare war on Russia. Then the NKVD had to predict a future war with Germany, the capture of Smolensk by the Germans and their discovery of the Katyn burials .....), a shot in the back of the head directly at the dug ditch, sometimes with lifting up the uniform, throwing a noose around the neck, using sawdust, inflicting wounds with a bayonet. Neither before nor after the murder were the Polish officers searched.

The Russian cemetery in Katyn is less equipped than the Polish one and the memorial here is still only in design. Here only bulk wooden floorings have been made - paths along which visitors walk, and under them there may still be unexhumed burials.

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A memorial at a Russian cemetery - the fence was made according to the designers' plans in such a way that its boundaries could be expanded. This seems to symbolize the limitlessness of these crimes.

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Orthodox cross at a Russian cemetery.

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After the Red Army liberated Smolensk, a commission led by doctor Nikolai Burdenko began to investigate the Katyn massacres. According to the Soviet version, graves untouched by the Nazis were excavated in Katyn, where documents dating back to a later date than the spring of 1940 were discovered.

The result of the work of the Burdenko commission was a document that places the blame for the execution of Polish officers in Katyn on the German occupiers. The Germans, in 1943, attracted an entire international commission to exhume the bodies, one of the participants of which, the Czech Francishek Hajek, later wrote an entire article “Katyn Evidence”, where he refers to the fact that the condition of the corpses and belongings of the murdered people speaks of a later period of execution, i.e. .e. not about the spring of 40, but about the autumn of 41 or even later.

Now the main document recognizing the German version of the tragedy is Beria’s note to Stalin.

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There, too, the Soviet version contains many inaccuracies, for example the phrase “The NKVD of the USSR considers it necessary to propose to the NKVD of the USSR,” the absence of the signatures of Kalinin and Kaganovich, and a host of other inconsistencies.

Speaking about the motives for the crime, supporters of the Soviet version believe that the Germans shot Polish officers due to the fact that in August 1941 peace was concluded between the USSR and the Polish government in exile, and the Polish army of General Anders began to be formed in concert from among the amnestied Polish prisoners of war (all Polish citizens who were on the territory of the USSR were amnestied).

Accordingly, Polish prisoners of war who fell into the hands of the Nazis could escape and take part in the war against Nazi Germany.

At the exit from the memorial there are 2 small exhibitions. The first of them is the Museum of Russian Political History. It is small, but some of the exhibits are quite interesting.

These are real drawings of Soviet children who, instead of the sun, sea or apple tree, painted portraits of tyrants, God save all subsequent generations of children from this.

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An excerpt from the newspaper “Pionerskaya Pravda”, you read and see how much “propaganda garbage” Soviet propaganda pushed into the heads of teenagers using the press.

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The words “scoundrel” and “scum” were used quite often in the official Soviet press, because it was necessary to clearly formulate an opinion among the masses - white or black and without any shades of gray. And propaganda also created hatred towards negative heroes; in the next clipping there is only a paragraph of text and for “counter-revolutionary agitation” - the meaning of the phrase is difficult to understand, the workers are already demanding to SHOOT PEOPLE.

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The wives only had to write letters to Comrade Stalin, which were hardly read by anyone from the top leadership.

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But here, in general, everything is simple and clear without unnecessary words - after all, “brevity is the sister of talent.”

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And this is the Seliger forum of that time.

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The second museum is also small, it displays some things of the Poles that were not taken to Warsaw to the Katyn Museum. Personal belongings - on the right are tongs that prisoners used to pull out their teeth.

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Military uniform of Polish officers of that time.

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Now a chapel has been built next to the memorial in memory of the people who met their death here.

47.

You can argue for a long time and give a bunch of facts about who is to blame for this tragedy. What is certain is that both Stalin and Hitler could have done this. The latter was merciless and guilty of a lot of deaths of innocent civilian Jews, Russians, Poles and others, and the former even destroyed his own people in exile and camps. About the German version, Polish director Andrzej Wajda made the film “Katyn” in 2007, it is generally not bad, although it smacks of propaganda, and of course not such an obvious propaganda crap as the Russian “August the Eighth” about the events in Georgia in 2008.

Personally, the following facts seem very strange to me: 1). The murder of Poles with German weapons (why shouldn’t the NKVD officers use standard NAGANs, and in general it is unlikely that the NKVD officers were armed with German “Walters”). 2). Why use a German tourniquet for the same reason. 3). If the Russians wanted to hide the truth like this, then why shoot officers in their clothes, it would be more logical to do it in their underwear and without documents, then it would be much easier to hide it.

Well, it’s unlikely that anyone will ever know the truth. After all, this is the difference between “real truth” and “political”. “Political truth” is always written to serve the interests of the current government. Well, everyone draws their own conclusions.

On March 5, 1940, the USSR authorities decided to apply the highest form of punishment to Polish prisoners of war - execution. This marked the beginning of the Katyn tragedy, one of the main stumbling blocks in Russian-Polish relations.

Missing officers

On August 8, 1941, against the backdrop of the outbreak of war with Germany, Stalin entered into diplomatic relations with his newfound ally, the Polish government in exile. As part of the new treaty, all Polish prisoners of war, especially those captured in 1939 on the territory of the Soviet Union, were granted an amnesty and the right to free movement throughout the territory of the Union. The formation of Anders' army began. However, the Polish government was missing about 15,000 officers who, according to documents, were supposed to be in the Kozelsky, Starobelsky and Yukhnovsky camps. To all the accusations of the Polish General Sikorski and General Anders of violating the amnesty agreement, Stalin replied that all the prisoners were released, but could escape to Manchuria. Subsequently, one of Anders’ subordinates described his alarm: “Despite the “amnesty”, Stalin’s own firm promise to return prisoners of war to us, despite his assurances that prisoners from Starobelsk, Kozelsk and Ostashkov were found and released, we did not receive a single call for help from prisoners of war from the above-mentioned camps. Questioning thousands of colleagues returning from camps and prisons, we have never heard any reliable confirmation of the whereabouts of the prisoners taken from those three camps.” He also owned the words spoken a few years later: “Only in the spring of 1943 a terrible secret was revealed to the world, the world heard a word that still emanates horror: Katyn.”

re-enactment

As you know, the Katyn burial site was discovered by the Germans in 1943, when these areas were under occupation. It was the fascists who contributed to the “promotion” of the Katyn case. Many specialists were involved, the exhumation was carefully carried out, they even took local residents on excursions there. The unexpected discovery in the occupied territory gave rise to a version of a deliberate staging, which was supposed to serve as propaganda against the USSR during the Second World War. This became an important argument in accusing the German side. Moreover, there were many Jews on the list of those identified.
The details also attracted attention: V.V. Kolturovich from Daugavpils outlined his conversation with a woman who, together with fellow villagers, went to look at the opened graves: “I asked her: “Vera, what did people say to each other while looking at the graves?” The answer was as follows: “Our careless slobs can’t do that - it’s too neat a job.” Indeed, the ditches were perfectly dug under the cord, the corpses were laid out in perfect stacks. The argument, of course, is ambiguous, but we should not forget that according to the documents, the execution of such a huge number of people was carried out in the shortest possible time. The performers simply did not have enough time for this.

Double jeopardy

At the famous Nuremberg Trials on July 1-3, 1946, the Katyn massacre was blamed on Germany and appeared in the indictment of the International Tribunal (IT) in Nuremberg, section III “War Crimes”, about cruel treatment of prisoners of war and military personnel of other countries. Friedrich Ahlens, commander of the 537th regiment, was declared the main organizer of the execution. He also acted as a witness in the retaliatory accusation against the USSR. The tribunal did not support the Soviet accusation, and the Katyn episode is absent from the tribunal’s verdict. All over the world this was perceived as a “tacit admission” by the USSR of its guilt.
The preparation and progress of the Nuremberg trials were accompanied by at least two events that compromised the USSR. On March 30, 1946, the Polish prosecutor Roman Martin, who allegedly had documents proving the guilt of the NKVD, died. Soviet prosecutor Nikolai Zorya also fell victim, who died suddenly right in Nuremberg in his hotel room. The day before, he told his immediate superior, Prosecutor General Gorshenin, that he had discovered inaccuracies in the Katyn documents and that he could not speak with them. The next morning he “shot himself.” There were rumors among the Soviet delegation that Stalin ordered “to bury him like a dog!”
After Gorbachev admitted the guilt of the USSR, researcher on the Katyn issue Vladimir Abarinov in his work cites the following monologue from the daughter of an NKVD officer: “I’ll tell you what. The order regarding the Polish officers came directly from Stalin. My father said that he saw an authentic document with Stalin’s signature, what should he do? Put yourself under arrest? Or shoot yourself? My father was made a scapegoat for decisions made by others.”

Party of Lavrentiy Beria

The Katyn massacre cannot be blamed on just one person. However, most big role in this, according to archival documents, Lavrentiy Beria “Stalin’s right hand” played. The leader’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, noted the extraordinary influence that this “scoundrel” had on her father. In her memoirs, she said that one word from Beria and a couple of forged documents was enough to determine the fate of future victims. The Katyn execution was no exception; on March 3, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Beria suggested that Stalin consider the cases of Polish officers "in a special manner, with the application of capital punishment to them - execution." Reason: “All of them are sworn enemies of the Soviet regime, filled with hatred of the Soviet system.” Two days later, the Politburo issued a decree on the transport of prisoners of war and preparations for execution.
There is a theory about the forgery of Beria’s “Note”. Linguistic analyzes give different results; the official version does not deny Beria’s involvement. However, statements about the falsification of the “note” are still being made. The last one in 2010, addressed to Zyuganov, reported on the acquaintance of the author, a certain V.I. Ilyukhin, with the real author of the letter.

Frustrated hopes

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

The downside of recognition

On February 22, 1990, the head of the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee, V. Falin, informed Gorbachev about new archival documents found that confirm the guilt of the NKVD in the Katyn execution. Falin proposed to urgently formulate a new position of the Soviet leadership in relation to this case and inform the President of the Polish Republic, Wladimir Jaruzelski, about new discoveries in the matter of the terrible tragedy. On April 13, 1990, TASS published an official statement admitting the guilt of the Soviet Union in the Katyn tragedy. Jaruzelski received from Mikhail Gorbachev lists of prisoners being transferred from three camps: Kozelsk, Ostashkov and Starobelsk. The main military prosecutor's office opened a case on the fact of the Katyn tragedy. The question arose of what to do with the surviving participants of the Katyn tragedy. This is what Valentin Alekseevich Alexandrov, a senior official of the CPSU Central Committee, told Nicholas Bethell: “We do not exclude the possibility of a judicial investigation or even a trial. But you must understand that Soviet public opinion does not entirely support Gorbachev's policy regarding Katyn. We in the Central Committee have received many letters from veterans’ organizations in which we are asked why we are defaming the names of those who were only doing their duty in relation to the enemies of socialism.” As a result, the investigation against those found guilty was terminated due to their death or lack of evidence.

Unresolved issue

The Katyn issue became the main stumbling block between Poland and Russia. When a new investigation into the Katyn tragedy began under Gorbachev, the Polish authorities hoped for a confession of guilt in the murder of all the missing officers, the total number of which was about fifteen thousand. The main attention was paid to the issue of the role of genocide in the Katyn tragedy. However, following the results of the case in 2004, it was announced that it was possible to establish the deaths of 1,803 officers, of whom 22 were identified. The Soviet leadership completely denied the genocide against the Poles. Prosecutor General Savenkov commented on this as follows: “during the preliminary investigation, at the initiative of the Polish side, the version of genocide was checked, and my firm statement is that there is no basis to talk about this legal phenomenon.” The Polish government was dissatisfied with the results of the investigation. In March 2005, in response to a statement by the Main Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation, the Polish Sejm demanded recognition of the Katyn events as an act of genocide. Members of the Polish parliament sent a resolution to the Russian authorities, in which they demanded that Russia “recognize the murder of Polish prisoners of war as genocide” based on Stalin’s personal hostility towards the Poles due to defeat in the 1920 war. In 2006, relatives of the dead Polish officers filed a lawsuit in the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights, with the aim of obtaining recognition of Russia in the genocide. The end to this pressing issue for Russian-Polish relations has not yet been reached.