The Katyn massacre
The Katyn massacre was the mass execution of Polish prisoners of war, officers and members of the intelligentsia carried out by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) in the spring of 1940. It is one of the clearest cases of a Soviet crime that the USSR denied for decades and blamed on Nazi Germany — and for that reason Katyn is also a key example of how Russia treats its history.
The order
After the Soviet Union occupied eastern Poland in September 1939 under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, tens of thousands of Polish soldiers and officials fell into its hands. On 5 March 1940 the members of the Politburo — Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Mikoyan and Kalinin — signed the proposal of the people’s commissar for internal affairs, Lavrentiy Beria, to execute about 25,700 Polish “nationalists and counter-revolutionaries” held in camps and prisons across occupied western Ukraine and Belarus.
The victims and the killing sites
Between April and May 1940, by the NKVD’s own records, 21,857 people were executed. Among them were about 8,000 officers, 6,000 police, and 8,000 members of the intelligentsia — physicians, lawyers, professors, teachers, priests and journalists — as well as 700–900 Polish Jews. Nearly half the Polish officer corps was killed. The main execution and burial sites were the Katyn forest near Smolensk (4,421 prisoners from the Kozelsk camp), the Kalinin (Tver) NKVD prison and the Mednoye burial ground (6,311 from Ostashkov), the Kharkiv prison and Piatykhatky (3,820 from Starobelsk), and prisons in western Ukraine and Belarus (7,305).
Denial and shifting the blame
In April 1943 the German army discovered the Katyn mass graves and announced them publicly. The Soviet Union denied responsibility and accused Nazi Germany of the killings. In January 1944 the Soviet Burdenko commission declared the Germans guilty, and the Soviet account held to this version until 1990. In 1946 the Soviet side tried to present Katyn at the Nuremberg trials as a German crime, but the British and American judges did not support the charge.
Acknowledging the truth
On 13 April 1990 the Soviet leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged the NKVD’s responsibility. In 1992 Russia handed Poland the classified documents, including Beria’s proposal of 5 March 1940 bearing Stalin’s signature. In November 2010 Russia’s State Duma, in a declaration, condemned the order given by Stalin and the leadership of the time. In 2012 the European Court of Human Rights called Katyn a war crime.
How Russia treats it today
The acknowledgement has not been irreversible. Since 2007 some Russian outlets have again circulated the version of German guilt, and Vladimir Medinsky’s 2011 book denied Soviet responsibility. Russia keeps 116 of the 183 investigation volumes classified to this day. In 2021 the status of the Katyn memorial was downgraded from federal to regional. The same machine that reframes Katyn also, in December 2021, outlawed the human-rights society Memorial, which had gathered the names of the victims of Soviet repression.
The link to us
Katyn is the clearest example of the pattern also described in the account of what an ordinary Russian is taught about history: a documented Soviet crime that is denied and reframed. The same narrative presents the 1940 occupation of the Baltic states as a voluntary accession — an occupation Estonia lived through until 1991. See also Dance of death between two devils and Russia and its soldiers.
Sources: Katyn massacre (Wikipedia); Katõni massimõrv (Wikipedia); Katyn Massacre (Britannica); Katyn massacre: how truth prevailed (Communist Crimes).