On March 5, 1940, the USSR authorities decided to apply the highest form of punishment to Polish prisoners of war - execution. It 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 enters into diplomatic relations with his newfound ally - the Polish government in exile. Within the framework of the new treaty, all Polish prisoners of war, especially the prisoners of 1939 on the territory of the Soviet Union, were granted amnesty and the right to free movement throughout the territory of the Union. The formation of Anders' army began. Nevertheless, the Polish government did not count about 15,000 officers, who, according to the documents, were supposed to be in the Kozelsky, Starobelsky and Yukhnovsky camps. To all the accusations of the Polish General Sikorsky and General Anders of violating the amnesty agreement, Stalin replied that all the prisoners were released, but they could have escaped to Manchuria.

Subsequently, one of Anders’s subordinates described his anxiety: “Despite the ‘amnesty’, the firm promise of Stalin himself to return the prisoners of war to us, despite his assurances that the 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 aforementioned camps. Questioning thousands of colleagues returning from camps and prisons, we have never heard any reliable confirmation of the whereabouts of the prisoners taken out of those three camps. He also owned the words uttered a few years later: “It was only in the spring of 1943 that a terrible secret was revealed to the world, the world heard a word from which horror still breathes: Katyn.”

dramatization

As you know, the Katyn burial was discovered by the Germans in 1943, when these areas were under occupation. It was the Nazis who contributed to the "promotion" of the Katyn case. Many specialists were involved, the exhumation was carefully carried out, they even led excursions there for local residents. An unexpected discovery in the occupied territory gave rise to a version of a deliberate staging, which was supposed to play the role of propaganda against the USSR during World War II. This became an important argument in accusing the German side. Moreover, there were many Jews on the list of those identified.

Attracted attention and details. V.V. Kolturovich from Daugavpils described his conversation with a woman who, along with her fellow villagers, went to look at the opened graves: “I asked her: “Vera, what did people say to each other, examining the graves?” The answer was: "Our negligent slobs can't do that - it's too neat a job." Indeed, the ditches were perfectly dug under the cord, the corpses were stacked in perfect piles. The argument, of course, is ambiguous, but do 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 should have simply not had enough time for this.

double charge

At the famous Nuremberg trials on July 1-3, 1946, the Katyn shooting was blamed on Germany and appeared in the indictment of the International Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg, section III "War crimes", about the 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 uphold the Soviet accusation, and the Katyn episode is missing from the Tribunal's verdict. All over the world, this was perceived as a "tacit admission" of the USSR of its guilt.

The preparation and course of the Nuremberg trials were accompanied by at least two events that compromised the USSR. On March 30, 1946, the Polish prosecutor Roman Martin died, who allegedly had documents proving the guilt of the NKVD. The Soviet prosecutor Nikolai Zorya also fell victim, who suddenly died 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, Vladimir Abarinov, a researcher on the Katyn issue, in his work cites the following monologue by the daughter of an NKVD officer: “I'll tell you this. The order about the Polish officers came directly from Stalin. My father told me that he saw a genuine document with a Stalinist signature, what was he to do? Bring yourself under arrest? Or shoot yourself? Father was made a scapegoat for decisions made by others."

Party of Lavrenty Beria

The Katyn massacre cannot be blamed on just one person. Nevertheless, the greatest role in this, according to archival documents, was played by Lavrenty Beria, "Stalin's right hand." Another daughter of the leader, 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 massacre 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 order, with the application of capital punishment to them - execution." Reason: "All of them are sworn enemies of the Soviet regime, full of hatred for the Soviet system." Two days later, the Politburo issued a resolution on the transfer of prisoners of war and the preparation of execution.

There is a theory about the forgery of Beria's Notes. Linguistic analyzes give different results, the official version does not deny the involvement of Beria. However, statements about the forgery of the “note” are still being announced.

Deceived hopes

At the beginning of 1940, the most optimistic moods hovered among the Polish prisoners of war in the Soviet camps. Kozelsky, Yukhnovsky camps were no exception. The convoy treated foreign prisoners of war somewhat softer than its own fellow citizens. It was announced that the prisoners would be handed over to neutral countries. In the worst case, the Poles believed, they would be handed over to the Germans. Meanwhile, NKVD officers arrived from Moscow and set to work.

Before being sent, the prisoners, who sincerely believed they were being sent to safety, were vaccinated against typhoid and cholera, apparently to calm them down. Everyone received a dry ration. But in Smolensk, everyone was ordered to prepare for the exit: “From 12 o’clock we have been standing in Smolensk on a siding. April 9 getting up in prison cars and getting ready to leave. We are transported somewhere in cars, what's next? Transportation in the boxes "crow" (scary). We were brought somewhere in the forest, it looks like a summer cottage ... ”, - this is the last entry in the diary of Major Solsky, who is resting today in the Katyn forest. The diary was found during the exhumation.

The reverse side of recognition

On February 22, 1990, the head of the International Department of the Central Committee of the CPSU, V. Falin, informed Gorbachev about new archival documents found that confirm the guilt of the NKVD in the Katyn massacre. Falin suggested urgently forming a new position of the Soviet leadership in relation to this matter and informing the President of the Polish Republic Vladimir Jaruzelsky about new discoveries in the terrible tragedy.

On April 13, 1990, TASS published an official statement admitting the guilt of the Soviet Union in the Katyn tragedy. Jaruzelsky received from Mikhail Gorbachev lists of prisoners to be transported 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 in the Katyn tragedy.

Here is what Valentin Alekseevich Aleksandrov, a senior official of the Central Committee of the CPSU, said to Nicholas Bethell: “We do not rule out 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 towards Katyn. We in the Central Committee have received many letters from organizations of veterans in which we are asked why we defame the names of those who only did their duty towards 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 an admission 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 question of the role of genocide in the Katyn tragedy. Nevertheless, following the results of the case in 2004, it was announced that the death of 1803 officers had been established, of which 22 were identified.

The genocide against the Poles was completely denied by the Soviet leadership. Prosecutor General Savenkov commented on this as follows: “during the preliminary investigation, on the initiative of the Polish side, the version of genocide was checked, and my firm statement is that there are no grounds 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 RF GVP, the Polish Sejm demanded that the Katyn events be recognized as an act of genocide. Deputies of the Polish parliament sent a resolution to the Russian authorities, in which they demanded that Russia "recognize the killing of Polish prisoners of war as genocide" based on Stalin's personal dislike for the Poles because of the defeat in the 1920 war. In 2006, the relatives of the deceased Polish officers filed a lawsuit with the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights, in order to achieve recognition of Russia in the genocide. An end to this sore point for Russian-Polish relations has not yet been made.

Katyn: Chronicle of events

The term "Katyn crime" is collective, it means the execution in April-May 1940 of almost 22 thousand Polish citizens held in various camps and prisons of the NKVD of the USSR:

– 14,552 Polish officers and policemen taken prisoner by the Red Army in September 1939 and held in three NKVD POW camps, including –

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

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

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

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

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

background

On August 23, 1939, the USSR and Germany signed a non-aggression pact - the "Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact". The pact included a secret protocol on the delimitation of spheres of interest, according to which, in particular, the eastern half of the territory of the pre-war Polish state was assigned to the Soviet Union. For Hitler, the pact meant the removal of the last obstacle before an attack on Poland.

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

The offensive of the Red Army came as a complete surprise to the Poles. Some did not even rule out that the introduction of Soviet troops was directed against German aggression. Realizing Poland's doom in a war on two fronts, the Polish commander-in-chief issued an order not to engage in battle with the Soviet troops and to resist only when trying to disarm the Polish units. As a result, only a few Polish units offered resistance to the Red Army. Until the end of September 1939, the Red Army captured 240-250 thousand Polish soldiers and officers, as well as border guards, police officers, gendarmerie, prison guards, etc. Not being able to maintain such a huge mass of prisoners, immediately after disarmament, half of the privates and non-commissioned officers were sent home, and the rest were transferred by the Red Army to a dozen specially created prisoner of war camps of the NKVD of the USSR.

However, these NKVD camps were also overloaded. Therefore, in October - November 1939, most of the privates and non-commissioned officers left the prisoner of war camps: the inhabitants of the territories captured by the Soviet Union were dismissed, and the inhabitants of the territories occupied by the Germans, by agreement on the exchange of prisoners, were transferred to Germany (Germany, in return, transferred the captured to the Soviet Union German troops of Polish military personnel - Ukrainians and Belarusians, residents of the territories that went to the USSR).

The exchange agreements also applied to civilian refugees who ended up on the territory occupied by the USSR. They could apply to the German commissions operating in the spring of 1940 on the Soviet side for permission to return to their permanent places of residence in the Polish territories occupied by Germany.

About 25 thousand Polish privates and non-commissioned officers were left in Soviet captivity. In addition to them, army officers (about 8.5 thousand people), who were concentrated in two prisoner of war camps - Starobelsky in the Voroshilovgrad (now Lugansk) region and Kozelsky in the Smolensk (now Kaluga) region, as well as border guards, were not subject to dissolution at home or transfer to Germany. police officers, gendarmes, prison guards, etc. (about 6.5 thousand people), who were gathered in the Ostashkov POW camp in the Kalinin (now Tver) region.

Not only prisoners of war became prisoners of the NKVD. One of the main means of "Sovietization" of the occupied territories was the campaign of incessant mass arrests for political reasons, directed primarily against officials of the Polish state apparatus (including officers and police officers who escaped captivity), members of Polish political parties and public organizations, industrialists, large landowners, businessmen. , border violators and other "enemies of Soviet power". Before the verdict was passed, those arrested were kept for months in the prisons of the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR, formed in the occupied territories of the pre-war Polish state.

On March 5, 1940, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks decided to execute “14,700 Polish officers, officials, landlords, policemen, intelligence agents, gendarmes, siegemen and jailers located in prisoner of war camps,” as well as 11,000 arrested and held in Western prisons. regions of Ukraine and Belarus "members of various counter-revolutionary espionage and sabotage organizations, former landowners, manufacturers, former Polish officers, officials and defectors."

The basis for the decision of the Politburo was a note by People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR Beria to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks to Stalin, in which the execution of the listed categories of Polish prisoners and prisoners was proposed "based on the fact that they are all inveterate, incorrigible enemies of Soviet power." At the same time, as a decision in the minutes of the meeting of the Politburo, the final part of Beria's note was verbatim reproduced.

Execution

The execution of Polish prisoners of war and prisoners belonging to the categories listed in the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940, was carried out in April and May of the same year.

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

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

395 prisoners of war, not included in the execution orders, were sent to the Yukhnovsky prisoner of war camp in the Smolensk region. They were then transferred to the Gryazovetsky prisoner of war camp in the Vologda Oblast, from which, at the end of August 1941, they were transferred to the formation of the Polish Army in the USSR.

On April 13, 1940, shortly after the start of executions of Polish prisoners of war and prison inmates, the NKVD operation was carried out to deport their families (as well as the families of other repressed people) living in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR to a settlement in Kazakhstan.

Subsequent events

On June 22, 1941, Germany attacked the USSR. Soon, on July 30, an agreement was concluded between the Soviet government and the Polish government in exile (who was in London) to invalidate the Soviet-German treaties of 1939 concerning "territorial changes in Poland", to restore diplomatic relations between the USSR and Poland, to form a the territory of the USSR of the Polish army to participate in the war against Germany and the release of all Polish citizens who were imprisoned in the USSR as prisoners of war, arrested or convicted, and also kept in a special settlement.

This agreement was followed by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of August 12, 1941 on granting amnesty to Polish citizens who were imprisoned or in a special settlement (by that time there were about 390 thousand of them), and the Soviet-Polish military agreement of August 14, 1941 on the organization Polish army on the territory of the USSR. The army was planned to be formed from amnestied Polish prisoners and special settlers, primarily from former prisoners of war; its commander was General Vladislav Anders, who was urgently released from the inner prison of the NKVD in the Lubyanka.

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

On April 13, 1943, German radio officially announced the discovery in Katyn near Smolensk of the graves of Polish officers shot by the Soviet authorities. By order of the German authorities, the identified names of the dead began to be read out over loudspeakers in the streets and squares of the occupied Polish cities. On April 15, 1943, an official refutation of the Soviet Information Bureau followed, according to which Polish prisoners of war in the summer of 1941 were employed in construction work west of Smolensk, fell into the hands of the Germans and were shot by them.

From the end of March to the beginning of June 1943, the German side, with the participation of the Technical Commission of the Polish Red Cross, carried out an exhumation in Katyn. The remains of 4,243 Polish officers were recovered, and the names and surnames of 2,730 of them were established from the discovered personal documents. The corpses were reburied in mass graves next to the original burials, and the results of the exhumation were published in Berlin in the summer of that year in the book Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn. The Germans handed over the documents and objects found on the corpses for detailed study to the Institute of Forensic Medicine and Criminalistics in Krakow. (In the summer of 1944, all of these materials, except for a small part of them, secretly hidden by employees of the Krakow Institute, were taken by the Germans from Krakow to Germany, where, according to rumors, they burned down during one of the bombings.)

On September 25, 1943, the Red Army liberated Smolensk. Only on January 12, 1944, the Soviet “Special Commission for Establishing and Investigating the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of War by the Nazi Invaders in the Katyn Forest” was created, chaired by Academician N.N. Burdenko. At the same time, since October 1943, specially seconded employees of the NKVD-NKGB of the USSR were preparing falsified "evidence" of the responsibility of the German authorities for the execution of Polish officers near Smolensk. According to the official report, the Soviet exhumation at Katyn was carried out from 16 to 26 January 1944 at the direction of the "Burdenko Commission". From the secondary graves left after the German exhumation, and one primary grave, which the Germans did not have time to explore, the remains of 1380 people were recovered, according to the documents found, the commission established the personal data of 22 people. On January 26, 1944, the Izvestiya newspaper published an official report from the Burdenko Commission, according to which the Polish prisoners of war, who were in three camps west of Smolensk in the summer of 1941 and remained there after the German troops invaded Smolensk, were shot by the Germans in the autumn of 1941.

To "legalize" this version on the world stage, the USSR tried to use the International Military Tribunal (IMT), which tried the main Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg in 1945-1946. However, having heard on July 1-3, 1946, the testimony of witnesses for the defense (represented by German lawyers) and the prosecution (represented by the Soviet side), in view of the obvious unconvincingness of the Soviet version, the IMT decided not to include the Katyn execution in its verdict as one of the crimes of Nazi Germany.

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

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

But the “Katyn lie” is not only the attempts of the USSR to impose on the world community the Soviet version of the execution in the Katyn forest. This is also one of the elements of the domestic policy of the communist leadership of Poland, brought to power by the Soviet Union after the liberation of the country. Another direction of this policy consisted in large-scale persecution and attempts to denigrate the members of the Home Army (AK) - a massive anti-Hitler armed underground, subordinate during the war years to the Polish "London" government in exile (with which the USSR severed relations in April 1943, after it turned to the International Red Cross with a request to investigate the murder of Polish officers whose remains were found in the Katyn Forest). The symbol of the smear campaign against AK after the war was the posting on the streets of Polish cities of a poster with a mocking slogan "AK is a spitting dwarf of the reaction." At the same time, any statements or actions that directly or indirectly cast doubt on the Soviet version of the death of captured Polish officers were punished, including attempts by relatives to install memorial plates in cemeteries and churches indicating 1940 as the time of death of their loved ones. In order not to lose their jobs, in order to be able to study at the institute, the relatives were forced to hide the fact that a member of their family had died in Katyn. The Polish state security agencies searched for witnesses and participants in the German exhumation and forced them to make statements "exposing" the Germans as the perpetrators of the execution.
The Soviet Union pleaded guilty only half a century after the execution of the captured Polish officers - on April 13, 1990, an official TASS statement was published about "the direct responsibility for the atrocities in the Katyn forest of Beria, Merkulov and their henchmen", and the atrocities themselves were qualified in it as "one of the grave crimes of Stalinism. At the same time, the President of the USSR M.S. Gorbachev handed over to President of Poland V. Jaruzelsky the lists of executed Polish prisoners of war (formally, these were lists of instructions for sending stages from the Kozelsky and Ostashkovsky camps to the NKVD for the Smolensk and Kalinin regions, as well as a list of records of the departed prisoners of war from the Starobelsky camp) and some other documents of the NKVD .

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

In 1991, the GVP investigation team, together with Polish specialists, carried out partial exhumations in the 6th quarter of the forest park zone of Kharkov, on the territory of the dacha village of the KGB in the Tver region, 2 km from the village of Mednoye and in the Katyn forest. The main result of these exhumations was the final establishment in the procedural order of the places of burial of the executed Polish prisoners of the Starobilsk and Ostashkovsky prisoner of war camps.

A year later, on October 14, 1992, by order of the President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin, documents were made public and handed over to Poland, exposing the leadership of the USSR in committing the "Katyn crime" - the above-mentioned decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940 on the execution of Polish prisoners, Beria's "staged" note to this decision, addressed to Stalin (with handwritten signatures of Politburo members Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and Mikoyan, as well as marks of voting "for" Kalinin and Kaganovich), Shelepin's note to Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959 and other documents from the Presidential Archive. Thus, documentary evidence became public that the victims of the "Katyn crime" were executed for political reasons - as "hardened, incorrigible enemies of the Soviet regime." At the same time, for the first time, it became known that not only prisoners of war, but also prisoners of prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR were shot. The decision of the Politburo of March 5, 1940, ordered, as already mentioned, to shoot 14,700 prisoners of war and 11,000 prisoners. From Shelepin's note to Khrushchev, it follows that about the same number of prisoners of war were shot, but fewer prisoners were shot - 7305 people. The reason for the "underperformance" is unknown.

On August 25, 1993, Russian President B.N. Yeltsin with the words "Forgive us ..." laid a wreath at the monument to the victims of Katyn at the Warsaw memorial cemetery "Powazki".

On May 5, 1994, the Deputy Head of the Security Service of Ukraine, General A. Khomich, handed over to the Deputy Prosecutor General of Poland, S. Snezhko, an alphabetical list of 3,435 inmates in prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR, indicating the numbers of orders, which, as it has been known since 1990, meant being sent to execution. The list, immediately published in Poland, became conditionally referred to as the “Ukrainian list”.

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

On July 13, 1994, the head of the GVP investigation group A.Yu. Yablokov (who replaced A.V. Tretetsky) issued a decision to terminate the criminal case on the basis of paragraph 8 of Article 5 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR (for the death of the perpetrators), and in the decision Stalin, members of the Politburo Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikoyan, Kalinin and Kaganovich, Beria and other leaders and employees of the NKVD, as well as the executioners, were found guilty of committing crimes under paragraphs "a", "b", "c" of Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity). It was precisely this qualification of the “Katyn case” (but in relation to the Nazis) that was already given by the Soviet side in 1945–1946 when it was submitted for consideration by the MVT. The Chief Military Prosecutor's Office and the Prosecutor General's Office of the Russian Federation canceled Yablokov's decision three days later, and another prosecutor was entrusted with further investigation.

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

On September 21, 2004, the GVP of the Russian Federation terminated criminal case No. 159 on the basis of clause 4 of part 1 of Article 24 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation (due to the death of the perpetrators). Notifying the public about this only a few months later, the then Chief Military Prosecutor A.N. Savenkov, at his press conference on March 11, 2005, declared secret not only most of the materials of the investigation, but also the very decision to terminate the "Katyn case". Thus, the personal composition of the perpetrators contained in the decision was also classified.

From the response of the GVP of the Russian Federation to the ensuing request from Memorial, it can be seen that “a number of specific high-ranking officials of the USSR” were found guilty, whose actions are qualified under paragraph “b” of Article 193-17 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR in force in 1926-1958 (abuse of power by a person in command composition of the Red Army, which had serious consequences in the presence of particularly aggravating circumstances).

The GVP also reported that in 36 volumes of the criminal case there are documents marked "secret" and "top secret", and in 80 volumes there are documents marked "for official use". On this basis, access to 116 out of 183 volumes is closed.

In the fall of 2005, Polish prosecutors were familiarized with the remaining 67 volumes, "not containing information constituting state secrets".

In 2005–2006, the RF GVP refused to consider applications submitted by relatives and Memorial for the rehabilitation of a number of specific executed Polish prisoners of war as victims of political repression, and in 2007, the Khamovnichesky District Court of Moscow and the Moscow City Court confirmed these refusals of the GVP.
In the first half of the 1990s, our country took important steps towards recognizing the truth in the Katyn case. The Memorial Society believes that now we need to return to this path. It is necessary to resume and complete the investigation of the “Katyn crime”, to give it an adequate legal assessment, to make public the names of all those responsible (from decision makers to ordinary executors), to declassify and make public all the materials of the investigation, to establish the names and places of burial of all executed Polish citizens, to recognize executed as victims of political repression and rehabilitate them in accordance with the Russian Law “On the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression”.

Information prepared by the International Society "Memorial".

Information from the brochure "Katyn", issued for the presentation of the film of the same name by Andrzej Wajda in Moscow in 2007.
Illustrations in the text: made during the German exhumation in 1943 in Katyn (published in books: Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn. Berlin, 1943; Katyń: Zbrodnia i propaganda: niemieckie fotografie dokumentacyjne ze zbiorów Instytutu Zachodniego. Poznań, 2003), photographs taken by Aleksey Pamyatnykh during the exhumation carried out by the GVP in 1991 in Medny.

In the application:

• Order No. 794/B dated March 5, 1940, signed by L. Beria, with a resolution by I. Stalin, K. Voroshilov, V. Molotov, A. Mikoyan;
• Note by A. Shelepin to N. Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959

So who shot the Poles in Katyn? Our enkavedeshniki in the spring of 1940 - according to the current Russian leadership, or still the Germans in the fall of 1941 - as I 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. 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 - for those who are ready to force Russia to repent for this "crime" - conclusion.

« If the reader remembers the first part (of the book) - write, in particular, the authors - then the Germans easily determined the ranks of the executed. How? And the insignia! Both in the report of Dr. Butz, and in some of the testimonies, stars are mentioned on the shoulder straps of the dead. But, according to the Soviet regulation on prisoners of war of 1931, they were forbidden to wear insignia. So shoulder straps with asterisks could not have been 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 allowed by the Geneva Convention».

It turns out that our enkavedeshniki could not shoot the captured Poles in 1940, crowned with military insignia, which were found along with the remains of the dead. This could not be simply because these same insignia were torn off from all prisoners of war. There were no captured generals, captured officers or captured privates in our POW camps: according to their status, they were all simply prisoners, without insignia.

And this means that the Poles with "asterisks" could be executed by the NKVD only after 1 July 1941. But they, as Goebbels' propaganda announced in the spring of 1943 (a version of which was later picked up in Poland with slight variations, and now the leadership of Russia 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 distinctions) was, one might say, the norm: after all, Germany had already acceded (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 an article by Daniil Ivanov “Did the non-signing of the Geneva Convention by the USSR affect the fate of Soviet prisoners of war?”:

“CONCLUSION OF THE CONSULTANT MALITSKY ON THE DRAFT RESOLUTION OF THE CEC AND SNK OF THE USSR “REGULATION ON PRISONERS OF WAR
Moscow, March 27, 1931

On July 27, 1929, the Geneva Conference worked out a convention on the maintenance of prisoners of war. The government of the USSR did not take part either in drawing up this convention or in its ratification. Instead of this convention, the present Regulations have been developed, the draft of which was adopted by the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR on March 19, 2009. G.

This draft provision is based on three ideas:
1) create a regime for our prisoners of war that would not be worse than the regime of the Geneva Convention;
2) issue, if possible, a brief law that does not reproduce the details of all those guarantees that the Geneva Convention gives, so that these details form the subject of instructions executing the law;
3) to formulate the issue of prisoners of war in accordance with Soviet principles of law (the inadmissibility of benefits for officers, the 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: the prohibition of ill-treatment of prisoners of war, insults and threats, the prohibition of using coercive measures to obtain information of a military nature from them, granting them civil legal capacity and disseminating on them the general laws of the country, the prohibition of using them in a war zone, etc.

However, in order to harmonize this Regulation with the general principles of Soviet law, the Regulation introduces the following differences from the Geneva Convention:
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 civil 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 who do not exploit other people's labor of the peasantry, on a common basis with other foreigners who are on the territory of the USSR (Article 10);
d) providing [opportunities] for prisoners of war of the same nationality, if they wish, to be placed together;
e) the so-called camp committees acquire broader camp competence, having the right to freely communicate with all bodies to represent all the interests of prisoners of war in general, and not only limit themselves to receiving and distributing parcels, the functions of a mutual benefit fund (Article 14);
f) prohibition to wear insignia and non-indication of the rules of saluting (Article 18);
g) prohibition of branching (art. 34);
h) the appointment of salaries not only for officers, but for all prisoners of war (Art. 32);
i) the involvement of prisoners of war in work only with their consent (Article 34) and with the application to them of the general legislation on labor protection and working conditions (Article 36), as well as the distribution of wages to them in an amount not lower than that existing in the given locality for the relevant category of workers, etc.

Taking into account that 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 Regulation, there are no objections to the adoption of this bill.

So, to summarize Anatoly Wasserman, another published 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 Germans themselves shot the Polish prisoners no earlier than the autumn of 1941.

Recall that for the first time the mass graves of Poles in the Katyn forest were 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 Smolensk land from the invaders, the Burdenko Commission was created in the USSR, 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 laying 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 indictment of the Tribunal.

And this version of the Katyn massacre was official in the USSR until 1990, when Gorbachev took, and acknowledged the responsibility of the NKVD for their deeds. 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 death sentences of 14,542 Polish prisoners of war by the "NKVD troika" and reliably established the death of 1,803 people and the identity of 22 of them. Russia continues to repent for Katyn and transfers to Poland all new declassified documents on these events.

True, these "documents", as it turned out recently, may very well turn out to be fake. The late State Duma deputy Viktor 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), who personally participated in the falsification of state archival data. Ilyukhin presented KM TV with blank forms of documents given to him by the source, corresponding to the late 1930s - early 1940s. The source bluntly stated that he and a group of other persons falsified documents on the Stalinist period of history, and on such forms.

« I can tell that these are absolutely real blanks- 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 organs, were provided in this group.

Viktor Ilyukhin also presented several samples of stamps and seals such as “Classified”, “Special folder”, “Keep forever”, etc. Experts confirmed to Ilyukhin that the stamps and seals that produced 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 fake stamps and seals, and our forensic science also did not know", - said Ilyukhin. According to him, the opportunity to produce such prints appeared only at the turn of the 1970-80s. " This is also the Soviet period, but already completely different, and they were made, as that stranger explained, in the late 1980s - early 1990s, when the country was already ruled by Boris Yeltsin ", - Ilyukhin noted.

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

Such, in brief, is the current state of the Katyn affair. The Poles demand more and more "documentary" evidence of the guilt of the then Soviet leadership in the Katyn "crime". Well, the leadership of Russia is meeting these wishes, declassifying more and more archival documents. Which, as it turns out, are fakes.

In the light of all this, at least two fundamental questions arise.
First concerns directly Katyn and Russian-Polish relations. Why is the voice of those who (very reasonably, by the way) exposes 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 issue is even more important. After all, if during an objective investigation it is confirmed that the state archives (at least their smallest part) are forged, then this puts an end to the legitimacy of the current Russian government. It turns out that she stood at the helm of the country in the early 1990s with the help of a forgery. How then can you trust her?

As you can see, in order to resolve these issues, it is required 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.

In 1940, more than 20 thousand Polish prisoners of war disappeared without a trace on the territory of the USSR. For a long time it was believed that they were killed by the Nazis. But in 1990, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev declassified part of the documents on the Katyn massacre and handed them over to Poland. The truth shocked both Russians and Poles.

In 1943, during the occupation of the Smolensk region by German troops, mass graves of people in Polish military uniforms were first discovered in the Katyn forest.

Tragedy without witnesses In the 1940s, on one of the islands of Lake Seliger, there was the so-called Ostashkovsky camp, where more than 5 thousand Polish military and policemen were kept. The captives were brought to the USSR after the outbreak of World War II, when the German army and Soviet troops entered Poland, dividing the country. The captured Poles were divided into several camps: Ostashkovsky, Starobelsky and Kozelsky.

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

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

In 1943, near Smolensk, in the town of Katyn, mass graves were discovered. German military medical experts said: the bodies of more than 4 thousand Polish officers were found in the forest in 7 trenches. The exhumation was led by a well-known forensic expert, professor at the University of Breslau Gerhard Butz. He later presented his findings to the International Commission of the Red Cross.

In the spring of 1943, the so-called "Katyn lists" began to appear in Warsaw. Behind them lined up at the newsstands. Every day the lists were replenished with the names of Polish prisoners of war identified during the exhumation.

At the end of 1943, Soviet troops liberated the Smolensk region. Soon a medical commission began to work in the Katyn Forest under the leadership of the famous Soviet surgeon Nikolai Burdenko. The responsibilities of the commission included the search for evidence that the captured Poles were destroyed by the Germans after the German attack on the USSR.

According to historian Sergei Alexandrov, “the main argument that the Polish officers were shot by the Germans was the discovery of a German-style Walter pistol. And this was the basis of the version that it was the Nazis who destroyed the Poles. In the same period, among the local residents they were looking for those who believed that the Poles were shot by the NKVD units. The fate of these people was sealed.

In 1944, after the end of the work of the Soviet commission in Katyn, a cross was placed with the inscription that Polish prisoners of war, shot by the Nazis in 1941, are buried here. The opening ceremony of the memorial was attended by the Polish military from the Kosciuszko division, who fought on the side of the USSR.

After the end of World War II, Poland joined the socialist bloc. Any discussion of the Katyn topic was banned. At the same time, in contrast to the official Soviet monument in Katyn, Warsaw had its own place of memory for compatriots. Relatives of the victims had to hold memorial services for a long time in secret from the authorities. The silence dragged on for almost half a century. Many relatives of the executed Polish prisoners of war died without waiting for the truth about the tragedy.

The secret becomes clear Access to the Soviet archives for many years was open only to selected party officials. Most of the documents are marked "Top Secret". In 1990, at the direction of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, this package with materials about the executions in Katyn was handed over to the Polish side. The most valuable of the documents is a note by the head of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs, Lavrenty Beria, addressed to Stalin, dated April 1940. According to the note, the Polish prisoners of war "tried to continue counter-revolutionary activities", which is why the head of the NKVD of the USSR advised Stalin to sentence all Polish officers to death.

Now it was necessary to find the places of all burials of Polish prisoners of war. Traces led to the city of Ostashkov, next to which the camp was located. Here, the surviving witnesses helped the investigators. They confirmed that the Poles were taken away from the camp by rail in April 1940. No one else saw them alive. Local residents learned only decades later that prisoners of war were taken to Kalinin.

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

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

During interrogation in 1991, Dmitry Tokarev agreed to draw a map of the route to the place where the bodies of the murdered Polish officers were buried. Here, not far from the village of Mednoye, there was a rest house for the leadership of the NKVD, and nearby was the dacha of Tokarev himself.

In the summer of 1991, excavations began on the territory of the former dachas of the NKVD in the Tver region. A few days later, the first terrible finds were discovered. Polish forensic experts took part in the identification along with Soviet investigators.

New disaster 2010 marked the 70th anniversary of the executions of Polish prisoners of war. On April 7, a mourning ceremony was held in the Katyn Forest, which was attended by relatives of the victims, as well as the prime ministers of Russia and Poland.

Three days later, a plane crash occurred near Katyn. The plane of Polish President Lech Kaczynski crashed near Smolensk while landing. Together with the president, who was hurrying to the funeral ceremony in Katyn, the relatives of the executed prisoners of war also died.

It is too early to put an end to the Katyn case. The search for graves is still ongoing.

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 it 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 to me: the course of lectures “Introduction to Slavic Studies” that I read to students of the State Academy of Slavic Culture (GASK) includes the section “Painful points of relations between Slavs”, in which the Katyn execution of Polish officers is given an obligatory place. And our students themselves, who have visited Poland, as a rule, ask about Katyn, wanting to know additional details. But most Russians know almost nothing about the Katyn tragedy. Therefore, here, first of all, it is necessary to give a brief historical background on how the Polish officers ended up in Katyn, how many of them were shot there, and when the said egregious crime was committed. Unfortunately, our newspapers, magazines and television often report superficial, very contradictory information, and people often have the erroneous idea that 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 exact 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, the German troops, having broken the enemy’s heroic resistance in two weeks (more precisely, in 17 days), occupied most of the original Polish lands, then forcing Poles to surrender. The USSR did not come to the aid of Poland: its proposal to the Polish side to conclude a cooperation agreement on the eve of World War II was rejected. Poland was involved in negotiations with Hitler to conclude a treaty directed against the USSR, it had previously stated that it would not allow the transit of Soviet troops through its territory to provide possible assistance to potential Soviet allies in Europe. This partly contributed to the Munich Agreement of 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-neighbourly relations between Poland and the USSR, and formed among the 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 were sent home only slightly more than half of the prisoners returned.

In Soviet propaganda, Poland appeared with stable epithets "bourgeois" or "pansky". 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 pans 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 Kyiv, 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 unjust and illogical, as a kind of historical absurdity to be eliminated as soon as possible. This is what the Ukrainians and Byelorussians thought, and so did the Russian people, who felt a sense of class solidarity and were absolutely sure that the Polish bourgeois "lords" 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 introduction of 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, the 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 the assessment of the number of Polish prisoners of war arise as a result of the use of various methods of counting and the fact that later, even before the start of World War II, 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 residence. 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 to leave in its border zone, which Western Ukraine and Western Belarus actually turned out to be for the USSR, an impressive number of foreign prisoners of war. Therefore, the Soviet authorities undertook what any state would do 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 faces in the mud on “walks”, and then deprive them of bathing 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 the Nilov Pustyn (Stolbny Island on Lake Seliger), where about 6,000 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 at first were 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 “special consideration” of the cases of 14,700 former officers of the Polish army and other military personnel, that is, they pronounced a sentence of “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 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. 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. For a 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 also caused by the data of Soviet intelligence 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 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 mass of many millions of people 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, exterminated 100,000 Orthodox priests with incredible cruelty, shot 54,000 officers, 6,000 teachers, almost 9,000 doctors, about 200,000 workers and over 815 thousand peasants19. In the 30s of the XX century. under Stalin, the terrible "Red Wheel" of terror again rolled through Soviet cities and villages, smearing millions of people like unnecessary insects hindering the movement forward. The edge of this terrible "Red Wheel" walked in 1940 through the Poles who fell within its reach.

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

Returning to the moral lessons of 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 "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 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 On the foreign policy of the 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. op. 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 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.