Table of Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright page
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
List of Figures
A Note on Translation and Transliteration
Map
Timeline
Introduction: Remembering Katyn
1.
2.
3.
Chapter One: Katyn in Poland
Fighting the Katyn Lie
Émigré Memory
Mobilization of Polish Civil Society
Representing Katyn
Chapter Two: Katyn in Katyn
Beginnings
History Lessons
Heroes and Villains
The New Antigone
Other Histories, Other Memories?
Massacre on Screen
Chapter Three: Katyn in Ukraine
The Katyn in Ukraine
The Katyn for Ukraine
‘Poor Yorickes’
Chapter Four: Katyn in Belarus
Katyn, Khatyn, Kurapaty
Lukashenka vs. Mourning
Chapter Five: Katyn in the Baltic States
Catalysing Memory
Memorial Militancy
Katyn as Litmus Test
Chapter Six: Katyn in Russia
From Shelepin to Medvedev
Deniers and Interpreters
From Détente to Catastrophe
Quo Vadis?
Chapter Seven: Katyn in Katyn
Origins – and Problems
The Russian Memorial
The Soviet Victims
‘Fictional’ Victims
Coda: ‘Katyn-2’
Unintended Sacrifice
Russia Responds
Post-Smolensk Poland
Post-Smolensk Russia
Smolensk One Year On
Bibliography
Index
Copyright Alexander Etkind, Rory Finnin, Uilleam Blacker, Julie Fedor, Simon Lewis, Maria Mälksoo, Matilda Mroz 2012
The right of Alexander Etkind, Rory Finnin, Uilleam Blacker, Julie Fedor, Simon Lewis, Maria Mälksoo and Matilda Mroz to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2012 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5576-5
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Alexander Etkind is Reader in Russian Literature and Cultural History in the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge.
Rory Finnin is Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies in the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge.
Uilleam Blacker is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the project ‘Memory at War’ at the University of Cambridge.
Julie Fedor is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the project ‘Memory at War’ at the University of Cambridge.
Simon Lewis is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge.
Maria Mälksoo is a Senior Researcher in the Institute of Government and Politics at the University of Tartu.
Matilda Mroz is Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Greenwich.
Work on this book was supported by a generous grant from the HERA JRP (Humanities in the European Research Area Joint Research Programme) for the research project, Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. We are grateful to the Department of Slavonic Studies of the University of Cambridge, which has created a unique home for the Memory at War project, and to Simon Franklin and Emma Widdis for their support and encouragement. At Polity Press, John Thompson and Jennifer Jahn were enthusiastic about, and patient with, the development of the manuscript. Jill Gather provided crucial help with logistics and bibliographical work. We would also like to thank the helpful and dedicated staff of the ‘Katyn’ Memorial Complex near Smolensk, and especially Galina Andreenkova. For their invaluable assistance, we are grateful to Clare Ansell, žuolas Bagdonas, Aliaksei Bratachkin, Anna Dzienkiewicz, Filmoteka Narodowa, Toomas Hiio, Olga Kerziouk, Anatol’ Mikhnavets, Zmitser Navitski, Ian Tuttle and Eugenia Florek.
AKArmia Krajowa (Home Army)ECHREuropean Court of Human RightsFSBFederal’naia Sluzhba Bezopasnosti (Federal Security Service)FSKFederal’naia Sluzhba Konttrazvedki (Federal Counter-Intelligence Service)IPNInstytut Pamici Narodowej (Institute of National Remembrance)KGBKomitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security)KORKomitet Obrony Robotników (Committee for the Defence of Workers)KPNKonfederacja Polski Niepodległej (Confederation of Independent Poland)NKGBNarodnyi Komissariat Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti (People’s Commissariat for State Security)NKHBZKNiezaleny Komitet Historyczny Badania Zbrodni Katyskiej (Independent Historical Committee for Research into the Katyn Crime)NKVDNarodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs)PiSPrawo i Sprawiedliwo (Law and Justice)PFKPolska Fundacja Katyska (Polish Katyn Foundation)PRLPolska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa (People’s Republic of Poland)PWNPastwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe (National Scientific Publishers)ROPCiORuch Obrony Praw Człowieka i Obywatela (Movement for the Defence of Human and Civic Rights)ROPWiM Rada Ochrony Pamici Walk i Mczestwa (Council for the Preservation of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites)SBSłuba Bezpieczestwa (Security Service)SSRSovetskaia Sotsialisticheskaia Respublika (Soviet Socialist Republic)TVPTelewizja Polska (Polish Television)UNKVDUpravlenie Narodnogo Komissariata Vnutrennikh Del (Directorate of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, i.e. regional branch of the NKVD)
Figure 3.1Letter dated 7 June 1969 from Chairman of the Ukrainian KGB Vitalii Nikitchenko to Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party Petro Shelest about the public discovery of the Katyn burial site in the Piatykhatky forest on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine.Figure 3.2Sign for the ‘Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarianism’ in Piatykhatky forest on the outskirts of Kharkiv. Photo by Rory Finnin.Figure 3.3Entrance to the ‘Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarianism’, Piatykhatky. Photo by Rory Finnin.Figure 3.4Interior of the ‘Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarianism’, Piatykhatky. Photo by Rory Finnin.Figure 3.5Wall of Ukrainian and Soviet victims at the ‘Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarianism’, Piatykhatky. Photo by Rory Finnin.Figure 3.6Close-up of wall of Ukrainian and Soviet victims, Piatykhatky. Photo by Rory Finnin.Figure 3.7Wall of Polish victims at the ‘Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarianism’, Piatykhatky. Photo by Rory Finnin.Figure 3.8Close-up of wall of Polish victims, Piatykhatky. Photo by Rory Finnin.Figure 3.9Burial mounds in the ‘Memorial to the Victims of Totalitarianism’, Piatykhatky. Photo by Rory Finnin.Figure 3.10 Plaque honouring Polish victim Jan Gumułka (‘Teacher’), Piatykhatky. Photo by Rory Finnin.Figure 3.11Plaque honouring Polish victim Jakub Wajda, Piatykhatky. Photo by Rory Finnin.Figure 7.1First ritual ground, Katyn Memorial. Photo by Julie Fedor.Figure 7.2Entrance pavilion, Katyn Memorial. Photo by Julie Fedor.Figure 7.3Russian graves, Katyn Memorial. Photo by Julie Fedor.Figure 7.4Monument in the ‘Valley of Death’, Katyn Memorial. Photo by Julie Fedor.Figure 7.5Monument to Soviet POWs, Katyn Memorial. Photo by Julie Fedor.
A Note on Translation and Transliteration
The translations in this book are ours, unless otherwise stated. Where established English spellings of names and place-names exist, these have been given preference (e.g. ‘Beria’ rather than ‘Beriia’, ‘Katyn’ rather than ‘Katy’). Polish names, however, are consistently rendered according to their Polish spelling (e.g. ‘Wałsa’ rather than ‘Walesa’), and Ukrainian cities according to their Ukrainian spelling (e.g. ‘Kyiv’ rather than ‘Kiev’, ‘Kharkiv’ rather than ‘Khar’kov’).
Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian have been transliterated according to the Library of Congress system. Soft signs are rendered with a quotation mark, hard signs with a double quotation mark. Belarusian and Ukrainian apostrophes have not been given.
23 August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.1 September 1939Germany invades Poland.17 September 1939Soviet Union invades Poland. 25,700 Polish citizens are arrested and interned on the territory of what is now western Ukraine and western Belarus. They are either incarcerated in local prisons or sent eastward to three special prisoner-of-war camps administered by the NKVD in Kozel’sk and Ostashkov (in western Russia) and Starobil’s’k (in eastern Ukraine).28 September 1939Soviet-Estonian mutual assistance treaty signed. It enables the establishment of Soviet military bases on Estonian territory.5 October 1939Soviet-Latvian mutual assistance treaty signed.10 October 1939Soviet-Lithuanian mutual assistance treaty signed.30 November 1939USSR invades Finland.2 March 1940Soviet party and state leaders take decision to deport up to 60,000 relatives of arrested Polish officers.5 March 1940Soviet party leadership approves decision to shoot ‘Polish prisoners-of-war (officers and policemen) and arrestees located in prisons of western regions of Ukraine and Belorussia’ in accordance with recommendations prepared by NKVD chief Beria.7 March 1940Beria orders the heads of the NKVD in Ukraine and Belarus to deport family members of the Polish prisoners to Kazakhstan.16 March 1940Registration of camp and prison inmates commences. Ban on correspondence by prisoners comes into force, and security at camps is stepped up.22 March 1940Beria orders ‘unloading’ of NKVD prisons in western regions of Ukraine and Belarus.April 1940Official lists of prisoners to be executed are submitted to the camps and prisons. These include 97% of inmates.Spring–Summer 1940Deportations of families to Kazakhstan and other remote Soviet locations.Spring 1940In accordance with the 5 March order, NKVD staff shoot 21,857 Poles and bury them in numerous killing fields in Russia, Ukraine and, very likely, Belarus.15 June 1940Soviet ultimatum and subsequent invasion of Lithuania.17 June 1940Soviet occupation of Latvia and Estonia.21 July 1940Establishment of Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs).26 October 1940Beria orders the decoration of 125 NKVD staff involved in the Katyn operation.14 June 1941Soviet mass deportations from the Baltic States to Siberia and Kazakhstan (including about 10,000 Estonian, 15,500 Latvian and 40,000 Lithuanian residents).22 June 1941Nazi Germany attacks USSR.24–25 June 1941Rainiai massacre, in which the NKVD murdered dozens of Lithuanian political prisoners in a forest near Telšiai, Lithuania.June 1941Mass deportations of Baltic officers to the 7th Strict Regime Special Camp in Noril’sk beyond the Polar Circle.July 1941Nazi occupation of the Baltic States begins. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania incorporated into the Reichskommissariat Ostland of the Third Reich.30 July 1941Agreement signed between Soviet and Polish government in London, whereby Soviet government renounces Polish territory gained under Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, diplomatic relations are resumed, and creation of Polish army on Soviet territory is approved.6 August 1941General Władysław Anders appointed commander of Polish army on USSR territory (‘Anders’ Army’).12 August 1941Polish citizens held prisoner in the USSR granted ‘amnesty’.1941–42Polish officials repeatedly seek information from Soviet government on whereabouts of missing Polish prisoners, but without success.Autumn 1941German army occupies Smolensk.3 December 1941Stalin receives Anders and Sikorski and tells them missing Polish officers may have fled to Manchuria.January 1942Polish construction workers stationed near Katyn discover graves; Germans are informed of the find, but do not announce it until the following year.March 1942Soviet censors suppress publication of search announcements placed by Polish families of the missing officers in the Polish embassy newspaper in Moscow.February–March 1943German searches and excavations at Katyn are underway, resulting in discovery of eight graves.13 April 1943Germany announces discovery of mass graves containing Polish corpses at Katyn.14 April 1943Polish Red Cross Technical Commission arrives at Katyn.15 April 1943Churchill privately acknowledges to Polish officials that the Soviet regime probably committed the Katyn murders.16 April 1943Soviet official propaganda bureau accuses Germany of murdering Poles at Katyn during German occupation of Smolensk.17 April 1943Polish government requests International Red Cross investigation of Katyn deaths.24 April 1943Churchill informs Stalin that Great Britain will oppose any International Red Cross investigation of Katyn.26 April 1943Soviet government breaks off diplomatic relations with Polish Government-in-Exile, which is based in London.28 April 1943International Commission formed by Germans commences work at Katyn.April–June 1943Eight graves exhumed at Katyn, containing the remains of 4,143 bodies, 2,730 of which are identified.May 1943Mass graves of nearly 10,000 victims of NKVD are unearthed by German authorities in Vinnytsia (Ukraine).June 1943General Władysław Sikorski dies in plane crash.September 1943German White Book of Official Materials on the Mass Killings at Katyn published.22 September 1943Leading Soviet propagandist recommends to Soviet leadership that it would be timely to create a Katyn investigation commission and begin gathering materials to assert German guilt.25 September 1943Red Army takes back Smolensk. Soon afterwards, a group of NKVD and NKGB operatives arrive and begin top secret work together with local NKVD staff, falsifying evidence of German responsibility, removing all evidence pointing to Soviet guilt, coaching witnesses, etc.1943Memo by Owen O’Malley (British ambassador to Polish Government-in-Exile) asserts Soviet guilt for the Katyn massacres but ends with the words, ‘Let us think of these things always and speak of them never.’1943Jan Zygmunt Robel begins work on the materials recovered from the Katyn pits.1944Publication of Józef Czapski’s Starobil’s’k Memoirs.1944Soviet Burdenko Commission conducts investigation at Katyn site. It claims that the Polish officers were shot by the Germans in 1941.1944/45–1991Second Soviet occupation of the Baltic States.1945–1946Nuremberg Trials.1945‘Robel’s Archive’ is lost in a fire during transportation to the West, although some materials, including prisoners’ diaries, are either hidden in Poland or spirited to London.1945Roman Martini begins his investigation into the Katyn massacres for the new Polish Communist authorities.30 March 1946Roman Martini is murdered.1946Memorial obelisk erected at Katyn with inscription in Polish and Russian blaming Germans for the crime and dating massacres to autumn 1941.1947Ivan Krivozertsev is found hanged in the UK.1948Publication of The Katyn Crime in the Light of Documents, edited anonymously by Józef Mackiewicz, with a foreword by Władysław Anders.1949Publication of Józef Czapski’s On Inhuman Land.1949American Committee for Investigation of the Katyn Massacre established.1951Publication, in English, of Józef Mackiewicz’s The Katyn Wood Murders.1951US Congressional Enquiry, known as the Madden Committee, begins.1955Publication of Ferdinand Goetel’s Times of War.Mid-1950sAnonymous tributes to the victims of Katyn begin to appear at the Home Army monument at Warsaw’s Powzkowski (or Powzki) Cemetery.22 April 195620,000 Poles congregate in central London to commemorate the Katyn massacres, laying flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and protesting the visit of Nikita Khrushchev.3 March 1959USSR KGB chief Aleksandr Shelepin recommends to Khrushchev that documents regarding the execution of 21,857 Poles in the Katyn operation be destroyed.1 November 1959First wooden cross with an inscription dedicated to Katyn placed in the Powzkowski Cemetery. It is removed immediately by the Polish security services.1964New edition of the official PWN encyclopedia is published in Poland with no entry for Katyn whatsoever.1965Mackiewicz’s The Katyn Crime in the Light of Documents appears in English.May 1966Ukrainian dissident Sviatoslav Karavans’kyi writes to the Union of Soviet Journalists about the unjust incarceration of Katyn ‘witness’ Andreev in Moscow’s Vladimir prison.7 June 1969Chairman of the Ukrainian KGB Vitalii Nikitchenko writes to KGB Chief Yuri Andropov and Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party Petro Shelest about the public discovery of the Katyn burial site in the Piatykhatky forest on the outskirts of Kharkiv.End of June 1969Head of the Kharkiv KGB Petr Feshchenko relays orders from Andropov that the ‘special objects’ [spetsob”ekty] in the Piatykhatky mass grave on the outskirts of Kharkiv be liquidated with a ‘corrosive’ chemical agent.30 April 1970The ‘Karavans’kyi Affair’ introduces the word ‘Katyn’ to the prominent samizdat journal Chronicle of Current Events.1971Katyn Memorial Fund set up in London.1972USSR pressures British government into preventing erection of Katyn monument in London.1973Włodzimierz Odojewski publishes in Paris the novel Everything Will be Covered by Snow … , which features extensive references to Katyn. His emigration two years earlier was partly a result of the impossibility of publishing the novel in Poland.1975First Katyn monument unveiled in Stockholm.5 April 1976Soviet Politburo resolution ‘On Measures to Counteract Western Propaganda on the So-called “Katyn affair” ’.1976Katyn Memorial unveiled in London. It bears the date 1940 but makes no mention of the Soviet perpetrators. Around 8,000 people attend the unveiling. The Stockholm monument is vandalized.1976Publication of Stanisław Swianiewicz’s In the Shadow of Katyn.1977Fr Stefan Niedzielak begins his ministry at St Karol Boromeusz parish, where he presides over commemorative activities at Powzkowski Cemetery.1977Opposition activist Ryszard Zieliski publishes his underground brochure Katyn in Poland under the pseudonyms Jan Abramski and Ryszard ywiecki (the first and last names on the ‘Katyn List’).1978Opposition activists form the Katyn Institute in Kraków and the Katyn Committee in Warsaw.1980Historian and activist Jerzy Łojek publishes one of the most influential Polish underground texts about Katyn, The History of the Katyn Case.21 March 1980Polish Home Army veteran Walenty Badylak burns himself alive in protest against, among other things, the ‘Katyn Lie’.April 1980Soviet dissidents issue a public statement ‘Look Back in Repentance’ on the fortieth anniversary of the Katyn massacres.3 May 1980Consecration of the first professionally designed Katyn monument in Poland, by Czesław Majerski, in the Gorce mountains.1981Leading activist of the Katyn Institute Adam Macedoski is jailed for seven months.31 July 1981A group of activists erects a large stone cross with the inscription ‘Katyn, Ostaszków, Kozielsk, Starobielsk, 1940’ at the Powzkowski Cemetery. It is removed by the security services the following night.1983Monument to ‘500 Soviet Prisoners-of-War’ killed by Nazis erected in Katyn at the initiative of the Smolensk City Soviet.1984‘The Sanctuary of Those Fallen in the East’ is consecrated at the church of St Karol Boromeusz.1984Włodzimierz Odojewski returns to the topic of Katyn in his collection of stories Covering the Traces.1985The Polish authorities erect a monument to Katyn at Powzkowski Cemetery blaming the Nazis and bearing the false date of 1941.1987Creation of Polish–Soviet Historical Commission with aim of investigating ‘blank spots’ of history.1987First Katyn Family association formed in Warsaw.1988Soviet party leadership grants access to Polish memorial to Soviet and Polish citizens.March 1988Polish party delegation visits Katyn, replaces old inscription on 1983 memorial ‘To the Victims of Hitler’s Fascism. 1941’ with a new one: ‘To the Fallen of Katyn’.5 May 1988In the lead-up to Gorbachev’s visit to Poland, the Soviet Politburo debates but decides against an official acknowledgement of the existence of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact secret protocols.3 June 1988Existence of mass graves of NKVD victims revealed at Kurapaty, near Minsk, Belarus.2 September 1988Wojciech Jaruzelski makes an unofficial visit to Katyn, during which a wooden Catholic cross is erected at the site with the inscription: ‘At This Site a Cross Is to Be Erected Immortalizing the Memory of the Death of the Polish Officers’.26 October 1988Soviet Council of Ministers resolves to build a memorial complex at Katyn commemorating the deaths of Polish officers and Soviet prisoners-of-war at the site.30 October 1988First mass demonstration held at the Kurapaty killing field in Belarus. It becomes an annual event on the Dziady feast day.20 January 1989Murder of Fr Stefan Niedzielak, ‘Katyn’s last victim’, by unknown assailants.19 April 1989Gorbachev is presented with documents from sealed ‘File No. 1’, including the Politburo resolution of March 1940, just before Jaruzelski’s trip to Moscow, but decides to suppress them.Spring 1989First Congress of USSR People’s Deputies demands that a commission be established to investigate the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Gorbachev continues to deny that original documents confirming the secret protocols have been found.1989Findings of the Technical Commission of the Polish Red Cross at Katyn are published for the first time.1989Jerzy Łojek’s The History of the Katyn Case is published legally in Poland, but it is substantially censored.1989Katyn is raised at the Round Table negotiations in Poland.1989Activists of the Katyn Committee and the Katyn Institute form the Independent Historical Committee for Research into the Katyn Crime (NKHBZK) and the Polish Katyn Foundation (PFK).Spring–Summer 1989Soviet historians discover archival documents related to Katyn which confirm hearings by NKVD Special Boards and NKVD orders to transport prisoners out of the three camps (Kozel’sk, Ostashkov and Starobil’s’k).October 1989Gorbachev allows delegation of Katyn Families to visit Katyn.28 December 1989Open access to Katyn territory granted by the Soviet government.Late 1989Soviet and Polish sides agree on a new inscription for Katyn memorial, removing reference to German guilt: ‘To the Polish Officers Who Perished at Katyn’.22 February 1990Leading Soviet official Valentin Falin informs Gorbachev about the recent archival discoveries about Katyn and suggests that continued denial is no longer feasible.April 1990Official Soviet media announcement acknowledges Soviet responsibility for Katyn massacres. Gorbachev hands lists of Polish POWs shot to Polish President Jaruzelski in Moscow. Polish TVP broadcasts Katyn Forest (Marcel Łoiski, 1990), a project initiated by Andrzej Wajda.3 June 1990Soviet authorities publicly announce the discovery of the Katyn burial site in the Piatykhatky forest on the outskirts of Kharkiv.1990A plaque is added to the London Katyn monument identifying Stalin and the Soviet secret police as perpetrators.Late 1990Soviet and Polish chief military procuracies agree to open investigation at Mednoe, Kharkiv and Katyn.1991–2004Russian Chief Military Prosecutor investigates Katyn case.1991Excavations are carried out at Katyn as part of Russian investigation.1991Some of the materials secretly archived by Jan Zygmunt Robel’s team in 1943–5 are discovered in a building in Krakow.25 October 1991The Smolensk Regional Soviet Executive Committee declares 100 hectares at Katyn to be a protected zone; mentions the presence of Soviet mass graves for the first time; and calls upon the procuracy and the KGB to conduct studies aimed at establishing sites and numbers of victims.May 1992Polish President Lech Wałsa visits Katyn.14 October 1992Russia transfers documents confirming Soviet guilt to Poland.27 October 1992Full Russian acknowledgement of existence and authenticity of secret protocols to Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.1992Russian–Polish bilateral agreement to maintain and protect extra-territorial memorial sites.1992Katyn Families visit Moscow at the invitation of Boris Yeltsin.1993Boris Yeltsin kneels before Katyn cross in Warsaw and asks Poles, ‘Forgive us, if you can’.1993Polish–Russian negotiations on Katyn memorial begin.22 February 1994The Russian–Polish agreement on burial sites and sites of memory of victims of wars and repressions is signed in Krakow.1994–96Excavations at Katyn (with stalling and delays on the Russian side).July 1994Aliaksandr Lukashenka becomes president of Belarus.1995President Lech Wałsa declares 1995 ‘The Year of Katyn’ in Poland.1995Publication of Jerzy Krzyanowski’s Katyn in Literature.31 January 1995Smolensk procuracy confirms the presence of mass Soviet burial sites at Katyn.May–June 1995Foundation stones are laid for a memorial at Katyn; Yeltsin does not attend the ceremony.1995Russian excavations at Katyn.October 1996Russian government resolves to build memorial complexes at Katyn and Mednoe.November 1998Additional explorations carried out at site of Soviet graves at Katyn.1999Construction of Katyn memorial complex commences.Summer–Autumn 2000Major memorial complexes opened at Piatykhatky (on the outskirts of Kharkiv), Katyn and Mednoe.June 2001Lukashenka signs decree to widen ring road around Minsk, threatening to destroy the Kurapaty site. Demonstrations ensue, including a permanent vigil at Kurapaty.December 2001Kurapaty is recognized by Belarusian government as a site of mass executions by NKVD. Parliament rejects bid to erect a monument there.2003Włodzimierz Odojewski publishes his novel Silent, Undefeated: A Katyn Story, originally written at the suggestion of Andrzej Wajda with a view to a future film project.September 2004Russian Chief Military Procuracy investigation of Katyn is closed.November 2004Polish Institute of National Remembrance launches its own Katyn investigation.12 April 2007ycie Warszawy announces that Wajda has changed the title of his Katyn film project from Post-Mortem to Katyn.17 September 2007Premiere of Wajda’s Katyn, attended by President Lech Kaczyski, Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyski, high-ranking officials of the Catholic Church, members of the Katyn Families, and members of the Russian ‘Memorial’ Society.14 November 2007Polish Sejm declares 13 April the ‘Worldwide Day of Memory of Victims of the Katyn Crime’. The date marks the anniversary of the 1943 German announcement.2008Latvian author Edvns Šnore releases the documentary The Soviet Story.2008Wajda’s Katyn premieres in Ukraine and Estonia. Andrzej Wajda awarded the Order of Yaroslav the Wise in Ukraine and the Cross of Terra Mariana in Estonia.2009Ukrainian government releases letters written by Vitalii Nikitchenko to Yuri Andropov and Petro Shelest in 1969 about the Katyn burial site in the Piatykhatky forest on the outskirts of Kharkiv.July 2009Consecration of memorial stone in the Katyn Valley of Death, marking mass graves of Soviet terror victims.23 August 2009First Belarusian pilgrimage to Katyn.13–14 January 2010Filming begins for Katyn Epitaphs. The DVD is released in April 2010.2 April 2010Wajda’s Katyn screened on Russian arts and culture TV channel Kul’tura.7 April 2010Prime Ministers Tusk and Putin take part in joint commemorative ceremony at Katyn.10 April 2010Polish President Lech Kaczyski’s plane crashes near Katyn, killing all 96 members of a delegation on its way to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the massacres.11 April 2010Wajda’s Katyn screened in a primetime slot on Russia’s Channel One.12 April 2010National day of mourning in Russia for Smolensk plane crash victims.12–14 April 2010Three days of national mourning held in Lithuania after the Smolensk plane crash to honour the late Polish president Lech Kaczyski.17 May 2010The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issues a judgment in the case of Kononov v. Latvia, establishing a precedent in applying the standards of the Nuremberg law to victors in the Second World War (i.e. the Soviet Union).26 November 2010Russian Duma resolution ‘On the Katyn Tragedy and Its Victims’ recognizes Katyn as a crime of the Stalinist regime.December 2010Medvedev decorates Wajda with the Order of Friendship.2011Russian Foreign Minister expresses willingness to consider rehabilitation of Katyn victims.
Introduction
Remembering Katyn
On the clear, crisp afternoon of 7 April 2010, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk stood before a phalanx of pines to address his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and other dignitaries in a cemetery complex outside the village of Katyn, in western Russia. He began his remarks with a question. ‘Why are we here today? Why do we come to this place every year?’ He continued: ‘Above all, because we remember’ (Tusk 2010).
Pamitamy: we remember. In Eastern Europe, a pivotal object of public memory is Katyn, the mass murder of over 20,000 unarmed Polish prisoners in the spring of 1940 by officers of the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), the Soviet secret police. ‘We will always remember those killed here’, declared Tusk, a historian by training. His stirring call to remember the Katyn tragedy was, of course, a call to remember the past, for as Aristotle posited long ago, to remember the future is impossible (Aristotle 1987). Yet three days after Tusk’s address, the grounds for Aristotle’s claim would feel vacant and forsaken. On 10 April 2010, an aircraft carrying 96 members of Poland’s military and political class, including the nation’s President Lech Kaczyski, crashed only miles away from Katyn, killing all on board. Time’s arrow lurched and fell; the bounds between past, present and future dissolved; only space seemed to matter. ‘Katyn is a cursed place, a terrible symbol’, said Tusk’s predecessor, former Prime Minister Aleksander Kwaniewski, on the day of the tragedy. ‘It sends shivers down my spine’ (‘Kwaniewski’ 2010).
Yet the ‘cursed place’ of Katyn and the ‘terrible symbol’ of Katyn are not congruent. The place is singular; the symbol is, in effect, plural, signifying a multitude of killing fields and burial sites. The majority of those killed in what has become known as ‘Katyn’ in fact perished in other places well beyond the Katyn Forest in the Soviet Republics of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. The toponym associated with their murder, moreover, has become a referential touchstone and descriptive shorthand throughout Eastern Europe for other, lesser-known sites of past savagery – Vinnytsia, Bykivnia, Kurapaty – and for sites of more recent savagery – Srebrenica, for instance, at one time proclaimed the ‘new Katyn’ (‘Srebrenica’ 1995). Today Katyn circulates with alacrity in public memory and in political discourse in Eastern Europe, fuelling both solidarity and suspicion, fellowship and fear. This book maps its legacy through the interconnected memory cultures of seven countries – Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine and the Baltic States – and explores its meaning as site and symbol, event and idea, fact and crypt.
1.
In the bloody annals of the twentieth century, Katyn stands as one of the first coordinated transnational mass murders of foreign prisoners by a totalitarian state. At the direction of one order from the Kremlin – Politburo Protocol 13/144, drafted by NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria and dated 5 March 1940 – NKVD agents shot 21,857 Poles and buried them in a number of clandestine sites in the Soviet Republics of Russia, Ukraine and, very likely, Belarus (Cienciala et al. 2007, 118–20, 332–3). The victims had been rounded up in the territory known in Polish as the Kresy, ‘the Borderlands’ – encompassing much of today’s western Ukraine and western Belarus – during and after the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939. They were either incarcerated in local prisons or sent eastward to special camps administered by the NKVD in Kozel’sk and Ostashkov (in western Russia) and Starobil’s’k (in eastern Ukraine). In Kozel’sk, Ostashkov and Starobil’s’k, they were classified as ‘prisoners of war’, even though war between Poland and the Soviet Union had never been declared. Months later, they were classified, fatally, as ‘enemies’, even though they were potential allies. Indeed, as early as 1941, Stalin would begin actively recruiting Polish soldiers and officers to fight alongside the Red Army against Nazi forces. What made these 21,857 prisoners, by contrast, such a threat to the Soviet regime? After all, in the clinical words of Beria’s fatal 5 March 1940 memorandum, they were only ‘former [military] officers, officials, landowners, […] rank-and-file police, [and] priests’ (Cienciala et al. 2007, 119). Among their number were also physicians, pharmacists, veterinarians, lawyers, teachers, rabbis and an eighteen-year-old telephone operator (Cienciala et al. 2007, 125). The victims of Katyn, in other words, were the pride and the promise of the Polish people – young and old, soldier and civilian. In large measure, every memory of Katyn today is a struggle to confront the sheer senselessness of their death sentence, to overcome a persistent and perplexing why?
The prisoners’ executions were as methodical as they were grisly, involving a formidable state logistical apparatus that, in effect, operationalized displacement. Prisoners were kept on the move. Those held in the Kresy were dispatched by train to various NKVD prisons in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kherson and Minsk, where they were then put to death. Precise details about the location and the identity of these victims remain, to an extent, unclear. What is better known is the fate of the prisoners held in the Kozel’sk, Ostashkov and Starobil’s’k camps, who were, in NKVD parlance, ‘unloaded’ (razgruzhalis’) from their cells – sometimes to a lively musical accompaniment, and nearly always under the pretence of imminent release – and sent to Smolensk, Kalinin (today’s Tver) and Kharkiv, respectively. At Kalinin and Kharkiv, victims were led into NKVD prisons and asked to confirm their names, one by one, before being shot in the back of the head at the base of the skull. Their bodies were then transported to NKVD burial sites in forests abutting the nearby villages of Mednoe and Piatykhatky and dumped in mass graves, which were, in at least one case, scattered with ‘white powder’ intended to ‘speed up decomposition’ (Cienciala et al. 2007, 127). At Smolensk, victims were organized into groups and sent by rail and then by bus to Katyn Forest, where they were largely not afforded the charade of questions from NKVD functionaries. Most were shot immediately upon arrival at the edge of eight pits, in broad daylight and under cover of darkness. By the middle of May 1940, their graves were filled in with dirt and covered over with pine seedlings. Weeks later their executioners were given rewards equivalent to a month’s salary for, in the words of one Soviet document, ‘successfully completing their assignments’ (Cienciala et al. 2007, 272).
Just as the singular term ‘Katyn’ cannot convey the plural, transnational nature of the massacres, an exclusive focus on the executions themselves cannot convey the extent of the horror of the crime. In the midst of killing these Polish prisoners in cold blood, the NKVD also actively sought out their wives and children and deported them to central Asia, where many perished from malnutrition, mistreatment and disease. In May 1940, four children who survived the arduous journey eastward appealed directly to Stalin for support and assistance, addressing him as their ‘great’, ‘beloved father’. ‘We little children are dying of hunger and we humbly ask Father Stalin not to forget about us’, they wrote from the village of Rozovka in Kazakhstan. ‘We will always be good working people in the Soviet Union, only it’s hard for us to live without our fathers’ (Cienciala et al. 2007, 198). The ‘great father’ had these fathers killed in Kalinin and buried at Mednoe.
This heartrending letter captures the particular perversity of the Stalinist disciplinary regime, which so often compelled the victim to honour and supplicate the victimizer. As the Russian writer Aleksandr Tvardovskii would declare sardonically in his poem ‘By Right of Memory’ (‘Po pravu pamiati’, 1966–9), ‘Be thankful for your fate, whatever it may be,/ And swear one thing: that [Stalin] is great’ (Tvardovskii 1991, 111). After the Second World War, with their decimated country firmly within the geopolitical orbit of Soviet power, the Polish people had little choice but to honour the victimizer, to ingest the ‘Pill of Murti-Bing’ that reconciles one to being ruled by another in Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind (Milosz 1953, 4–5).1 In 1951, for instance – the same year that an investigation into the Katyn massacre was being launched in the United States Congress – Communist Poland issued a commemorative stamp adorned with the face of the man responsible for the atrocity. It featured a profile of Stalin as decorated generalissimo and celebratory text marking ‘Polish–Soviet friendship month’.
According to the official Soviet narrative, Katyn was a ‘monstrous’ Nazi atrocity. This lie – known as the ‘Katyn Lie’, kłamstwo katyskie – was the centrepiece of a relentless Soviet campaign of falsification and disinformation that spanned nearly half a century. Today it constitutes one of the longest and most extensive cover-ups of a mass murder in history. The Katyn Lie began as a fiercely defensive rejoinder to an announcement, broadcast worldwide from Berlin in April 1943, that mass graves of an estimated ‘10,000’ Polish victims of ‘Bolshevik’ terror had been found by German authorities near Smolensk (Cienciala et al. 2007, 216, 305–6). The Wehrmacht had seized Smolensk in the autumn of 1941 during Operation Barbarossa, and whispered rumours of burial pits in the Katyn Forest soon reached German authorities, who ordered an excavation. Goebbels, who apparently found the whole matter ‘gruesome’, gleefully remarked in his diary that the discovery would be used ‘for anti-Bolshevik propaganda in a grand style’ (Lochner 1948, 253).2 In an effort to shame Moscow and divide the Allies, the Nazis invited the Red Cross and formed an International Commission of forensic scientists to examine the burial site. In the war of perception that attended the Second World War, ‘Katyn’ became a potent weapon, a chilling refrain.
The Soviet counter-accusation was swift and vociferous. ‘In launching this monstrous invention, the German-Fascist scoundrels do not hesitate at the most unscrupulous and base lies in their attempt to cover up crimes which, as has now become evident, were perpetrated by themselves’ (Cienciala et al. 2007, 306). Moscow responded by alleging that the bodies found in the Katyn forest were those of Poles who had been taken captive and executed by Nazi forces on Soviet territory in 1941, after the launch of Operation Barbarossa. The date – 1941 instead of 1940 – was everything to the Katyn Lie. Indeed, as we shall see in chapter 1, simply marking the Katyn tragedy as an event from 1940 would constitute a resounding protest against Soviet power in post-war Communist Poland.
Not to be outdone by Goebbels, Soviet authorities set up an investigatory commission of their own upon retaking Smolensk and its environs in 1944, which was preceded by an NKVD operation that doctored evidence and coached local witnesses (Lebedeva 2001, 429–30). The preordained conclusions of the Burdenko Commission gave cover to the Katyn Lie and emboldened Moscow to ‘double down’ on its claims. In 1944, for instance, the Red Army brazenly considered the formation of a new Polish tank brigade called ‘the avengers of Katyn’ (Sanford 2005, 206). In 1945 and 1946, they attempted to establish German guilt for Katyn at Nuremberg, only to fail spectacularly in the face of refutations drawn from witness testimony. Talk of Katyn was subsequently abandoned at the international tribunal. The Katyn Lie, however, endured. Only in 1990, when Mikhail Gorbachev handed over cartons of documents attesting to Soviet perpetration of the crime to Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski, did the truth finally begin to emerge publicly.
The full truth, however, has yet to prevail. In 1992, the President of the Russian Federation Boris Yeltsin offered his Polish counterpart Lech Wał
