The massacre of 22,000 Poles 70 years ago has embittered relations ever since, writes DEREK SCALLYin Berlin
FOR SEVEN decades, one event has strained relations between Poland and Russia like no other: the April 1940 Red Army massacre of 22,000 Polish soldiers in a Russian forest.
Though he ordered the massacre personally, Stalin blamed the atrocity on the Nazis; it was 1990 before Moscow admitted its responsibility.
Today, Polish and Russian leaders will attempt to disperse the shadow the massacre still casts on bilateral relations in a joint ceremony to honour the dead of Katyn Forest, near the Russian city of Smolensk.
After laying wreaths, Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin and his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, will hold talks and listen to the latest historical research into one of Poland’s great national tragedies.
Polish hopes are high that Mr Putin will use the occasion to release the remaining Kremlin classified documents on Katyn, papers that may explain the fate of nearly 4,000 still unaccounted for prisoners of war.
The Katyn massacre was a direct consequence of the secret 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact, which saw Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union attack Poland on both fronts. Nearly 22,000 Polish officers were taken prisoner on the eastern front and, amid fears they would start an uprising, were handed over to the Soviet secret police, the NKVD.
The prisoners, ranging from ordinary soldiers to some of Poland’s most decorated majors and colonels, were herded into the forest, shot in the head and buried in mass graves. In 1943, Nazi troops uncovered a grave containing 4,500 bodies, trumpeted by Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda ministry as proof of “Bolshevik barbarism”.
When Soviet troops retook the area later in the war, they claimed to have found evidence that Katyn was a Nazi atrocity – a line Moscow followed until 1990.
When an international investigation found proof of the NKVD’s role, Poland’s government-in-exile in London demanded a Red Cross investigation. Stalin refused, cut ties with Poland’s exile government in London and began lobbying the Allies to recognise a pro-Soviet communist government for a postwar Poland.
This communist administration forbade any public discussion of Katyn that veered from the Kremlin line. Then, in 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev handed over declassified documents he said “indirectly but convincingly” proved NKVD responsibility.
That conciliatory line was continued by Russian president Boris Yeltsin but had soured amid rising nationalist sentiment in both countries in recent years.
Like no other event, Katyn has served for decades as both historical battleground and barometer of political relations between Poland and Russia.
Polish relations with Moscow reached a low point in recent years when the national conservative Kaczynski brothers, as prime minister and president, agreed to co-host a US missile defence facility on Polish territory.
The ambitious plan caused huge anger in Moscow, so Mr Obama’s decision to scale back the project has helped Mr Tusk rebuild relations.
Last September at a ceremony in Gdansk to mark the start of the second World War, Mr Putin described the Katyn massacre as “a crime”.
Last week, Russian state television screened Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyn, followed by a panel discussion.
Meanwhile, members of a joint Polish-Russian historical commission have said they were “in agreement that the murders were a war crime carried out on orders of the Soviet leadership and later covered up”.
Poles will be watching and waiting for a final nod of acknowledgement from Mr Putin at today’s ceremonies. Speculation is modest about how far the Russian prime minister will be willing to go.
For Warsaw mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz, today’s ceremony is about honouring the “twice-murdered” victims of Katyn.
“The first time they were murdered with a shot to the back of the head,” she said, “and a second time by attempts to wipe out memory of them entirely”.