Why were Polish officers shot in Katyn. Katyn dead end: everything points to the execution of Polish officers in Katyn by the Nazis - peacebuilding

Katyn massacre - massacres of Polish citizens (mainly captured officers of the Polish army), carried out in the spring of 1940 by the NKVD of the USSR. As evidenced by documents published in 1992, the executions were carried out by decision of the troika of the NKVD of the USSR in accordance with the resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940. According to published archival documents, a total of 21,857 Polish prisoners were shot.

During the partition of Poland, the Red Army captured up to half a million Polish citizens. Most of them were soon released, and 130,242 people ended up in NKVD camps, including both members of the Polish army and others whom the leadership of the Soviet Union considered "suspicious" because of their desire to restore Poland's independence. The servicemen of the Polish army were divided: the highest officers were concentrated in three camps: Ostashkovsky, Kozelsky and Starobelsky.

And on March 3, 1940, the head of the NKVD, Lavrenty Beria, proposed to the Politburo of the Central Committee to destroy all these people, since "They are all sworn enemies of the Soviet regime, full of hatred for the Soviet system." In fact, according to the ideology that existed in the USSR at that time, all nobles and representatives of wealthy circles were declared class enemies and were subject to destruction. Therefore, the death sentence was signed for the entire officer corps of the Polish army, which was soon carried out.

Then the war between the USSR and Germany began, and Polish units began to form in the USSR. Then the question arose about the officers who were in these camps. Soviet officials responded vaguely and evasively. And in 1943, the Germans found the burial places of the "missing" Polish officers in the Katyn forest. The USSR accused the Germans of lying, and after the liberation of this area, a Soviet commission headed by N. N. Burdenko worked in the Katyn forest. The conclusions of this commission were predictable: they blamed the Germans for everything.

In the future, Katyn has repeatedly become the subject of international scandals and high-profile accusations. In the early 90s, documents were published that confirmed that the execution in Katyn was carried out by decision of the top Soviet leadership. And on November 26, 2010, the State Duma Russian Federation by its decision, it recognized the guilt of the USSR in the Katyn massacre. Seems like enough has been said. But it's too early to make a point. Until a full assessment of these atrocities is given, until all the executioners and their victims are named, until the Stalinist legacy is overcome, until then we will not be able to say that the case of the execution in the Katyn Forest, which took place in the spring of 1940, is closed.

Resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of March 5, 1940, which determined the fate of the Poles. It states that “cases of 14,700 former Polish officers, officials, landlords, policemen, intelligence officers, gendarmes, siegemen and jailers who are in the camps of prisoners of war, as well as cases of 11 arrested and in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus 000 members of various spyware and sabotage organizations former landowners, manufacturers, former Polish officers, officials and defectors - to be considered in special order, applying to them supreme measure punishment is execution.

The remains of General M. Smoravinsky.

Polish catholic church and the Polish Red Cross examine the corpses removed for identification.

The delegation of the Polish Red Cross examines the documents found on the corpses.

Identity card of the chaplain (military priest) Zelkovsky, who was killed in Katyn.

Members of the International Commission interview the local population.

Local resident Parfen Gavrilovich Kiselev talks with a delegation of the Polish Red Cross.

N. N. Burdenko

Commission headed by N.N. Burdenko.

Executioners who "distinguished themselves" during the Katyn execution.

Chief Katyn executioner: V. I. Blokhin.

Hands tied with rope.

A memorandum from Beria to Stalin, with a proposal to destroy the Polish officers. On it are the paintings of all members of the Politburo.

Polish prisoners of war.

The international commission examines the corpses.

Note from the head of the KGB Shelepin to N.S. Khrushchev, which says: “Any unforeseen accident can lead to the disclosure of the operation, with all the consequences that are undesirable for our state. Moreover, with regard to those shot in the Katyn forest, there is official version: all Poles liquidated there are considered to be destroyed by the German occupiers. Based on the foregoing, it seems appropriate to destroy all records of the executed Polish officers.

Polish order on the found remains.

Captured British and Americans are present at the autopsy, which is performed by a German doctor.

Excavated common grave.

The bodies were piled up.

The remains of a major of the Polish army (Brigade named after Pilsudski).

A place in the Katyn forest where burials were discovered.

Adapted from http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%8B%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9_ %D1%80%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%BB

(Visited 331 times, 1 visits today)

In perestroika, Gorbachev did not hang any sins on the Soviet Power. One of them was the execution of Polish officers near Katyn by supposedly Soviet secret services. In reality, the Poles were shot by the Germans, and the myth of the USSR's involvement in the execution of Polish prisoners of war was put into circulation by Nikita Khrushchev, based on his own selfish considerations.

The 20th Congress had devastating consequences not only within the USSR, but also for the entire world communist movement, because Moscow lost its role as a cementing ideological center, and each of the people's democracies (with the exception of the PRC and Albania) began to look for its own path to socialism, and under this actually took the path of eliminating the dictatorship of the proletariat and restoring capitalism.

The first serious international reaction to Khrushchev's "secret" report was the anti-Soviet speeches in Poznań, the historical center of Wielkopolska chauvinism, that followed shortly after the death of the leader of the Polish communists, Bolesław Bierut. Soon the turmoil began to spread to other cities in Poland and even spread to other Eastern European countries, in more- Hungary, to a lesser extent - Bulgaria. In the end, the Polish anti-Sovietists, under the smoke screen of “the fight against Stalin’s personality cult,” managed not only to free the right-wing nationalist deviator Vladislav Gomulka and his associates from prison, but also to bring them to power.

And although Khrushchev tried at first to somehow oppose, in the end, he was forced to accept the Polish demands in order to defuse the current situation, which was ready to get out of control. These demands contained such unpleasant moments as the unconditional recognition of the new leadership, the dissolution of collective farms, some liberalization of the economy, guarantees of freedom of speech, meetings and demonstrations, the abolition of censorship, and, most importantly, the official recognition of the vile Nazi lie about the involvement of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in the Katyn execution of Polish prisoners of war. officers. In the heat of giving such guarantees, Khrushchev recalled the Soviet Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, a Pole by origin, who served as Minister of Defense of Poland, and all Soviet military and political advisers.

Perhaps the most unpleasant for Khrushchev was the demand to recognize the involvement of his party in the Katyn massacre, but he agreed to this only in connection with the promise of V. Gomulka to put Stepan Bandera on the trail, worst enemy Soviet power, head of paramilitary formations Ukrainian nationalists who fought against the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War and continued their terrorist activities in the Lviv region until the 50s of the twentieth century.

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), headed by S. Bandera, relied on cooperation with the intelligence services of the USA, England, Germany, on permanent contacts with various underground circles and groups in Ukraine. To do this, its emissaries penetrated there illegally, with the goal of creating an underground network and transporting anti-Soviet and nationalist literature.

It is possible that during his unofficial visit to Moscow in February 1959, Gomulka reported that his secret services had discovered Bandera in Munich, and hurried with the recognition of "Katyn's guilt." One way or another, but on the instructions of Khrushchev on October 15, 1959, the KGB officer Bogdan Stashinsky finally eliminates Bandera in Munich, and the trial that took place over Stashinsky in Karlsruhe (Germany) will find it possible to determine the killer with a relatively mild punishment - only a few years in prison, since the main blame will be placed on the organizers of the crime - the Khrushchev leadership.

Fulfilling his obligation, Khrushchev, an experienced ripper secret archives, gives appropriate orders to the chairman of the KGB Shelepin, who moved to this chair a year ago from the post of first secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League, and he begins feverishly "working" on creating a material justification for the Hitlerite version of the Katyn myth.

First of all, Shelepin starts a “special folder” “On the involvement of the CPSU (this one puncture already speaks of the fact of gross falsification - until 1952 the CPSU was called the CPSU (b) - L.B.) to the Katyn execution, where, as he believes, should be stored four main documents: a) lists of executed Polish officers; b) Beria's report to Stalin; c) Resolution of the Central Committee of the Party of March 5, 1940; d) Shelepin's letter to Khrushchev (the motherland must know its "heroes"!)

It was this “special folder”, created by Khrushchev at the request of the new Polish leadership, that spurred on all the anti-people forces of the PPR, inspired by Pope John Paul II (former Archbishop of Krakow and Cardinal of Poland), as well as Assistant to US President Jimmy Carter for national security, permanent director research center, called the "Stalin Institute" under University of California, a Pole by origin, Zbigniew Brzezinski to more and more brazen ideological sabotage.

In the end, after another three decades, the story of the visit of the leader of Poland to Soviet Union repeated, only this time in April 1990, President of the Republic of Poland V. Jaruzelsky arrived on an official state visit to the USSR demanding repentance for the “Katyn atrocity” and forced Gorbachev to make the following statement: “Recently, documents have been found (meaning Khrushchev’s “ special folder "- L.B.), which indirectly but convincingly testify that thousands of Polish citizens who died in the Smolensk forests exactly half a century ago became victims of Beria and his henchmen. Graves of Polish officers - next to the graves Soviet people who fell by the same evil hand."

Considering that the "special folder" is a fake, then Gorbachev's statement was not worth a penny. Having achieved from the mediocre Gorbachev leadership in April 1990 a shameful public repentance for Hitler's sins, that is, the publication of the TASS Report that “the Soviet side, expressing deep regret over the Katyn tragedy, declares that it represents one of the grave crimes of Stalinism ”, counter-revolutionaries of all stripes successfully took advantage of this “Khrushchev time bomb” explosion - false documents about Katyn - for their base subversive purposes.

The leader of the notorious "Solidarity" Lech Walesa was the first to "respond" to Gorbachev's "repentance" (they put a finger in his mouth - he bit his hand - L.B.). He proposed to resolve other important problems: to reconsider the assessments of post-war Polish-Soviet relations, including the role of the Polish National Liberation Committee created in July 1944, the treaties concluded with the USSR, because they were allegedly based on criminal principles, to punish those responsible for the genocide, to allow free access to the burial places of Polish officers, and most importantly, of course, to compensate for material damage to the families and relatives of the victims. On April 28, 1990, a representative of the government spoke in the Sejm of Poland with information that negotiations with the government of the USSR on the issue of monetary compensation were already underway and that in this moment it is important to compile a list of all those claiming such payments (according to official figures, there were up to 800,000 such "relatives").

And the vile action of Khrushchev-Gorbachev ended with the dispersal of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the dissolution of the military union of countries Warsaw Pact, the liquidation of the Eastern European socialist camp. Moreover, it was believed: the West would dissolve NATO in response, but - “figs to you”: NATO is doing “drang nah Osten”, brazenly absorbing the countries of the former Eastern European socialist camp.

However, back to the kitchen of creating a “special folder”. A. Shelepin began by breaking the seal and entering the sealed room where records of 21,857 prisoners and internees of Polish nationality were kept since September 1939. In a letter to Khrushchev dated March 3, 1959, justifying the uselessness of this archival material by the fact that “all accounting files are of neither operational interest nor historical value,” the newly minted “chekist” comes to the conclusion: “Based on the foregoing, it seems appropriate to destroy all accounting files on persons (attention!!!) who were shot in 1940 in the named operation. So there were "lists of executed Polish officers" in Katyn. Subsequently, the son of Lavrenty Beria reasonably remarks: “During Jaruzelsky’s official visit to Moscow, Gorbachev handed him only copies of the lists of the former Main Directorate for Prisoners of War and Internees of the NKVD of the USSR found in Soviet archives. The copies contain the names of Polish citizens who were in 1939-1940 in the Kozelsky, Ostashkovsky and Starobelsky camps of the NKVD. None of these documents mentions the participation of the NKVD in the execution of prisoners of war.

The second "document" from the Khrushchev-Shelepin "special folder" was not at all difficult to fabricate, since there was a detailed digital report by the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR L. Beria

I.V. Stalin "About the Polish prisoners of war". Shelepin had only one thing left to do - to come up with and print out the “operative part”, where Beria allegedly demands execution for all prisoners of war from the camps and prisoners held in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus “without summoning those arrested and without bringing charges” - the benefit of typewriters in the former NKVD The USSR has not yet been decommissioned. However, Shelepin did not dare to forge Beria's signature, leaving this "document" as a cheap anonymous letter. But his “operative part”, copied word for word, will fall into the next “document”, which the “literate” Shelepin will call in his letter to Khrushchev “Decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU (?) of March 5, 1940”, and this lapsus calami, this a mistake in the “letter” still sticks out like an awl from a bag (and, indeed, how can “archival documents” be corrected, even if they were invented two decades after the event? - L.B.).

True, this main “document” itself on the involvement of the party is designated as “an extract from the minutes of the meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee. Decision dated 5.03.40.” (The Central Committee of which party? In all party documents without exception, the entire abbreviation was always indicated in full - Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks - L.B.). Most surprising of all, this “document” was left unsigned. And on this anonymous letter, instead of a signature, there are only two words - "Secretary of the Central Committee." And that's it!

This is how Khrushchev paid the Polish leadership for the head of his worst personal enemy Stepan Bandera, who spoiled him a lot of blood when Nikita Sergeevich was the first leader of Ukraine.

Khrushchev did not understand another thing: that the price he had to pay Poland for this, in general, irrelevant by that time, the terrorist attack was immeasurably higher - in fact, it was equal to the revision of the decisions of the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences on the post-war structure of the statehood of Poland and other Eastern European countries .

Nevertheless, the false “special folder” fabricated by Khrushchev and Shelepin, covered with archival dust, waited in the wings three decades later. It pecked at her, as we have already seen, the enemy Soviet people Gorbachev. The ardent enemy of the Soviet people, Yeltsin, also pecked at her. The latter tried to use the Katyn fakes at the meetings of the Constitutional Court of the RSFSR, dedicated to the “case of the CPSU” initiated by him. These fakes were presented by the notorious "figures" of the Yeltsin era - Shakhrai and Makarov. However, even the complaisant Constitutional Court could not recognize these forgeries as genuine documents and did not mention them anywhere in its decisions. Khrushchev and Shelepin did a dirty job!

A paradoxical position on the Katyn "case" was taken by Sergo Beria. His book “My father is Lavrenty Beria” was signed for publication on April 18, 1994, and the “documents” from the “special folder” were, as we already know, made public in January 1993. It is unlikely that Beria's son was not aware of this, although he makes a similar appearance. But his "awl from the bag" is an almost exact reproduction of the figure of the Khrushchev number of prisoners of war shot in Katyn - 21 thousand 857 (Khrushchev) and 20 thousand 857 (S. Beria).

In his attempt to whitewash his father, he admits the "fact" of the Katyn massacre the Soviet side, but at the same time he blames the “system” and agrees that his father was allegedly ordered to transfer the captured Polish officers of the Red Army within a week, and the execution itself was allegedly ordered to be carried out by the leadership of the People’s Commissariat of Defense, that is, Klim Voroshilov, and adds that “ this is the truth that is carefully concealed to this day ... The fact remains: my father refused to participate in the crime, although he knew that he was no longer able to save these 20 thousand 857 lives ... I know for sure that my father motivated his fundamental disagreement with execution of Polish officers and in writing. Where are these documents?

The late Sergo Lavrentievich correctly stated that these documents do not exist. Because there never was. Instead of proving the inconsistency of recognizing the involvement of the Soviet side in the Hitlerite-Goebbels provocation in the "Katyn case" and exposing Khrushchev's cheap stuff, Sergo Beria saw this as a selfish chance to take revenge on the party, which, in his words, "always knew how to put a hand to dirty things and at an opportunity to shift the responsibility to anyone, but not to the top party leadership. That is, Sergo Beria also contributed to the big lie about Katyn, as we see.

At careful reading The “Report of the head of the NKVD Lavrenty Beria” draws attention to the following absurdity: the “Report” gives digital calculations about 14 thousand 700 people from among the former Polish officers, officials, landowners, policemen, intelligence officers, gendarmes, siegemen and jailers (hence - Gorbachev's figure - "about 15 thousand executed Polish officers" - L.B.), as well as about 11 thousand people arrested and in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus - members of various counter-revolutionary and sabotage organizations, former landowners , manufacturers and defectors".

In total, therefore, 25 thousand 700. The same figure also appears in the allegedly mentioned above “Extract from the meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee”, since it was rewritten into a fake document without due critical thinking. But in this regard, it is difficult to understand Shelepin's statement that 21,857 records were kept in the "secret sealed room" and that all 21,857 Polish officers were shot.

First, as we have seen, not all of them were officers. According to Lavrenty Beria's estimates, in general there were only a little over 4 thousand army officers proper (generals, colonels and lieutenant colonels - 295, majors and captains - 2080, lieutenants, second lieutenants and cornets - 604). This is in prisoner of war camps, and there were 1207 former Polish prisoners of war in prisons. In total, therefore, 4,186 people. In the Big encyclopedic dictionary”The 1998 edition of the year is written like this: “In the spring of 1940, the NKVD destroyed over 4 thousand Polish officers in Katyn.” And then: “Executions on the territory of Katyn were carried out during the occupation Smolensk region fascist German troops.

So who, in the end, carried out these ill-fated executions - the Nazis, the NKVD, or, as the son of Lavrenty Beria claims, parts of the regular Red Army?

Secondly, there is a clear discrepancy between the number of "shot" - 21 thousand 857 and the number of people who were "ordered" to be shot - 25 thousand 700. It is permissible to ask how it could happen that 3843 Polish officers turned out to be unaccounted for, which department fed them during their lifetime, on what means did they live? And who dared to spare them if the "bloodthirsty" "secretary of the Central Committee" ordered to shoot all the "officers" to the last?

And the last. In the materials fabricated in 1959 on the Katyn case, it is stated that the “troika” was the court for the unfortunate. Khrushchev "forgot" that in accordance with the Decree of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks of November 17, 1938 "On Arrests, Prosecutorial Supervision and the Conduct of Investigations", judicial "troikas" were liquidated. This happened a year and a half before the Katyn massacre, which was incriminated to the Soviet authorities.

The truth about Katyn

After the shamefully failed campaign against Warsaw, undertaken by Tukhachevsky, obsessed with the Trotskyist idea of a world revolutionary fire, to bourgeois Poland from Soviet Russia withdrew under the Riga Peace Treaty of 1921 western lands Ukraine and Belarus, and this soon led to the forced Polonization of the population so unexpectedly acquired territories for free: to the closure of Ukrainian and Belarusian schools; to the transformation Orthodox churches in Catholic churches; to the expropriation of fertile lands from the peasants and their transfer to the Polish landowners; to lawlessness and arbitrariness; to persecution on national and religious grounds; to the brutal suppression of any manifestations of popular discontent.

That is why Western Ukrainians and Byelorussians, having drunk on bourgeois Greater Poland lawlessness, longing for Bolshevik social justice and genuine freedom, as their liberators and deliverers, as relatives, met the Red Army when it came to their region on September 17, 1939, and all its actions to liberate the Western Ukraine and Western Belarus lasted 12 days.

Polish military units and formations of troops, with almost no resistance, surrendered. The Polish government of Kozlovsky, who fled to Romania on the eve of the capture of Warsaw by Hitler, actually betrayed his people, and the new Polish government in exile, headed by General V. Sikorsky, was formed in London on September 30, 1939, i.e. two weeks after the national catastrophe.

By the time of the perfidious attack of fascist Germany on the USSR, 389 thousand 382 Poles were kept in Soviet prisons, camps and places of exile. From London, the fate of Polish prisoners of war, who were used mainly for road construction work, was very closely followed, so that if they were shot by the Soviet authorities in the spring of 1940, as the false Goebbels propaganda trumpeted to the whole world, it would be timely known through diplomatic channels and would cause a great international outcry.

In addition, Sikorsky, seeking rapprochement with I.V. Stalin, sought to present himself in the best possible light, played the role of a friend of the Soviet Union, which again excludes the possibility of a "massacre" "perpetrated" by the Bolsheviks over Polish prisoners of war in the spring of 1940. Nothing indicates the presence of a historical situation that could be an incentive for such an action by the Soviet side.

At the same time, the Germans had such an incentive in August-September 1941 after the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, concluded a friendship treaty between the two governments with the Poles on July 30, 1941, according to which General Sikorsky was to form from prisoners of war compatriots in the Russian army under the command of a prisoner of war Polish General Anders to participate in hostilities against Germany. This was the incentive for Hitler to liquidate Poles as enemies of the German nation, who, as he knew, had already been amnestied by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of August 12, 1941 - 389 thousand 41 Poles, including future victims of Nazi atrocities, shot in the Katyn forest.

The process of forming the National Polish Army under the command of General Anders was in full swing in the Soviet Union, and in quantitatively in half a year it reached 76 thousand 110 people.

However, as it turned out later, Anders received instructions from Sikorsky: "In no case should Russia be helped, but use the situation to the maximum advantage for the Polish nation." At the same time, Sikorsky convinces Churchill of the expediency of transferring Anders' army to the Middle East, about which the British Prime Minister writes to I.V. Stalin, and the leader gives his go-ahead, not only for the evacuation to Iran of the Anders army itself, but also for family members of military personnel in the amount of 43 thousand 755 people. It was clear to both Stalin and Hitler that Sikorsky was playing a double game. As tensions increased between Stalin and Sikorsky, there was a thaw between Hitler and Sikorsky. The Soviet-Polish "friendship" ended with a frank anti-Soviet statement by the head of the Polish government in exile on February 25, 1943, which said that it did not want to recognize the historical rights of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples to unite in their national states. In other words, there was the fact of the impudent claims of the Polish émigré government to the Soviet lands - Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. In response to this statement, I.V. Stalin formed from the Poles loyal to the Soviet Union, the Tadeusz Kosciuszko division of 15 thousand people. In October 1943, she was already fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Red Army.

For Hitler, this statement was a signal to take revenge for the Leipzig process he lost to the communists in the case of the Reichstag fire, and he intensifies the activities of the police and the Gestapo of the Smolensk region to organize the Katyn provocation.

Already on April 15, the German Information Bureau reported on the Berlin radio that the German occupation authorities had discovered in Katyn, near Smolensk, the graves of 11,000 Polish officers shot by Jewish commissars. The next day, the Soviet Information Bureau exposed the bloody machinations of the Nazi executioners, and on April 19, the Pravda newspaper wrote in an editorial: “The Nazis invent some kind of Jewish commissars who allegedly participated in the murder of 11,000 Polish officers. It is not difficult for experienced masters of provocation to come up with several names of people who never existed. Such “commissars” as Lev Rybak, Avraam Borisovich, Pavel Brodninsky, Chaim Finberg, named by the German information bureau, were simply invented by the Nazi swindlers, since there were no such “commissars” either in the Smolensk branch of the GPU, or in general in the NKVD bodies and No".

On April 28, 1943, Pravda published a “note of the Soviet government on the decision to break off relations with the Polish government”, which, in particular, stated that “this hostile campaign against the Soviet state was undertaken by the Polish government in order to use the Hitlerite slanderous fake to put pressure on the Soviet government in order to wrest territorial concessions from it at the expense of the interests of Soviet Ukraine, Soviet Belarus and Soviet Lithuania.

Immediately after the expulsion of the Nazi invaders from Smolensk (September 25, 1943), I.V. Stalin sends a special commission to the crime scene to establish and investigate the circumstances of the execution of Polish officers of war by the Nazi invaders in the Katyn forest. The commission included: a member of the Extraordinary State Commission(ChGK was investigating the atrocities of the Nazis in the occupied territories of the USSR and scrupulously calculated the damage caused by them - L.B.), Academician N. N. Burdenko (Chairman of the Special Commission on Katyn), members of the ChGK: Academician Alexei Tolstoy and Metropolitan Nikolai, Chairman of the All-Slavic Committee , Lieutenant General A.S. Gundorov, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Union of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies S.A. Kolesnikov, People's Commissar of Education of the USSR, Academician V.P. Potemkin, head of the Main Military Sanitary Directorate of the Red Army, Colonel-General E.I. Smirnov, Chairman of the Smolensk Regional Executive Committee R.E. Melnikov. To fulfill the task assigned to it, the commission attracted the best forensic experts in the country: the chief forensic expert of the People's Commissariat of Health of the USSR, director of the Research Institute of Forensic Medicine V.I. Prozorovsky, head. Department of Forensic Medicine of the 2nd Moscow Medical Institute V.M. Smolyaninov, senior researchers of the Research Institute of Forensic Medicine P.S. Semenovsky and M.D. Shvaikov, chief pathologist of the front, major of the medical service, professor D.N. Vyropayeva.

Day and night, tirelessly, for four months, the authoritative commission conscientiously investigated the details of the Katyn case. On January 26, 1944, the most convincing report of a special commission was published in all the central newspapers, which did not leave a stone unturned from the Hitler myth of Katyn and revealed to the whole world a true picture of the atrocities of the Nazi invaders against Polish prisoners of war officers.

However, in the midst of cold war» The US Congress again makes an attempt to revive the "Katyn issue", even creates the so-called. “A commission to investigate the Katyn case, headed by Congressman Madden.

On March 3, 1952, Pravda published a note to the US State Department dated February 29, 1952, which, in particular, stated: thus generally recognized Hitlerite criminals (it is characteristic that the special "Katyn" commission of the US Congress was created simultaneously with the approval of the appropriation of 100 million dollars for sabotage and espionage activities in Poland - L.B.).

The note was accompanied by the re-published in Pravda on March 3, 1952, the full text of the message of the Burdenko commission, which collected extensive material obtained as a result of a detailed study of the corpses recovered from the graves and those documents and material evidence that were found on the corpses and in the graves. At the same time, the Burdenko special commission interviewed numerous witnesses from the local population, whose testimony accurately established the time and circumstances of the crimes committed by the German invaders.

First of all, the message gives information about what constitutes the Katyn forest.

“For a long time, the Katyn forest has been a favorite place where the people of Smolensk usually spent their holidays. The local population grazed cattle in the Katyn forest and procured fuel for themselves. There were no prohibitions or restrictions on access to the Katyn Forest.

Back in the summer of 1941, the pioneer camp of Promstrakhkassa was located in this forest, which was closed only in July 1941 with the capture of Smolensk by the German invaders, the forest began to be guarded by reinforced patrols, in many places there were inscriptions warning that persons entering the forest without a special pass were subject to shooting on the spot.

That part was especially strictly guarded. Katyn forest, which was called "Goat Mountains", as well as the territory on the banks of the Dnieper, where at a distance of 700 meters from the discovered graves of Polish prisoners of war there was a summer house - a rest house of the Smolensk department of the NKVD. Upon the arrival of the Germans, a German military establishment was located in this dacha, hiding under the code name "Headquarters of the 537th construction battalion" (which also appeared in the documents Nuremberg Trials- L.B.).

From the testimony of the peasant Kiselyov, born in 1870: “The officer stated that, according to the information available to the Gestapo, the NKVD officers shot Polish officers in 1940 at the Kozy Gory section, and asked me what evidence I could give about this. I replied that I had never heard of the NKVD carrying out executions in the Kozy Gory, and it was hardly possible at all, I explained to the officer, since the Goat Gory is a completely open crowded place and if they were shot there, then about This would be known to the entire population of nearby villages ... ".

Kiselyov and others told how false testimony was literally knocked out of them with rubber truncheons and threats of execution, which later appeared in a book superbly published by the German Foreign Ministry, in which materials fabricated by the Germans on the Katyn case were placed. In addition to Kiselyov, Godezov (aka Godunov), Silverstov, Andreev, Zhigulev, Krivozertsev, Zakharov were named as witnesses in this book.

The Burdenko Commission found that Godezov and Silverstov died in 1943, before the liberation of the Smolensk region by the Red Army. Andreev, Zhigulev and Krivozertsev left with the Germans. The last of the “witnesses” named by the Germans, Zakharov, who worked under the Germans as a headman in the village of Novye Batek, told the Burdenko commission that he was first beaten until he lost consciousness, and then, when he came to, the officer demanded to sign the protocol of interrogation, and he, faint-hearted, under the influence of beatings and threats of execution, he gave false testimony and signed the protocol.

The Nazi command understood that for such a large-scale provocation "witnesses" were clearly not enough. And it distributed among the inhabitants of Smolensk and the surrounding villages "Appeal to the population", which was placed in the newspaper published by the Germans in Smolensk " New way"(No. 35 (157) of May 6, 1943: "Can you give data about the mass murder committed by the Bolsheviks in 1940 over captured Polish officers and priests (? - this is something new - L.B.) in "Kozy Gory" forest, near the Gnezdovo-Katyn highway. Who observed the vehicles from Gnezdovo to "Kozy Gory" or who saw or heard executions? Who knows the inhabitants who can tell about it? Every report will be rewarded."

To my credit Soviet citizens, no one pecked at the reward for giving the false testimony needed by the Germans in the Katyn case.

Of the documents discovered by forensic experts relating to the second half of 1940 and spring-summer 1941, deserve Special attention the following:

1. On corpse No. 92.
Letter from Warsaw addressed to the Red Cross in the Central Bank of Prisoners of War - Moscow, st. Kuibysheva, 12. The letter is written in Russian. In this letter, Sofya Zygon asks for the whereabouts of her husband, Tomasz Zygon. The letter is dated 12.09. 1940. The stamp on the envelope is “Warsaw. 09.1940" and a stamp - "Moscow, Post Office, Expedition 9, 8.10. 1940”, as well as a resolution in red ink “Uch. set up a camp and send for delivery - 11/15/40. (Signature is illegible).

2. On corpse #4
Postcard, order No. 0112 from Tarnopol with a postmark "Tarnopol 12. 11.40" The handwriting and address are discolored.

3. On corpse No. 101.
Receipt No. 10293 dated 19.12.39, issued by the Kozelsky camp about the acceptance of a gold watch from Lewandovsky Eduard Adamovich. On the back of the receipt there is an entry dated March 14, 1941 about the sale of this watch to Yuvelirtorg.

4. On corpse no. 53.

Unsent postcard Polish with the address: Warsaw, Bagatela 15, apt. 47, Irina Kuchinskaya. Dated June 20, 1941.

It must be said that in preparation for their provocation, the German occupation authorities used up to 500 Russian prisoners of war to work on digging graves in the Katyn forest, extracting documents and material evidence incriminating them, who, after doing this work, were shot by the Germans.

From the report of the "Special Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of War by the Nazi Invaders in the Katyn Forest": "Conclusions from the testimony and forensic medical examination about the execution of Polish prisoners of war by the Germans in the autumn of 1941, are fully confirmed by material evidence and documents recovered from the Katyn graves.

This is the truth about Katyn. The irrefutable truth of the fact.

What is meant by the term "Katyn crime"? The term is collective. We are talking about the execution of about twenty-two thousand Poles, who had previously been in different prisons and camps of the NKVD of the USSR. The tragedy happened in April-May 1940. Polish policemen and officers who were taken prisoner by the Red Army in September 1939 were shot.

The prisoners of the Starobelsky camp were killed and buried in Kharkov; prisoners of the Ostashkov camp were shot in Kalinin and buried in Medny; and the prisoners of the Kozelsky camp were shot and buried in the Katyn forest (near Smolensk, at a distance of two km from the Gnezdovo station). As for the prisoners from the prisons of the western regions of Belarus and Ukraine, there is reason to believe that they were shot in Kharkov, Kyiv, Kherson, Minsk. Probably, in other places of the Ukrainian SSR and BSSR, which have not yet been established.

Katyn is considered one of the places of execution. This is a symbol of the execution to which the above groups of Poles were subjected, since the graves of Polish officers were discovered in Katyn (in 1943). For the next 47 years, Katyn was the only established location where a mass grave of victims was found.

What preceded the execution

The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact (non-aggression pact between Germany and the USSR) was signed on August 23, 1939. The presence of a secret protocol in the pact indicated that the two countries had demarcated their areas of interest. For example, the USSR was supposed to get East End pre-war Poland. And Hitler, with the help of this pact, got rid of the last obstacle before attacking Poland.

On September 1, 1939, World War II began with an attack Nazi Germany to Poland. During the bloody battles of the Polish army with the aggressor, the Red Army invaded (September 17, 1939). Although Poland signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR. The operation of the Red Army was announced Soviet propaganda as "a liberation campaign in Western Belarus and Western Ukraine."

The Poles could not have foreseen that the Red Army would also attack them. Some even thought that Soviet troops were brought in to fight against the Germans. Due to the hopeless position of Poland in that situation, the Polish commander-in-chief had no choice but to issue an order not to fight the Soviet army, but to resist only if the enemy tried to disarm the Polish units.

As a result, only some Polish units fought the Red Army. At the end of September 1939, Soviet soldiers captured 240-250 thousand Poles (including officers, soldiers, border guards, policemen, gendarmes, prison guards, and so on). It was impossible to provide so many prisoners with food. For this reason, after the disarmament took place, some non-commissioned officers and privates were released home, and the rest were transferred to the prisoner of war camps of the NKVD of the USSR.

But there were too many prisoners in these camps. Therefore, many privates and non-commissioned officers left the camp. Those who lived in the territories occupied by the USSR were sent home. And who were from the territories occupied by the Germans, according to the agreements, were transferred to Germany. The USSR was transferred to the Polish soldiers captured by the German army: Belarusians, Ukrainians, residents of the territory that had ceded to the USSR.

The agreement on the exchange also affected civilian refugees who ended up in the territories occupied by the USSR. People could apply to the German commission (these operated in the spring of 1940 on the Soviet side). And the refugees were allowed to return to their permanent place of residence in the Polish territory, which was occupied by Germany.

Non-commissioned officers and privates (approximately 25,000 Poles) remained in captivity of the Red Army. However, the prisoners of the NKVD included not only prisoners of war. There were mass arrests due to political motives. Members affected public organizations, political parties, large landowners, industrialists, merchants, border violators and other "enemies of Soviet power." Before the verdicts were passed, those arrested were in prisons in the Western BSSR and the Ukrainian SSR for months.

On March 5, 1940, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks decided to shoot 14,700 people. This number included officials, Polish officers, landlords, policemen, scouts, gendarmes, jailers and siegemen. It was also decided to exterminate 11,000 prisoners from the western regions of Belarus and Ukraine, who allegedly were counter-revolutionary spies and saboteurs, although in reality this was not the case.

Beria, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR, wrote a note to Stalin that all these people should be shot, because they are "hardened, incorrigible enemies of the Soviet regime." This served final decision Politburo .

Execution of prisoners

Polish prisoners of war and prisoners were executed in April-May 1940. The prisoners of the Ostashkovsky, Kozelsky and Starobelsky camps were sent in stages of 100 people under the command of the NKVD departments in the Kalinin, Smolensk and Kharkov regions, respectively. People were shot as new stages arrived.

At the same time, prisoners of prisons were shot in the western regions of Belarus and Ukraine.

Those 395 prisoners who were not included in the execution order were sent to the Yukhnovsky camp (Smolensk region). Later they were transferred to the Gryazovets camp (Vologda region). At the end of August 1941, the prisoners formed the Polish Army in the USSR.

Through a short time after the execution of prisoners of war, the NKVD carried out an operation: the families of the repressed were sent to Kazakhstan.

Consequences of the tragedy

Throughout the time after the terrible crime that happened, the USSR tried to do everything possible to put its blame on German army. Allegedly, this German soldiers shot Polish prisoners and prisoners. Propaganda worked with might and main, there were even "evidence" of this. At the end of March 1943, the Germans, together with the Technical Commission of the Polish Red Cross, exhumed the remains of 4243 killed. The commission was able to establish the names of half of the dead.
However, the “Katyn lies” of the USSR are not only its efforts to impose its version of what happened on all countries of the world. The communist leadership of the then Poland, which was put in power by the Soviet Union, also led this domestic policy.
Only after half a century did the USSR take the blame. On April 13, 1990, a TASS statement was published, which dealt with "the direct responsibility for the atrocities in the Katyn forest of Beria, Merkulov and their henchmen."
In 1991, Polish specialists and Home military prosecutor's office(GVP) carried out a partial exhumation. The places of burial of prisoners of war were finally established.
On October 14, 1992, B. N. Yeltsin made public and handed over to Poland evidence confirming the guilt of the USSR leadership in the "Katyn crime". A lot of the materials of the investigation are still classified.
On November 26, 2010, the State Duma, despite the opposition of the Communist Party faction, decided to adopt a statement on the "Katyn tragedy and its victims." This incident in history was recognized as a crime, the commission of which was a direct indication of Stalin and other leaders of the USSR.
In 2011, Russian officials made a statement about their readiness to consider the issue of rehabilitation of the victims of the tragedy.

In perestroika, Gorbachev did not hang any sins on the Soviet Power. One of them was the execution of Polish officers near Katyn by supposedly Soviet secret services.

In reality, the Poles were shot by the Germans, and the myth of the USSR's involvement in the execution of Polish prisoners of war was put into circulation by Nikita Khrushchev, based on his own selfish considerations.

The first serious international reaction to Khrushchev's "secret" report was the anti-Soviet demonstrations in Poznan, the historical center of Wielkopolska chauvinism, that followed shortly after the death of the leader of the Polish communists Bolesław Bierut.

Soon, the turmoil began to spread to other cities in Poland and even spread to other Eastern European countries, to a greater extent - Hungary, to a lesser extent - Bulgaria. In the end, the Polish anti-Sovietists, under the smoke screen of “the fight against Stalin’s personality cult,” managed not only to free the right-wing nationalist deviator Vladislav Gomulka and his associates from prison, but also to bring them to power.

In the heat of giving such guarantees, Khrushchev recalled the Soviet Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, a Pole by origin, who served as Minister of Defense of Poland, and all Soviet military and political advisers.

Perhaps the most unpleasant for Khrushchev was the demand to recognize the involvement of his party in the Katyn massacre, but he agreed to this only in connection with the promise of V. Gomulka to put on the trail of Stepan Bandera, the worst enemy of the Soviet government, the head of the paramilitary formations of Ukrainian nationalists who fought against the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War and continued their terrorist activities in the Lviv region until the 50s of the twentieth century.

It is possible that during his unofficial visit to Moscow in February 1959, Gomulka reported that his secret services had discovered Bandera in Munich, and hurried with the recognition of "Katyn's guilt." One way or another, but on the instructions of Khrushchev on October 15, 1959, the KGB officer Bogdan Stashinsky finally eliminates Bandera in Munich, and the trial that took place over Stashinsky in Karlsruhe (Germany) considers it possible to determine the killer with a relatively mild punishment - only a few years in prison, since the main blame will be placed on the organizers of the crime - the Khrushchev leadership.

Fulfilling his obligation, Khrushchev, an experienced ripper of secret archives, gives appropriate orders to the KGB chairman Shelepin, who moved to this chair a year ago from the post of first secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee, and he begins feverishly “working” on creating a material justification for the Hitlerite version of the Katyn myth.

It was this “special folder”, created by Khrushchev on the order of the new Polish leadership, that spurred on all the anti-people forces of the PPR, inspired by Pope John Paul II (former Archbishop of Krakow and Cardinal of Poland), as well as Assistant to US President Jimmy Carter for National Security, permanent director " research center called the "Stalin Institute" at the University of California, a Pole by birth, Zbigniew Brzezinski to more and more brazen ideological diversions.

In the end, after another three decades, the story of the visit of the leader of Poland to the Soviet Union repeated itself, only this time in April 1990 the President of the Republic of Poland V. Jaruzelsky arrived in the USSR with an official state visit demanding repentance for the "Katyn atrocity" and forced Gorbachev to make the following statement: “Recently, documents have been found (meaning Khrushchev’s “special folder” - L.B.), which indirectly but convincingly indicate that thousands of Polish citizens who died in the Smolensk forests exactly half a century ago, became victims of Beria and his henchmen. The graves of Polish officers are next to the graves of Soviet people who fell from the same evil hand.

If we take into account that the "special folder" is a fake, then Gorbachev's statement was not worth a penny. Having achieved from the mediocre Gorbachev leadership in April 1990 a shameful public repentance for Hitler's sins, that is, the publication of the TASS Report that “the Soviet side, expressing deep regret over the Katyn tragedy, declares that it represents one of the grave crimes of Stalinism ”, counter-revolutionaries of all stripes safely took advantage of this explosion of the “Khrushchev time bomb” - false documents about Katyn - for their base subversive purposes.

The leader of the notorious "Solidarity" Lech Walesa was the first to "respond" to Gorbachev's "repentance" (they put a finger in his mouth - he bit his hand - L.B.). He proposed to resolve other important problems: to reconsider the assessments of post-war Polish-Soviet relations, including the role of the Polish National Liberation Committee created in July 1944, the treaties concluded with the USSR, because they were allegedly based on criminal principles, to punish those responsible for the genocide, to allow free access to the burial places of Polish officers, and most importantly, of course, to compensate for material damage to the families and relatives of the victims. On April 28, 1990, a representative of the government spoke in the Sejm of Poland with information that negotiations with the government of the USSR on the issue of monetary compensation were already underway and that at the moment it was important to compile a list of all those claiming such payments (according to official data, there were up to 800 thousand).

And the vile action of Khrushchev-Gorbachev ended with the dispersal of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the dissolution of the military union of the Warsaw Pact countries, and the liquidation of the Eastern European socialist camp. Moreover, it was believed: the West would dissolve NATO in response, but - “figs to you”: NATO is doing “drang nah Osten”, brazenly absorbing the countries of the former Eastern European socialist camp.

So there were "lists of executed Polish officers" in Katyn. Subsequently, the son of Lavrenty Beria reasonably remarks: “During Jaruzelsky’s official visit to Moscow, Gorbachev handed him only copies of the lists of the former Main Directorate for Prisoners of War and Internees of the NKVD of the USSR found in Soviet archives. The copies contain the names of Polish citizens who were in 1939-1940 in the Kozelsky, Ostashkovsky and Starobelsky camps of the NKVD. None of these documents mentions the participation of the NKVD in the execution of prisoners of war.

But his “operative part”, copied word for word, will fall into the next “document”, which the “literate” Shelepin will call in his letter to Khrushchev “Decree of the Central Committee of the CPSU (?) of March 5, 1940”, and this lapsus calami, this the typo in the “letter” still sticks out like an awl from a bag (and, indeed, how can “archival documents” be corrected, even if they were invented two decades after the event? - L.B.).

True, this main “document” itself on the involvement of the party is designated as “an extract from the minutes of the meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee. Decision dated 5.03.40.” (The Central Committee of which party? In all party documents, without exception, the entire abbreviation was always indicated in full - Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks - L.B.). Most surprising of all, this “document” was left unsigned. And on this anonymous letter, instead of a signature, there are only two words - "Secretary of the Central Committee." And that's it!

This is how Khrushchev paid the Polish leadership for the head of his worst personal enemy Stepan Bandera, who spoiled him a lot of blood when Nikita Sergeevich was the first leader of Ukraine.

Khrushchev did not understand another thing: that the price he had to pay Poland for this, in general, irrelevant by that time, terrorist attack was immeasurably higher - in fact, it was equal to the revision of the decisions of the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences on the post-war structure of the statehood of Poland and other Eastern European countries .

Nevertheless, the false “special folder” fabricated by Khrushchev and Shelepin, covered with archival dust, waited in the wings three decades later. Gorbachev, the enemy of the Soviet people, pecked at her, as we have already seen. The ardent enemy of the Soviet people, Yeltsin, also pecked at her. The latter tried to use the Katyn fakes at the meetings of the Constitutional Court of the RSFSR, dedicated to the “case of the CPSU” initiated by him. These fakes were presented by the notorious "figures" of the Yeltsin era - Shakhrai and Makarov. However, even the complaisant Constitutional Court could not recognize these forgeries as genuine documents and did not mention them anywhere in its decisions. Khrushchev and Shelepin did a dirty job!

In his attempt to whitewash his father, he recognizes the “fact” of the Katyn massacre by the Soviet side, but at the same time he blames the “system” and agrees that his father was allegedly ordered to hand over the captured Polish officers of the Red Army within a week, and the execution itself was allegedly entrusted hold the leadership of the People’s Commissariat of Defense, that is, Klim Voroshilov, and adds that “this is the truth that is carefully hidden to this day ... The fact remains: the father refused to participate in the crime, although he knew that saving these 20 thousand 857 lives was already unable to ... I know for sure that my father motivated his fundamental disagreement with the execution of Polish officers in writing. Where are these documents?

A careful reading of the “Report of the head of the NKVD Lavrenty Beria” draws attention to the following absurdity: the “Report” gives digital calculations about 14 thousand 700 people who are in the prisoner of war camps from among the former Polish officers, officials, landowners, policemen, intelligence officers, gendarmes , siegemen and jailers (hence - Gorbachev's figure - "about 15 thousand executed Polish officers" - L.B.), as well as about 11 thousand people arrested and in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus - members of various counter-revolutionary and sabotage organizations , former landowners, manufacturers and defectors.

In total, therefore, 25 thousand 700. The same figure also appears in the allegedly mentioned above “Extract from the meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee”, since it was rewritten into a fake document without proper critical reflection. But in this regard, it is difficult to understand Shelepin's statement that 21,857 records were kept in the "secret sealed room" and that all 21,857 Polish officers were shot.

First, as we have seen, not all of them were officers. According to Lavrenty Beria's estimates, in general there were only a little over 4 thousand army officers proper (generals, colonels and lieutenant colonels - 295, majors and captains - 2080, lieutenants, second lieutenants and cornets - 604). This is in prisoner of war camps, and there were 1207 former Polish prisoners of war in prisons. In total, therefore, 4,186 people. In the "Big Encyclopedic Dictionary" of the 1998 edition, it is written that: "In the spring of 1940, the NKVD destroyed over 4 thousand Polish officers in Katyn." And then: "Executions on the territory of Katyn were carried out during the occupation of the Smolensk region by Nazi troops."

So who, in the end, carried out these ill-fated executions - the Nazis, the NKVD, or, as the son of Lavrenty Beria claims, parts of the regular Red Army?

Secondly, there is a clear discrepancy between the number of “shot” - 21 thousand 857 and the number of people who were “ordered” to be shot - 25 thousand 700. It is permissible to ask how it could happen that 3843 Polish officers turned out to be unaccounted for, which department fed them during their lifetime, on what means did they live? And who dared to spare them if the "bloodthirsty" "secretary of the Central Committee" ordered to shoot all the "officers" to the last?

The truth about Katyn

After the shamefully failed campaign against Warsaw, undertaken by Tukhachevsky, obsessed with the Trotskyist idea of a world revolutionary fire, the western lands of Ukraine and Belarus were ceded to bourgeois Poland from Soviet Russia under the Riga Peace Treaty of 1921, and this soon led to the forcible Polonization of the population so unexpectedly acquired for free territories: to the closure of Ukrainian and Belarusian schools; to the transformation of Orthodox churches into Catholic churches; to the expropriation of fertile lands from the peasants and their transfer to the Polish landowners; to lawlessness and arbitrariness; to persecution on national and religious grounds; to the brutal suppression of any manifestations of popular discontent.

At the same time, the Germans had such an incentive in August - September 1941 after the Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan Maisky, signed a friendship treaty between the two governments with the Poles on July 30, 1941, according to which General Sikorsky was to form from prisoners of war compatriots in the Russian army under the command of a prisoner of war Polish General Anders to participate in hostilities against Germany.

This was the incentive for Hitler to liquidate Poles as enemies of the German nation, who, as he knew, had already been amnestied by the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of August 12, 1941 - 389 thousand 41 Poles, including future victims of Nazi atrocities, shot in the Katyn forest.

The process of formation of the National Polish Army under the command of General Anders was in full swing in the Soviet Union, and in quantitative terms it reached 76 thousand 110 people in six months.

As tensions increased between Stalin and Sikorsky, there was a thaw between Hitler and Sikorsky. The Soviet-Polish "friendship" ended with a frank anti-Soviet statement by the head of the Polish government in exile on February 25, 1943, which said that it did not want to recognize the historical rights of the Ukrainian and Belarusian peoples to unite in their national states.

In other words, there was the fact of the brazen claims of the Polish émigré government to the Soviet lands - Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. In response to this statement, I.V. Stalin formed from the Poles loyal to the Soviet Union, the Tadeusz Kosciuszko division of 15 thousand people. In October 1943, she was already fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Red Army.

It is not difficult for experienced masters of provocation to come up with several names of people who never existed. Such “commissars” as Lev Rybak, Avraam Borisovich, Pavel Brodninsky, Chaim Finberg, named by the German information bureau, were simply invented by the Nazi swindlers, since there were no such “commissars” either in the Smolensk branch of the GPU, or in general in the NKVD bodies and No".

The commission included: a member of the Extraordinary State Commission (the ChGK was investigating the atrocities of the Nazis in the occupied territories of the USSR and scrupulously calculated the damage caused by them - L.B.), academician N. N. Burdenko (chairman of the Special Commission for Katyn), members of the ChGK: academician Alexei Tolstoy and Metropolitan Nikolai, Chairman of the All-Slavic Committee, Lieutenant General A.S. Gundorov, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Union of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies S.A. Kolesnikov, People's Commissar of Education of the USSR, Academician V.P. Potemkin, head of the Main Military Sanitary Directorate of the Red Army, Colonel-General E.I. Smirnov, Chairman of the Smolensk Regional Executive Committee R.E. Melnikov. To fulfill the task assigned to it, the commission attracted the best forensic experts in the country: the chief forensic expert of the People's Commissariat of Health of the USSR, director of the Research Institute of Forensic Medicine V.I. Prozorovsky, head. Department of Forensic Medicine of the 2nd Moscow Medical Institute V.M. Smolyaninov, senior researchers of the Research Institute of Forensic Medicine P.S. Semenovsky and M.D. Shvaikov, chief pathologist of the front, major of the medical service, professor D.N. Vyropayeva.

However, in the midst of the Cold War, the US Congress again makes an attempt to revive the Katyn issue, even creating the so-called. “A commission to investigate the Katyn case, headed by Congressman Madden.

On March 3, 1952, Pravda published a note to the US State Department dated February 29, 1952, which, in particular, stated: thus generally recognized Hitlerite criminals (it is characteristic that a special "Katyn" commission of the US Congress was created simultaneously with the approval of the appropriation of $ 100 million for sabotage and espionage activities in Poland - L.B.).

First of all, the message gives information about what constitutes the Katyn forest.

Particularly strictly guarded was that part of the Katyn forest, which was called the "Goat Mountains", as well as the territory on the banks of the Dnieper, where at a distance of 700 meters from the discovered graves of Polish prisoners of war there was a summer house - a rest house of the Smolensk department of the NKVD. Upon the arrival of the Germans, a German military institution was located in this dacha, hiding under the code name “Headquarters of the 537th construction battalion” (which also appeared in the documents of the Nuremberg Trials - L.B.).

The Nazi command understood that for such a large-scale provocation "witnesses" were clearly not enough. And it distributed among the inhabitants of Smolensk and the surrounding villages an "Appeal to the population", which was published in the newspaper "New Way" published by the Germans in Smolensk (No. 35 (157) of May 6, 1943): committed by the Bolsheviks in 1940 over captured Polish officers and priests (? - this is something new - L.B.) in the Goat Mountains forest, near the Gnezdovo - Katyn highway. Who observed the vehicles from Gnezdovo to Goat Mountains or who saw or heard the executions? Who knows the residents who can tell about it? Every report will be rewarded."

To the credit of Soviet citizens, no one pecked at the reward for giving the false testimony needed by the Germans in the Katyn case.

Of the documents discovered by forensic experts relating to the second half of 1940 and the spring - summer of 1941, the following deserve special attention:

1. On corpse No. 92.
Letter from Warsaw addressed to the Red Cross in the Central Bank of Prisoners of War - Moscow, st. Kuibysheva, 12. The letter is written in Russian. In this letter, Sofya Zygon asks for the whereabouts of her husband, Tomasz Zygon. The letter is dated 12.09. 1940. On the envelope there is a stamp - “Warsaw. 09.1940" and a stamp - "Moscow, post office, expedition 9, 8.10. 1940”, as well as a resolution in red ink “Uch. set up a camp and send for delivery - 11/15/40. (Signature is illegible).

2. On corpse #4
Postcard, order No. 0112 from Tarnopol with a postmark "Tarnopol 12. 11.40" The handwriting and address are discolored.

4. On corpse no. 53.
Unsent postcard in Polish with the address: Warsaw, Bagatela 15, apt. 47, Irina Kuchinskaya. Dated June 20, 1941.

From the report of the “Special Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Circumstances of the Execution of Polish Officers of War by the Nazi Invaders in the Katyn Forest”: “The conclusions from the testimonies and forensic medical examination about the execution of Polish prisoners of war by the Germans in the autumn of 1941 are fully confirmed by material evidence and documents extracted from the Katyn graves.

This is the truth about Katyn. The irrefutable truth of the fact.

On April 16, 2012, the European Court of Human Rights will issue a final verdict on the so-called Katyn case. One of the Polish radio stations, citing the lawyer of the plaintiffs, Mr. Kaminski, reports that the ECtHR session will be held in open form, and therefore the whole world will finally know about the true truth regarding Katyn. In principle, one can especially not even guess about what the verdict of the court will be. One can only guess what mine he will lay under the further development of the Russian Federation and the attitude of the international community towards it. By the way, Russia admits at the state level that the execution of Polish officers was the work of the NKVD servicemen acting on the orders of Stalin and Beria, as even President Medvedev once said.

The crux of the matter is to blame Soviet authorities sample of the 40s is that, on their orders, on the territory of the Smolensk region alone, according to some sources, about 4.5 thousand were shot, and according to another - 20 thousand Polish military personnel. At the same time, if such a verdict is adopted (which can no longer be doubted), then, as often happens, the guilt will automatically migrate to modern Russia.

Recall that the first talk about the tragedy in the Katyn forest was started in 1943 by the Nazi occupation troops. Then the German soldiers discovered (this word could, in principle, be written in quotation marks) near Smolensk in the Katyn region and the Gnezdovo station, a mass grave of Polish (specifically Polish) officers. This was immediately presented as a fact of the mass extermination of Polish prisoners by representatives of the NKVD. At the same time, the Germans stated that they had conducted a thorough investigation and found that the execution took place in the spring of 1940, which once again proves the “Stalin trace” in this case. The NKVD allegedly specifically used Walter and Browning pistols with German-made Gecko bullets to carry out mass executions in order to cast a shadow on the “most humane” Nazi army in the world. The Soviet Union, for obvious reasons, subjected all the conclusions of the German commission to complete obstruction.

However, in 1944, when the Soviet troops drove the Nazis out of the territory of the Smolensk region, Moscow was already investigating this fact. According to the findings of the Moscow Commission, which included public figures, military experts, doctors medical sciences and even representatives of the clergy, it turned out that together with the Poles in the huge graves of the Katyn forest, the bodies of several hundred more Soviet soldiers and officers. The Soviet commission pointed out that the murders of thousands of prisoners of war were committed by the Nazis in the autumn of 1941. Of course, the conclusions of the Soviet commission of 1944 also cannot be taken unequivocally, but our task is to approach the consideration of the so-called Katyn issue from an objective point of view, based on facts, and not unfounded accusations. This one has too many pitfalls, but trying to ignore them means trying to dissociate yourself from Russian history.

The point of view of the commission of the 1944 model on Katyn tragedy remained in the Soviet Union for several decades, until in 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev handed over the so-called “new materials” on the Katyn case to the hands of Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski, after which the whole world started talking about the crimes of Stalinism against Polish officers. What were these "new materials"? They were based on secret documents allegedly signed by I.V. Stalin, L.P. Beria and other high-ranking statesmen Soviet state. Even during the transfer of these documents into the hands of M.S. Gorbachev himself, experts said that he was in no hurry to draw conclusions from these materials, because these documents do not provide direct evidence of the executions of Poles by the NKVD units and need to be verified for authenticity. However, Mr. Gorbachev did not wait for the completion of the examination of documents and further conclusions of the commission on this difficult case, and decided to publish " terrible secret about the atrocities of the Soviet regime.

In this regard, the first inconsistency arises, indicating that it is too early to put an end to the Katyn issue. Why did these secret documents surface in February 1990? But even before that, at least twice they could have been made public.

The first publicity of the execution of Polish officers by the hands of Soviet Chekists could have appeared even during the famous XX Congress of the Central Committee of the CPSU, when the personality cult of I.V. Stalin was debunked by N.S. Khrushchev. In principle, in 1956, Khrushchev could not only condemn Stalin’s crimes on the territory of the USSR, but also receive huge foreign policy dividends from “disclosing the Katyn secret”, because shortly before that, the commission of the American Congress also dealt with the Katyn case. But Khrushchev did not take advantage of this opportunity. And could you use it? Were these "documents" available at the time? And to say that he knew nothing about the real situation in the early 40s with Polish prisoners of war is naive ...

Publicity could take place in the initial period of Gorbachev's tenure in power, but, for some reason, did not take place. Why did it take place in February 1990? Perhaps the secret lies in the fact that all these “new materials”, about which, strangely, nothing was known until 1990, were simply fabricated, and such systematic falsification was carried out precisely at the end of the 80s, when the Soviet Union already set a course for rapprochement with the West. Real "historical bombs" were needed.

By the way, such a point of view can be questioned as much as you like, but there are the results of a documentary examination of those very “new materials” of the Katyn case. It turned out that the documents on which there are signatures of Stalin and other persons demanding that the cases of Polish prisoners of war be considered in a special order were printed on one typewriter, and the sheets with the final signature of Beria on another. In addition, on one of the extracts of the final decision adopted at a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in March 1940, in a strange way, there was a seal with the attributes and name of the CPSU. It is strange, because the Communist Party of the Soviet Union itself appeared only in 1952. Such inconsistencies were also announced during the so-called Round Table on the Katyn issue, organized in the State Duma in 2010.

But the inconsistencies in the Katyn tragedy, in which recently they see only the evidence of the guilt of the NKVD officers, do not end there. In the materials of the cases that have already been transferred to the Polish side, and this is more than fifty volumes, there are several documents that cast doubt on the date of the mass execution near Katyn - April-May 1940. These documents are letters from Polish servicemen, which were dated in the summer and autumn of 1941 - the time when the Smolensk land was already ruled by Hitler's troops.

If you believe that the NKVD decided to deliberately shoot the Poles with German and German bullets, then why did this even need to be done? After all, in Moscow at that time they still could not know in any way that in a little over a year fascist Germany would attack the Soviet Union ...

The German commission, which worked at the site of the tragedy, established that the hands of the executed were tied with special German-made cotton laces. All this again suggests that the far-sighted NKVD officers already knew then that Germany would attack the USSR and, apparently, they ordered not only Brownings in Berlin, but also these strings in order to cast a shadow on Germany.
The same commission found in mass (spontaneous) graves near Katyn a large number of foliage, which clearly could not fall from the trees in April, but this indirectly confirms that the massacres of Polish and Soviet prisoners of war could have been committed precisely in the autumn of 1941.

It turns out that in Katyn case there are a large number of questions that still do not find unambiguous answers, if you are firmly convinced that the execution was the work of the NKVD. In fact, the entire evidence base declaring the Soviet Union guilty is based on those very documents, the authenticity of which is clearly in doubt. The appearance of these documents in 1990 only indicates that the Katyn case was actually prepared as another blow to the integrity of the USSR, which at that time was already experiencing enormous difficulties.

Now it is worth turning to the so-called eyewitness accounts. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, on the territory located 400-500 meters from the place where mass executions were subsequently carried out, the so-called government dacha was located. According to the testimony of the employees of this dacha, such famous people as Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Shvernik liked to come here on vacation. The documents, which were “declassified” in the 90s, directly state that these visits took place when in the forest near the Goat Mountains ( former name Katyn) there were mass executions of Polish officers. It turns out that high-ranking officials went to rest at the site of a giant cemetery ... They could simply not know about its existence - an argument that is difficult to take seriously. If the executions took place precisely in April-May 1940 in close proximity from that same government dacha, it turns out that the NKVD decided to violate the unshakable instructions on the order of executions. This instruction clearly states that mass executions should be carried out in places located no closer than 10 km from cities - at night. And here - 400 meters and not even from the city, but from the place where the political elite came to fish and breathe fresh air. It is hard to imagine how Klim Voroshilov was fishing when bulldozers were working a few hundred meters from him, burying thousands of corpses in the ground. At the same time, they buried it slightly. It was established that the bodies of some of the executed were barely covered with sand, and therefore the infernal smell of numerous corpses must have spread through the forest. This is how the government dacha ... All this looks somehow a little intelligible, taking into account the thoroughness of the NKVD approach to such cases.

In 1991 former boss Directorate of the NKVD P. Soprunenko stated that in March 1940 he held in his hands a paper with a Politburo resolution signed by Joseph Stalin on the execution of Polish officers. This is yet another reason to doubt the case file, since it is known for certain that Comrade Soprunenko could in no way hold such a document in his hands, since his powers did not extend so far. It is difficult to assume that L. Beria himself “gave him a hold” on this document in March 1940, because just a month before that, ex-People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Nikolai Yezhov, who had been arrested, had been shot on charges of attempting to commit a coup d'état. Did Beria really feel so free that he could walk around the offices with secret decisions of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of the Soviet Union and give them "to hold in their hands" to anyone he wanted ... Naive thoughts ...

As Vyacheslav Shved says in the comments to his book The Secret of Katyn, the falsification of historical materials took place at different times and in different countries. One of the clearest examples of fraud in the United States is the accusation of Oswald that he single-handedly decided to kill President Kennedy. Only more than 40 years later it turned out that a multi-stage conspiracy was planned against John F. a large number actors.

It is quite possible that they are also trying to present the Katyn tragedy in a way that is beneficial to certain political circles. Instead of conducting a truly objective investigation and complete declassification of documentary data, the information war continues around mass murder Polish and Soviet military personnel, which deals another blow to the authority of Russia.

In this regard, it is interesting to pay attention to the recent decision of the Tverskoy court on the suit of E.Ya. Dzhugashvili, who defends the honor and dignity of his grandfather I.V. Stalin's grandson demands that the State Duma remove the phrase from the parliamentary statement that the Katyn execution took place on the direct orders of I.V. Stalin. I note that this is the second such lawsuit against the State Duma by Stalin's grandson (the first one was dismissed by the court).

Despite the fact that the Tverskoy Court dismissed the second lawsuit, its decision cannot be called unequivocal. In her final ruling, Judge Fedosova stated that “Stalin was one of the leaders of the USSR during the Katyn tragedy in September 1941". With these words alone, the Tverskoy Court, obviously not wanting it, managed to emphasize that all the documents in the case of the executed Polish officers are possibly a gross falsification, which has yet to be seriously studied, and then based on it, real independent conclusions can be drawn. This once again shows that no matter what decision the ECtHR makes, it will clearly not be based on all the historical facts of the tragedy, which still causes conflicting feelings.

Of course, the execution of thousands of Polish officers is a huge national tragedy Poland, and this tragedy in Russia, most people understand and share Polish grief. And at the same time, we must not forget that in addition to the Polish officers in that big war tens of millions of other people perished, whose descendants also dream of a worthy attitude to the memory of their dead ancestors on the part of the state and the public. You can exaggerate the Katyn tragedy as much as you like, but at the same time you don’t need to deliberately keep silent about the thousands and thousands of other victims of the Second World War, about how today the nationalist movements are actively raising their heads in the Baltic countries, to which Poland for some reason is very warm attitude. History, as we know, does not know subjunctive mood Therefore, history must be treated objectively. On each historical stage There will be a very controversial period in the development of any state, and if all these historical disputes are used to escalate new conflicts, this will lead to a grandiose catastrophe that will simply crush civilization.