Katyń crime

In September 1939, 240,000-250,000 soldiers of the Polish Army, including some 15,000 officers, were taken prisoner by the Soviets. The Germans and Soviets quickly began to combat any manifestations of Polish independence action in the territories they had seized, and to cooperate in the elimination of the Polish state elite. This was to be achieved by a German-Soviet training centre for the security services, established as early as December 1939 in Zakopane, where Gestapo and NKVD officers agreed on tactics for fighting the resistance movement in the Polish territories and exchanged experiences in the use of terror methods. It is therefore possible that the murder of almost 15,000 prisoners of war held in Soviet camps and more than 7,000 Polish civilians imprisoned in prisons in western Belarus and Ukraine in April and May 1940 did not coincide by chance with the German AB (Ausserordentliche Befriedungsaktion) operation against the Polish intelligentsia.

From the first days of the aggression, the Soviets meticulously carried out a plan to detain and transport Polish prisoners of war. Ironically, the lightning-fast campaign and the weaker-than-expected resistance of the Polish army units resulted in masses of prisoners of war being taken into captivity, which the Soviets initially could not cope with.

 

Special camps

The solution to this situation was to be the release of prisoners of war, peasants from Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. On 19 September, Lavrenty Beria created the Board for Prisoners of War and Internees at the NKVD, which took charge of the transport of Polish prisoners of war and the operation of the special camps at Ostashkov, Juchnov, Kozelsk, Putywl, Kozelshchin, Starobelsk, Yuzhia and Oranki, where they were to be assembled. The head of the Board was appointed Petr Soprunienko - an employee of Beria's secretariat - and the political commissar was Semyon Nechoroshev, an experienced politician transferred from the Gulag, in whose structures this new institution was placed.

 

The first transports of Polish soldiers to the special camps of the Board for Prisoners of War departed as early as 20 September. It quickly became apparent that they were unable to accommodate such a large mass of people. In the Kozelsk camp (commandant - Major Vasily Korolov), located 5 km from Kozelsk on the grounds of the "Optyńska Hermitage" monastery and the so-called "Skit", already at the beginning of October there were 8,843 Polish servicemen, including 117 officers. In November, when it became the so-called officers' camp, it held, among others, Rear Admiral Ksawery Czernicki, four generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains and 3,420 other officers. Among them was a woman - Lt. Pilot Janina Lewandowska, daughter of General Józef Dowbór-Muśnicki, who refused to be discharged in the spring of 1940 and shared the tragic fate of her comrades-in-arms. 

 

All the special camps were not prepared to accept such a huge number of catastrophic prisoners of war. Overcrowding, abysmal hygienic conditions and food shortages quickly led to a disastrous epidemiological situation. In the Starobel camp, located in the former buildings of a women's monastery and in several buildings in the town, there were 7045 people in mid-October, including 4813 privates and non-commissioned officers, 2232 officers, 155 civil servants and gendarmes (by mid-November, there were already more than 11,000 people there). Lice was rife in the camp, as the authorities had not organised a bathhouse or laundry. Senior officers were in a slightly better situation: separate rooms for generals were even equipped with furniture, and lieutenant colonels were given two-storey beds.  

Instead, the Soviets took care of indoctrination. At the expense of the WKP(b) regional committee, party newspapers and magazines were subscribed for the camp, and political talks were held. Propaganda anti-Polish films, in which Soviet cinematography was abundant in autumn 1939, were also screened. Loudspeakers installed in every room, from which Soviet propaganda was broadcast all day long, drove the prisoners to frenzy.

The Ostashkov camp (commandant - Major Pavel Borisovets) was located 10km from the town of Ostashkov, on Stolbnyy Island (on Lake Seliger). At the end of September, 8731 prisoners of war were assembled there, and by the end of October their number had risen to 12,235. By the end of its operation, almost 16,000 people had passed through the camp, of whom 9,413 privates and non-commissioned officers had been released or transported to the mines of the Krzyworoski District.

Due to its disastrous location and unpreparedness, the Putywl camp (commandant - Major Nikolai Smirnov) proved to be the hardest. Housed in the buildings of the Safronev monastery, 40 km from Putywl, it was located in the midst of swamps. As a rule, the prisoners of war were quartered in stables, pigsties and barracks, which, with the unheard-of cramped conditions (there was 0.6 sq m of space per person!) and a total lack of water, made the sanitary situation disastrous. For the 6 tonnes of daily bread required, the local bakeries were only able to supply 2.4 tonnes.

The situation was similar in the Kozelshchina camp (commandant - Lt. Col. V. Sokolov), on the outskirts of the town of Kozelshchina in the Poltava region. Due to a lack of space, only half of the prisoners were accommodated in the buildings of the former monastery and on the grounds of the local sovkhoz. The rest camped out in tents (11,79 people) and uncleaned pigsties (1106 people). In the absence of a bakery, bread was insufficiently supplied from Poltava, and the six field kitchens were only able to barely meet the needs of the captives.

Terrible overcrowding also prevailed in the Yuzha camp (commandant - Lieutenant Commander Aleksandr Kij), located in the town of Talitsa, 30 km from Yuzha. In October 1939, 11,640 prisoners of war were taken there (the camp was intended for 6,000). There was a shortage of water and food. Although field kitchens were quickly set up, the prisoners had to stand in long queues all day to get a hot meal.

Similar conditions prevailed in the Yuchnov and Vologda camps. The first, whose commander was Major Filipp Kadyshev, was organised in the premises of the former tuberculosis sanatorium "Pavlishchev Bor", near the village of Shchelkovo. In October, there were 8096 people there: for lack of space, most were accommodated on verandas, in stables and granaries. It was cold, there was a shortage of food and water. In the Vologda camp (commandant - Matveyev), located in a decommissioned orphanage 18 km from Vologda, intended for 1,500 people, there were 3,450 prisoners. The extreme overcrowding meant that 347 POWs, who arrived there in the last transport in the first decade of October, were not unloaded at all, to be sent back to the German occupation zone after several days. In the Vologda region, the Soviets organised another special camp, in Gryazovets (commandant - Lieutenant Mikhail Filippov). 3095 prisoners of war were incarcerated in the former monastery.

The network of special camps for Polish prisoners of war was completed by the easternmost camp in the village of Oranki, near Bogorodsk in the Gorki region (commandant - Lt. Col. Ivan Sorokin). The prisoners were assembled in the monastery buildings - 7063 of them at the beginning of October. Conditions here were also very difficult.

 

Selection

In October-November, the Soviets released (42,500 men) or handed over to the Germans (also about 42,500 men) privates and non-commissioned officers of non-Polish nationality who came from the former Eastern Borderlands of the Republic. In addition, 25,000 POWs were used for the construction of the Novgorod-Volynsk-Lviv road, and 12,000 to work in enterprises of the People's Commissariat of Ferrous Metallurgy in the Krygy Rog, Donetsk Basin and Zaporizhia.

The rest of the POWs who remained in captivity were divided according to rank and type of formation and grouped in three main camps. Starobielsk and Kozelsk held only officers, while Ostashkov held gendarmes, intelligence agents and officers, policemen, KOP soldiers and prison officers.

Beria ordered the normalisation of the procedure and rules for the treatment of individual categories of prisoners of war (including improving living conditions for generals, officers and senior military and state officials, ensuring "good treatment" of all prisoners of war, implementing a cultural programme), taking security measures to prevent escapes and anti-Soviet activity. Counter-intelligence 'processing' was also begun: gathering information about the prisoners' private and professional lives, their political views, foreign connections and even their knowledge of foreign languages. This was what the special squads did - their task was to verify and infiltrate the captives in order to detect among them agents of the intelligence services, activists of anti-Soviet organisations (including the Polish Military Organisation), and recruitment for service in the Soviet intelligence and security organs.       

In spite of the national tragedy of the fall of their homeland, the terrible living conditions and Soviet harassment, the prisoners of war did not give in to the camp's marasm and anti-Polish propaganda. They quickly began to organise themselves. In November at Starobelsk, the prisoners organised illegal celebrations of the Independence Day and Jozef Pilsudski's name day, and animated language learning groups, reading circles, professional groups and others. Lectures on psychology, biology, military art, medicine or literature were held. In other camps, too, POWs carried out illegal self-help, educational and political activities. In Kozielsk, they published the newspapers "Merkuriusz" (four issues had come out by the end of January), "Monitor" (15 issues), and prepared daily oral "live newspapers". The Soviets fiercely fought these activities, treating them as anti-Soviet activities. As far as the three main camps were concerned, escapes were sporadic and, thanks to the vigilance of the camp guards and the branching agents, the Chekists managed to counter them.

 

NKVD operations

The investigative methods of the enkavudzists whom Moscow sent to Ostashkov and Starobielsk were not very sophisticated. They were limited to primitive psychological pressure and had little effect. The exception was the operations group led by a senior intelligence officer, Major Vasily Zarubin and Captain Aleksandrovich. Zarubin was distinguished by his erudition, spoke several languages, was polite and kind. He brought with him to Kozelsk a library of 500 volumes: these were books in Russian, French, English and German, which he made available to the POWs. Proof of their appreciation was the fact that he was the only enclave officer to whom they paid tribute. It was also to him that Prof Stanislaw Swaniewicz, an eminent economist specialising in the economies of Germany and the USSR, and Prof. Waclaw Komarnicki, later Minister of Justice in General Sikorski's government, owed their lives to him.

 

Stalin's revenge?

By Beria's order, the investigative work was to be completed by the end of January 1940. In late January and early February, the Soviet leadership began to mature the thought of liquidating the "special contingent". There is no doubt that Stalin, who hated Poland and the Poles for ideological and personal reasons, had the deciding vote. He believed that this bourgeois state was responsible for stopping the march of the Bolsheviks to the West and was a constant threat to the USSR. He blamed the defeat of 1920 on Tukhachevsky and the Polish officers who were now in Soviet captivity (among them were many veterans of the Polish-Bolshevik war). In this context, their physical liquidation should be seen both as Stalin's personal vendetta and possibly also as an intention to eliminate part of the Polish intellectual elite, with the prospect of facilitating his vassalisation of Poland.

It is said that the "unloading" of the camps where Polish officers and policemen were held was intended to make room for Finnish soldiers who had been taken prisoner during the Winter War of 1939-1940. The snag is that far fewer of them ended up in Soviet hands than expected - only about a thousand. In all likelihood, we can accept the thesis that the Soviets were guided by class and nationality considerations when murdering Polish officers and policemen. This would mean that the shooting of Polish prisoners of war by the Soviets in the spring of 1940 should be considered genocide.

The decision to murder Polish prisoners of war was taken by Stalin and Beria at a meeting on 5 March 1939. The head of the NKVD also proposed that the cases of 14,700 people from the three prisoner-of-war camps and 11,000 arrested and imprisoned in prisons in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus "be considered under a special procedure with the application to them of the highest penalty - execution". The decision to execute the entire 'contingent', instead of the Special College, was ruled on by a three-member panel consisting of Vsevolod Merkulov, Bakhchok Kobulov and Leonid Bashtakov, without the presence of the arrestees and without presenting them with an indictment.  The letter, which prejudged the fate of the Polish prisoners, was signed by, in order: Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov, Mikoyan, and in the margins, in the place of Kalinin and Kaganovich, the paraphrasing was done by a secretary.

Linked to the decision to murder officers and policemen was another, taken three days earlier: the resettlement of 22,000 families of prisoners held in prisons in Western Ukraine and Belarus, as well as officers, policemen and others from three special camps. This was the second of the planned deportations - as a result of the first (February 1940), almost 140,000 people were deported from Western Ukraine and Belarus deep into the USSR.

 

Extermination  

At the end of March/April, there were 3895 prisoners of war in the Starobelsk camp, 4599 in Kozelsk, and 6364 in the Ostashkov camp. Prisoners were transported to the places of execution in batches, as and when the three of them signed "orders" (nariads), which were tantamount to execution. Those from Kozelsk were transported in special isolation vans (so-called wagonzaks) to the Gnezdovo railway station near Smolensk, from where they were delivered in special isolation vans (so-called avtozaks) to the NKVD dais in the Katyn forest. Most, with their hands tied, were killed by a shot below the occiput at previously dug pits, a few in the building of the dais itself. It is likely that some of the POWs from the Kozel camp were murdered in the internal prison of the UNKVD (local NKVD Board) of the Smolensk region. A similar scenario applied to the POWs from Starobelsk and Ostashkov. The first prisoners were transported by train to Kharkov, and the second to the internal prison of the UNKVD there, where they were murdered. The bodies were buried at a distance of 1.5 km from the village of Pyatichatki, near the UNKVD dachs. The victims from Ostashkov were transported by rail to Kalinin and then by truck to the local NKVD building, where they were deprived of their lives in a special room using a tried and tested method. The bodies were buried in pre-prepared pits near the village of Mednoye, not far from the NKVD dormitories.

The operation to murder the Polish prisoners of war involved officers of the NKVD central apparatus sent from Moscow, as well as employees of the NKVD of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSR, NKVD district divisions (Smolensk, Kharkiv and Kalinin) and NKVD convoy and military units. The role of executioners was played by special NKVD execution squads, assisted by employees of the local interior ministry prisons (in Kalinin the squad of murderers and those assisting them, for example, in restraining a prisoner of war, numbered 30, in Kharkov and Katyn 23 each). German Walther pistols, with German 7.65mm calibre ammunition, were used in the executions. Approximately 25 per cent of the officers had their hands tied from behind with a double loop of wire or rope, and in one Katyn grave, corpses were found that had necklaces on their heads that were wrapped at the neck with rope, connected to a loop tying their hands.

The preparation and execution of the operation to murder Polish prisoners of war from the special camps and prisons of the western districts lasted almost three months, from 5 March to the end of June 1940 (the "unloading" of the three special camps lasted from 3 April to 16 May.

According to the latest findings of historians, in the spring of 1940 the Soviets murdered 22,079 (or 23,109) citizens of the Second Polish Republic. These included 14,463 military, police and KOP officers from special camps (4,410 from Kozelsk, 6,314 from Ostashkov and 3,739 from Starobielsk) and, according to various data, from 7,616 to 8,646 inmates of prisons in the western regions of the Ukrainian and Belarusian SSR (executions were carried out in prisons in Kiev and Minsk), among whom were about 1,000 Polish officers. In the Katyn forest, Smolensk and Kharkov, the Soviets executed, among others, 12 generals, a Rear Admiral, 77 colonels, 197 lieutenant colonels, 541 majors, 1,441 captains, 6,061 lieutenants, second lieutenants, captains and ensigns, and 18 chaplains and other clergy.

 

Survivors

The Soviets executed 97 per cent of all officers, policemen and other prisoners of war from the camps at Starobielsk, Kozelsk and Ostashkov. 395 prisoners were left alive: all but two were in Juchnov - one general, eight colonels, 16 lieutenant colonels, eight majors, 18 captains, 201 other officers, eight ensigns, nine police non-commissioned officers, 38 police privates, one non-commissioned officer and one private of the gendarmerie, nine prison guards, two settlers, eight clerks, 15 army and Border Protection Corps privates, 12 juniors, one forestry worker and 38 refugees. As an aside, that general was Jerzy Wolkowicki, a former officer in the Tsarist navy. At the Battle of Tsushima during the Russo-Japanese War, Volkovicki distinguished himself by exceptional valour and courage, exhorting Admiral Niebogatov and a group of officers and sailors not to surrender to the Japanese and to fight at all costs. This act brought him fame with his book Tsushima by Novikov-Priboy, which was reprinted many times in the Soviet Union: when asked by the enkavudznik interrogating him if he was a relative of the "famous michman Volkovitsky", he was to reply "It's me!".

The Soviets shot 97 per cent of all officers, policemen and other prisoners of war from the camps at Starobielsk, Kozelsk and Ostashkov. 395 prisoners were left alive: all but two were in Juchnov - one general, eight colonels, 16 lieutenant colonels, eight majors, 18 captains, 201 other officers, eight ensigns, nine police non-commissioned officers, 38 police privates, one non-commissioned officer and one private of the gendarmerie, nine prison guards, two settlers, eight clerks, 15 army and Border Protection Corps privates, 12 juniors, one forestry worker and 38 refugees. As an aside, that general was Jerzy Wolkowicki, a former officer in the Tsarist navy. At the Battle of Tsushima during the Russo-Japanese War, Volkovicki distinguished himself by exceptional valour and courage, exhorting Admiral Niebogatov, along with a group of officers and sailors, not to surrender to the Japanese and to fight at all costs. This act brought him fame with his book Tsushima by Novikov-Priboy, which was reprinted many times in the Soviet Union: when asked by the enkavudznik interrogating him if he was a relative of the "famous michman Volkovitsky", he was to reply "It's me!".

Either way, it is likely that the 5th Division of the Main Board of the NKVD Politburo (Intelligence) selected these prisoners of war - because of their willingness to cooperate or their possession of valuable information, as well as their extensive international contacts - as useful for exploitation. Forty-seven were saved thanks to influential acquaintances or relatives who intervened with the Third Reich Foreign Ministry, which, through its representative in Moscow, succeeded in forcing the Soviets to transfer them to the Yukhnov camp. The surviving group also included 24 prisoners of German nationality, while the Lithuanian Mission in Moscow intervened in the case of 19 others. Mistakes were made in haste and those excluded from the death lists were shot. The only officer destined to be shot who avoided death was the aforementioned Vilnius University professor Stanislav Svantsevich, an expert on the economy of Germany and the USSR, who was delivered to the station in Gryazovets at the end of April, but was excluded from the death transport at the last moment and escorted to an empty wagon.

 

Crime comes to light

The families of the murdered Polish prisoners of war did not even imagine that the Soviets could have been capable of such a monstrous crime. Their letters sent to the camps came from the German occupation zone, Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, and even from distant Kazakhstan, where tens of thousands of Poles from the lands occupied by the USSR were resettled in early 1940. In an act of desperation, the closest relatives addressed desperate and humble requests to the administration of the various camps and higher authorities: Board of Prisoners of War, the NKVD, senior Soviet officials and military officers, and even Stalin himself.

Although signals were reaching the Polish authorities in exile about the deportation of civilians and the disappearance of prisoners of war from the camps at Kozelsk, Ostashkov and Starobilsk, there was little that the latter could do. After diplomatic relations were broken off in September 1939, the Polish government did not maintain contacts with the Soviet regime. The situation changed after Germany invaded the USSR in June 1941. On 30 July, in London, Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief Władysław Sikorski and Soviet Ambassador to the UK Iwan Majski signed a Polish-Soviet treaty on the establishment of diplomatic relations and cooperation in the fight against the Third Reich. On 12 August, the Soviets announced an amnesty for the Poles, and two days later General Zygmunt Szyszko-Bohusz and General Aleksander Wasilewski signed a military agreement.

A mixed military commission was set up in Moscow to establish, among other things, the whereabouts of the Polish officers interned in September 1939. The Polish side was represented there by General Szyszko-Bohusz and General Anders, while the Soviet side was represented by Generals Alexei Panfilov and Grigoriy Zhukov. The Soviets reported that they had managed to identify clusters of prisoners of war, and provided a list of 1,650 Polish officers held in captivity. When asked where the rest were (Polish military officials estimated that there should have been a total of 4,000-5,000 Polish officers in Soviet captivity), Zhukov wriggled out, saying that it was difficult to determine their fate due to the war effort. The NKVD and Stalin intervened on the matter. The Soviet dictator deceived the Poles - first by claiming that the Polish officers may have fled to Manchuria, which was under Japanese occupation, and then that they may have been murdered by the Germans. It is also clear that Stalin, in the face of increasingly forceful interventions, began to propagate the version that would later become binding. It is worth noting in passing a much more ominous incident which occurred as late as October 1940. According to the account of Capt. Józef Czapski, who was General Władysław Anders' plenipotentiary for the search for missing Polish prisoners of war, a meeting took place at this time with Colonel Zygmunt Berling. The latter, because of his pro-Soviet leanings, was considered by them to be suitable for cooperation and was transferred with a group of officers gathered around him to Malakhovka to a dacha no. 20, called the "pleasure villa". At Lubianka, an interesting exchange of words took place between him and Beria and Merkulov. When Berling, obviously unaware that the Soviets had murdered most of the officer corps, proposed the creation of a Polish army in the USSR based on soldiers and officers in captivity, Beria agreed, while his deputy, as if correcting his boss, countered: "No, these are not. We made a big mistake with them".   

 

Discovery in the Katyn forest

Already in the summer of 1942, Polish construction workers working for the German organisation Todt in the Smolensk area, thanks to information from local Russians, unearthed two corpses in Polish uniforms in the Katyn forest. They informed the German authorities of their discovery, who for the time being were not interested in carrying out the exhumation. After the defeat at Stalingrad in January-February 1943, the Germans needed a subject for a high-powered propaganda campaign that could have led to the weakening, if not disintegration, of the Allied coalition. The case of the discovery of mysterious human remains was perfectly suited to this. On 18 February, the Germans began exhumation work and by 13 April had excavated more than 400 bodies. Later that day, the Berlin radio announced that mass graves had been found in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, in which an estimated 12,000 Polish officers were buried.

On 16 April, the Germans approached the International Red Cross with a proposal to take part in the research and exhumation. To support their impartiality, they also proposed that representatives of the Polish side, selected by the General Welfare Council operating in the General Government, and prisoners of war, including Polish servicemen, could take part in the work. On 17 April, General Sikorski's government independently asked the ICC to investigate the matter. The organisation's authorities tentatively agreed to the Polish Prime Minister's proposal, but with the proviso that all interested parties, and therefore the USSR, had to ask for their help. Naturally, Stalin, sanctimoniously indignant at how anyone could believe Nazi lies, did not agree to the proposal, and on 26 April 1943 broke off diplomatic relations with Sikorski's government.

The Germans, in turn, set up an international commission comprising eminent forensic and criminological specialists from European universities, as well as 12 people from countries dependent on or occupied by the Third Reich and from Switzerland. Apart from them, a dozen Poles participated in the exhumation work (most of them only between 28 and 30 April), including writers Ferdynand Goetel and Józef Mackiewicz (arbitrarily, which later got him into trouble for alleged collaboration with the Germans - the underground authorities passed a death sentence on him, but it was not carried out), Jan Emil Skiwski, and Dr Marian Wodziński on behalf of the Polish Red Cross and the Main Welfare Council. The Polish church was represented by Father Stanisław Jasiński, canon of the Cracow Cathedral Chapter. Prisoners of war from German oflags - English, American and Polish officers, including Colonel Stefan Mossor, who claimed after the war that he had found himself there against his will - were also taken to the Katyn forest.

Eight mass graves were exhumed by 3 June, from which more than 4,000 bodies were retrieved, including those of two generals - Bronisław Bohatyrewicz and Mieczysław Smorawiński. Dr Wodziński, on the basis of identification materials found with the remains, identified 2,800 bodies. The work resulted in an extensive dossier detailing the manner in which the murders were carried out (during the war, the dossier was found at a forensic medicine unit in Kraków, from where it mysteriously disappeared in 1945). It was established, for example, that the murderers used German weapons and ammunition, which, due to their reliability, were on the equipment of NKVD operational units. Correspondence found with the murdered in the spring of 1940, the age of the trees planted on the graves and the state of decomposition of the corpses indicated that the crime was committed in the spring of 1940. The work was stopped due to the approaching front.

No one involved in the exhumation was in any doubt as to who was responsible for the crime. All members of the International Commission signed the German protocols. After the war - probably due to Soviet threats - Prof. Hajek and Prof. Markov - revoked their signatures.

 

Covering up the traces

After the recapture of the Smolensk region, the Soviets set up a "Special Commission to establish and investigate the circumstances of the shooting of Polish prisoners of war in the Katyn forest by the German-Fascist invaders". It was chaired by Nikolai Burdenko, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and included the writer Alexei Tolstoy and a dignitary of the Russian Orthodox Church, Exarch of Ukraine, Metropolitan of Kiev and Halych Nikolai. The exhumation, carried out under the supervision of the NKVD, was a farce, and its aim was to prove that Polish officers at Katyn were murdered by the Germans. Supposedly 900 bodies were excavated, and the fact that it was a Nazi crime was supposedly proven by newspaper scraps, a receipt from a laundry and a postcard with a Warsaw address, sent in July 1941. The conclusion was that the crime was committed in August-September of that year by the 537th Wehrmacht sapper battalion under the command of Colonel Friedrich Ahrens (in fact, the unit did not appear in Katyn until November 1941).

After the war, the Soviet authorities tried to cover up the traces of their involvement in the Katyn crime. Although they failed to blame those tried at the Nuremberg Trials for it, by the end of the 1950s they had probably destroyed almost 22,000 personal files of the murdered. It was decided to keep only a small corpus of the main documents, which was placed in file No. 1, kept in a separate secret archive of the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU. Henceforth, every genshek assuming power in the Kremlin was obliged to familiarise himself with its contents and pass them on, like codes for firing nuclear missiles, to his successor.

Despite the reluctance of the governments of the Western powers to pursue the matter, it was dealt with by independent researchers, including Polish historians in exile. The British ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile, Sir Owen O'Malley, produced a report on the crime in June 1943, confirming the Soviets' guilt, and handed it over to King George VI, Prime Minister Churchill and the War Cabinet. In contrast, American Colonel John van Vliet, who as a prisoner of war participated in the exhumation work at Katyn in April 1943, submitted the report after his release to the US military authorities, who ordered it first to be classified and then destroyed. In 1952, he reconstructed it for the US Senate committee which, at the request of the Polish American Congress, investigated the case and unsuccessfully recommended that the government present it to the United Nations and indict the USSR at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

With Gorbachev's perestroika in the second half of the 1980s, a favourable climate began to emerge for a full explanation of the circumstances of the Katyn massacre. In 1987, thanks to an agreement between the authorities of the Polish People's Republic and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, a mixed Polish-Soviet commission was established to clarify the white spots in the history of the joint relationship. Its main objective was to uncover the perpetrators of the Katyn massacre. It is arguable that, had it not been for the erosion of the political system in the USSR and the changes in Eastern Europe that began in Poland in 1989, the commission's findings would have had to wait a long time yet. On 13 April 1990, during Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski's visit to Moscow, Gorbachev admitted that the responsibility for the Katyn massacre lay with the USSR, and in particular with the Stalinist repression apparatus headed by Beria and his associates. Moreover, Gorbachev also handed over documents that unequivocally proved Soviet culpability. As an aside, a few months later Gorbachev, in a special decree, instructed Russian scientific research institutions, including historians from the Russian Academy of Sciences, to search for and document events in the history of Polish-Soviet relations that would incriminate Poland and counterbalance the issue of the murder of Polish prisoners of war in 1940.

The next step in revealing the circumstances of the Katyn massacre was the handing over to President Lech Wałęsa, on 14 October 1992, of copies of documents from Special File No. 1 by President Boris Yeltsin's special envoy, Russia's chief state archivist Rudolf Pichoja. At the same time, by virtue of an agreement between the directorates of the archives of both countries, further research by Polish historians in the Russian archives concerning the disclosure of the circumstances and course of the Katyn massacre became possible. Unfortunately, since the presidency of Vladimir Putin, this process has slowed down due to a change in the position of the Russian authorities.