The Katyń massacre was exceptional. BOGUSŁAW KUBISZ and TOMASZ BOHUN are interviewing SŁAWOMIR Z. FRĄTCZAK, WOJCIECH MATERSKI AND ALEXEI PAMIATNYCH

70 years ago, in April 1943, the Germans announced that they had found mass graves of Polish officers murdered by the Soviets in 1940 in the Katyń Forest near Smolensk. Today we know that they were killed by a decision taken by Stalin and his comrades in the Bolshevik Party leadership, taken on 5 March 1940, and that the victims were almost 22,000 Poles, not only prisoners of war, but also political prisoners. Why, however, were they exterminated? After all, the USSR was the world's largest prison and could exploit these people, just as the Tsar used Polish exiles during the Partitions era, sending them to Siberia or Central Asia.

 

Wojciech Materski: This was probably originally considered. 600 prisoners of war from the Ostashkov camp were sentenced to Gulag in February 1940 - they received sentences of several years in a labour camp in Kamchatka. All of a sudden, for unknown reasons, the convictions were overturned. The case of the prisoners of war was put before the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and, according to a memo prepared by People's Commissar of the Internal Affairs, Beria, the genocidal verdict was passed. It is hard to say why this has happened. There was only one person who could stop the procedure of sending the prisoners to the gulags - Joseph Stalin. Yet why did it happen at this precise moment? This is where the space for hypotheses opens up. It is important to note, however, what is most significant about Beria's proposal: Poles are an anti-Soviet element, not susceptible to re-education. In view of this, the Soviets resorted to the methods characteristic of their system, which committed far greater atrocities than Katyń in the 1930s, as far as the number of victims is concerned.

Was it "only" twenty-something thousand people to kill for the Soviet leadership?

 

Wojciech Materski: Yes. We should bear in mind that the so-called Polish operation in the second half of the 1930s took the lives of some 140,000 Soviet Poles, as historians today estimate.

Sławomir Z. Frątczak: To this day, we cannot be entirely sure what lingered in Stalin's mind. The Katyń murder appears to be a continuation of the horrible Machiavellian plan implemented using the NKVD. If a person is politically dangerous, in systems like the Soviet one they are simply eliminated.

 

IS IT REVENGE FOR 1920 OR THE DESTRUCTION OF THE POLISH ELITES?

 

Perhaps Stalin was seeking revenge for 1920? At that time, as political commissar of the South-Western Front, he was so eager to gain Lviv that he ignored the orders to support the troops attacking Warsaw. This ended in a major defeat of the Red Army.

 

Alexei Pamiatnych: This hypothesis is also there, although there is no hard evidence. There were many participants of the 1920 war among the Katyń victims, but they were not the only ones. It seems to me that Professor Materski is right and that the explanation lies in Beria's note: they are not fit for re-education, so it is the easiest way to execute them.

Wojciech Materski: We can put forward three basic hypotheses, although each is easy to dismiss. Let's assume that this was revenge for 1920. But why at this particular point in time, when the procedure for sentencing the captives to the gulags had begun two weeks earlier? This is incoherent. There is another hypothesis that has to do with the Soviet-Finnish war: the camps had to be emptied to accommodate the captured Finns, so the Poles were eliminated. However, there were very few Finnish prisoners of war - an estimated 850. This is like a drop in the ocean compared to the almost 15,000 Poles. The third hypothesis assumes an attempt to exterminate the Polish elite. However, I don't think Stalin was that much of a visionary and had predicted the post-war situation of Central and Eastern Europe as early as 1940. At that point in time, it was not at all certain that the Polish state would be reborn. Once, Professor Natalia Lebedeva and I came forward with the hypothesis that the annihilation of the Polish intelligentsia was a plan coordinated between the Gestapo and the NKVD - the Germans implemented it as part of Operation AB and the Soviets - as part of the Katyń crime. We have backed away from it because it is poorly supported by sources.

We may need to revisit it, but only when something changes with our eastern neighbour and we get greater access to the archives. With Russia's current ruling team, which is pursuing a neo-imperialist policy, this is highly unlikely to succeed. After all, it considers that no shadow can be cast upon the Soviet victory in the Second World War. From the historical perspective, the Soviet system has failed, everything turned out to be a mistake, an evil thing, the only thing that remained is the victory in the so-called Great Patriotic War. Katyń, deportations, mass rape by the Red Army - this cannot be discussed.

Sławomir Z. Frątczak: I would not reject the research hypothesis of German-Russian consensus on the extermination of Polish elites. If you look at the aftermath of the Katyń Massacre and Operation AB, you can see that this was the goal of both occupiers.

 

Perhaps there is no point in looking for logic in the reasoning of Stalin and the Soviet apparatus of violence regarding Katyń? This mechanism worked with impetus: there was the great famine in Ukraine in the 1930s, purges in the Bolshevik Party and the Red Army, repressions of Soviet Poles, Germans or Japanese living in the Far East.

 

Sławomir Z. Frątczak: Someone, however, had to set this machine in motion. It is also surprising how smoothly everything has been run and surrounded by a conspiracy of silence. It was not until the early 1990s - more than 50 years later - that we learned, for example, that prisoners were also murdered as part of the Katyń massacre. Prior to that, we only knew about prisoners of war.

Alexei Pamiatnych: The Katyń massacre, however, was a unique operation. It required a special decision by the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the formation of a special trio of senior NKVD officers to approve the sentences.

Wojciech Materski: The death sentences were a pre-determined outcome. The troika was mainly involved in dividing the convicts into batches of about 100. Similar procedures had been used previously. The disturbing film Chekist from the early 1990s shows a 'court' like this:
one NKVD officer reads a name, while another puts a tick next to it. It all lasts just a few seconds.

Sławomir Z. Frątczak: I tell my students visiting the Katyń Museum during their museum lessons that, despite all the Soviet mess, there was order in the NKVD. There was a top-level decision which was being implemented with precision. Documents, convoys and burial sites were prepared. As the victims of the Katyń massacre were dying, their families were being deported to Kazakhstan as part of the so-called second deportation.

This indicates that the notion of 'anti-Soviet element', was also extended to the relatives of murdered captives and prisoners. Did the NKVD special camps collect information on the families of prisoners of war?

Wojciech Materski: Yes. The NKVD was using two basic keys to draw up the lists of people to be deported. The first one included addresses collected from correspondence sent by or coming to the captives. The other one was a survey conducted in the camps. Each prisoner of war was asked where he would like to go if the camp was closed down. They had to indicate the city and address. Few said they wished to join the Red Army and fight the Germans - these ones survived.

 

A WEDGE IN THE ANTI-HITLER COALITION

The Germans exposed the Katyń crime because they wanted to drive a wedge into the anti-Hitler coalition. Could this matter really have blown it apart?

 

Wojciech Materski: No. The Anglo-Saxons were very keen to speed up the end of the war. The fighting in the Far East without the involvement of the Red Army could have continued into the 1950s and cost the lives of more than a million Americans. Maintaining the allied cooperation was therefore of paramount importance to US President Roosevelt in particular, but also to British Prime Minister Churchill. The promise that the Red Army would enter the war in the Far East had not yet been made at the time - it was not made until at Tehran in November/December 1943. At the same time, there were concerns that the case of the First World War would be repeated - with Bolshevik Russia making the separatist peace treaty with Germany in Brest. That is why they approached Stalin wearing white gloves.

Churchill told General Sikorski that the British knew who had murdered the Poles in Katyń, but he believed that there was strength in the Soviets' savage brutality and that this strength had to be used for the benefit of the anti-German coalition. He promised to return to the issue after the war. However, efforts were later made not to return to it. The Americans did not recall Katyń until 1951, in the context of the Korean War, when news broke that the Koreans were shooting American captives en masse. The British, on the other hand, did not admit until 2003, in the so-called Butler Report, that they had known about the true perpetrators of the Katyń crime from the very start.

Sławomir Z. Frątczak: The Germans probably did not have high hopes that the coalition would collapse, but they acted on the principle that one must try all possible solutions. One thing they did manage to win. Whether the Western democracies liked it or not, the news spread into the world that the Katyń massacre had been committed by the Soviets.

The German propaganda exploited the Katyń graves throughout the occupied Europe. Was it successful in any way?

 

Sławomir Z. Frątczak: I come from a mixed family of Borderland and Masovia origin, so given my family experience I have a perspective on both occupations: the Soviet and the German. I think that exposure of the Katyń massacre, if it did not affect the immediate family - and, after all, it did not affect most Polish families - could not change or re-evaluate resentment towards either of the invaders. Undoubtedly, however, the news of discovery of the graves in Katyń came as a tremendous shock to the Poles.

 

Could the Polish government in London have behaved differently towards this case?

 

Wojciech Materski: It undoubtedly could. The decision to appeal to the International Red Cross was pushed through by Minister Stanisław Kot, and General Sikorski, who was visiting the Polish troops in Scotland at the time, approved it. However, if steps had not been taken in this case, the nation would have had justified resentment that the truth had not been sought.

The Katyń case did not break out suddenly. The fact that the Poles had been murdered by the Soviets had long been in the air. The Polish side had been making requests for the missing officers since August 1941, when the convention on the formation of the Polish Army in the USSR was signed. Prof. Kot tried, followed by Ambassador Romer, but to no effect. As I was working in Russian archives, I found documents confirming that the Soviet People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs was preparing to dispute the Polish view. However, the USSR authorities renounced this and decided to drop the case. In particular, Sikorski was no longer on the same page as them. When it became clear at the turn of 1942 and 1943 that
the Red Army would be the one to enter Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviets began to prepare a so-called left-wing alternative for Poland, which soon thereafter manifested itself in the form of the Union of Polish Patriots. They were also looking for an excuse to sever ties with the London government. They hoped to achieve it with the note of 16 January 1943 on the irrevocable status of all citizens of the Polish lands annexed in 1939, including ethnic Poles, as Soviet citizens. But then the Polish authorities did not indulge in the provocation. The Polish reaction to the German report on Katyń was ultimately a valid pretext.

 

BREAKING UP THE KATYŃ LIE

 

When was the Katyń lie - which involved blaming the Germans for this crime - formulated?

 

Sławomir Z. Frątczak: The problem emerged with the discovery of the Katyń graves. When it came to the Katyń issue, Stalin tried to do a bit of twiddling - from one occasion to another, from one pretext to another, from one argument to another. It was overall easy for him to blame the Germans and block the information, because he had the silent consent of the Western powers, which took no interest in the matter.

Wojciech Materski: The subject of Katyń was not blocked until after the Nuremberg Trials, when the weakness of Soviet evidence claiming it was a German crime came to light. Today we know from published documents that an American directive was in place not to raise the Katyń issue in the public domain. The case was therefore not pursued further in Nuremberg, although the Russians themselves inadvertently brought it up.

 

Documents from the Kremlin Archives disclosed in 1992 on the instructions of Russian President Yeltsin show that Katyń was a "state lie" of the USSR. Each Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, upon taking office, was acquainted with the Katyń files and had to declare that they knew the truth and would ensure that it did not come to light.

 

Alexei Pamiatnych: This is true. But note that Yeltsin revealed these documents in connection with internal friction in Russia, since there was a trial against the Communist Party. This would be evidence that the party was a criminal organisation and should be dissolved.

Was it possible to find out anything about Katyń while living in the USSR? How did you find out about it?

Alexei Pamiatnych: I first heard about Katyń in 1987, when I was visiting Poland. I read the book The Katyń Massacre in the Light of Documents published unofficially, which made a tremendous impression on me. Later that year I cycled to Katyń with my son. I took photos there but I was chased away.

 

Was the area guarded by the KGB?

 

Alexei Pamiatnych: Yes, because there was a KGB holiday resort nearby. But just then the fence was being repaired, so we were able to get in and came to the monument to the "Polish officers shot by the Nazis in 1941". When I returned home, I wrote a letter to the regional committee of the CPSU in Smolensk asking why the monument was inaccessible and normal people could not see it. I received a reply saying that access to the monument is indeed restricted, but that efforts are being made so that people will be able to see it in the future.

 

You contributed to the fact that the USSR authorities acknowledged the Katyń massacre, by publishing a major article on the subject in 1989 - the first one in the official Soviet press. How did you beat the censors?

 

Alexei Pamiatnych: We wrote the article in collaboration with Memorial colleague Alexander Akulichev and published it in the highly popular and belligerent weekly Moskovskiye Novosti. The editor-in-chief let the text go to print, but the final decision, I was told, was made 'at the top', perhaps by Gorbachev himself. The censorship did not interfere. On the editorial side, we were assisted by journalist Gennady Zhavoronkov. These were the beginnings when it comes to talking and writing about Katyń in the USSR. Later, Natalia Lebedeva published some material, also in Moskovskie Novosti, about the convoy troops who were transporting the Polish prisoners. Finally, in April 1990, Gorbachev handed over the NKVD transport lists from Kozelsk and Ostashkov
camps and the register of prisoners of the Starobelsk camp to Jaruzelski.

 

Why did the USSR authorities give up maintaining the Katyń lie after 47 years?

 

Alexei Pamiatnych: It could not be left like that. Perestroika was in full swing. There was increasing pressure on the authorities in both the USSR and Poland to reject communism.

Wojciech Materski: Everything went down a different channel than the one it was expected to go down. The archives were kept with a strong hand, but journalist Vladimir Abarinov, by chance, managed to identify the number of the NKVD convoy unit that escorted the captives from Kozelsk to Gnezdovo near Katyń and, following this trail, reached the documentation of the convoy troops, for which no seals had been placed to close off access. Based on these, several historians and journalists concluded that something must have happened if the escorts of convoyed troops with Poles travelled from Kozelsk, Ostashkov and Starobelsk to Smolensk, Kharkov and Tver in the spring of 1940 and returned empty. By then, the truth had been leaked to the public and there was no longer any point in trying to prevent the truth from coming out. Some of the advisors to Gorbachev also advised him that the issue had to be sealed once and for all.

 

THE DISPUTE OVER THE KATYŃ INVESTIGATIONS

 

The explanation of the Katyń massacre, which progressed in the first half of the 1990s, declined thereafter, primarily due to obstacles on the part of the Russian authorities. It was initially considered a war crime by Russian military prosecutors, but the conclusion of the investigation closed in 2004 saying it was a 'breach of professional authority' is a slap in the face to the Poles. Why is Russia so defensive about accountability for Katyń?

 

Alexei Pamiatnych: It seems to me that the Russian authorities have made a fool's errand by terminating the investigation and are now afraid to admit it. I believe that Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin have, until recently, wanted and perhaps still want to solve this problem in cooperation with the Poles. This is evidenced by the declaration of the State Duma of 2010 and the fact that more than 80 per cent of the investigation documentation was handed over to Poland. Not long ago, Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov mentioned that work was underway to declassify and hand over more volumes to the Poles and that a commission would be set up to deal with the rehabilitation of the executed Poles.

But why is it progressing so slowly?

Alexei Pamiatnych: Even those Russians who want to get along with the Poles do not live in a vacuum. Russia is now in the process of searching for a national idea to replace communism, and politicians are keen to refer to the ethos of the Great Patriotic War. There are some nationalist tendencies as well. It is therefore difficult to emphasise that Katyń was a crime under international law.

The Polish side, however, is not using all the opportunities it has to clarify the matter fully, either. Poland has received 148 volumes of the Russian investigation files, which are still not available to historians, and this is because the investigation by the Institute of National Remembrance is still underway. There is no one to slam their fist on the table and say: what are they doing there, take three months and be done with this investigation! Poland, as part of the construction of military cemeteries in Katyń, Miednoje and Kharkov, carried out exhumations and, as far as I know, their results were not included in the Polish investigation. Not only that, they were also not handed over to Russia. It is irritating that no official reliable report on the work carried out at Mednoye in 1994/1995 has been published, as was done for Katyń and Kharkov.

In general, I believe that the Katyń issue is also an internal Russian problem. We must solve it ourselves, as it is the best documented example of political repression. The whole truth must be told in Russia, and this is why the aforementioned results of the Polish exhumations in Mednoye are extremely important to us. For example, 68 identification badges of Polish police officers were retrieved there. But the Polish prosecutor's office did not make the effort to check to whom they belonged.

Sławomir Z. Frątczak: I am aware of the Polish omissions in the Katyń case. Let me tell you that, for example, the bulky volume of materials from the US Congressional Commission investigating the Katyń massacre has never been translated into Polish, nor has much of the German material. British and American archives have not been fully penetrated. French archives also contain 'Katyń files'. Anyway, is it even possible to bring an issue such as Katyń to a research conclusion? A historian knows that this cannot be done. Nonetheless, demands must be made that the state which has the most of these materials makes them available to researchers. Meanwhile, Russia is dosing access in a way that, I believe, is supposed to slow down the powerful
research momentum that was once there.

 

TERMS OF THE AGREEMENT

Is there hope for a mutually satisfactory agreement?

 

Wojciech Materski: I was critical of the decision to open the Polish investigation, but I understand why it was opened - in protest against the closure of the Russian investigation. The materials handed over to the Polish side by the Russian Chief Military Prosecutor's Office - I have seen more than 60 volumes from the first batch handed over to us - are of little value. The documentation of the auxiliary Ukrainian investigation is the most valuable part of these. On the other hand, there are no files to justify the investigation's conclusion that this was a common crime subject to the statute of limitations. This is an embarrassment and that's why we will probably never get these files.

A Polish-Russian agreement on the Katyń issue is of course possible, but not under the terms of just one side. The cited Duma resolution refers to the moral rehabilitation of the victims, which does not entail any formal legal consequences and does not invalidate the conclusion of the Russian investigation, which was offensive to Poland. The Russian side declares: we have made the basic documents available, we have admitted the perpetration of the crime, we offer moral rehabilitation and we are closing the case. The Polish side replies: where are the other documents, such as the personal files of the murdered or the reports of the NKVD officers who executed them and were rewarded based on these reports? Why is there no Belarussian list or documents which would have helped to create it, i.e. transfer lists from field prisons to the Minsk prison? Why are there no documents that would clearly indicate the burial places of the prisoners, the victims of this genocide?

Alexei Pamiatnych: The Memorial team and I are fighting for the disclosure of all documents, even in court. The Memorial disagrees with the claim that the killed Poles have already been rehabilitated by history. Their rehabilitation must be individual, as they will then be recognised as victims of political repression, which will be the basis for obtaining documents on specific individuals.

Wojciech Materski: I think the Memorial activists are wonderful people. I am very impressed with what they are doing, but they keep banging their heads against the wall. To make matters worse, Soviet responsibility for the Katyń crime is being increasingly denied in Russia. In 2010, the collective works Germans in Katyń and Secrets of the Katyń tragedy - with the late Duma deputy Ilyukhin as scientific editor - came out in print, in large numbers. When I asked at an academic conference why this was happening, I was told by my Russian colleagues: after all, we have freedom of speech here.

Alexei Pamiatnych: Sadly, there are plenty of lunatics who publish books like this. They are exceptionally thorough in looking at what the opposing side writes and catching any errors. One of the arguments they raise concerns Mednoye: they say that the Poles are hiding something, that no Polish remains were found there, just some old newspapers and objects thrown into the graves. The underlying reason is that there is no detailed report on the exhumation work carried out there.

Wojciech Materski: Mednoye is important as it was not under German occupation and the Germans could have had nothing to do with the killing of the Poles buried there. The Polish side should therefore be interested in publishing full documentation of the research conducted there.

Sławomir Z. Frątczak: I don't know why Miednoye is not given proper recognition, as it bears many of the hallmarks of the Katyń crime. But this does not explain the Russian people who write nonsense news, very unpleasant for Poland. There is a feeling that this is happening with the approval of the authorities. Russia should eliminate all barriers to investigating the Katyń issue so as not to give people like this a breeding ground.

If there is a tendency in Russia to neutralise anything in connection with Katyń, it would be in the sense of not returning to it, not talking about it.

Alexei Pamiatnych: I believe that the authorities have decided to keep the matter quiet. I tried to convince the decision-makers that it was possible to come to an agreement with the Poles and find a shared vision, for example on the legal qualification of Katyń: that it was a not a common crime, but a war crime.

Wojciech Materski: If the Russian authorities reject the label genocide with such determination, then the formula of a war crime with the hallmarks of genocide is acceptable.

Alexei Pamiatnych: Even if the Poles perceive elements of genocide, compromise and an end to the matter on political and legal grounds are possible. The rest must be left to historians. The problem is that the Russian authorities think: We give the Poles more volumes of files and these are later not available to anyone. How is that possible? The families of the victims, who brought a case against Russia to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, were also not allowed to see the 148 volumes from the Russian investigation handed over to Poland.

Wojciech Materski: I have a good counter-argument. The Russians say they cannot give us the wreck from the Smolensk crash due to the ongoing investigation. We are also in the process of investigating the Katyń massacre, so we are not sharing documents either. This is a similar situation.

Sławomir Z. Frątczak: How many years did it take Russia to hand over successive tranches of Katyń documents? Mr Pamiatnych has the right to highlight mistakes on the Polish side. I am sad to admit - there are some. But the main problem lies in the fact that the Russians are not interested in closing the Katyń case, for historical and mental reasons.

 

HOW TO SPEAK ABOUT KATYŃ?

 

The Katyń massacre is not an easy or pleasant subject. Therefore, how should we talk about it, how should we educate young people about it?

 

Sławomir Z. Frątczak: There are no easy or pleasant topics in historical memory. The Katyń massacre - if it were to be translated into popular language - represents a timeline that has already been chronicled with events. Still, it is an exceptional crime, which is why we need to talk about it. I regret that so little time is devoted in school education to discussing the Katyń crime in the context of the entire Soviet occupation. When it comes to education support institutions, things are not so great either - please take a look. The museum does not have an educational apparatus or the power sufficient to shout in a voice adequate to the gravity of the problem. It is good that Katyń is discussed on successive anniversaries, but I don't know if it is loud enough to get the message out to the public. 'Rzeczpospolita' published the results of a sociological study a few years ago, which showed that 10 per cent of schoolchildren who had heard about the Katyń massacre thought it had been committed by the Germans. This is not happening in Russia or Ukraine, but in Poland! And the very fact that the construction of the Katyń Museum is taking so long is also evidence of something.

How do we speak about Katyń? This message also includes the technology of murder - it is not possible to escape it. That is why the new exhibition of the Katyń Museum, which I am honoured to manage, will be open to students from junior high school upwards. We also need to ensure that this crime is not faceless, so that we can see living people among the thousands of names on the Katyń lists - people who, before they were exterminated, had their professional achievements, families, plans and dreams that they did not manage to realise. This is also something we would like to show to the visitors to our museum.

 

 

 

 

Slawomir Z. Frątczak, historian, museum expert, head of the Katyń Museum, a branch of the Polish Army Museum in Warsaw.

 

Alexei Pamiatnych, PhD, Russian astrophysicist, associate professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Centre of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, activist of the Russian Memorial Association, merited for the promotion of the truth about the Katyń crime.

 

Prof. Wojciech Materski, Ph.D., historian, political scientist, employed at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, researches the history of the USSR, Georgia and Transcaucasia, Polish-Soviet relations and the history of diplomacy, author of many books, including: The Shield of Europe. Polish-Soviet Relations 1918 - 1939 (1994), Georgia (2000), Vedette. The Second Republic vs. the Soviets 1918 - 1943 (2005), Katyń. From the lie to the truth (2012).