Katyń: A History Written in Blood and Tears

A memorial to the Katyń massacre in Krakow. Credit: Flickr/themactep.

When I first went to Poland in the mid-1980s, the Katyń question mystified me. For really there was no question: every Pole knew that the Soviets had massacred thousands of Army officers and civilian leaders in April 1940, burying many of them in shallow graves in the Katyń Forest near Smolensk. Their names, their fates, and the perpetrators were known. The Communist regime didn't talk about it -- but then there were plenty of things in twentieth-century Polish history that the Communists did not discuss. The so-called blank spots included beloved writers, doomed uprisings, economic failures, and all manner of regime crimes. Like many of these, the Katyń massacre was anything but blank. Emigre historians had pieced together the evidence into a fairly complete picture, and through the underground press of the late 1970s and 1980s had effectively countered the regime's disinformation. So what was different about Katyń? Why has the non-mystery retained its hold?

The release last week of thousands of previously-classified documents from the U.S. National Archives reopens these questions. Next February will mark seventy years since German forces advancing through the western Soviet Union uncovered the bodies in the Katyń Forest. Nazi officials immediately publicized the discovery, using it as evidence of the perfidy of the Soviets and of their own more civilized protection of conquered peoples. They invited an international team of doctors to assist in the exhumation, and published the findings. The evidence was clear: Diaries and letters found on bodies all stopped in April 1940, well before the June 1941 Nazi attack on the Soviet Union.

No Pole could doubt that the Nazis were equally capable of such a crime: they had, after all, massacred thousands of Polish politicians and intellectuals in the Palmiry Forest outside Warsaw that same spring of 1940. But Katyń was a Soviet crime then and ever since.

In the face of this evidence, the Soviets for nearly fifty years maintained that the Germans had manipulated evidence and fooled a gullible, fascist-sympathizing West. Their comrades in Warsaw propped up the same fiction -- and persecuted those who attempted to reveal the truth. The obvious lie was especially painful to Poles, for three reasons.

First, the massacre amounted to a direct attack on the entire Polish nation. The nearly 22,000 men and one woman killed constituted a sizeable percentage of the nation's elites. Most were well-educated, and in the prime of life; they would have taken their place in the country's leadership in peacetime. Stalin's decision to execute them was thus a conscious crippling of an entire nation. The war itself, of course, claimed many, many times more of Poland's best and brightest. But only the Katyń massacre was so clearly premeditated.

Second, nothing the Polish Communist leaders did made them seem more craven, and made the regime seem less authentic, than the dogged fealty to the Orwellian lies about Katyń. After Stalin's death in 1953, Soviet leaders did not receive the adulation in the Polish press that they did in other satellite countries; even the Russian Revolution was mostly celebrated with reserve. But on Katyń the Polish regime was ever obedient, endlessly demonstrating to its citizens that it was not free.

Most important, though, was that so much that mattered at the most intimate level about Katyń remained unknown. The forest lay deep within the Soviet Union, as inaccessible as were the documents of the crime. Hundreds of thousands of Poles were personally touched by the crime, losing husbands, fathers, friends, colleagues. How they died could only be surmised. And where they were buried? The graves at Katyń contained about 4,400 bodies; the rest had simply vanished from prisons and internment camps in unknown directions. Those they left behind had no one to bury, no anniversary to mourn, and were forced to tolerate the insinuation that denial of the Soviets' version of events amounted to sympathy with the Nazis. Most suffered in heart-wrenching silence for decades.

That silence ended in 1990, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev admitted Soviet responsibility. Two years later, Boris Yeltsin released more documents from the archives, and Poles could now read Lavrentii Beria's letter to Stalin proposing the executions, and see Stalin's laconic signature of approval. The full dimensions of the crime became clear, and the many places of burial of those 22,000 could be discovered and memorialized. But the pain of repressed grief remains; even today, the word "Katyń" connotes for many Poles the betrayals and cover-ups that make it impossible for them to ever trust the Russians or -- for some -- even their own government.

To this wrenching story the American documents add nothing new. They do contain some revelations, in particular that the U.S. government had first-hand knowledge of the circumstances of the massacre, via two American POWs whom their German captors showed convincing evidence of Soviet culpability. Particularly poignant is the comment by one of these soldiers -- who were, remarkably, able to send out messages to Washington -- that the POWs recognized the German version of events was likely accurate when they noticed that the uniforms and shoes worn by the victims looked well-cared for, as they might if the victims had been killed shortly after capture and not after years in captivity.

So American authorities, like the Polish citizens, knew the basic truth about Katyń; unlike the Poles, they could have forced discussion of the facts, perhaps made diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union or Poland difficult. Will this revelation change anything for those who mourn the massacre's victims? Almost certainly not. That the Americans would not go too far in challenging the Soviets' control over Poland was clear from the moment Roosevelt signed the Yalta Agreement in early 1945. These documents are not evidence of betrayal, but simply more evidence of the tortured ambiguities of the Cold War. They may leave no impact on international relations, but will surely furnish their Polish readers another occasion to reflect on a tragedy whose scars will long be visible.