Admitting the Truth Behind the Katyn Massacre

Almost overriding the tragic plane crash that killed Poland's President Lech Kaczynski, is the destination he was intending to visit: the memorial of Katyn Forest. Through much of the Cold War, both the Soviets and the West refused to acknowledge the truth behind the massacre.

In a curious way, the destination of Poland’s President Lech Kaczynski and some 88 high level generals and officials, dominates the crash of the Tupolev-154 jet that killed them all.

Whenever the symbolic leader of a country and his entourage die suddenly and somewhat mysteriously, it shocks the world and rattles the dynamics of the country in question.

And so it is with Poland today – and Polish people scattered throughout the world.

But almost overriding the tragedy, is the destination that President Kaczynski and his group were intending to visit – the memorial of Katyn Forest, one of  the most sinister and infamous legacies of the second world war.

It was here that over 20,000 Polish officers and potential leaders were methodically and deliberately massacred in 1940 -  most of them with bullets to the head by NKVD assassins, on the order of Josef Stalin.

It should be remembered – and all Poles remember – that when Hitler invaded Poland to start WWII, the Soviet Union invaded from the east. In those days, Stalin was Hitler’s greatest ally.

Katyn Forest was a crime beyond compare in the war. So cynical and brutal that we – our side in that war – chose to blame it on the Nazis. The massacre site was discovered by German forces near Smolensk when Hitler attacked his erstwhile ally in 1941.

For a couple of years in the mid-1960s I was based in Moscow for the old Toronto Telegram – the end of the Khrushchev era, and the first couple of years of the Brezhnev-Kosygin regime. Even then, 20 years after WWII, the Soviets were still “officially” denying culpability for Katyn Forest, and blaming the Germans.

Even our side, Ottawa for example, refused to publicly acknowledge that Katyn was a Soviet atrocity, not a Nazi one. Even at the height of the Cold War, we were reluctant to unnecessarily accuse or rile the Soviets.

I wrote about Katyn a lot – everything about it was obscene.

In those days, the Soviets had only recently publicized Babi Yar – the massacre of some 30,000 Jews at Kiev by the SS. Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s famous poem Babi Yar had been published, and Anatoly Kuznetsov’s book, highly censored until he defected and published an un-expurgated version, would soon be published.

Nazi responsibility for Babi Yar, reinforced the conviction of many that the Nazis were also responsible for Katyn Forest. People who should have known better, ignored evidence of the bodies exhumed that had copies of Pravda and Russians newspapers in their boots for warmth, or in their pockets.

The NKVD even executed local peasants who might have witnessed their deed – just as the SS exhumed and burned bodies at Babi Yar to destroy evidence of their evil.

Ironically, President Kuczynski and entourage were en route to pay homage to the victims of Katyn, in response to the visit to the site by Vladimir Putin, who more or less acknowledged Soviet responsibility.

Putin’s gesture, in itself, is significant. His democratic instincts are questionable, but at least he acknowledges history. Putin sees Poland’s acceptance of American defensive missiles as threatening – which from his viewpoint they are.

Kuczynski’s support of missile defence, has sparked conspiracy theories that his plane was sabotaged  - unlikely, since the black box apparently shows the pilot of the doomed Tu-154 ignored ground control orders that he not try to land in a heavy fog, and hit the tops of trees and crashed.