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1940 - Katyn

One of the main challenges facing leaders of the Solidarity movement was what to teach people: Solidarity represented a spiritual as well as a linguistic revolution. Solidarity leaders considered the original political program, not one of institutional change, but rather an educational program. According to Lech Walesa, the goal was to build a "Noah's Ark" of popularly accepted terms free from the straightjacket of official sloganeering. It represented a mixed bag of demands and articulations, or half-articulations: sovereignty, democracy (understood as personal relations in the work place and worker's self-management), independent trade unions, the Katyn massacre (a code word for admitting that Poland was under Soviet domination).

Walesa's anti-Sovietism in 1990 was clearly a useful tool in the presidential campaign. It was tactical, verbal and superficial. Walesa made four demands during the talks with Soviet Ambassador Brovikov: the withdrawal of the Soviet forces; disclosure of the truth about Katyn; the right for displaced persons to visit the old lands, and; compensation for the victims of repatriation. Of all of these, only the first demand was related to actual national interests. The rest had to do with history, propaganda and a list of sentiments.

Polish army officers were called up in 1939, due to German aggression against Poland. Those who were in eastern Poland which had been occupied but the Soviet Union since September 17th 1939, were captured by the Red Army and committed to the NKVD. On 28 September, the USSR and Nazi Germany, allied since August, partitioned and then dissolved the Polish state. They then began implementing parallel policies of suppressing all resistance and destroying the Polish elite in their respective areas. They were imprisoned in several camps.

During April-May 1940, the Polish prisoners were moved from their internment camps and taken to three execution sites. The place most identified with the Soviet atrocity is Katyn Forest, located 12 miles west of Smolensk, Russia. They were murdered (nearly 25.000 persons) in April and May 1940. The prisoners from the camp in Kozelsk (over 4.400 persons) were shot in Katyn forest near Smolensk.

Stalin liquidated 14,500 Polish officers and 11,000 others in territory newly "liberated" under the secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, reflected perfidy at its finest: mass summary execution of potential enemies by Politburo decree using German weapons. Those who died at Katyn included an admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 3,420 NCOs, seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials, 85 privates, and 131 refugees. Also among the dead were 20 university professors; 300 physicians; several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers; and more than 100 writers and journalists as well as about 200 pilots. 7 It was their social status that landed them in front of NKVD execution squads. Most of the victims were reservists who had been mobilized when Germany invaded. In all, the NKVD eliminated almost half the Polish officer corps -- part of Stalin's long-range effort to prevent the resurgence of an independent Poland.

When Nazi occupation forces in April 1943 announced the discovery of several mass graves, propaganda minister Josef Goebbels hoped that international revulsion over the Soviet atrocity would drive a wedge into the Big Three coalition and buy Germany a breathing space, if not a victory, in its war against Russia. But Stalin blamed the massacre on the Wehrmacht after discovery of the graves, and it was politically exploited, and officially denied, by successive Soviet leaders until 1990.

In 1944, President Roosevelt assigned Capt. George Earle, his special emissary to the Balkans, to compile information on Katyn. Earle did so, using contacts in Bulgaria and Romania. He concluded that the Soviet Union was guilty. FDR rejected Earle's conclusion, saying that he was convinced of Nazi Germany's responsibility.

After Russian President Vladimir Putin's setback in the 2004 Ukraine election, Polish-Russian relations becameeven more fractious as Moscow refused to denounce the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact or the Katyn Forest massacre of Polish officers during World War II as Polish President Kwasniewski demanded. On 07 April 2010, a ceremony was held in Katyn in the Smolensk region to mark the 70th anniversary of the massacre of Polish officers. Vladimir Putin and Donald Tusk participated in the ceremony. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin joined his Polish counterpart in the first joint commemoration marking the anniversary of the murder of thousands of Polish officers by the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II. The decision by Putin to become the first Russian leader to commemorate the anniversary of the Katyn massacre is perhaps an indication that Russia has begun to take a more nuanced view of the Soviet role in World War II, which had previously been denied by Russian leaders.