Courtesy of the Katyn Forest: Massacre. Politics. Morality. exhibit
A cross recovered in one of Katyn’s mass graves:
“For the defenders of Poland’s eastern borders, 1918-1919”
WASHINGTON – Russia should apologize for the 1940 Katyn massacre of nearly 22,000 Polish prisoners of war, the chairman of the U.S. Helsinki Commission said Wednesday.
“Russia needs a clear and unequivocal apology to the Polish people for what was done 70 years ago,” said Sen. Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., at a conference of scholars, experts and analysts from Poland, Russia and the U.S. as well as members of Congress who met at the Library of Congress to discuss Katyn’s significance and the future of Polish-Russian relations.
Cardin also called on Russia to fully disclose all of its archives and records about Katyn.
“It’s important to be able to document exactly what happened 70 years ago” using original documents, Cardin said.
In the spring of 1940, nearly 22,000 Polish prisoners of war were executed one by one with a shot to the back of the head by Stalin’s security police. The bodies were dumped into mass graves in a forest near Smolensk, Russia. When German soldiers announced their discovery of one such grave in 1943, the Soviet government blamed them for the crime and continued to do so until Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev finally admitted Soviet guilt in 1990 and disclosed the location of the remaining graves.
The unreleased Russian documents are key to the process of defining Katyn as a war crime and crime against humanity as defined by the International Military Tribunal set up at Nuremburg to judge the main Nazi criminals, according to Russian scholar and Katyn expert Alexander Guryanov, a representative of the Russian human rights group Memorial. “And under those points it would be characterized as a war crime and a crime against humanity that has no statute of limitations,” he said.
When Gorbachev admitted Soviet guilt in 1990, a Russian investigation into the massacre was opened. But the investigation was halted in 2004. Those materials were re-classified by a top Russian government agency, even though that reclassification is a violation of existing Russian law on state secrets, Guryanov said: Russian law does not allow matters pertaining to violations of human rights and violation of the law by state agencies and their employees to be classified.
Instead of being defined as a war crime, the Katyn massacre is defined as a criminal act in Russia, he said – with a statute of limitations that has expired.
The investigation begun in 1990 lists those who carried out the crime only as “individuals from the leadership of the USSR or NKVD [Soviet security police]” while their actions are noted as an “excess of authority that had onerous consequences in the presence of specially aggravating circumstances,” Guryanov said.
Therefore, this crime, carried out on the orders of the Soviet leadership, “and being a genuine act of state terrorism, is now characterized as merely an excess of authority by individual supervisory officials at the departmental level,” he said.
Clear steps must be taken to declassify those and all materials on Katyn, Guryanov said. He said the stalled investigation must be resumed and a full comprehensive listing of all those who were shot should be established.
That listing is crucial, according to Mark Kramer, director of Harvard University’s Cold War Program, and should include not just the victims but everyone who carried out the operations at all levels.
“It’s especially important for the memories of the victims to be able to establish the full registration of those who were responsible for the massacre,” Kramer said, so that the crime can be placed in its proper historical perspective.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, said that Katyn occurred in the midst of “the worst war that humanity ever experienced. It was a war pregnant with crimes.”
On the scale of World War II, he said, Katyn wasn’t that large – especially compared to the Holocaust or to the hundreds of thousands who died in Germany, Japan, Poland, Holland, Britain.
“The reason that Katyn was so indelible and so morally intolerable was that it was a murder, shrouded by a lie, institutionalized globally,” Brzezinski said. “And the lie was globally accepted on the whole.”
In Poland, families of victims were forced to accept the official Soviet line that the Katyn executioners were German – or be suspected as being anti-Soviet and anti-Communist.
“You had to lie about something that was to you a personal tragedy,” Brzezinski said.
Cold war scholar and author Michael Szporer said that Katyn should become an important legal precedent for international agreements on war crimes and the treatment of prisoners of war in captivity as well as crimes against humanity.
“This was a political massacre with a political agenda committed by political police,” Szporer said.
He said that recognizing Katyn as a Soviet war crime would be in long-term Russian interest, and a way to “put the failed Soviet experiment and Stalin” in the past.
Brzezinski said that the Russian reaction –from the Russian government and the Russian public – to the Polish plane crash in April shows promise.
“I do think it is the beginning of a change,” Brzezinski said. Official Polish-Russian reconciliation is the next step, he said. “If that happens, a great many things will change,” including Russia’s relationship to Europe and to such countries as Estonia and Georgia.
“As the knowledge of the past illuminates the past, the future becomes more manageable, more promising,” Brzezinski said. “And that ultimately may be the most important message of Katyn.”
The conference was sponsored by the Kosciuszko Foundation in cooperation with the U.S. Helsinki Commission and the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Washington DC, and co-sponsored by the Council to Preserve the Memory of Combat and Martyrdom, Foundation for Polish Science, the Cold War Studies Program at Harvard University, and the International Historical-Enlightenment, Human Rights and Charitable Society Memorial.