Moscow blamed the Nazis for Katyn for half a century before admitting guilt
In spring 1940 Soviet secret police killed nearly 22,000 Polish officers, police and professionals on Stalin's orders. When Germany exposed the graves in 1943, the Soviet Union blamed the Nazis and kept denying responsibility until 1990. The episode shaped Polish memory and Polish-Soviet relations for generations.
The background was the carve-up of Poland in 1939. Germany invaded on 1 September, and on 17 September the Red Army moved in from the east under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, meeting little resistance because Polish units had orders not to fight it. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and police were captured, and about 125,000 ended up in camps run by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. Because Polish conscription made university graduates into reserve officers, the prisoners included a large share of the country's educated class.
Through the winter, prisoners in camps such as Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov underwent long interrogations. They expected release, but the questioning was effectively a screening process: those who would not adopt a pro-Soviet stance were labelled irreconcilable enemies. On 5 March 1940, after a proposal from Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin and five other Politburo members signed an order to execute 25,700 Polish prisoners. The historian Gerhard Weinberg argued that Stalin wanted to strip any future Polish army of its leadership.
The victims, about 8,000 army officers, 6,000 police and 8,000 members of the intelligentsia, reflected Poland's diversity, including Ukrainians, Belarusians and between 700 and 900 Polish Jews. Killings took place in several NKVD prisons as well as the Katyn forest, which gave the massacre its name after German forces announced the discovery of graves there in April 1943. When the Polish government-in-exile in London asked the Red Cross to investigate, Stalin broke off relations with it.
For decades the official Soviet line held that the Nazis were responsible. Only in 1990 did the Soviet Union acknowledge that the NKVD had carried out the killings and that the government had covered them up. A later Russian investigation confirmed Soviet responsibility but closed without classifying it as a war crime, reasoning that the perpetrators were dead. In 2010 the Russian State Duma condemned Stalin and other officials for ordering the massacre, and a Polish parliamentary resolution in 2009 said it bore the hallmarks of genocide.
Source: Katyn massacre
