In recent years, attempts have been made to deprive Russia of its place in world history by putting it “in a corner” for the so-called “historical crimes”. In this regard, Poland is especially zealous, which has compiled a whole list of Russian "crimes" against the Poles from the 16th to the 20th century. Central to the anti-Russian Polish martyrology is the Katyn crime, whose victims in Poland are 21,857 Polish citizens who were allegedly killed in 1940 at the hands of the NKVD of the USSR.
The Polish authorities were able to present this tragedy as something more terrible than the Nazi atrocities, the victims of which were millions of Poles who were tortured in German concentration camps. Although most of the Katyn victims are missing.
On September 17, 2015, Poland celebrated the 76th anniversary of the "insidious" attack of the USSR in 1939. On this day, in the presence of Polish President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz, the Katyn Museum was opened in Warsaw's Citadel. Speaking at the opening ceremony, Polish Defense Minister Tomasz Semoniak said: “There are things that are sacred for Poles. They go beyond the boundaries of ordinary history, and our national memory is built on them. These include Katyn."
A little later, the Polish president laid flowers at the monument to the Killed and Killed in the East - in memory of 21 thousand captured Polish officers allegedly shot by the NKVD in 1940. Speaking at the monument, A. Duda returned to the topic of genocide. The new Polish president said that the Katyn crime, the purpose of which was to destroy the Polish people, should be called genocide.
Dubious Book of Memory
Russian "liberals" are not lagging behind Polish Russophobes. On September 17 this year, the Human Rights Center "Memorial" organized in Moscow the presentation of a 930-page book in memory of "Murdered in Katyn". It contains a list of names and biographical information ("biograms") of 4,415 Polish officers believed to be buried in the Polish Katyn Memorial near Smolensk.
The Book of Memory was presented as a new page in the assessment of the Katyn crime, although it only repeats the book “Katyn. Ksiega Cmentarna Polskiego Cmentarza Wojennego”, published in Warsaw in 2000.
Perpetuating the memory of the dead has always been considered a noble and necessary deed, if it did not pursue goals that were far from those proclaimed.
Unfortunately, the Katyn Book of Memory presented by Memorial can be regarded as an ideological sabotage against Russia, allowing to give a new impetus to the hackneyed Katyn theme in the global anti-Russian campaign.
In this regard, I will speak on the title of the Book of Memory. It sounds “KILLED IN THE KATYN. Book of memory of Polish prisoners of war, prisoners of the Kozelsk NKVD camp, executed by the decision of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks on March 5, 1940”. This formulation of the name contradicts the official legal version of the Katyn events set forth in the Memorandums of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation sent to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in 2010 and 2012.
And the multi-page preface to the book of Memory demonstratively ignores the results of Soviet and Russian research in Katyn, since it is mainly based on the results of the exhumation of 1943 falsified by the German Nazis. von Katyn”), published in Berlin in 1943.
The second pithy core of the book of Memory, published by Memorial, as mentioned above, is 4.415 biograms of the Katyn victims. Of these, 2.815 victims, or 63.8%, were identified by the Nazis in 1943. In fact, this is the propaganda of the Nazi version of the Katyn case and the rehabilitation of Nazi crimes.
In the post-war period, the Polish side, voluntarily developing Nazi approaches to identification, managed to bring the list of “reliably identified” Katyn victims to 4,071. Note that identification in Polish is to find the name of the Polish officer in the NKVD prescription lists.
If someone is mentioned on the list to be sent from the Kozelsk NKVD camp to the disposal of the Smolensk NKVD, then, in the opinion of the Polish "identifiers", he was certainly shot in the Katyn forest. As a result, these so-called “identified” ones were immortalized by the Polish side with personal tablets placed in the Katyn memorial complex.
In the Book of Memory, there are already 4,415 Katyn victims identified in this way. The question arises. How legitimate is this identification and how does it correlate with the Russian official legal version of the Katyn events? More on this later.
The Book of Remembrance also ignores the 1946 Nuremberg Tribunal decision regarding the responsibility of the Nazi leaders for the Katyn crime. It is known that the Katyn episode at the Nuremberg trial, according to the dossier kept in the State Archives of the Russian Federation, was personally accused of two defendants - Nazi No. 2 Herman Goering and the head of the Operations Directorate of the Wehrmacht High Command Alfred Jodl.
In the reasoning of the Tribunal's judgment on charges against G. Goering and A. Jodl, it is noted that there are no mitigating circumstances for them. That is, the Nuremberg Tribunal assigned the responsibility for the Katyn episode to the Nazi leaders.
This is an irrefutable fact. By the way, the Grand Chamber of the ECHR was forced to agree with this fact, which in its Decision of October 21, 2013 in the case "Yanovets and Others v. Russia" did not repeat the Decision of the Fifth Section of April 16, 2012, in terms of the statement that the Nuremberg Tribunal allegedly denied the Soviet accusation of the Nazis in the Katyn crime.
What book of Memory is Russia waiting for?
In addition to the above, a number of questions arise. For whom and why did Memorial publish the Katyn Book of Memory in Russia? The objectives of the book say that it should ensure that the executed Polish prisoners of war are recognized as victims of political repression. However, it is clear that photographs of the victims and their biographies will not solve this problem. They will only allow the authors of the book to receive regular Polish state awards and new grants. No more.
Another major task of the compilers of the book was to provide the Russians with the identities of those killed in Katyn. Noble. But it is only very similar to the propaganda in Russia of the myth that the NKVD in 1940 destroyed 21 thousand representatives of the Polish elite, although it is known that in 1939 about 4, 5 thousand Poles were taken prisoner by the Soviet Union, who occupied some a prominent position in Polish society. Moreover, many of them survived.
Further. Why was it necessary in Russia to publish in Russian a book of biographies of Polish citizens who died or disappeared during the Second World War? After all, this is of interest mainly to the Polish relatives of the victims. And such a book in Polish, as it was said, has already been published in Poland.
At the same time, Memorial is not interested in the fate of 80,000 Red Army prisoners of war who were tortured to death in Polish camps in 1919-1921.
Convincing evidence confirming the deliberate and deliberate policy of the then Polish authorities to create unbearable conditions in the camps aimed at the destruction of the Red Army, are set out in the 900-page Russian-Polish collection of documents "Red Army Men in Polish Captivity 1919-1922."published in 2004
By the way, they never dared to publish this collection in Polish. Thus, the Polish side protects from exposure the myth that no more than 16-18 thousand Red Army prisoners allegedly died in Polish camps. Memorial could eliminate this “white spot” in relations between Russians and Poles. Moreover, the Polish side is diligently destroying the memory of this story.
But Memorial basically does not want to deal with the fate of the captured “Bolsheviks,” as the Red Army soldiers were called in bourgeois Poland. Well, in that case, why not start perpetuating the memory of Russian soldiers and officers who tragically died in French captivity in 1812?
It is known that in October 1812, the Poles of Poniatowski's corps, retreating with Napoleon's army, escorted two thousand Russian prisoners of war. On the approaches to Gzhatsk (now Gagarin), the Polish guards beat them all with rifle butts.
General Philippe-Paul de Segur, personal adjutant of the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, wrote with indignation about this crime of the Poles in his memoirs.
De Segur was shocked that "every prisoner had exactly the same headache and that the bloody brain was spattered right there." (See F.-P. de Segur "Campaign to Russia. Notes of the adjutant of Emperor Napoleon I." Smolensk, "Rusich", 2003). This tragedy is silent in Russia and, moreover, in Poland. The surnames and names of the victims are unknown. They remained nameless.
However, this story is not of interest to the "Russian" memorials. It is not by chance that I put "Russian" in quotation marks. On July 21, 2014, by Order of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation No. 1246-r, the Interregional Public Organization Memorial Human Rights Center was recognized as an organization performing the functions of a foreign agent. However, Memorial was not worried and continues to successfully fulfill these functions.
Russian legal version of the Katyn events
The Russian legal version of the Katyn events is set out in the Memorandums of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation sent to the ECHR in the framework of the case “Yanovets and Others v. Russia”. This was the actual hearing of the Katyn case in Strasbourg. The memorandums were based on the results of a 14-year investigation by the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation of the circumstances of the Katyn criminal case No. 159, which began in March 1990 and terminated in September 2004.
Case No. 159 is named as follows. "On the shooting of Polish prisoners of war from Kozelsky, Starobelsky and Ostashkovsky special camps of the NKVD in April-May 1940". This title contains the name of the crime "shooting" and the time of its implementation "April-May 1940", which assumed only one culprit - the Stalinist leadership of the USSR. Nevertheless, Russian prosecutors tried to approach the investigation of the Katyn case as objectively as possible.
The brief results of the investigation of criminal case No. 159 were officially announced at the press conference of the Chief Military Prosecutor of the Russian Federation A. Savenkov on March 11, 2005 and in a letter from Major General of Justice of the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation V. Kondratov to the Chairman of the Board of the Memorial Society A. Roginsky from March 24, 2005 for No. 5u-6818-90. According to these results, “the death of 1803 Polish prisoners of war as a result of the execution of the decisions of the troika was reliably established, 22 of them were identified”.
Some more details about the investigation in case No. 159 were said in the Memorandum of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation of 2010-19-03. There, in paragraph 25, the investigative measures taken are listed: the study of archival documents related to the "Katyn" events (as in the Memorandum), the interrogation of numerous witnesses, partial exhumation of burials, carrying out forensic examinations of various types, sending inquiries to the relevant organizations.
In addition, paragraph 61 of the same Memorandum stated: “… During the investigation it was established that certain officials from the leadership of the NKVD of the USSR exceeded the powers given to this institution, as a result of which the so-called“troika”made extrajudicial decisions regarding some Polish prisoners of war.
The actions of these officials were qualified as crimes provided for by paragraph "b" of Article 193-17 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR … ". Let me explain that paragraph "b" of Article 193-17 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR provided for liability up to the highest measure for abuse of office under especially aggravating circumstances.
From the above it follows that at the legal level we are talking about responsibility for making extrajudicial decisions on the execution of Polish prisoners of war not of the Stalinist Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, but of the then leadership of the NKVD of the USSR.
Accordingly, the title of the Book of Memory, in which the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks is presented as responsible for the execution in Katyn, is not only incorrect, but illegitimate from the legal point of view.
At the same time, I note that paragraph 60 of the Memorandum of 19.03.2010 stated that “the Government would like to clarify that they did not conduct an investigation into the circumstances of the death of the applicants' relatives”.
This was due to the name of criminal case No. 159, which limited the activities of the investigation to a strict time frame, April-May 1940. It follows from this that Russia did not conduct an investigation into the circumstances of the death or disappearance of 21,857 Polish citizens during the Second World War.
Therefore, the statements of some Russian historians regarding the perpetrators of the death or disappearance of 21 thousand Polish citizens on the territory of the USSR during World War II are their personal opinion and cannot be replicated as the final version of the Katyn tragedy, which the Memorial society has been trying to do for a number of years. The circumstances of the death or disappearance of 21,857 Polish citizens are yet to be investigated.
Nazi rigging in Katyn
It is interesting how the Russian investigation reacted to the results of the Nazi exhumation and identification of 1943? Clause 45 of the Memorandum of 19.03.2010 gives its assessment. “With regard to the exhumations of 1943 in the Katyn Forest, according to archival documents, the Technical Commission of the Polish Red Cross and the International Commission did not identify the recovered remains in accordance with the requirements of the criminal procedure legislation.”
Paragraph 46 continues this assessment. “The list of persons allegedly identified in 1943 was published in the book“Amtliches Material zum Massenmord von Katyn”, published by the German authorities in the same year. This list is not evidence in criminal case No. 159”.
However, it is known that the Nazi list of 2,815 Polish officers, allegedly identified in 1943 in Katyn, formed the basis of the list, according to which, as it was said, the Polish side made 4,071 personal tablets for the Katyn memorial.
In this regard, in paragraph 9 of the Memorandum of 13.10.2010, it was stated that the plaques with the names of Polish officers on the Katyn memorial complex could not serve as evidence of any facts, including the death of Polish citizens, since the Polish side did not ask Russia to obtain or confirm the list of Katyn victims.
It also does not hurt to recall a letter from the Presidium of the Polish Red Cross (PPKK) sent on October 12, 1943 to the International Committee of the Red Cross. It noted that: "… even if the PKK had all the results of the exhumation and identification, including documents and memoirs, it could not officially and conclusively testify that these officers were killed in Katyn."
An irrefutable conclusion about the falsified nature of the Nazi-Polish exhumation and identification in Katyn was made by a professor at Moscow State University. Lomonosov, Doctor of Historical Sciences Valentin Sakharov.
He examined the documents of the German secret police that controlled the exhumation in Katyn, as well as the correspondence of the German Red Cross (GKK), the Polish Red Cross (PKK) and the administration of the Polish General Government regarding the exhumation of the Katyn graves in 1943.
Professor Sakharov also revealed the fact that the Nazi exhumators had "Lists of internees in the Kozelsk NKVD camp" seized by the Nazis in July 1941 in the building of the UNKD in the Smolensk region. This was confirmed by a letter from the German Ministry of Propaganda to the Presidium of the GKK dated June 23, 1943, in which it was reported that the GKK was sending lists of captured Polish officers "found in the GPU of Smolensk."They were needed to check them against the German list of exhumed and identified Katyn victims.
On the basis of these lists, the Nazis were able to provide an incredible and not repeated result of the identification of human remains in Katyn - 67.9%. The main conclusion of Professor Sakharov was as follows. In Katyn, “pimping of unknown corpses with happily acquired documents” was widely practiced, that is, a large-scale falsification was carried out.
Naturally, the lists of “identified” Katyn victims, which the Polish side and the Russian society “Memorial” are trying to use, are falsified. Therefore, it is not surprising that neither Poland nor Memorial is interested in the report on the 9th unknown Polish burial, found outside the memorial complex in the Katyn Forest. It could not have been the work of the Chekists, since it is literally 50 meters from the place where the NKVD rest house stood in 1940.
About this burial on April 12, 2000 and. O. Russian President Vladimir Putin told the then Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski in a telephone conversation. Pani Iolanta Kwasniewska, the wife of the President of Poland, who arrived in Katyn the next day, laid flowers on this grave … According to preliminary estimates, the total number of corpses in the grave ranges from three hundred to a thousand.
However, for 15 years, the Polish authorities have not made any attempts to clarify the situation with the "Polish grave No. 9" in the Goat Hills. Memorial takes a similar position. What's the matter?
Apparently, according to the Nazi-Polish version, all Polish officers from the Kozelsk camp who were shot in Katyn have already been found, identified and buried on the territory of the Polish memorial. There is no longer any place among them for the "new" Katyn victims. The appearance of hundreds of "new" Polish corpses will "bring down" the aforementioned version.
Dubious Katyn Kremlin documents
Well, what about the most important argument of the "Memorial" and Polish so-called historians - "closed package No. 1" with the Katyn documents, allegedly discovered in 1992 in the former archive of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee? Among these documents, a note from the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the USSR Lavrenty Beria to the Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) Joseph Stalin No. 794 / B dated March 1940 with a proposal to shoot 25,700 Polish citizens was found, as well as a note from the Chairman of the KGB of the USSR A. Shelepin to the First Secretary of the Central Committee CPSU N. Khrushchev that the NKVD officers in 1940 shot 21,857 Polish citizens.
However, in spite of these documents, which are extremely serious in name, it is noted in paragraph 62 of the Memorandum of 19.03.2010. "In the course of the investigation it turned out to be impossible … to obtain information regarding the implementation of the decision to shoot specific persons, since all the records were destroyed and it was impossible to restore them."
The above allows us to assert that Russian military prosecutors and experts questioned the authenticity of the entire set of Katyn documents from “closed package No. 1” from the archive of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, which the supporters of the Nazi-Polish version of the Katyn crime like to refer to. And this is no coincidence
In March 2009, E. Molokov's forensic laboratory established that the first three pages of a note by the USSR People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Lavrenty Beria to the Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks Joseph Stalin No. 794 / B dated March 1940 with a proposal to shoot 25.700 Polish citizens were typed on one typewriter and the last fourth page on another.
Moreover, it was established that the font of the fourth page is found on the pages of a number of genuine letters of the NKVD of 1939-40, and the font of the first three pages is not found in any of the original letters of the NKVD of that period that have been identified to date.
This is clear evidence of falsification of the first three pages of Beria's note.
I will add that the circumstances of the actual discovery of the "closed package No. 1" with the Katyn documents also suggest a possible falsification of the Katyn documents. The myth that a certain commission accidentally discovered this package in the archives of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee in September 1992 was dispelled by lawyer and State Duma deputy Andrei Makarov.
Speaking on October 15, 2009 at the round table “Falsification of history and historical myths as an instrument of modern politics”, he said that “closed package No. 1” was handed to him and S. Shakhrai by President Boris Yeltsin, taken from a personal safe. The credibility of this version is confirmed by the fact that it was A. Makarov, together with S. Shakhrai, on October 14, 1992, who submitted the Katyn documents from “closed package No. 1” to the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation.
This version was confirmed in May 2010. Then the applicant, who was known to the deputy from the Soviet period, came to the Deputy of the State Duma Viktor Ilyukhin. He stated that in the early 90s he was recruited to work in a group of high-ranking specialists in forging archival documents concerning important events of the Soviet period, including the Katyn case. This group worked in the structure of the security service of Russian President Boris Yeltsin
To confirm his words, the applicant gave V. Ilyukhin a set of pre-war official forms, a lot of facsimiles, seals and stamps of the Soviet period, as well as drafts of falsified pages of the already mentioned note by Beria No. 794 / B.
Initially, according to these drafts, it was proposed to impute the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks with the decision to shoot not 25,700 Polish citizens (14,700 in camps + 11,000 in prisons), but 46,700 (24,700 in camps + 22,000 in prisons). But, apparently, the head of the falsifiers brigade, realizing the absurdity of such a figure, decided to reduce it and made handwritten corrections to the digital part of the first falsification variant.
Unfortunately, the untimely death of V. Ilyukhin did not allow the scandalous situation to be fully investigated.
Katyn in Strasbourg
In 2012 and 2013. The Nazi-Polish version of the Katyn case received strong support in the form of the Decisions of the Fifth Section of the ECHR of 2012-16-04 and of the Grand Chamber of the ECHR of 2013-21-10 in the case “Yanovets and Others v. Russia” (Katyn case).
Particularly noteworthy is the ECHR judgment of 16.04.2012. In it, the European Court, in violation of its jurisdiction (the ECHR must consider only procedural violations of the provisions of the Convention on Human Rights in respect of the applicants, but not determine the perpetrators of the crime), ignored the Russian legal version of the Katyn events set out in the Memorandums of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation and blamed for the death of 21,857 Polish citizens on the Stalinist leadership of the USSR.
The key point here is 136. It categorically states: “The Court notes that the relatives of the applicants, who were captured after the Soviet Red Army occupied Poland and who were held in Soviet camps, were shot by order of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee in April and May 1940.
The lists of prisoners to be shot were compiled on the basis of the NKVD's "dispatch lists", which mentioned, in particular, the names of the applicants' relatives … execution, it must be presumed that they died in a mass execution in 1940”.
An analysis of the judgment of 16.04.2012 showed that when considering the case “Yanovets and Others v. Russia” the ECHR took an extremely politicized position, and in the judgment itself made so many inaccuracies and obvious mistakes that this casts doubt on its validity.
The situation was aggravated by the fact that the Grand Chamber of the ECHR, after a year and a half, by its Decree of October 21, 2013, upheld the main provisions of the Decree of the Fifth Section, however, excluding the statement that the 1946 Nuremberg Tribunal allegedly rejected the Soviet accusation of the Nazis in the Katyn crime.
In the judgment in the case “Yanovets and Others v. Russia,” the ECHR did not explicitly impose formal legal responsibility on Russia for the Katyn execution. Indeed, if we proceed from the false and illegal decision of the ECHR on the responsibility of the USSR for Katyn, it is clear that in legal terms the Russian Federation, as the legal successor and successor of the USSR, is the heir of legal responsibility for the Katyn crime.
All subsequent claims of the Polish side on the Katyn crime will be addressed to the Russian Federation. It should not be forgotten that the case considered by the ECHR was called “Yanovets and Others v. Russia”.
Strasbourg dilettantes or Russophobes
The content of the ECtHR judgment of 16.04.2012, which has already been mentioned more than once, as the main modern court decision in the Katyn case, deserves a special discussion. A lot can be said about formal inaccuracies in this document. I will only mention a few of them.
The Decree distorted the titles of most of the positions of Soviet leaders and the names of the political and executive bodies of the USSR. This testifies either to the amateurism of the experts of the Secretariat of the ECHR, or to their blatant anti-Sovietism, multiplied by Russophobia.
For example, in paragraph 140, the NKVD is referred to as the "secret police of the Soviet Union." The ECHR is clearly striving to identify the NKVD and the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei - the secret state police). Paragraph 157 of the Resolution gives a derogatory assessment of the Soviet era as "a time of lies and distortion of historical facts."
Clause 18 of the Resolution states that "… in September 1943 the NKVD created a special commission chaired by Burdenko …". This is a primitive lie.
Documents indicate that the Burdenko Commission was created by the decision of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Atrocities of the German-Fascist Invaders and their accomplices on January 12, 1944. The initiative to create the Burdenko Commission came not from the NKVD of the USSR, but from the Agitation and Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) …
Reanimators of the Goebbels case
It should be noted that the ECtHR judgment of 2012-16-04 contains fundamental errors that make it possible to rehabilitate the Nazi version of the Katyn crime, the founder of which was the well-known Nazi forger J. Goebbels.
Thus, paragraph 17 of the Decree erroneously states that in the Katyn forest "an international commission consisting of twelve forensic experts and their assistants … carried out exhumation work in the period from April to June 1943".
It has been reliably established that the experts of the international commission arrived in Katyn on April 28, 1943, and already on April 30, departed for Berlin. During the day they were able to examine only 9 corpses specially prepared for them.
The exhumation works in the Katyn Forest from April to June 1943 were carried out not by members of the International Medical Commission, but by German experts led by Professor G. Butz and representatives of the PAC Technical Commission led by Dr. M. Wodziński.
By paragraph 57 of its Decree, the ECHR actually rehabilitated the results of the German-Polish exhumation of 1943, noting that “it is well known that as a result of the exhumation in 1943, the remains of 4,243 people were found, of which 2,730 were identified”, although in the final version the official German data amounted to 4,143 found and 2,815 identified corpses. But the experts of the ECHR Secretariat do not care about the accuracy of the figures when the task is to get rid of Russia.
The foregoing testifies that the political component in the work of the ECHR more and more prevails every year. Especially if the contentious cases concern Russia, which so far does not sufficiently take into account this aspect of the behavior of the ECHR.
And it should, since the decisions of the ECHR contribute to the formation of a negative image of Russia in the world.