Is it true that The Polish officers at Katyn were shot by Nazi troops in 1940?

For more than half a century the USSR claimed that the Polish officers in the Katyn Forest had been shot by the Germans in 1941. That is a lie, refuted by the Kremlin's own documents. In reality some 22,000 Polish prisoners of war and detainees were killed by the Soviet NKVD in the spring of 1940 — on a Politburo decision signed personally by Stalin. Part of the victims were shot in Ukraine, in Kharkiv, and buried at Piatykhatky, while prisoners from Ukrainian jails were buried at Bykivnia near Kyiv. Katyn is a textbook example of how the Soviet state falsified history for decades, pinning its own crime on the enemy.

The Katyn Massacre of 1940

The myth and how easily it collapses

Soviet — and now Russian — propaganda claimed for decades that the mass graves of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk were the work of the Nazis, who supposedly shot the prisoners in the summer of 1941. In a street debate, Vitaliy Dribnytsia demolishes this myth with a single logical blow: the executions near Smolensk, in Kharkiv and elsewhere took place already in 1940 — but German troops did not reach those territories until 1941. So the Germans physically could not have done it: the killers were Soviet soldiers, the NKVD, acting on the decision of a special “troika”^[1]. This is not a hypothesis — Russia itself officially handed the documents about these executions to the Polish side in the 1990s^[2].

What actually happened

In the autumn of 1939, after the joint partition of Poland with Nazi Germany, the USSR took hundreds of thousands of Polish servicemen prisoner. Officers, police, border guards and members of the intelligentsia were gathered in three main camps — Kozelsk, Starobilsk and Ostashkov — and in the prisons of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus.

On 5 March 1940, People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs Lavrentiy Beria submitted a note to Stalin proposing to shoot about 25,700 of these prisoners as “sworn enemies of Soviet power.” That same day the Politburo of the CC of the AUCP(b) took the decision to execute them — it bears the signatures of Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan and Kalinin. In the spring of 1940 the NKVD shot — with a bullet to the back of the head — 21,857 people (per the 1959 report of KGB head Shelepin). The motive, historians assess, was coldly pragmatic: to deprive a future Poland of its military and intellectual elite.

The executions took place in several locations, each tied to a specific camp:

prisoners of the Kozelsk camp were taken to the Katyn Forest near Smolensk (which gave the crime its general name);
officers of the Ostashkov camp were executed in the internal prison of Kalinin (Tver) and buried at Mednoye;
prisoners of the Starobilsk camp were killed in Kharkiv.

The Ukrainian dimension of Katyn

Katyn is not only a “Russian–Polish” story. A significant part of the crime was committed on Ukrainian soil. Captured officers from the Starobilsk camp (in today’s Luhansk region) were transported by rail to Kharkiv, shot in the internal prison of the Kharkiv NKVD, and secretly buried in the Piatykhatky forest park — about 3,800 people. A memorial stands there today, one of the four principal Katyn burial sites.

Separately, there is the Ukrainian Katyn List — a register of 3,435 Polish citizens shot by the NKVD in the prisons of Western Ukraine under the same Politburo decision of 5 March 1940. Ukraine officially handed this list to Poland on 5 May 1994. Their bodies lie at Bykivnia near Kyiv — a site of mass graves of Soviet-terror victims that Poles call the “fourth Katyn.” So Katyn is a story both about Ukrainian land turned into a killing ground by the Soviet state, and about the very same repressive apparatus that destroyed Ukrainians too (see the “Executed Renaissance”).

Half a century of lying

The most telling thing about Katyn is not only the crime itself but how long and how insistently it was concealed. In 1943, after the Germans discovered the graves and announced Soviet guilt, the USSR denied everything. What is more, it was the Katyn question itself that ruptured the Soviet-Polish alliance: when the government-in-exile of General Władysław Sikorski demanded an independent investigation by the International Red Cross, Stalin used this as a pretext and on 25 April 1943 severed diplomatic relations with the Polish government, accusing the Poles of a “conspiracy” with Berlin (in the debate Dribnytsia dates the break vaguely — to “late ‘43 or ‘44” — whereas it was in fact April 1943, and not the Tehran Conference, as his interlocutor had supposed)^[3]. And in 1944 the Soviet authorities set up a special Burdenko Commission, which, with a foregone conclusion, “established” that the Poles had been shot by the Germans in August 1941. The Kremlin officially maintained this version for more than forty years and even tried to enshrine it at the Nuremberg trials.

The truth broke through slowly, and only under the pressure of the system’s collapse:

On 13 April 1990 a TASS communiqué acknowledged the NKVD’s responsibility for the first time; Mikhail Gorbachev handed over part of the documents and confirmed the burials at Mednoye and Piatykhatky.
In October 1992 an envoy of Boris Yeltsin handed Poland the declassified “Special File No. 1” — Beria’s own note and the Politburo decision of 5 March 1940 with Stalin’s signature. It was the documentary “smoking gun.”
On 26 November 2010 the Russian State Duma adopted a statement directly placing the blame on Stalin and the Soviet leadership.

But even then the KPRF faction voted against and went on denying Soviet responsibility — the “Katyn lie” has survived to our days. In Putin’s Russia, Katyn is once again increasingly turned into a matter of “doubts,” and the memorials into a platform for revanchist propaganda.

Why this matters

Katyn is the model of Soviet — and now Russian — historical policy in its purest form: commit a mass murder, spend decades pinning it on the enemy, destroy and forge documents, and when the lie becomes unbearable, admit the minimum and immediately begin a new cycle of “doubts.” The same method — claim others’ achievements as your own and offload your own crimes onto others — underlies both the cult of the “Great Victory” and the justifications of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the shared-with-Hitler starting point of the Second World War. Katyn matters precisely because here the lie is refuted not by interpretation but by the executioner’s own signature — a Politburo decision that the Kremlin itself made public.