Glasnost isn’t so open after all. Mikhail Gorbachev’s de-Stalinization campaign ground to a sudden halt when it came face to face with admitting the truth about one of the greatest crimes in history – the Katyn Forest Massacre.
Gorbachev had agreed to appear at a July 8 news conferences in Warsaw with Polish government officials and accept Soviet blame for Stalin’s 1940 murder of 15,000 Polish officers and leaders. The news conference turned out to be a nonevent after Gorbachev’s Kremlin buddies put down their collective boots.
Gorbachev’s glasnost was thus proven again to be a sham. Fortunately, in America we can set the historical record straight.
World War II began when Hitler declared war on Poland on September 1, 1939. On September 17, Stalin invaded Poland. On September 28, the Hitler-Stalin treaty divided Poland, giving the Soviets the eastern half.
From September 1939 through March 1940, the Soviets carried out a deliberate, secret, well-organized plan to separate Polish Army officers, lawyers, doctors, clergy, professionals, government officials, and intellectual leaders from the mass of other Polish prisoners taken by the invading Russian troops. These selected Polish prisoners were placed in three special camps: Kozielsk, Starobielsk, and Ostashkov.
This group of Poland’s military and civilian elite numbered about 15,400. From September-October 1939 until April-May 1940, they were kept heavily guarded by the Soviet NKVD, People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, in contrast to ordinary Polish prisoners who were guarded by regular Russian soldiers.
This six-months’ internment was used for methodical political investigation and observation. Each prisoner was exhaustively interrogated, mostly at night, about the reasons and probably outcome of the war and his attitude toward Russia.
The Soviets were apparently trying to determine if any of these prisoners could be converted to Communism. From this entire group of Poles at the three camps, only six joined the Soviets.
At the end of the investigation, the Soviets encouraged rumors that the prisoners would soon be released to go home. During April and May, groups of 200 to 300 Polish prisoners left the camps each day, or sometimes every other day.
From among these 15,400 Polish prisoners, 400 were taken to another NKVD camp where questioning continued in the hope of converting them to Communism. They were the only ones who survived; not a single one of the 15,000 prisoners was ever heard from again.
You can imagine the numbers of relatives and compatriots of the 15,000 men who tried to locate their whereabouts and find news of what happened to them. The mystery was solved on April 13, 1943 when the Germans conquered the territory called Katyn Forest, which had been until that time in Soviet hands, and discovered the mass graces into which the Russians had buried the Polish officers.
When the graves were opened, the bodies of thousands of Polish officers were unearthed, many in full uniform, some of them shackled. Most had wounds from pistol bullets in the backs of their necks, and some were buried alive.
Into just one of these graves, the Soviet executioners packed the bodies of two generals, 12 colonels, 50 lieutenant colonels, 165 majors, 440 captains, 542 first lieutenants, 930 second lieutenants, and 146 military doctors. That’s how a whole generation, the flower of Polish manhood, was scientifically liquidated by the Communists.
When the world heard this news, the Kremlin tried to blame the ugly deed on the Nazis. But exhaustive investigation by numerous international commissions including the International Red Cross, by a U.S. Congressional committee, and by independent investigators and observers of the bodies, proved conclusively that the Soviets committed this horrendous crime.
The House Select Committee on the Katyn Forest Massacre conducted a nine-month investigation in 1952. It heard, for example, testimony that Stalin’s own son had frankly admitted, “Why those were the intelligentsia, the most dangerous element to us, and they had to be eliminated.”
The verdict of the Congressional committee, as well as of history, was that “beyond any question of reasonable doubt, the Soviet NKVD committed the mass murders of the Polish officers and intellectual leaders in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia,” But glasnost is not open enough to face the truth.
The House Committee reported that the Katyn Massacre was a blueprint for Communist mass murders elsewhere. During the Korean War, hundreds of American soldiers who were taken prisoner by the Communists were shot in the backs of their heads with Soviet-made bullets. And their hands behind their backs were tired with the same tricky knot used on the Polish prisoners at Katyn Forest.
