Katyn: Thèse de Louis Robert Coatney Département d'Histoire, Université d'Illinois, 1993.

Un des rares travaux universitaires sur Katyn. En Europe, on peut compter sur les professeurs pour faire de la propagande favorable aux pays communistes, la plupart d'entre-eux étant sympathisants marxistes, mais c'est toujours le grand silence sur la communisme réel. Ces soi-disant défenseurs d'un monde plus juste se sont fait en réalité les complices des plus grands crimes et massacres qui ont jalonnés la construction du socialisme. Croire aider le peuple pour en réalité aider les bourreaux du peuple, quelle imbécillité….

THE KATYN MASSACRE

AN ASSESSMENT OF ITS SIGNIFICANCE AS A PUBLIC AND HISTORICAL ISSUE IN THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN, 1940-1993

A Thesis Presented to the Department of History Western Illinois University

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts
by Louis Robert Coatney
December 1993

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/history/marshall/military/wwii/special.studies/katyn.massacre/katynlrc.txt

Copyrighted, 1993, by Louis R. Coatney. All rights reserved.

THE KATYN MASSACRE: AN ASSESSMENT OF ITS SIGNIFICANCE AS A PUBLIC AND HISTORICAL ISSUE IN THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN, 1940-1993

Abstract

The Katyn Massacre: A Assessment of Its Significance As A Public and Historical Issue in the United States and Great Britain, 1940-1993.


The purpose of this research is to assess the public, political and historical, scholarly significance of the Katyn Massacre--the extermination of 26,000 Polish officers, cadets, and other officials at Katyn and other killing sites in Russia in Spring 1940. Specifically, the study surveys the historical and contemporary treatment of the Katyn Massacre in the public press and scholarly literature of the United States and Great Britain, 1943-1993.

The struggle to uncover and establish the truth about Katyn, in the face of denials, counteraccusations and/or equivocations by various Soviet governments and by some opinion leaders in Great Britain and the United States--including the leaders and bureaucracies of various Anglo-American governments--is, itself, significant. The Katyn Massacre and its coverup challenged the integrity of our political, academic, and media leaders and institutions. My thesis is that Katyn was obviously significant to those who knew the facts about it, and too many of those leaders and institutions remained indifferent to the issue and failed to grasp its importance.
1

2
Specifically, the Katyn Massacre's horrendous significance and the Soviet Union's responsibility for it was widely disbelieved or ignored, following the Second World War. Until Congressional hearings in 1952, a lack of public information about the massacre can be cited to explain and excuse the scanty coverage and widespread skepticism about Soviet guilt for the killings. After 1952--and certainly after the publication of Dr. Janusz K. Zawodny's book, Death in the Forest, in 1962--Katyn should not have been neglected as it was in many relevant studies: of the politics and diplomacy of the Second World War; of the national diplomacies of Poland and the Soviet Union; or of the Cold War.

Many journalists and scholars were unable or unwilling to report accurately on Katyn and its importance--even in the 1960s and 1970s--for reasons ranging from honest confusion or actual ignorance about the massacre and its implications to motivations that may have been rooted in ideological bias. I describe the implications of this oversight, in respect to the effectiveness and integrity--or lack thereof--of historians, journalists, and government officials in Great Britain and
the United States.

Chapter one describes the killings at Katyn. Chapter two deals with the discovery of the Katyn site as a Second World War war crimes issue. Chapter three analyzes its treatment as a postwar public and political issue in the United States and Great Britain. Chapter four considers Katyn's postwar historical and scholarly treatment in these countries. Chapter five summarizes the historical and political implications for the West of Katyn and similar episodes. A chronological listing of Katyn-related books and articles is appended.

APPROVAL PAGE

This thesis, by Louis Robert Coatney, is accepted in its present form by the Department of History of Western Illinois University, as satisfying the thesis requirement for the degree Master of Arts.

Nicholas C. Pano Chair, Examining Committee
Sterling J. Kernek, Member, Examining Committee
William L. Combs, Member, Examining Committee
____________________
Date

DEDICATION

To Richard Wartman, my Russian professor at Augustana College (Rock Island, IL), 1971-72, who used wit and kindness to spark an appreciation for Russian language and history among his students, even though he had lost an uncle and cousin at Katyn

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the members of my Western Illinois University thesis committee--committee chair Professor Nicholas Pano, a specialist in Eastern European and Albanian history and affairs; diplomatic history scholar Dr. Sterling Kernek; and German and Nazi history expert Dr. William Combs--for all of their time, criticism, and guidance. I also thank Polish-American leader Roman Pucinski, Soviet history authority Robert Conquest, U.S. State Department Soviet affairs strategic analyst Martha Mautner, Katyn scholars Dr. Janusz Zawodny and Robert Szymczak, and many others left unnamed for sharing their time, interest, and resources. Finally, I thank former Alaska Governor Steve Cowper for his unhesitating political courage on the issue of Katyn in Spring 1988.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii

MAPS

1. KOZIELSK, OSTASHKOV, AND STAROBIELSK, WITH KILLING SITES . . . iv

2. KATYN AND GRAVES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

3. THE "CURZON" LINE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi

PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .vii

CHAPTERS

1. INTRODUCTION: THE KATYN MASSACRE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2. KATYN AS A SECOND WORLD WAR ISSUE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

3. KATYN AS A POSTWAR PUBLIC AND POLITICAL ISSUE IN THE WEST . . 40

4. KATYN AS AN HISTORICAL AND SCHOLARLY ISSUE IN THE WEST . . . . 81

5. THE HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF KATYN . . . . . .137

ENDNOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .147

SOURCES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .177

APPENDIX

COVER PAGE OF L. BERIA'S 5 MARCH 1940 MEMORANDUM . . . . . . . . A-1

iii

Map 1. Kozielsk, Ostashkov, Starobielsk and the killing sites

iv

Map 2. Katyn and graves*


*U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, The Katyn Forest Massacre, Hearings before the Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre, Eighty-second Congress, Second Session, on Investigations of the Murder of Thousands of Polish Officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia, Part 6, (Exhibits 32 and 33 Presented to the Committee in London by the Polish Government in Exile, (Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952), 1742.

v

Map 3. The "Curzon" Line*

*Edward J. Rozek, Allied Wartime Diplomacy: A Pattern in Poland, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1958), 347.

vi

PREFACE

Fifty-three years ago, over 4,000 prisoners of war were taken out into a forest in small groups where they were methodically murdered. The victims, encumbered in greatcoats and with their hands tied behind their backs, were forced face down onto the fresh corpses of their comrades, to be likewise shot through the back of the head. A younger few who attempted to resist had self-strangulation knots tied from their hands to their necks. Sawdust was rammed down the gullets of those who screamed and struggled, or their overcoats were tied down around their heads. The small groups became vast, neat stacks of human refuse. 1 At the time, these men and 11,000 others who suffered the same fate at similar killing sites were only known to be missing.

The victims were Polish officers and cadets, about half of whom were reservists from key civilian professions: doctors, lawyers, teachers, clergymen, and the like. 2 They represented the leading, educated elements--"the best and the brightest"--of Polish society. The place and time of their slaughter was the Russian forest village of Katyn near Smolensk in the Spring of 1940. At that time, their families' contact with them (by mail, to the Soviet internment camps where they were being detained) ceased with no explanation. They simply disappeared, until their mass graves were discovered and publicized by the Nazi government, whose troops occupied the area in April 1943.

vii

viii
The intended purpose of this study is not to condemn the Russian people (or any other former Soviet peoples) for the Katyn killings, or to promote the punishment of any surviving executioners. It should be remembered that over 30,000 of the best and most forwardthinking Soviet officers of the Red Army were similary exterminated in the late 1930s--greatly facilitating the Nazi German invasion in 1941. 3 Before the Katyn Massacre, the Russian people themselves had suffered far worse holocausts from Stalinism, numerically. 4 Forcing the now-aged NKVD executioners to remember and relive the details of their crimes and victims is far more vital and justice-serving, historically and morally, than punishing them in the conventional sense.

Nor, in an age of a cheapening surplus of human life which is critically over-burdening an increasingly exhausted and fragile natural environment, is it the primary purpose of this paper to condemn mass killing as an unnecessary and immoral instrument of state policy. 5 Rather, the purpose of this study is to assess the public and political and the historical and scholarly significance of the Katyn Massacre and its prolonged coverup. Specifically, the study will survey the contemporary and historical treatment of the Katyn Massacre episode and will assess its significance, both in the public press and the scholarly literature of the United States and Great Britain. "Significance" can be defined in two ways. One interpretation of the "significance" of an event can be the public recognition of its importance. Some may claim that something is not significant if its importance is not generally known. It is easy to believe this in our present age which has been dominated by news media which seem so all-

ix

pervasive and omnipotent. "Damage control" and "spin control" have become essential, recognized survival skills for a political leader or institution.

Until the early 1950s, for reasons described later in this study, Katyn's power and danger were realized only by the Poles, the Soviet leadership, and a few political and intellectual leaders around the world. It is true that there are episodes in history that become known and significant because they are politically useful and used. Some-times, it is difficult to tell whether history begets political events or political events beget history. (Indeed, the two often cannot be separated.) However, an event (and the truth about it) is sometimes so historically and politically powerful and compelling--intrinsically significant--that it cannot be controlled, contained, or ignored.

The Katyn Massacre has proven to be a sterling example of this. Its nature and implications exerted this kind of inexorable power and impact on the peoples and institutions of Poland, of the Soviet Union and other nations under its control, and of the West. The Katyn Massacre was a politically motivated, mass ethnic killing that has important political relevance and ramifications, for academic as well as civic spheres.

The struggle to uncover and establish the truth about Katyn, in the face of denials and counteraccusations by various Soviet governments and by some opinion leaders in the West--including leaders and bureaucracies of various Western governments--is, itself, significant. The Katyn Massacre and its coverup challenged the integrity of political, academic, and media leaders and institutions in the United States and Great

x

Britain. In retrospect, we see that too many failed the test of Katyn.

The horrendous significance of the Katyn Massacre and of the Soviet Union's responsibility for it was widely disbelieved or ignored during the immediate postwar years. Until Congressional hearings in 1952, a lack of public information about the massacre can be cited to explain and excuse the scanty coverage and widespread skepticism. After 1952--and certainly after the publication of Dr. Janusz K. Zawodny's book, Death in the Forest, in 1962--Katyn should not have been neglected as it was in many studies of Poland or the Soviet Union; of the politics and diplomacy of the Second World War; of the national diplomacies of Poland, the Soviet Union, Germany, Great Britain, or the United States; or of the Cold War.6

I also intend to demonstrate that many reputable scholars were unable or unwilling to report accurately on Katyn and its importance--even in the 1960s and 1970s--for reasons ranging from honest confusion or actual ignorance about the Katyn Massacre and its implications to motivations that may have been rooted in ideological bias.

Finally, I shall describe the grave and enduring implications of this oversight, regarding the effectiveness and integrity--or lack thereof--of historians, journalists, and government officials in the West.

NOTES

PREFACE pp. vii-xi

1. Louis Fitzgibbon. Katyn. (New York: Scribner's, 1971), 102-3.
2. Stewart Steven, The Poles, (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 135; and Allen Paul, Katyn, The Untold Story of Stalin's Polish Massacre, (New York: Scribner's, 1991) 224.
3. David M. Glantz, Soviet Military Operational Art: In Pursuit of Deep Battle, (London: Frank Cass, 1991), 88-90.
4. The most reputable estimate, thus far, was done by Dr. Iosif (Joseph) Dyadkin, a geophysicist in Kalinin, in 1976. From birth and death rates, Dyadkin conservatively estimated that up to twenty million people had died of political persecution from 1927 to 1940. The post-Soviet examination of NKVD/KGB archives may drive that figure up much
higher. Iosif G. Dyadkin, Unnatural Deaths in the USSR, 1928-1954, (New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Books, 1983), 60.
For his statistical efforts, Dr. Dyadkin was sentenced in 1981 to three years in a labor camp. In the conclusion of his introduction, Nick Eberstadt--a translator of Dyadkin's little book and a faculty member at the Harvard Center for Population Studies--observed, "Iosif Dyadkin has become a victim of the terror apparatus whose results he
attempted to quantify." Ibid., 9-10.
5. Specifically, this author believes that the relative priority of worldwide concern about human rights and (economic and social) justice will decline precipitously, as our environmental and social crises (resulting from human overpopulation and wantonness) become more acute.
6. Janusz K. Zawodny, Death in the Forest: The Story of the Katyn Forest Massacre, (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame, 1962).

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: THE KATYN MASSACRE

Documents found only recently, in 1992, have certified the identity of those who ordered the Katyn Massacre of April-May 1940. They point the finger of guilt to the collective membership of the Soviet Politburo, dominated by Communist dictator Iosif Vissarianovich Stalin. The killings resulted from the recommendation of Politburo member Lavrenti Beria, the dreaded chief of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. 1

There were a number of motives for the killings. Foremost was the "liquidation"--the Communist euphemism for extermination--of the social and intellectual leadership elites of Poland, as the initial step to eliminating that independent, anti-Soviet (and, historically, frequently anti-Russian) nation, permanently. In 1939, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov had gloated, "One swift blow to Poland, first by the German Army and then by the Red Army, and nothing was left of this bastard of the Versailles Treaty." 2

Specifically, Beria suggested to the Soviet Politburo that the Polish officers be exterminated, since they were ". . . involved in anti-Soviet propaganda. Each of them is only waiting for his release from imprisonment in order to enter into a struggle against Soviet power." 3

1

Indeed, the Poles were hardly model prisoners and imprudently ridiculed their Soviet guards and indoctrination cadre members to their faces. 4 Their attitude now seems incredibly naive--even arrogantly stupid, considering that the Bolsheviks' record of atrocities was well known to them. Yet, the Poles apparently believed that the West--specifically, the British and French--were actively concerned about them, being interested in their future usefulness, and would not abandon them. A "white paper" submitted to the 1952 U.S. Congressional hearings on Katyn by the Polish Government-in-Exile describes this misassumption: With a few exceptions, the morale of the prisoners at Kozielsk appeared to be good. Firmly believing in the ultimate victory of justice and trusting implicitly in Poland's Western Allies, the prisoners hoped for a quick release from Soviet captivity and the granting of facilities either to return to Poland or to make their way through a neutral state to join the forces fighting in the West. 5

A rumour circulated in the camp that General Zarubin himself had said to one of the prisoners. "You have too many protectors, so you cannot go". The prisoners interpreted this remark as meaning that Britain and France did not want them to be returned to German-occupied Poland, as they were anxious to get them to the West. It was even said that Britain had asked the Soviets to send the Poles to the West and had offered to pay the expenses of their detention in Russia and that the Soviets were bargaining over the price. Rumours of this kind, which made the prisoners feel that they were an object of concern to the outside world helped considerably to keep up morale in the camp. 6

Their faith in the West proved to be pathetically ill-advised. Although the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941--"Operation Barbarossa"--forced Stalin to obtain material assistance from the West and concede the reestablishment of a postwar Poland independent in name (if not in fact), the extermination of the Polish intelligentsia facilitated another motive for the Soviet crime, the intended (and eventual) Soviet subjugation of Poland. As former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1960, "The Nazi and Soviet extermination policies, which had decimated the Polish intelligentsia, the usual source of the political elite, had badly weakened the nation as a whole, decreasing its capacity for resistance." 7

Stalin himself had a deep grudge against Poland and its intelligentsia. It stemmed in part from that nation's military victories over Bolshevik armies, to which Stalin was attached as a political commissar, in the Russo-Polish War of 1919-20. 8

Another motive for the extermination of the Polish officers was Stalin's effort to appease his Nazi ally, Hitler. The second, secret protocol of the Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact of 23 August 1939 had provided for the fourth partition of Poland, dividing it between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. While the Germans invaded Poland, in defiance of the British and French, and effectively began the Second World War on 1 September 1939, the Soviets did not attack the Poles until 6:00 AM, 17 September 1939. 9 Although the Poles were by then already collapsing under the weight of the German onslaught, Polish Army units in the East fought, and in a few cases won, some pitched battles with the Red Army units advancing from the East. Against such overwhelming military odds, though, there obviously could be only one result, and Poland surrendered on 27 September 1939.

While the British reaction to the German invasion of Poland had been to declare war, their reaction was noticeably more circumspect and indulgent toward the Soviet invasion. One example was this quote from The Times of London:

Lloyd George, who had always been regarded by the Poles as hostile to their cause, justified his reputation with a suitable piece of invective in the Sunday Express. Under the heading "What is Stalin up to?" he criticized the "class-ridden Polish government" and praised the Soviet government for "liberating their kinsmen from the Polish yoke." 10 At a somewhat later stage, on 11 November 1939, Picture Post captured the careful distinction fostered by many British officials, in referring to "The Nazi Army of invasion and the Russian Red Army of intervention . . . ." 11

The Katyn Massacre occurred in the context of a Polish holocaust on a par with the Jewish Holocaust. It is estimated that 5,384,000 Poles, including Polish Jews, died during the German occupation through slave labor exhaustion, disease and starvation, repression of resistance, or outright extermination. The first victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp were Polish. The first gassing at Auschwitz was performed upon 300 Polish and 700 Soviet prisoners of war. 12 An estimated total of 6,028,000 Poles -- 22 percent of Poland's population -- died in the Second World War. Half of the victims were Jewish.13

The Nazis launched a calculated campaign to exterminate the educated elite of Polish society and racially undesirable elements. The German Army perpetrated this massacre, as well as the more intently genocidal Nazi SS. 14 There were plans to exterminate the Poles entirely, after they had outlived their usefulness and the Jews had already been annihilated. Polish children were not allowed to go to high school or college. The Catholic Church in Poland was suppressed. 15 Ironically, though, many of the Polish officers who were Jewish did avoid the Holocaust and survive the war, having been in the custody of the regular German Army Wehrmacht, rather than that of the Nazi SS. 16

The method of capture, detention, and extermination of Poles by the Soviets is also important to consider. These victims were not just Polish officers and cadets who had surrendered to the Red Army in the field. They also included reservists and other officials who had been arrested in their homes in the Soviet-occupied zone of Poland. 17 As it was, many Polish officers had been murdered immediately upon their capture, in spite of Soviet assurances of good treatment, particularly when their units had successfully battled against the Soviet invasion. Polish civilians suffered many Red Army atrocities as well. 18

Conditions in the Soviet-held territories were so ghastly that some resident Jews actually petitioned--a few successfully, tragically--to be transferred to the German-occupied zone. 19 In the Ukraine during the confusion of the changeover, Ukrainian nationalists occasionally took revenge on the ethnic Poles in their region. In time, these killings were investigated and punished by the Soviets who had as little use for Ukrainian nationalists as for Poles. 20 Later, during the German occupation, the Ukrainians and Poles fought pitched battles against each other. 21

There were approximately 15,000 Polish officers and cadets captured by the Soviets in September-October 1939. Many of them were reservists who in civilian life were professionals such as doctors, lawyers, college professors, etc. They were incarcerated in three internment camps: Kozielsk (southwest of Moscow), Ostashkov (between Moscow and Leningrad), and Starobielsk (southeast of Kharkov). At the Kozielsk camp there were 262 Poles of Jewish descent. There was also one woman, Polish aviatrix Janina Lewandowski.

Of the captive Poles, only 448 seemed to the Soviets to be receptive to political collaboration. Initially, and during the winter (of 1939/40), the NKVD appeared to be trying to convert the Poles to Stalinist Communism. However, the interrogation and indoctrination sessions were too crude, dogmatic, and alien for most of the loyal, sophisticated Poles to accept. Eventually, the NKVD separated the potential collaborators from the thousands of loyal Poles. Then, in April-May 1940, having been given food and assurances that they were to be repatriated home, the Poles were shipped out by train, in groups of a hundred or so at a time.

The destinations of most of these prisoners were three separate killing sites. Katyn was the terminus for the Kozielsk inmates. The other points were similarly railheads, near Kalinin for the Ostashkov prisoners and near Kharkov for the Starobielsk captives. Only recently have the locations of these other mass graves been verified. 23 The 448 potential collaborators were transported by train to Pawlishtchev Bor, located between Kozielsk and Smolensk.

The NKVD executioners were brutally efficient, having refined their methods on many thousands of Russian social, political, and military purge victims in the previous decades. It was simply an occupational routine for the killers, and some wore special attire, similar to that of butchers.24 Apparently, there were also a few especially vicious or fanatical thugs who took delight in sadistically abusing these members of the Polish elite, as they murdered them. 25

Until Spring 1940, some of these officers' families had been corresponding with them. Thereafter, the families' mail was returned as undeliverable. Inquiries about the missing officer prisoners from the Polish Government-in-Exile, in London, and from the British government went unanswered by the Soviet government. In December 1940 (after the German overrunning of France in the Summer of 1940) at a reception for the leaders of the pro-Soviet Polish officers, NKVD chief Beria and his deputy, Vsevolod N. Merkulov, both enigmatically admitted that a "great mistake" had been made in the case of the other Polish officers.26

There had been meetings in March 1940, during which the Soviet NKVD shared its well-practiced terror and extermination technology with the Nazi SS. (The only Nazi "improvement" over Soviet extermination methods was the use of poison gas.) Professor George Watson has concluded that the fate of the interned Polish officers may have been decided at this conference, which according to him was held in Cracow. 27 In his 1991 book, Stalin: Breaker of Nations, historian Robert Conquest stated that the conference had taken place at Zakopane in the Winter of 1939/40. 28 While it may seem to be grimly amusing and fair justice that the Nazis would ultimately turn these extermination techniques against the NKVD, political commissars, and other Stalinists that they caught, the terminal horror suffered by so many millions of innocent Jewish, Slavic, and other European peoples as a result of this meeting of evil minds is an indelible stain on the history and integrity of Western "civilization," with all of its humanitarian pretensions. 29

According to Watson, the fate of the Polish officers in Soviet custody was probably discussed during the conference. This would have been a significant factor in Stalin's decision to exterminate them, considering how slavishly he adhered to his pact with Hitler. (In spite of warnings from the British and Americans of imminent Nazi attack, trainloads of Russian raw materials were being faithfully sent to the Germans, right until the very moment of Hitler's 22 June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. 30 The NKVD even turned over, to the German Gestapo, German Communists who had been living in the Soviet Union. 31)

However, considering Stalin's predilection for mass murder as a political tool and his hatred of the Poles, he certainly would have had no hesitation about annihilating them, anyway. Even Stalin's daughter, Svetlana, noted his peculiar obsession with a much earlier forest death of Polish officers in the Russian folk opera, "Ivan Susanin."32

From Soviet-occupied Poland, Poles considered potentially subversive--including women and children--were shipped off in the 1940-41 period to live in primitive camps in the Soviet Union. According to Polish sources, these captives numbered over a million. The categories of Poles considered potentially subversive even included stamp collectors and Esperantists.33 Two- or three-hundred-thousand Poles, an estimated quarter of the number exiled to the Soviet Union, perished in the Soviet Union.34

In contrast, in his recent, critical biography of Stalin, General Dmitri Volkogonov, quoted a 2 November 1945 NKVD memorandum to Stalin giving 494,310 as the figure of "former Polish citizens arrived in the Soviet Union." Later, the NKVD document mentioned 389,382 "men" being held in Soviet "prisons, camps and places of exile." Volkogonov added to this account that "None of the documents I have seen on Polish citizens, who were on Soviet territory at Stalin's will, contain accurate figures of those who were either killed or died." 35

In any case, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov's remark about "wiping out all remains of this misshapen offspring of the Versailles treaty," during a session of the Supreme Soviet in October 1939, was indicative of the annihilatory nature of Soviet intentions toward the nation of Poland. 36

Initiating the destruction of a nation by exterminating its leadership classes is consistent with the standard definition of "genocide." 37 The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the resulting, initially desperate need for cooperation and assistance from Great Britain and the United States would later force Stalin to accept the continued existence of a Poland in some political form and in some westward, displaced location. However, the original, genocidal intent of the Katyn Massacre remains evident. The current Polish government apparently agrees, judging by the title, Katyn. Dokumenty Ludobojstwa (Katyn: Documents of Genocide), of its reprinting of the 1940 Soviet documents authorizing the massacre. 38

NOTES

1. Vera Tolz, "The Katyn Documents and the CPSU Hearings," Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Report, No. 44, 6 November 1992, 27-38.
2. Isvestiya, 1 November 1939; as quoted in Paul, 64.
3. Tolz, 31.
4. U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. The Katyn Forest Massacre, Hearings before the Select Committee to Conduct an Investigation of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre, Eighty-second Congress, Second Session, on Investigations of the Murder of Thousands of Polish Officers in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia, Part 6, (Exhibits 32 and 33 Presented to the Committee in London by the Polish Government in Exile, (Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952), 1651.
5. Ibid., 1651.
6. Ibid., 1651n.
7. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 9.
8. "Stalin also hated the Poles. They had defeated Lenin in 1920 when the Red Army had been humiliated before Warsaw and forced to retreat far into White Russia and the Ukraine." (Norman Stone, "Katyn: The Heart of Stalin's Darkness," The Sunday Times [London], 15 April 1990.)
9. Edward J. Rozek, Allied Wartime Diplomacy: A Pattern in Poland, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1958), 34. By invading Poland, the Soviets violated their 1932 nonaggression pact with Poland (which had been extended to 31 December 1945), as well as the 1929 Treaty of Paris, outlawing war, which they had signed. Ibid., 18-9, 35.
10. Times (London), 23 September 1939, as cited in Keith Sword, "Soviet Occupation of Eastern Europe," Slavonic and East European Review, January 1991, 93.
11. Sunday Express, 24 September 1939, as cited in Keith Sword, "Soviet Occupation of Eastern Poland," Slavonic and East European Review, January 1991, 81-101.
12. Lukas, Forgotten Holocaust, 38.
13. Richard C. Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation, 1939-1944, (Lexington KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1986, 38-9.
14. Ibid., 8-9.
15. Ibid., 5.
16. Simon Schochet, An Attempt to Identify the Polish-Jewish Officers Who Were Prisoners in Katyn, (New York: Yeshiva University, 1989), 16.
17. Zawodny, 5.
18. Wladyslaw Anders, An Army in Exile, (London: Macmillan, 1949), 10-1.
19. Rozek, 50.
20. Israel Goldfliess, "Outbreak of the German-Russian War," in B.F. Sabrin, Alliance for Murder: The Nazi-Ukrainian Nationalist Partnership in Genocide (New York: Sarpedon, 1991), 44.
21. Joseph Einleger, "The Annihilation of the Trembowla Jewish Community," in Sabrin, 138-9.
22. Schochet, 3.
23. Robert Conquest, interview by Louis R. Coatney, 18 June 1992.
24. Nicholas Bethell, "The Cold Killers of Kalinin," The Times (London), 6 October 1991, 23.
25. Eugenjusz Andrei Komorowski, Night Never Ending, (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1974), 120.
26. Zawodny, 149-50.
27. George Watson, "Rehearsal for the Holocaust?," Commentary, June 1981, 60. Watson was a Cambridge University history professor.
28. Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations, (New York: Viking, 1991), 229.
29. A couple of the principal histories of the Russian Front -- The Great Patriotic War, as the Russian people remember it--provide interesting contrasts, regarding the order to execute captured Soviet political commissars: "The directive dated May 12, 1941, requiring instant killing of all captured political workers, is one of the most disgraceful documents issued by the German High Command." P.N. Pospelov and others, eds., Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 1941-1945: A General Outline (Moscow: Progress, 1974), 28; "The liquidation of the commissars, communist intelligentsia, gypsies, Jews and civilian hostages in the early stages of the war was to be followed by Fuehrerbefehle, . . . . The Soviet High Command and Red Army troops were of course equally guilty of similar barbarity. Never in modern times was a war to be waged so piteously." Albert Seaton, The Russo-German War 1941-45 (New York: Praeger, 1970), 55. Stalin's prewar trials and executions or enslavements of "enemies of the people" were no secret, particularly to those who supported him -- in the Soviet Union or in the West.
30. John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad, (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 107n.
31. Boris Levytsky, The Uses of Terror: The Soviet Secret Police, 1917-1970, (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1972), 150.
32. Svetlana Alliluyeva, Only One Year, (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 390.
33. Rozek, 39.
34. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 612.
35. Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, edited and translated by Harold Shukman, (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 360-1.
36. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, (New York: Summit Books, 1982), 341-2. This quotation is an interesting contrast to another, similar one by Molotov on Page 1 of this study.
37. "1: the use of deliberate systematic measures (as killing, bodily or mental injury, unlivable conditions, prevention of births) calculated to bring about the extermination of a racial, political, or cultural group or to destroy the language, religion, or culture of a group . . . ." Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged, (Springfield MA: Merriam-Webster, 1986.
38. Katyn. Dokumenty Ludobojstwa (Katyn: Documents of Genocide), (Warsaw: Instytut Studiow Politycznych PAN, 1992); as cited in Louisa Vinton, "The Katyn Documents: Politics and History," Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty Research Report 2, January 1993, 19n.