Katyn: a Russian perspective.

From Novosti, commentary addressing the Katyn massacre:

The facts of the [Katyn] matter seemed to have been finally established in 1990, when TASS issued its first statement on the Katyn tragedy. It admitted that the officers imprisoned by the Red Army during partition of Poland had been killed by the NKVD. Two years later, Boris Yeltsin handed Polish President Lech Walesa materials from a secret folder, which successive Communist Party general secretaries had kept under lock and key. This file included an excerpt from protocol #13 of the Central Committee Politburo session of March 5, 1940, which passed a death sentence on Polish officers, policemen, government officials, landlords, factory owners and other "counterrevolutionary elements" who were kept in forced labor camps (14,700) and prisons in western Ukraine and Byelorussia (11,000).

The same protocol ordered a review of cases, in absentia and without filing charges. As a result POWs from the Kozel camp were shot in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, while those detained in Starobelsk and Ostashkov were taken to local execution sites. In a secret memo to Nikita Khrushchev in 1959, KGB chief Alexander Shelepin reported that about 22,000 Poles had been killed. More than 200,000 relatives of POWs, and almost as many Poles from the "Soviet-liberated" territories were deported to exile in Kazakhstan, Siberia and the North.

These are hard facts. After 50 years of secrecy and cover-up, the Soviet and Russian presidents admitted the Stalinist regime's responsibility for this heinous crime.

Read the whole commentary here.

Russia Poland Katyn Wajda Stalin