Understanding Katyn

Epitaph tablets honouring Katyn victims outside of Kharkiv, Ukraine

Earlier this month the National Archives of the United States released to the public a massive corpus of declassified documents related to Katyn, the massacre of nearly 22,000 unarmed Polish prisoners by Stalin's secret police in 1940. Obscured by one of the longest and most extensive cover-ups in history, Katyn has been for decades a sodden field of unanswered questions, among them: did the Allies know during the Second World War that the Soviet Union, not Nazi Germany, was responsible for the crime? 

Many of the documents made public on 10 September 2012 shed light on this question. They offer evidence that the Roosevelt Administration likely knew of Stalin's guilt as early as 1943, when the Katyn site was first discovered, and subsequently suppressed that knowledge in order to preserve a fragile wartime alliance with the Kremlin. One of the biggest revelations is a secret communiqué of September 1950 sent by US Army Intelligence to Major Donald B. Stewart, who was one of two American POWs to dispatch coded messages positing Soviet responsibility for the massacre in 1943. "Ref[erring to] Katyn massacre you are directed not to repeat, not to affirm, deny or discuss in any manner the coded report you made," the order reads. "Info pertaining to existence of such reports is highly classified."

The news about these archival disclosures has largely focussed our attention on the Katyn forest in western Russia that gives the tragedy its name. One article even implies that all of the 22,000 executed Polish prisoners are buried there. In reality, however, the majority of these victims perished far from the Katyn forest. They were shot outside of Kalinin (today's Tver) in northwestern Russia, near Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine, and in secret prisons in cities such as Minsk, the Belarusian capital. Today the remains of these victims - the pride and promise of the Polish people - are buried in mass graves throughout Russia, Ukraine and, most likely, Belarus. They lie alongside Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian artists and civic figures; Jews, Catholics and Orthodox; men and women known and unknown. All of them were murdered by the Stalinist regime.

Katyn, in other words, is not simply Katyn. It is Mednoe near Tver and Piatykhatky near Kharkiv, where Polish families and the Polish state have spearheaded the construction of memorials to all of Stalin's victims. It is Bykivnia, the forest on the outskirts of Kyiv where, as we now know, the Soviet secret police buried Polish Katyn victims next to unknown thousands of Ukrainian and other Soviet citizens executed during the Purges. It is likely also Kurapaty, the forest near Minsk containing the remains of tens of thousands of murdered Belarusian and other Soviet citizens that has long been suspected of concealing the remains of the Katyn dead. Today these sites are places of pilgrimage for Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian families alike.

The legacy of Katyn across Eastern Europe is not only material and human. It is also deeply symbolic. Katyn has become a central referential touchstone and descriptive shorthand for other, lesser-known atrocities in the region. There is the "Ukrainian Katyn" of Vinnytsia, the city in central Ukraine where in 1937-8 Stalin's secret police tortured and executed over 9,000 Ukrainians and other Soviet citizens and built a "Gorky Park of Culture and Rest" over their bodies to cover up the crime. There are also the "Lithuanian Katyns" of Kaušėnų and Ablinga, where the Nazis killed a total of nearly 2,000 Jews and other civilians during the Second World War.

As we come to know more about Katyn in the future, as new documents emerge and new theories develop, we would do well to endeavour to understand it in full. Katyn is a Polish national tragedy, but it is also a collective Eastern European tragedy, one that has literally and figuratively touched the entire region. Already observers are bracing for political fallout from this week's discoveries, which may "reignite the intense debate over historical memory and wartime allegiances in Eastern Europe". Yet to understand Katyn is to reject "intense debates" that force easy sides, sow discord, and politicise the past for present gain. Over seventy years on, its lessons remain dialogue, empathy, and solidarity.

Rory Finnin
University of Cambridge

Originally published in the Huffington Post on 12 September 2012

Memory Work and Civil Society

Memory Work and Civil Society, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, 5 December 2011.

In a paper given at Memory at War’s ‘Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe’ conference in July 2011, Jay Winter outlined the important role of memory in bolstering the growing discourse of human rights in post-war Europe. Undoubtedly, in both Western and Eastern Europe, the attention to memory, versus traditionally authority-centred History, was of huge importance in re-evaluating a continent left in ruins by World War II. The cultivation of memory-based human rights discourse has, as Winter pointed out, been carried out to a large degree by activists operating in the sphere of civil society. Such individuals and groups existed in both Western and Eastern Europe, but the challenges they faced were quite different. In the West, the processes of uncovering and preserving the memories of the atrocities of the war, particularly the Holocaust, were central to official discourse and the basis of the creation of unity in Europe. In the Soviet Union and its satellite states, such groups were decidedly anti-official: memory, whether of those repressed by the state, or of alternative versions of the war, was a key element of resistance against communist ideology. With the fall of communism, such groups did not disappear, but came into the open, grew and developed. Today these movements function as influential non-governmental organisations, continuing to preserve memory and, in many cases, cultivate civil society. A number of these groups gathered in Cambridge in December 2011 to exchange experience with one another, with analogous groups from Western Europe, and with academics at the at the workshop ‘Memory Work and Civil Society’, organised by the East European Memory Studies research group, based at Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).

Katyn Museum as Site of Divided Memory: Warsaw Seminar

On 22 June the Social Memory Laboratory at the Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw, hosted a presentation by Piotr H. Kosicki (Department of History, Princeton University) A Divided Memory: A History of the Katyń Museum in Warsaw. The presentation was part of the Social Memory Laboratory’s regular ongoing seminar series.

Sites of Forgetting II, by Andriy Portnov

Somewhat unexpectedly for me, my text about how a ‘Death Tower’ of a Nazi concentration camp for Soviet POWs was transformed into a five-star hotel in Lviv, published a week ago at the ‘History Lessons’ portal, in English translation on the 'Memory at War' collective blog, and in Ukrainian at Polit.ua, prompted a broad response. I received a great many letters and comments, and these have shaped the theme of this essay: the problem of reflecting on sites of forgetting.

Red Army monument in Poland vandalised in response to removal of Katyń cross

The conflict over the removal of the Katyń cross from outside the Presidential Palace in Warsaw has found a new manifestation in the shape of a recently constructed monument to Red Army soldiers in Ossów near Warsaw. The monument has been vandalised twice since it was built earlier this year.

Summer of Memories # 2: Poland - parallel battles

The ongoing fight over whether to remove or keep the makeshift cross, erected outside Poland’s Presidential Palace in Warsaw to commemorate Lech Kaczynski, has been documented elsewhere in this blog (below). Its role in crystallizing discussions about contemporary Polish identity and, broadly defined, the politics of memory, are further highlighted by a comment piece in Gazeta Wyborcza, worth presenting here: ‘Battle of the Cross’ (‘Bitwę pod krzyzem’).

Post-Smolensk Crash Tensions in Poland

Tensions surrounding the aftermath of the Smolensk plane crash hit a peak today in Poland as crowds gathered to prevent the government from relocating a crucifix erected outside the Presidential Palace in Warsaw to commemorate the crash victims.

Putin in Katyn

7 April 2010 marked a premiere – on the invitation of the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the Prime Ministers of Russia and Poland met in the Katyn forest to commemorate the more than 20,000 Polish officers shot there by Soviet forces in 1940. In his address, Putin stated “этим преступлениям не может быть никаких оправданий”. Putin’s words could be a milestone on the path towards a reappraisal of the massacre in Russia. To the present day those shot here are not officially recognised as victims of Stalin’s terror, and many Russians continue to believe in the Soviet propaganda version, according to which the Katyn massacre was committed by German occupation forces and not the NKVD.


See Putin's speech here

For a comment by Arsenii Roginsky, chairman of "Memorial" see here

Tragically, the Polish President and a number of government officials were killed this morning in a plane crash on their way to an official ceremony in Katyn.

Clash in Kyiv over 'Volyn Massacre' Exhibition

Yesterday in Kyiv a group of Ukrainians protested an exhibition at Ukrainian House organised by a 'human rights group' called 'Russophone Ukraine' (Русскоязычная Украина, a project of Party of Regions MP Vadim Kolesnichenko) and the Polish 'Society for Honouring the Memory of the Victims of the Crimes of Ukrainian Nationalists.' Video of the confrontation is embedded above. The exhibition is entitled 'The Volyn Massacre: Polish and Jewish Victims of OUN-UPA [Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army]'. An essay on the memory of the Volyn Massacre among the Ukrainian diaspora by John-Paul Himka can be read here. As with other events of this period, the historical scholarship on the massacre -- not to mention public discourse about it -- is often fraught and lacking in contextualization.

This volatile collision of Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian memories of wartime violence is the focus of our project, 'Memory at War: Cultural Dynamics in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine.'

German-Polish Reconciliation

Władysław Bartoszewski has just published his new book O Niemcach i Polakach. Wspomnienia. Nadzieje. Prognozy (with the help of Rafał Rogulski and Jan Rydel, Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2010) potentially roughly translated into About Germans and Poles. Memories. Hopes. Prospects. Few people have such credentials to write about Polish-German contacts as this survivor of Auschwitz, veteran of the Warsaw Uprising and activist in the underground Council to Aid Jews during the Second World War and later professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in the 1980s, Poland’s foreign minister in 1995 and currently the Polish government’s representative for Polish-German relations. His book traces the evolution of the interactions between the two nations from the war, through the visits to Poland of East German activists of Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (an organisation confronting the legacy of Nazism) and the West German aid to the Polish Solidarity movement, to the Polish-German cooperation after 1989. As reviews of the book suggest, Bartoszewski confirms in it his reputation as a perceptive observer and great story-teller. One can find few more insightful pictures of how much changed between Poland and Germany in the last seventy years. A review of the book can be found here.

Poles and Jews during the Second World War

The passing year brought further contributions to the discussions about the attitudes of Catholic Poles towards the Jews during the Second World War, perhaps the most complex and controversial topic in modern Polish history and one of the most painful and politically charged aspects of collective memory in the country. After the most thoroughly researched Polish study of the Warsaw Ghetto (Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, Getto warszawskie: przewodnik po nieistniejącym mieście, 1st edn. Warsaw, 2001) became available in English owing to the translation by Emma Harris for Yale University Press (The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, New Haven, 2009), its co-author, Barbara Engelking, the director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, together with Dariusz Libionka, the director of the Research Department of the Majdanek State Museum, turned her attention to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Their book Żydzi w powstańczej Warszawie (Warsaw, 2009) explores the place of Jews and Polish freedom fighters’ attitudes towards them during the doomed attempt of the Polish Home Army to liberate Warsaw from the Nazis before its capture by the Red Army. As the authors explain in an interview with the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, their aim was to show “the entire spectrum of [Polish] responses” to the Jews (“My staramy się pokazać całe spektrum postaw”). They conclude that during “the last battle for free Poland, nobody had time for the Jews” (“Rozgrywała się ostatnia bitwa o wolną Polskę, nikt nie miał głowy do Żydów”). The interview can be found here on the website of Gazeta Wyborcza.

CRASSH Launches East European Memory Studies Research Group

Two exciting presentations recently launched the new research seminar series in East European Memory Studies at the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). Andrzej Nowak (Jagiellonian University, Krakow) surveyed two central trends of Polish memory connected to empire. The first trend involved the memory of ‘Polish empire' -- the Jagiellonian dynasty of late Middle Ages, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Second Polish Republic of Joseph Pilsudski, the 2003 Polish occupational zone in Iraq (with its capital in... Babylon) -- while the second involved the memory of 'Poland under empire.' Mark Bassin (University of Birmingham) explored the significance of the Battle of Kulikovo for Russian nationalism in the early 1980s, offering fresh insights into the work of Lev Gumilev and Olzhas Suleimenov.

History Lessons from Putin

by Alexander Etkind
Originally published in the 17 September 2009 edition of The Moscow Times

Soviet ideology was always about the future. By contrast, today’s official Russian ideology seems to be focused squarely on the past.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s recent article for the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza — written to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland — expresses his determination to make 20th-century European history a major part of the Russian government’s business. That article reflects the deep, unresolved problems of Putin’s era: the inability to distinguish between the Soviet past and the Russian present; an unscrupulous mix of political conservatism and historical revisionism; and indifference, bordering on incomprehension, with regard to the key values of democracy.

In his article, Putin did not mourn the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed, he even praised the democratic movements that buried the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence, and he expressed no sympathy for the 20th century’s revolutions, which he called “deep wounds” that humanity inflicted on itself.

What really worries Putin is the balancing of World War II and Stalinism in Soviet history. Calling for a “contextual” and “causal” view of history, he acknowledges the Stalinist terror but interprets it as a response to the extraordinary need to defeat Nazism.

Putin summarizes his understanding of the scale of the war by recalling the loss of “27 million lives of my compatriots.” That number has grown over the years, as Soviet officials broadened the definition of wartime deaths to mean total “population loss,” rather than direct military casualties. Official estimates of Soviet deaths in World War II thus rose from 7 million (the figure put forth under Stalin) to 20 million (Khrushchev) to 26.6 million (Gorbachev), with civilian deaths accounting for at least two-thirds of Putin’s estimate.

Unfortunately, Putin does not explain whom he counts as his compatriots. If he meant those who lived within Russia’s contemporary borders, the number would have been much lower. Instead, he includes all citizens of the Soviet Union who died during the war, including millions of Ukrainians, Belarussians, and others. And, when the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic countries, Königsberg, parts of Poland, Finland, Moldova, and Japan, their citizens, too, became Soviet compatriots.

Moreover, because Putin’s “contextual” history subordinates Soviet-era suffering to the purpose of fighting the Great Patriotic War, his number mixes those who died in battle fighting for the Soviet Union with those whom the Soviets killed through mass murder, deportation, and forced labor. By this logic, one could also reclassify the victims of the terror, collectivization, and famine of the 1930s in order to boost the number of Hitler’s casualties in the Soviet Union.

Putin connects two events that triggered World War II, the Munich Agreement of 1938 and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, in one causal construction. Both acts of collusion with Nazi Germany were immoral mistakes, writes Putin, but the latter was merely a response to the former. To be sure, Britain’s Neville Chamberlain and France’s Edouard Daladier signed a shameful treaty with Hitler and Mussolini in Munich. But when Hitler breached the treaty, both Chamberlain and Daladier lost popular support, and, by the start of World War II, neither was still in office. The dictators remained, however, Molotov and Stalin among them.

Moreover, while the Munich Agreement cynically blessed Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, it was a public document that meant what it said. But the truly important part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was its Secret Protocols, which divided Europe into two imperial domains, Stalin’s and Hitler’s, without the consent — or even the knowledge — of the nations consigned to them. Molotov, who remained in power throughout the war and until 1956, denied the existence of the Secret Protocols until his death 30 years later. Democracies make shameful mistakes, but they eventually correct them, or at least apologize for them. And they dethrone those who got them into trouble.

It is wrong, and even immoral, to equate democratic and dictatorial practices. But this is the new Russian equation.

Cover image from Peter Andrews, Reuters.

Jarosław Kaczyński: Putin 'spun a story'

A strong majority of Poles wanted Prime Minister Putin to apologise yesterday for the 17 September 1939 Soviet invasion of eastern Poland. He made no such apology, but offered a conciliatory hand to Polish readers (and the back of his hand to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko) in letter published yesterday in Gazeta Wyborcza. (The letter has been made available in English translation on Putin's website.) Here is the reaction of former Polish PM Jarosław Kaczyński this afternoon, referring to Putin as "prezydent":

Po pierwsze, nie było przeprosin... Putin snuł pewną opowieść, która jest właściwa dla nacjonalizmu. Rosja Stalina była przedstawiana jako zwykłe państwo. Były oczywiście jakieś przyjazne dla Polski akcenty, ale są one nie satysfakcjonujące.

First of all, there was no apology... Putin spun a story that was suitable for [Russian] nationalism. Stalin's Russia was presented as a normal state. There were some nice sentiments for Poland, but they were not enough.

Kaczyński went on to ask why Putin had been invited to Gdańsk in the first place.

Recent Sorties in the 'Memory War'

A quick update. On May 19, President Medvedev declared the creation of a special commission “to counteract attempts to falsify history that undermine the interests of Russia” (“по противодействию попыткам фальсификации истории в ущерб интересам России"). He did so days after recording this entry on his video-blog marking Victory Day, in which he states (after 3:06) that “attempts to falsify history” about World War II have become increasingly “angry and aggressive.” More about the ukase establishing the commission can be read in these Russian-language articles by RIA Novosti and Vedomosti and in this 11 June opinion piece by Janusz Bugajski from the Wall Street Journal Europe.

Who is responsible for these so-called “angry and aggressive” attempts to “falsify history,” according to the Kremlin? Medvedev has in mind, of course, Ukraine and Poland, who have recently announced a new development in their increasingly collaborative efforts to come to terms with the past.

On 11 June, the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU, Служба безпеки України), which has become a significant actor in the investigation of Soviet crimes in Ukraine, announced that Poland's Institute of National Memory (IPN, Instytut Pamięci Narodowej) has given it a large store of archival documents relating to the activity of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA, Українська повстанська армія) from 1944-47. More about the transfer can be read in this Ukrainian-language article on Korrespondent.net. The SBU noted that this was not the first time it has collaborated with IPN, and these strides in Ukrainian-Polish cooperation on the memory front clearly have the Kremlin feeling defensive.