What was distinctive about Katyn? The massacres in context.

• Author: Kramer, Mark
• Position: Confronting Complexities Through the Diversity of International Law

1. INTRODUCTION II. UNTANGLING THE COVER-UP III. THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORICAL JUSTICE I. INTRODUCTION

   The Katyn massacres must be understood in their proper historical context: the context not only of Soviet domestic politics, but also of Soviet occupation policy in the swaths of Eastern Europe that fell under Soviet military rule from September 1939 to June 1941. (1)

   In the USSR in the 1930s, mass killing had become a way of life under Joseph Stalin. (2) In the brutal de-kulakization and forced collectivization campaigns from 1929 to 1934, millions of peasants were killed, and millions more starved to death in famines that were the direct result of Stalin's policies. (3)

   During the mass terror in the Soviet Union in the latter half of the 1930s, the Soviet NKVD security apparatus became proficient in shooting vast numbers of people as rapidly as possible. In just sixteen months, from August 1937 through November 1938, the NKVD shot to death some 800,000 people in the USSR, most of whom were not Communists. (4) This rate of mass killing in peacetime, with more than 50,000 people shot to death every month--1,700 every day--is one of the most egregious cases of state-perpetrated murder in the long list of atrocities committed in the twentieth century. Among the 800,000 shot were nearly 250,000 (including more than 110,000 Poles) whose only "crime" was to belong to a particular ethnic group that had fallen into disfavor with Stalin. (5) Mass deportations of ethnic groups in the Soviet Union, starting with some communities of ethnic Poles in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine in 1932-1936, (6) and then more sweepingly with ethnic Koreans and Finns in 1937, (7) also resulted in the deaths of untold numbers of people. Mass terror and mass killing became standard operating procedures for the Stalinist regime and the NKVD throughout the 1930s. (8)

   Viewed in that context, the Katyn massacres, affecting roughly 22,000 Polish military personnel and civilians, hardly seem especially significant. Millions of people in the USSR who died at Stalin's hands, including millions of Russians, have never been memorialized.

   However, in the context of Soviet occupation policy in 1939-1941, (9) the Katyn massacres do stand out. When Soviet troops moved en masse into eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Bessarabia after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the occupation regimes they established were brutal, killing many people and deporting huge numbers of others to desolate prison camps in Siberia and the Arctic region. (10) But even though Soviet forces in the occupied regions committed atrocities on a regular basis, they generally did not carry out systematic executions of thousands of people at a time. Katyn in that sense was an anomaly in Soviet occupation policy and was soon perceived as such by some key Soviet officials and their Polish Communist counterparts.

   For example, the Polish Communist military officer Zygmunt Berling, who had fallen into Soviet captivity in 1939 and was imprisoned in Starobielsk and Moscow in 1939-1940 before moving on to become a key figure in Poland's Communist-era army, recounts an episode in his memoirs that sheds interesting light on how at least a few Soviet leaders soon came to view Katyn. (11) Berling, who avoided execution himself in 1940 by agreeing to cooperate with the Soviet NKVD, describes a meeting he and two other Polish Communist officers had in Moscow in January 1941. (12) This meeting was first publicly disclosed in U.S. congressional hearings in the early 1950s in two different versions: one provided by Jozef Czapski, a Polish army captain who apparently heard about the meeting from the Polish army commander General Wtadyslaw Anders, and the other by Henryk Szymanski, a U.S army colonel and military intelligence officer, who obtained a document about the meeting from General Anders. (13) Of the two accounts, Czapski's is more accurate, though the date that both he and Szymanski give for the meeting--the fall of 1940--is earlier than the January 1941 date cited in the authoritative version of Berling's posthumously published memoir. (14)

   Berling in his memoir...