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Russia posts Katyn massacre documents online

28 April 2010 19:57 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. The publication of Soviet documents about Russia’s 1940 massacre of Polish officers is the latest diplomatic gesture towards Warsaw, APA reports quoting â€œThe Guardianâ€ newspaper.
Russia today posted documents concerning the massacre of Polish prisoners in Katyn on a government website, and said it would release further controversial archive material dealing with Soviet-era repression.
Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, said he personally ordered the online publication of the archive on the massacre, which took place 70 years ago when Soviet secret police gunned down 22,000 Polish officers near Katyn in western Russia.
The documents have been published before in Poland and Russia. But the decision to put them on the web is the latest positive gesture by Moscow towards Warsaw, following this month’s catastrophic air disaster that killed Poland’s president Lech Kaczynski and other top government figures.
The crash provoked an unprecedented Russian reaction â€“ with Medvedev attending Kaczynski’s funeral in Warsaw, and the prime minister, Vladimir Putin, leading the investigation into why Kaczynski’s plane went down in thick fog just short of Smolensk airport. Both governments have since moved closer together.
Speaking in Copenhagen today, Medvedev suggested Russia would now release further classified documents on the massacre long demanded by the Poles. "The Katyn archives are open. (But) there are certain materials that have not yet been forwarded to our Polish partners," Medvedev admitted.
Pledging greater openness before the public, he went on: "I have ordered that appropriate work be carried out and materials that are interesting to our Polish colleagues be handed over to them."
Human rights groups point out that Russia has refused to hand over the most sensitive archive materials â€“ which identify individual officers from the NKVD â€“ the pre-KGB secret police â€“ who carried out the killings. Poland has also been frustrated in its search for information on other wartime Polish PoWs taken back to the Soviet Union, who disappeared.
Today, the head of Russia’s state archives agency Rosarchiv, Andrei Artizov, said the documents came from file No1, the top-secret archive of the politburo. They include a letter from Lavrenti Beria, the head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, written in March 1940.
In it, Beria describes the Polish PoWs as "incorrigible enemies of Soviet power" and urges their liquidation. The archive includes the signatures of Stalin and other politburo members on a resolution authorising the murders â€“ which Stalin subsequently blamed on the Nazis. The Kremlin maintained the lie until 1990.
Artizov said all Soviet leaders after Stalin were told the truth about Katyn. He said the murders were carried out at three distinct sites: Pyatikhatka, near Kharkov, Katyn near Smolensk and Mednoye in Russia’s Tver region. The largest number of Polish generals and officers were shot dead in Mednoye, he said.
The government website was unavailable for most of the day, as nearly 700,000 people tried to log on. Historians said that the documents were well known, but said the decision to post them on the internet was an important step to enable Russians to come to terms with their past.
Polish historian Andrzej Kunert described the Kremlin’s move as significant.
"We can surely call the decision a breakthrough, because it seems that for the first time a website that is generally accessible to everyone in the Russian Federation publishes three very important documents concerning the Katyn massacre," Kunert said on Polish TVN24, Associated Press reported. "It is certainly a very important step forward."
Kunert stressed that Poles were still waiting to see the results of the investigation by Russian prosecutors, and especially the classified reasons behind the discontinuation of the inquiry in 2004.