Katyń: 75 Years On. Introduction: Katyń: An Inconvenient Truth
Katyń: 75 Years On. Introduction: Katyń: An Inconvenient Truth

Summary/Abstract: The spring of 2015 marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the secret executions of approximately twenty-two thousand Polish prisoners, ordered by Stalin and the Soviet Politburo on 5 March 1940. The victims included, among others, nearly all of the Polish army officers held in Soviet custody after the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939. Although the killings were carried out by the NKVD in several locations—Katyń, Tver, and Kharkiv being the principal places—they are referred to by the collective term “the Katyń crime” or the “Katyń massacres.” Until 1990, the mass burial in Katyń near Smolensk, discovered by the German occupation forces and widely publicized by the Nazi authorities in 1943, was the only one of these locations that was known to the public. Today, despite some missing information and a relatively small number of the dead still unaccounted for, these mass killings constitute one of the most thoroughly researched of all Stalin’s crimes. [...]

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