How is the NKVD better than the SS?

Soviet leaders faithfully guarded the secrets of Stalin's crimes until the beginning of perestroika. The truth about Katyn was hidden even longer, right up to the year 90. Only then did Gorbachev admit that more than 20 thousand Poles were killed at three execution sites in April-May 1940 by NKVD officers.

In mid-August 1991, the prosecutor's office began excavations at one of the sites, near Kalinin. The excavations were carried out by Soviet soldiers together with Polish volunteers under the leadership of Colonel Tretetsky, assigned to the prosecutor's office to organize investigative work.

On the morning of August 19, Tretetsky received a call from a general from the regional KGB branch, demanding to stop the excavations and report to headquarters. The colonel refused and for two days continued to sabotage the order of the KGB general. Their confrontation ended with the triumph of the colonel - with the defeat of the Gekachepists.

The KGB general unmistakably felt that admitting the truth undermined his power. Trying to hastily push the truth back underground, he hoped that his state, based on lies and fear, could be preserved. But his hopes did not come true.

Then the victory over the totalitarian past, symbolically secured by the statue of Dzerzhinsky dangling in a noose, seemed final and irrevocable.

Excavations at the site were completed, and a memorial was built in Katyn, open to the public to this day. But the national efforts to return and comprehend history, made by the nation during perestroika, were largely wasted.

Another conflict surrounding the investigation into the Katyn tragedy arose in early March. Of course, the current claims against Russia are not at all the same as in previous times, when the Soviet authorities simply denied the very fact of mass executions of Poles. Now we are talking only about the fact that the Russian prosecutor’s office refuses to transfer to Poland the lion’s share of the materials of the already conducted investigation. Of the 183 volumes, 116 are classified and the Polish government will not receive them.

Last year, the Poles were promised that the materials would be transferred to them, and formally the promise was fulfilled: Russia is ready to provide 67 unclassified volumes. If informally, then Russia, although it admits its guilt in mass executions, but somehow patter and through clenched teeth. And besides, I really want to somehow repay the unfriendly Kwasniewski. The Polish president recently incurred the extreme irritation of the Russian one. After the second round of the Ukrainian elections, Kwasniewski, together with Solana, rushed to Kyiv to ensure that the crisis was resolved peacefully and legally, and thereby contributed to the final and shameful defeat of Russia. In addition, a certain St. Petersburg journalist publicly told Putin about Kwasniewski: they say that the Polish president spoke in the sense that “Russia without Ukraine is better for the United States than Russia with Ukraine.” Responding to his fellow countryman, Putin did not hide his displeasure with his Polish colleague.

Russia's foreign policy game is going very badly, and the authorities are using Katyn as a trump card. What you need from us is what you won’t get; next time you will act more carefully and choose your words. It turns out something like the announcement of the sale of MANPADS to Syria. Today we threaten that we will sell, but tomorrow, you see, we may not sell it if those who are greatly disturbed by these MANPADS make us some concessions.

The Katyn documents are not suitable for trade. The transfer of investigative materials is not part of the Russian-Polish deal. This is a symbolic gesture from Russia, which asks to believe that it has nothing to do with the crimes of the Soviet regime. If anything, this is a form of repentance. And if we do not repent, it will be worse for us, but the Poles, and at the same time other countries that suffered from Soviet expansion, will have a new reason to remind our EU colleagues and everyone interested that they are our victims, and not the countries that Russia liberated from the Nazis.

Our indignation at the neo-Nazi marches in Riga would have been much more convincing if not for the tricks with classifying the Katyn documents. The Baltic presidents, who refused to go to Moscow to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the victory, might not have felt so confident if Russia itself had not dragged the events of 65 years ago into today's politics.

“We respect the opinion of those people in the Baltic states who believe that the end of World War II is associated with the tragedy of the loss of independence of the Baltic states,” Putin said recently. It seems that these words indicate that the Russian president is rejecting the Soviet view of the war solely as a Great Patriotic War, which ended in the glorious victory of the Soviet army over the Nazi invaders. It seems that he knows as well as his former allies and adversaries that there was a Second World War. But as often happens with Russian official discourse, Putin’s quoted words come into conflict with politics, and with other statements by government officials, and with the very neo-imperial spirit and mentality of today’s Russia.

The Katyn Memorial is dedicated to the memory of the Poles who were executed by Stalin's order after the partition of Poland between Stalin and Hitler. But a significant part of our fellow citizens consider Stalin to be the main national hero, and it is he who takes credit for the victory in the war. The current ruling elite and the president trace their ancestry back to the NKVD, which executed the Poles in 1940, but they are not only not ashamed of this relationship, but consider it a source of pride.

The sudden classification of the materials of the Katyn investigation falls precisely into this context - a murky attitude towards the past and an unclear national choice. Because the current government, instead of presenting the terrible bloody secrets of the NKVD executioners to everyone to see and thereby renouncing them once and for all, continues to hide and cover them up as if it were their own.