Dancing on the bones

Lying has now become a “state interest.” In accordance with it, schoolchildren will take exams

Ashamed!

It would seem that nothing that happens can cause this feeling again, but these people do not stop even at the obviously impossible, they are ready for anything. They do not have a sense of decency; they believe there is no one to be ashamed of. On April 10, on the eve of the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Katyn Tragedy, the exhibition “Ten Centuries of Polish Russophobia” was opened at the site of the mass execution in the Katyn Forest. We've chosen a place!

"Scatter Poland to the Wind"

After October 27, 1939, the Soviet-German Border Committee was created. At the end of October its members gathered in Warsaw. This was the first opportunity for the Germans to “repay the Russians for their hospitality,” and, according to a special order from Ribbentrop, special attention was paid to organizing a two-day stay of Soviet officials and officers “so that these two days in the Polish capital would become a pleasant event for them.”

Governor General Hans Frank invited the Soviet delegation to breakfast. He said that "the goal of the committee is to restore peaceful life to the (former) Polish territory, which was inflicted incredible suffering by the former blind rulers." Frank offered the head of the Soviet delegation, Aleksandrov, a Polish cigarette, saying: “You and I will light Polish cigarettes to symbolize the fact that we have scattered Poland to the wind.” We laughed...

In Nuremberg, Frank will be hanged among the main defendants. Including for “scattering Poland to the wind.”

In the spring of 1940, on the basis of a resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, NKVD officers shot 21,875 Polish citizens - primarily officers, but also representatives of the intelligentsia and clergy. They were shot in Kharkov, the village of Mednoye in the Kalinin (now Tver) region and here, in the Katyn forest located in the Smolensk region. It became the main place and symbol of the massacre.

In the history of the 20th century, there was NO such crime - the instant extrajudicial execution of thousands of captured officers.

Moreover, this was done (like everything then) in deep secrecy, “in compliance with all measures of secrecy.” In my opinion, this in itself is an accurate assessment: they understood, that’s why they kept it secret. That's the only reason.

In Russia, history is being rewritten again, and this Katyn exhibition, organized by the Russian Military Historical Society (RVIO), not only once again places responsibility for the execution on the German occupation authorities. According to the exhibition, during the Second World War, Poland, “scattered to the wind,” unexpectedly turned out to be “an ally of Germany.” Other manifestations of Russophobia include Poland’s support for Ukraine in a “special military operation” and the demolition of monuments from the Soviet period.

Has there been new data?

There are no new data. During the war, the Germans accidentally discovered burials here in the Katyn Forest, and, of course, they could not help but take advantage of the opportunity. In Pravda, on April 19, 1943, under the headline “Hitler’s Polish henchmen,” a sharp rebuke of “brazen Goebbels’ provocation” was published. Both German and Polish newspapers flatly refused to accept the Soviet version of events - and this, according to Pravda, served as clear evidence of a conspiracy between them: “A treacherous blow against the Soviet Union.”

It must be said that the hypocrisy of the Soviet Union did not deceive our then allies (the USA and Great Britain) at all. But the allies chose to close their eyes. However, in Nuremberg they did not allow this lie to be covered up by the authority of an international tribunal. Although Soviet representatives tried to sneak relevant statements into the verdict.

Only in 1990, President Gorbachev was forced to admit the guilt of the USSR, obvious to the whole world. Next, all three Russian presidents (Yeltsin, Putin, Medvedev) stated that there are no justifications for what they did, just as there are no justifications for forty years of stupid and disgusting lies about this, the deliberate destruction of documents (not all, not all!), and the silencing of everyone who can tell the truth.

Under Yeltsin, a criminal case was opened into the shooting of Polish officers. Under Putin, the prosecutor's office closed it; under Medvedev, after considering the cassation appeal in the Supreme Court, this decision came into force.

The Supreme Court considered that the statute of limitations had expired, because in this case it was necessary to rely on the Stalinist Criminal Code of 1929 (and what else?). Previously, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation refused to provide the Poles with the materials of its investigation, arguing that it was a “state secret.” Most of the 183 volumes of the “Katyn case” are classified as “secret” and “top secret” to this day. Although what of the hidden things do we not know?

In the twentieth century, I had to write about the execution of Poles 12 times; seven materials on this topic were published in Novaya Gazeta. I visited memorials in Katyn, Kharkov Pyatikhatki, Medny... It’s simply indecent to prove something - in addition to the confessions of presidents, there are 50-page expert opinions that have not been refuted by anyone, handwriting examinations, interrogation reports... And, in fact, there is no one to prove, you can only argue with those who really think differently. And not just lying without blushing. What kind of arguments do you, lying, need? You liars don’t need any arguments!

Historian Konstantin Boguslavsky recently published the following document from the materials of the “Katyn Case” of the Main Military Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation - testimony about the execution of captured Poles in 1940 by the NKVD forces of Pyotr Fedorovich Klimov, from 1930 to 1975 a state security officer in the Smolensk region, a member of the CPSU (b) since 1940:

“...Few people were buried at the fraternal cemetery, but mostly those who were executed were taken to Kozye Gory, where there were more than ten thousand Soviet citizens and others who were executed. I was paid 5 rubles for washing cars for blood. Those who shot were also paid according to the list, and those who removed the corpses were also paid.

Polish soldiers were shot in 1940 in the Goat Mountains. They were shot by the team of Stelmakh Ivan Ivanovich. He was the commandant of the Smolensk NKVD. I myself was in the Goat Mountains by chance and saw: there was a large ditch, it stretched all the way to the swamp, and in this ditch lay “stacks” of Poles covered with earth, who were shot right in the ditch. I know this because... I myself saw the corpses (covered with earth) of the Poles. Ustinov told me the circumstances of the execution: he was a driver, he drove Poles to execution and saw, as he himself said, their execution. They were unloaded from the car directly into the ditch and shot, and some were finished off with a bayonet. The fencing around the execution site was like this: double barbed wire. When I looked, there were a lot of Poles in this ditch, they were lying in a row, and the ditch was a hundred meters long, and the depth was two or three meters. After I looked at the executed Poles, they immediately escorted me out and told me not to come close again.

Then and after the war, Stelmakh, Reinson, Gvozdovsky and Gribov repeatedly warned me to remain silent.

Ustinov and Gribov told me that Polish military officers were shot by Stelmakh, Gribov himself, Gvozdovsky, and Reinson Karl. They were the ones in charge during the executions, I don’t remember the others.

Poles were brought to be shot in wagons along a railway line to the Gnezdovo station. The NKVD escort regiment guarded the execution site.

Everything I said is true, I understand the responsibility for libel, I told the whole truth. Written at my request (because my fingers don’t bend) by Oleg Zakirovich Zakirov, everything was read to me and written down correctly.

I would also like to add that those who shot people and those who drove people were given alcohol and snacks for free. I remember that after the execution they washed their hands with alcohol.

I also wiped my hands with alcohol after washing off the blood.

The alcohol was still stored in my basement, and snacks were taken from the dining room (sausage, sturgeon and other products).

On August 29, 1990, he testified before the rehabilitation commission. Why, I can’t say.”

Really - why?

“The graves of the Poles killed by the Germans cry out for revenge”

Just now, in an exclusive interview with Kommersant, Vladislav Kononov, the executive secretary of the state line of history textbooks, an assistant in the department of the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation for state policy in the humanitarian sphere, with amazing frankness, for the first time, fully and unambiguously formulated the current Russian policy in the field of history. They don’t care about the provisions of the Constitution, which directly prohibits any state ideology. However, what am I talking about, what Constitution?

“Why should a point of view different from the state’s be conveyed in a state school and in state textbooks? Whose point of view should it be then? "Foreign agents"? Ukrainian? — Kononov asks these interesting questions. And he answers:

“I’ll emphasize once again: the state not only has the right, it is obliged to convey its point of view to students. Moreover, in the school system, history is the most ideological subject. Why should the state provide alternative points of view in history textbooks that contradict both the state policy and its foundations?

Please let parents watch videos with their children anywhere and discuss what they see. But if you take a history exam, no one will ask you about alternative theories. In the end, the Unified State Exam is not based on the principle of identifying loyalty or disloyalty to the current political course of the state. You must know the heroes of the SVO - please learn their names from the textbook, know their exploits, and then you will pass the Unified State Exam. And if you don’t learn, you won’t pass.”

Or does it just seem to me that we are talking about the abolition of history as a science in general? Replacing it with arbitrarily understood “state interests”? With not only moral, but also legal assessments taken far beyond the brackets?

We have what is called experience.

I read in the book of documents “Soviet Propaganda at the Final Stage of the War” (M., 2015), where the full message of the “Bulletin of Frontline Information” dated January 31, 1944 “Oath on the grave in the Katyn Forest” is given. Author K. Pukhov, TASS special correspondent.

“Sunday morning. Trucks are speeding along the Smolensk-Vitebsk highway. Having reached the fifteenth kilometer beyond Smolensk, they turn into the Katyn Forest. The military get out of their vehicles and quickly line up.

In a forest clearing there is a large grave, above which rises a freshly planed wooden cross. On the southern section of the grave, an eagle with spread wings is skillfully laid out in the snow with green spruce branches. Above the eagle is an inscription in Polish: “Glory to the fallen. 1941".

Troops lined up in a semicircle near the grave in which Polish soldiers and officers brutally killed by the Nazis were buried. Ahead, protected by a guard of honor, flutter the battle flags of Polish units operating on the Soviet-German front.

...A Willys appeared around a bend in the forest road. A tall man in a hat with earflaps came out. In a black leather coat. The commander of the Polish corps in the USSR, Major General Zygmunt Berling, is accompanied by his deputies, Major General Swierczewski and Major Zawadski. Colonel Bukoemsky came forward and reported to Major General Berling that everything was ready for the ceremony.

After the service, before the consecration of the grave of the victims of the Nazi executioners, Father Franciszek Kubsch addressed the worshipers with a sermon. He said that in a mass grave lay the flower of the Polish people - 11,000 soldiers and officers who suffered martyrdom at the hands of Hitler’s murderers.

...After the funeral ceremony, a rally took place. The corps commander, Major General Berling, addressed the delegations of the Polish units that had arrived in the Katyn Forest.

“Those whose memory we honor today,” says the general, “fell into the clutches of an inexorable enemy—the Germans.” There are dozens of graves like these in Poland. Thousands of those tortured by the Nazis are buried in Polish soil. The cruel enemy, the German, destroys everything Polish, he strives to ensure that Poland ceases to exist and gives up its place on the soil to Germany. The graves of the Poles killed by the Germans cry out for revenge, and we must avenge them. And we will take revenge! "

Eight months later, General Berling will throw his units across the Vistula in order to somehow help Warsaw, which rebelled in 1944. For this he will be removed from command and sent “to study” at the Moscow Academy.

There are no comments on Tass's note in the book. But we already know who and on whose orders shot the Poles captured in 1939, who hid this crime for forty years, and then (I repeat: through the mouths of presidents Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, Medvedev) repeatedly apologized for this crime.

Now those who take the courage to speak on behalf of the state again propose not to simply interpret events depending on their views. And to “correct” the events themselves, to make them “necessary”.

Now the same Poland is “an ally of Hitler’s Germany.”

***

One of our most authoritative historians of the Soviet period, Professor Oleg Budnitsky, director of the International Center for History and Sociology of the Second World War and Its Consequences at the Higher School of Economics, was a member of the Expert Council on History, but in October 2017 he left it when the Presidium of the Higher Attestation Commission, despite the withdrawal of the Expert Council, refused to deprive the then Minister of Culture of Russia Vladimir Medinsky of the degree of Doctor of Historical Sciences.

Fragments from our conversation with Oleg Budnitsky, which took place exactly 7 years ago (Novaya Gazeta, 04/01/2019):

— You know, I believe that the current system of awarding academic degrees will gradually die out, and this process has already begun; the rights to award academic degrees are transferred to leading universities. I don’t make a fetish out of a doctor’s or candidate of sciences diploma. If some university, like the Social University, whose dissertation council became “famous” for awarding doctorate degrees to Mr. Medinsky and a whole bunch of other people, many of whom have already been deprived of these degrees, does not care about its reputation, then let them continue. It’s just that the diploma must say who issued it. I wouldn’t like to give specific examples, but I worked for several years on the expert council of the Higher Attestation Commission on history and I know which institutions produce such “scientists.” People can call themselves whatever they want, after all, we have a lot of academies, people got together and created, for example, the “intergalactic water rescue academy.” You just need to understand who awarded this or that degree, and that’s quite enough.

— But how can people who do not have your experience in the Higher Attestation Commission understand this? Have you already read the recently published “Government House” by American professor Yuri Slezkine? There I was struck by excerpts from the diary of the brilliant schoolboy Leva Fedotov, Trifonov’s hero, about the beginning of the Winter War. Devout faith in all the arguments of the propaganda of that time, holy faith in the crimes of the Finnish fascists who attacked the peaceful and defenseless USSR... So in 2014, a ninth-grader, after watching TV, could write about the Ukrainian fascists who “crucified a boy.”

- This is an incorrect comparison. Leva Fedotov lived in a country where there were no alternative sources of information. None. And it is impossible to compare the era of Stalin and ours today. Now a person who wants to receive information will receive it, there are no problems here, right? I think today Leva Fedotov would not be so categorical.

The possibilities are still different.

I read Slezkine’s book a long time ago, in English. You see, it has been translated, published and available. There are other wonderful works, I’ll name at least two hundred-odd volumes of the “History of Stalinism” series, published by ROSSPEN, in which the activities of the punitive authorities and the issues of social and economic development of the country in those years are analyzed in detail. <…> So a person who wants to find out what happened has every opportunity to do so. Under these conditions, I don’t see any point in arguing with people who speak another language.

- But when people have no idea about the existence of all these books and scientists that you refer to. A huge country, to which three and a half thousand (a huge circulation for our days!) of Slezkine’s book will not reach, and even more so they will not pay one and a half thousand rubles for it. And these monuments, all these outrages, they are before our eyes. In the squares, on the streets...

— You have to understand that when some (I don’t want to offend anyone) strange people erect monuments to Stalin here and there, at the same time monuments to the victims of repression are opened in the center of the capital, right? There is a Gulag Museum in Moscow. “Memorial”* is actively working, its website is available to everyone, on which a lot of materials are posted, including a database of victims of repression with names, sentences... And it is clear, by the way, that the absolute majority of these victims are ordinary people, people from the street, and not just residents of the “Government House”...

It’s scary to re-read: “Now a person who wants to receive information will receive it, there are no problems here, right?..”

The series “History of Stalinism” mentioned by Budnitsky, published by ROSSPEN, has been discontinued. The Gulag Museum in Moscow is closed. Memorial has just been recognized as an extremist organization.

Like pancakes, the Duma bakes laws according to which Professor Budnitsky must think four times before saying something.

The same Military Historical Society is conducting excavations at the site of the KGB executions in Karelian Sandarmokh, trying to prove that it was the Finns who shot Soviet people. And what? Finland joined NATO, and now you can talk about them any way you like.

Organize any exhibition.

* Recognized as a “foreign agent”, liquidated by a court decision, international structures declared undesirable, and all together - an extremist movement.