Published : 2024-06-30

“Anti-Katyn”. Prelude to O Russian Uhistorical policy towards Poland in the years 1990-2012

Abstract

The release of information by the TASS Agency on 13 April 1990 concerning the responsibility of the Soviet authorities for the Katyn massacre caused a shock in Russian society. The earlier message, which had been reproduced for more than fifty years, and which spoke of a Nazi perpetration, was replaced by a completely different narrative. For the political elites of the Third Republic of Poland and Polish society, clarification of all the circumstances of those events - identification of all the names of the victims murdered in 1940, indication of their places of execution and burial, identification of those responsible for both taking and directly executing the decision on the extermination of Polish prisoners of war and, if still possible, bringing the living perpetrators to justice and punishing them – was the most important objective of the diplomatic efforts undertaken towards Moscow. In order to weaken the impact of this information and, at the same time, to justify the conduct of the then Soviet authorities headed by Joseph Stalin, the then leader of the Soviet Union, President Mikhail Gor- bachev, instructed scientific institutions, the prosecutor’s office and the KGB to find a topic that could be interpreted in Russia’s favour. The case of the Red Army soldiers who had been taken prisoner in Poland during the 1919-1920 war was very quickly seen as suitable for this. Actions began to exaggerate and falsify the causes and scale associated with the deaths of between 16,000 and 18,000 Red Army soldiers. In the light of documents and scientific studies by Polish researchers and some Russian re-searchers (from the 1990s) - they were not exterminated, no one murdered them on the orders of the authorities or command - which the Russian side deceitfully tried and tries to point out. Russian researchers dealing with the fate of Soviet prisoners of war in Polish captivity have either avoided the Polish archives by a wide margin or have used the collected materials selectively. The ‘anti-Katyń’ myth was and still is necessary and will be used to camouflage the truth.




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Wiśniewski, J. (2024). “Anti-Katyn”. Prelude to O Russian Uhistorical policy towards Poland in the years 1990-2012. Fides, Ratio Et Patria. Studia Toruńskie, (20), 47–61. https://doi.org/10.56583/frp.2693

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