Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940

Truth, Justice and Memory

George Sanford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134302994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

The Soviet massacre of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn and in other camps in 1940 was one of the most notorious incidents of the Second World War. The truth about the massacres was long suppressed, both by the Soviet Union, and also by the United States and Britain who wished to hold together their wartime alliance with the Soviet Union.

This informative book examines the details of this often overlooked event, shedding light on what took place especially in relation to the massacres at locations other than Katyn itself. It discusses how the truth about the killings was hidden, how it gradually came to light and why the memory of the massacres has long affected Polish-Russian relations.

1
Poland and Russia

Conflict and domination

The relationship between Poland and Russia has been described as an ‘age-old antagonism’ which transcended the level of mere conflict between two major Slavonic states.¹ It has been depicted as a historical struggle between different civilisations for political, economic and religious control and, consequently, cultural hegemony over the vast contested borderlands lying between them. Poland was one of the great states in Europe and certainly Russia’s (Muscovy’s) equal until early modern times.² The Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania controlled much of what is now Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania and the Baltic States during the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. The weakening of the state through an excessive form of gentry democracy and the unwise policies of a foreign Swedish Vasa dynasty from the end of the sixteenth century onwards worsened political and social decay. Poland’s international position was also shattered by a Swedish onslaught, the rise of Prussia and an uprising in the Ukraine, half of which was lost by the Truce of Andrusowo in 1667. As a result (much of) Poland until 1989 has been dominated, and controlled in different ways, by Russia in its varying incarnations for most of the period since the death of King Jan II Sobieski in 1697 and Peter the Great’s modernisation of Russia. But the Polish ethnic and cultural presence in the borderlands (kresy) of Belarus and Ukraine remained, until finally removed by Stalin’s ethnic cleansing of 1939–1941 and the Second World War border changes and population transfers.

Russian control was camouflaged during the eighteenth century as it made use of collaborating aristocratic landowners and slogans of religious toleration.³ The central and eastern lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were seized by Russia in the three partitions of 1772, 1792 and 1795. After Napoleon’s defeat in the 1812 campaign, a re-established and extended form of Russian territorial control, confirmed at the Congress of Vienna, lasted until the First World War.⁴ Inter-war Polish independence survived only from November 1918 until September 1939.⁵ Although there is debate on the extent of the autonomy of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL) full sovereignty as well as systemic and international self-determination was achieved only in the Third Republic after 1989. The country’s democracy has been consolidated since then and strengthened through EU and NATO membership.⁶

Both Russian policy towards Poland and Polish reactions ran through a wide and varying gamut over time. At one end of the spectrum Czar Nicholas I, after the 1831 Uprising, wanted to steamroll Polish national differences away and to turn the country into the Vistula Province, merely the westernmost extension of a uniformly ruled Russian Empire. His executions, imprisonments, forced emigration and deportations to Siberia began ‘the systematic extermination of the Polish presence in the east’ that continued until 1945.⁷ Something similar was attempted, after the suppression of the 1863–1864 Uprising. Iosif Stalin also took advantage of his alliance with Adolf Hitler from 1939–1941 to partially exterminate, and wholly marginalise, Poland’s national elites as a preliminary to establishing Soviet Stalinist communist rule in Poland after 1944.

Hardline policies of Russification, repression and tight uniform control from Moscow did not, however, dominate all the time. Catherine the Great played on domestic conflicts between conservative and reform Polish confederations during the reign of King Stanisław Poniatowski (1764–1795) .⁸ She was, eventually, forced to share her Polish spoils with Prussia and the Hapsburg Empire in the Partitions. The Congress Kingdom of 1815–1831 gave the Poles real cultural and socio-religious, as well as a degree of political, autonomy. The same was, arguably, true of the PRL under the post-1956 regimes of Władysław Gomułka, Edward Gierek and Wojciech Jaruzelski.⁹

Adam Bromke’s depiction of the swings between political idealism and realism from Napoleonic times until fairly recently captured the wide Polish divergences, generation after generation, on the independence issue.¹⁰ Political idealists inspired by historical memories of national greatness felt that the national struggle for independence would be rewarded eventually by a favourable constellation of European forces (as in fact happened in 1918 and 1989 and with the Duchy of Warsaw of 1807–1812). Defeats such as the Napoleonic Legions, the 1831 and 1863 Uprisings and even September 1939 and the 1944 Warsaw Uprising would strengthen national resolve through blood shed by heroes. This Romantic view was particularly strong at moments in the nineteenth century and in the interwar period; but the realist counter-argument predominated more often, especially in the twentieth century. The arguments of Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, Marquis Aleksander Wielopolski and the Organic Work school of the second half of the nineteenth century were reiterated by many Poles during the communist takeover of power (1944–1947), and again after October 1956. For them, the 1944 Warsaw Uprising became a symbol of Romantic futility, once the consciousness of Western betrayal and indifference, both in 1939 and at Yalta, seeped through. Post-war Roman Catholic Primates of Poland, Cardinals Stefan Wyszy

ski and Stefan Glemp, therefore counselled against violence and favoured compromise from 1956 onwards. Stalin’s purges of inter-war communists, the 1940 massacre and associated deportations of Poles also contributed to similar attitudes within the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR). This was especially so during Solidarity’s heyday, Martial Law in 1980–1983, and during the attempted reform period preceding communism’s collapse in Poland in 1989.

The Russian threat from the east has also been matched by the German menace from the west. Frederick the Great and his Hohenzollern successors merely questioned the Polishness of Pomerania, Pozna

and Silesia. Adolf Hitler’s anti-Slavonic racism and drive for Teutonic Lebensraum, however, threatened the very existence of the Polish national community during the Second World War. During 1939–1941 Poland faced the maximum moment of danger to its national survival. The Nazis and Soviets came together in the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact and its secret annexe to carry out the country’s Fourth Partition.

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