Remembering-Katyn-Introduction-and-Coda.pdf

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‘Introduction: Remembering Katyn’ (pp. 1-12) and ‘Coda: Katyn-2’ (pp.132-152) taken
from: Alexander Etkind, Rory Finnin, Uilleam Blacker, Julie Fedor, Simon Lews, Maria
Malksöo, Matilda Mroz,
Remembering Katyn
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012)
Introduction
Remembering Katyn
On the clear, crisp afternoon of 7 April 2010, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk
stood before a phalanx of pines to address his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin and other
dignitaries in a cemetery complex outside the village of Katyn, in western Russia. He began
his remarks with a question. ‘Why are we here today? Why do we come to this place every
year?’ He continued: ‘Above all, because we remember’ (Tusk 2010).
Pamiętamy:
we remember. In Eastern Europe, a pivotal object of public memory is
Katyn, the mass murder of over 20,000 unarmed Polish prisoners in the spring of 1940 by
officers of the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), the Soviet secret police.
‘We will always remember those killed here,’ declared Tusk, a historian by training. His
stirring call to remember the Katyn tragedy was, of course, a call to remember the past, for as
Aristotle posited long ago, to remember the future is impossible (Aristotle 1928). Yet three
days after Tusk’s address, the grounds for Aristotle’s claim would feel vacant and forsaken.
On 10 April 2010, an aircraft carrying 96 members of Poland’s military and political class,
including the nation’s president Lech Kaczyński, crashed only miles away from Katyn,
killing all on board. Time’s arrow lurched and fell; the bounds between past, present, and
future dissolved; only space seemed to matter. ‘Katyn is a cursed place, a terrible symbol,’
said Tusk’s predecessor, former Prime Minister Aleksander Kwaśniewski, on the day of the
tragedy, ‘it sends shivers down my spine’ (‘Kwaśniewski’ 2010).
Yet the ‘cursed place’ of Katyn and the ‘terrible symbol’ of Katyn are not congruent.
The place is singular; the symbol is, in effect, plural, signifying a multitude of killing fields
and burial sites. The majority of those killed in what has become known as ‘Katyn’ in fact
perished in other places well beyond the Katyn forest in the Soviet Republics of Belarus,
Russia, and Ukraine. The toponym associated with their murder, moreover, has become a
referential touchstone and descriptive shorthand throughout Eastern Europe for other, lesser-
known sites of past savagery – Vinnytsia, Bykivnia, Kurapaty – and for sites of more recent
savagery – Srebrenica, for instance, at one time proclaimed the ‘new Katyn’ (‘Srebrenica’
1995). Today Katyn circulates with alacrity in public memory and in political discourse in
Eastern Europe, fuelling both solidarity and suspicion, fellowship and fear. This book maps
its legacy through the interconnected memory cultures of seven countries – Belarus, Poland,
Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic States – and explores its meaning as site and symbol, event
and idea, fact and crypt.
1.
In the bloody annals of the twentieth century, Katyn stands as one of the first
coordinated transnational mass murders of foreign prisoners by a totalitarian state. At the
direction of one order from the Kremlin – Politburo Protocol 13/144, drafted by NKVD chief
Lavrenty Beria and dated 5 March 1940 – NKVD agents shot 21,857 Poles and buried them
in a number of clandestine sites in the Soviet Republics of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine
(Cienciala et al 2007, 332-33). The victims had been rounded up in the territory known in
Polish as the
kresy
– encompassing much of today’s western Ukraine and western Belarus –
during and after the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939. They were either
incarcerated in local prisons or sent eastward to special camps administered by the NKVD in
Kozelsk and Ostashkov (in western Russia) and Starobilsk (in eastern Ukraine). In Kozelsk,
Ostashkov, and Starobilsk, they were classified as ‘prisoners of war’, even though war
between Poland and the Soviet Union had never been declared. Months later, they were
classified, fatally, as ‘enemies’, even though they were potential allies. Indeed, as early as
1941, Stalin would begin actively recruiting Polish soldiers and officers to fight alongside the
Red Army against Nazi forces. What made these 21,857 prisoners, by contrast, such a threat
to the Soviet regime? After all, in the clinical words of the 5 March 1940 execution order,
they were only ‘former [military] officers, officials, landowners, […] rank-and-file police,
[and] priests’ (ibid 119). Among their number were also physicians, pharmacists,
veterinarians, lawyers, teachers, priests, rabbis, and an eighteen-year-old telephone operator.
The victims of Katyn, in other words, were the pride and the promise of the Polish people –
young and old, soldier and civilian. In large measure, every memory of Katyn today is a
struggle to confront the sheer senselessness of their death sentence, to overcome a persistent
and perplexing
why?
The prisoners’ executions were as methodical as they were grisly, involving a
formidable state logistical apparatus that, in effect, operationalized displacement. Prisoners
were kept on the move. Those held in the
kresy
were dispatched by train to various NKVD
prisons in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, and Minsk, where they were then put to death. Precise
details about the location and the identity of these victims remain, to an extent, unclear. What
is better known is the fate of the prisoners held in the Kozelsk, Ostashkov, and Starobilsk
camps, who were, in NKVD parlance, ‘unloaded’ (razgruzhalis’) from their cells –
sometimes to a lively musical accompaniment, and nearly always under the pretence of
imminent release – and sent to Smolensk, Kalinin (today’s Tver), and Kharkiv, respectively.
At Kalinin and Kharkiv, victims were led into NKVD prisons and asked to state their names,
one by one, before being shot in the back of the head at the base of the skull. Their bodies
were then transported to NKVD burial sites in forests abutting the nearby villages of Mednoe
and Piatykhatky and dumped in mass graves, which were, in at least one case, scattered with
‘white powder’ intended to ‘speed up decomposition’ (Cienciala et al 2007, 127). At
Smolensk, victims were organized into groups and sent by rail and then by bus to Katyn
forest, where they were largely not afforded the charade of questions from NKVD
functionaries. Most were shot immediately upon arrival at the edge of eight pits, in broad
daylight and under cover of darkness. By the middle of May 1940, their graves were filled in
with dirt and covered over with pine seedlings. Weeks later their executioners were given
rewards equivalent to a month’s salary for, in the words of one Soviet document,
‘successfully completing their assignments’ (ibid 272).
Just as the singular term ‘Katyn’ cannot convey the plural, transnational nature of the
massacre, an exclusive focus on the executions themselves cannot convey the extent of the
horror of the crime. In the midst of killing these Polish prisoners in cold blood, the NKVD
also actively sought out their wives and children and deported them to central Asia, where
many perished from malnutrition, mistreatment, and disease. In May 1940, four children who
survived the arduous journey eastward appealed directly to Stalin for support and assistance,
addressing him as their ‘great’, ‘beloved father’. ‘We little children are dying of hunger and
we humbly ask Father Stalin not to forget about us,’ they wrote from the village of Rozovka
in Kazakhstan. ‘We will always be good working people in the Soviet Union, only it’s hard
for us to live without our fathers’ (Cienciala et al 2007, 198). The ‘great father’ had these
fathers killed in Kalinin and buried at Mednoe.
This heartrending letter captures the particular perversity of the Stalinist disciplinary
regime, which so often compelled the victim to honour and supplicate the victimizer. As the
Russian writer Aleksandr Tvardovskii would declare sardonically in his poem ‘By Right of
Memory’ (‘Po pravu pamiati’, 1966-69), ‘Be thankful for your fate, whatever it may be,/ And
swear one thing: that [Stalin] is great’ (Tvardovskii
1991, 111).
After World War II, with
their decimated country firmly within the geopolitical orbit of Soviet power, the Polish
people had little choice but to honour the victimizer, to ingest the ‘Pill of Murti-Bing’ that
reconciles one to being ruled by another in Czesław Miłosz’s
The Captive Mind
(Milosz
1953: 4-5).
1
In 1951, for instance – the same year that an investigation into the Katyn
massacre was being launched in the United States Congress – Communist Poland issued a
commemorative stamp adorned with the face of the man responsible for the atrocity. It
featured a profile of Stalin as decorated
generalissimo
and celebratory text marking ‘Polish-
Soviet friendship month’.
According to the official Soviet narrative, Katyn was a ‘monstrous’ Nazi atrocity.
This lie – known as the ‘Katyn Lie,’
kłamstwo katyńskie
– was the centerpiece of a relentless
Soviet campaign of falsification and disinformation that spanned nearly half a century. Today
it constitutes one of the longest and most extensive cover-ups of a mass murder in history.
The Katyn Lie began as a fiercely defensive rejoinder to an announcement, broadcast
worldwide from Berlin on 13 April 1943, that a mass grave of Polish victims of ‘Bolshevik’
terror had been found by German authorities near Smolensk (Cienciala
et al 2007, 216).
The
Wehrmacht
had seized Smolensk in the autumn of 1941 during Operation Barbarossa, and
whispered rumours of burial pits in the Katyn forest soon reached German authorities, who
promptly ordered an excavation. Goebbels, who apparently found the whole matter
‘gruesome’, gleefully remarked in his diary that the discovery would be used ‘for anti-
Bolshevik propaganda in a grand style’ (Lochner 1948, 253).
2
In an effort to shame Moscow
and divide the Allies, the Nazis invited the Red Cross and formed an International
1
Originally the brainchild of writer Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, the Pill of Murti-Bing is a drug that impedes
the realization that the approach of the occupier is an existential danger to one’s culture and civilization in the
novel
Nienasycenie
(Insatiability).
2
Western observers commented that Katyn was ‘a gift to Goebbels’ (Harvey 1978, 249-51).

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