Katyń: The Wound That Will Not Heal And The Essence Of Stalinism

“[T]his Katyń massacre] is entirely German propaganda and a German plot. I am absolutely convinced that the Russians did not do this.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt to George Howard Earle, 1944 ¹

More than any country other than Russia herself, Poland has endured what might be understood as the essence of Stalinism. The Poles to their great and lasting sorrow had the geographic misfortune in the mid-1930s to have both Stalin and Hitler as next door, east-west neighbors.

Moreover, the Polish militia under Josef Pilsudki had defeated the Red Army in 1920 at the gates of Warsaw and imposed a humiliating treaty, thus earning for the Poles the deep, implacable enmity of Joseph Stalin, a man distinguished by the great depth of his resentments and his determination and capacity for turning those who had given him cause for his many grudges into corpses.

Beginning in the fall of 1939, Poland would bear the brunt of these two powerful and colluding states. Germany’s invasion of September hit the tipping point for Hitler-appeasing England and France. They remained supine while the former Austrian corporal quickly swallowed up Austria and Czechoslovakia, but drew their red lines with his attack on Poland. Too little and much too late—they declared war on Germany, but were unable to help the Poles who mounted a gallant but doomed defense from the onslaught that came from the Red Army, as well as the Wehrmacht.

Of course, Hitler and the Wehrmacht were responsible for only a portion of the calamity falling upon the Poles. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with its secret protocols—never acknowledged until the Gorbachev era—late in that summer enabled Stalin to invade Poland with Hitler’s imprimatur, settle old scores, and do whatever he wanted, including unleashing his NKVD to round up and murder the Polish elite and organize the mass forced deportation of Polish civilians by the millions.

Members of the Red Army and the Wehrmacht celebrated with a joint victory parade in Brest Litovsk, where Lenin’s revolutionary government had concluded a humiliating peace with the Germans twenty-one years earlier. ² What better event and location to symbolize this voracious partnership of wolves with all of its cynical and duplicitous machinations?

From the very beginning of the September invasions, the essence of Stalinism can be contemplated in its grossest application through the experience of the Polish government and the suffering of the Polish people. Stalinism is a highly coercive enterprise of dissimulating and pretending that stems from the dishonesty of its ideological premises from which follow the false promises and failed predictions.

The dimensions of the pretending are best gleaned from the propaganda churned out by the official organs, reflecting that unique Stalinesque mix of paranoia, resentment, fiction, and psychological projection, which can almost always be reliably read as affirming the opposite of what is true and right. The “reverse-reality” nature of Stalinist propaganda, shaped by Marxist eschatology, is forced by the enormous disparity between what the chief ideologues aver are their aspirations and goals, and what they actually do when they have power.

The ideologues must constantly resort to coercion to thwart the inevitable intrusion of grim reality into the body of halcyon fictions they assemble, an intrusion that threatens to dislodge the hold of their myths over the minds of those under their command.

The Soviet Union, from the beginning through the end of the war, unleashed a propaganda barrage of outrageous, massive lies that slandered the Poles, disguised the real aggressive intentions of the Soviets, and aimed to cover up their long trail of atrocities.

Stalin seemed particularly to have disliked the Poles, even Polish communists. His purges of the mid- and late-1930s fell heavily on minorities in the Soviet Union and most heavily upon the Polish.

As Timothy Snyder in his book, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin writes, “Stalin was pioneer of national mass murder and the Poles were the preeminent victims among the Soviet nationalities.” ³

During the Great Terror in 1937 and 1938 Stalin, contrary to the existence of any facts or evidence, decided that large numbers of Poles residing in Russia and Ukraine were spies, saboteurs, and fifth-columnists. The result was a purge of the NKVD of Polish officers in 1937, followed by a wave of terror that targeted groups of Polish émigrés by the thousands for immediate arrest and in many cases summary execution. The sheer numbers of the accused (their Polish names sometimes simply gleaned from telephone books) was so great and the pressure to dispatch them so intense that, as Snyder notes, Nicolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD, and Andrei Vyshynskii, State Prosecutor, “on a single day…might finalize two thousand death sentences.” ³

The Bolsheviks and the Nazis, from September 1939 to 1941, worked mightily in tandem to plunder Poland and reduce it to a region of helotry. They systematically targeted Poland’s human capital for elimination or deportation. Mass arrests, sequestrations, killings and deportations were part of the regular order of these two years. For Stalin, the Polish were fascists, spies, anti-Soviet reactionaries, and old, intractable enemies not to be trusted.

Once Hitler double crossed Stalin and attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Polish government-in-exile, pressed by the British and Americans and with few options available, concluded with Stalin the Polish-Soviet agreement of 1941. It was mostly to Stalin’s advantage. He used Polish soldiers to help him defeat Hitler and position himself to turn Poland into a communist satellite state after the war. ¹

In 1943, as the German armies were pushing their way into Russia, they happened to discover in a forested area known as the Katyń Forest, near Smolensk, the mass graves of 22,000 Polish officers murdered on Stalin’s personal orders by the NKVD early in 1940. The victims had been rounded up and disarmed shortly after the Soviet invasion in 1939. The murdered officers represented Poland’s top leadership, an aristocracy of talent, expertise, and high achievement. Included in the victims were an admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 3,420 non-commissioned officers, seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials, 85 privates, 131 refugees, 20 university professors, 300 physicians; several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers; and more than 100 writers and journalists, as well as about 200 pilots. The NKVD would execute almost half the Polish officer corps. ⁴

Stalin and the Soviet press organs immediately claimed that the executions were carried out by the Germans. By sheer numbers (body count), this Stalin-instigated atrocity measures lower on the register against some of his other projects, such as the starving of Ukraine earlier in the 1930s, where the casualties count in the millions. But numbers alone cannot capture the scale of the monumental wickedness and infamy of Katyń, with its intent to destroy the Polish nation by slaughtering its elite and most accomplished leaders and citizens. Katyń was done while Stalin was still in league with Hitler and was a signature piece of their joint effort to destroy Poland as a nation and people by murdering in mass their leadership.

Following the discovery by the Germans in the spring of 1943 of the mass graves and the murders, planned and systematically carried out by the Russians with a kind of calculated, cold blooded efficiency more often associated with the employees of the Third Reich, came the storm of denial from the Soviet Information Bureau, stylistically Stalinist in its vehemence and the standard litany of “fascist” invective directed toward his former colleague.

In launching this monstrous invention the German-Fascist scoundrels did not hesitate at the most unscrupulous and base, lies, in their attempts to cover up crimes which, as has now become evident, were perpetrated by themselves…. Beyond doubt Goebbels’s slanderers are now trying by lies and calumnies to cover up the bloody crimes of the Hitlerite gangsters…. These arrant German-Fascist murderers, whose hands are stained with the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent victims, who methodically exterminate the population of countries they have occupied without sparing children, women or old people, who exterminated many thousands of Polish citizens in Poland itself, will deceive no one by their base lies and slander. ¹

One ponders the pathology that permeates this production with the hysterical denunciation, name-calling, extreme posturing and the crude rhetorical substitution of stock phrases like “has now become evident”, “beyond doubt”, and “will deceive none” in place of evidence or argument. The inescapable irony lies in reading this feigned excoriation of the “German-Fascist scoundrels”, “murderers” who methodically “exterminate” entire populations including women, children and old people as a masterpiece of Bolshevik psychological projection.

One merely needs to exchange “NKVD” for “German-Fascist”, “Stalinist” for “Hitlerite” and “Vyshinksi” for “Goebbels” along with their efforts to complete a “cover up” and then you have an accurate picture of what really did happen and who the real “gangsters”, “scoundrels”, “slanderers” and exterminators were.

The defeated Germans at the end of WWII were put through show trials by the allies for their conduct in Poland and beyond and punished harshly. Stalin and his henchmen, however, as members of the victory-party, got to play the part of prosecutor and handily escape exposure, much less accountability for their vast catalog of war crimes. Stalin also, as one of the principal architects of the military conquest of the German army, was able to immortalize himself as the world’s greatest anti-fascist, the man who vanquished the bestial Third Reich, turned the Führer’s bunker into rumble and the Führer himself into a charred corpse. Setting himself up as Hitler’s antipode was a brilliant stroke, although that embarrassing business of his earlier collusion with the Nazi chief was strictly taboo; since Hitler was the embodiment of evil, Stalin as Hitler’s nemesis had to have been a force of rectitude and righteousness.

The Poles, then, were not only victims of an exterminationist regime in many ways comparable to the Nazis but, unlike the victims of the Nazi’s, when the war finally came to an end, none of the Western powers stepped forward to help them expose the Soviet atrocities to the world, much less identify and formally accuse the perpetrators. No Soviet-Eichmanns were brought into the dock, tried, and hanged.

For Churchill and FDR with regard to the Poles, it was “see no evil” and “hear no evil.” Churchill seems to have known that it was the Soviets who did the Katyń murders, and FDR’s engagement with Stalin throughout the war was so replete with naïveté bordering on the delusional that he seemed unable to begin to grasp the deep malignancy of Stalin’s personality and more than willing to ignore the ample evidence of Stalin’s transgressions. CIA historian Benjamin B. Fischer relates FDR’s appalling remarks with regard to Poland and its plight.

In 1944, President Roosevelt assigned Capt. George Earle, his special emissary to the Balkans, to compile information on Katyń Earle did so, using contacts in Bulgaria and Romania. He too concluded that the Soviet Union was guilty. FDR rejected Earle’s conclusion, saying that he was convinced of Nazi Germany’s responsibility. The report was suppressed. When Earle requested permission to publish his findings, the President gave him a written order to desist. Earle—who had been a Roosevelt family friend—spent the rest of the war in American Samoa. ⁴

One must still wonder to this day why FDR was so fiercely determined to believe as true what so many others already had clearly seen to be false.

In his dealings with the Polish government-in-exile, FDR was duplicitous and ultimately handed Poland to Stalin as a gift for his war partnership. In a conversation with FDR in 1944, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, Polish government-in-exile Prime Minister, expressed over Stalin’s insistence on pushing the post-war Polish borders to the west. FDR’s response was, “Don’t worry … Stalin doesn’t intend to take freedom from Poland. He wouldn’t dare do that because he knows that the United States government stands solidly behind you. I will see to it that Poland does not come out of the war injured.” ¹

The British and the Americans thus decided to give Stalin a pass on the same sort of crimes for which they had hanged the Nazis and let him and his Kremlin successors continue to peddle the fiction of German guilt for Katyń, which they did up until 1990.

And so the Poles not only had to suffer from the deepest sort of wound imaginable with the Soviet destruction of their best and brightest, they also for decades had to endure as their overlords Stalin’s proconsuls, who enforced all of the official lies and criminalized the very mention of Katyń.

Katyń continues to be the wound that will not heal. ⁴

Even Gorbachev’s admission of the Soviet guilt in 1990 was a calculated misrepresentation of the facts. He withheld Beria’s execution order signed by Stalin—one that he had very likely read—leaving the false impression that Katyń was a rouge operation rather than a war crime planned and authorized by Stalin. ⁴

Katyń will not heal because Stalin’s ghost has never been exorcised and the Russians continue to be enthralled with him. The Putin government has made considerable efforts to rehabilitate his image and present him in a similar way as the Chinese Communist Party does with Mao—thirty percent bad; seventy percent good. In 2009, a Moscow subway station was refurbished with large inscriptions reading “Stalin reared us on loyalty to the people. He inspired us to labour and to heroism”—a direct quotation from the pre-1977 version of the Soviet anthem. ⁵

Stalinism still lives, and so its victims cannot rest.

________________________

¹ Allen Paul, Stalin’s Massacre and the Seeds of Polish Resurrection, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1991, 314, 35, 161, 211, 288.

² See Norman Davis, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

³ Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, New York: Basic Books, 2010, 89

⁴ Benjamin, B. Fischer, The Katyn Controversy: Stalin’s Killing Field, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/winter99-00/art6.html

⁵ Emily Whitaker, “Stalin’s Resurrection, History Today, http://www.historytoday.com/emily-whitaker/stalin%E2%80%99s-resurrection

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