The decision to commit the crime against 25,700 Polish prisoners of war and inmates was made on March 5, 1940, by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), with the personal participation of Joseph Stalin. From the outset, the Soviet Union concealed the crime, spread disinformation, and ultimately enforced the so-called “Katyn lie” for the next fifty years across the USSR and its satellite states.
After the invasion of Poland on September 17, 1939 by the Soviet Union — an ally of Nazi Germany at the time — thousands of Polish soldiers were taken prisoner by Soviet forces. Officers were held in camps in Kozelsk, Starobelsk, and Ostashkov, as well as in prisons across the territories annexed by the USSR following its aggression against the Second Polish Republic on 17 September 1939. In April and May 1940, the NKVD carried out mass executions at several sites within the Soviet Union. Among the sites of execution and concealment of the victims’ bodies was Katyn, which became the symbol of this war crime — a crime bearing all the hallmarks of genocide. Its victims included no fewer than 21,857 officers of the Polish Army, officers of the State Police, and other Polish citizens.
The murders were meticulously concealed. Until the summer of 1941, Soviet authorities successfully hid all traces of the crime, withholding information from the Polish Government-in-Exile and denying international aid organisations, including the Red Cross, access to the POW camps and prisons. The situation changed following the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the signing of the Sikorski–Mayski Agreement on July 30, 1941, which restored diplomatic relations between Poland and the USSR. At that time, the formation of a Polish Army in the East began — an army that was to include thousands of officers and soldiers previously interned in Kozelsk, Starobelsk, and Ostashkov. When only a few hundred of them could be accounted for, the Polish side began asking a pressing question: Where are the rest? The Soviets responded with silence, evasions, or even absurd claims. In December 1941, Stalin told Władysław Sikorski that the Polish prisoners had “escaped to Manchuria,” and three months later suggested to General Władysław Anders that they were being held in German camps.
Polish suspicions that the USSR had executed its prisoners of war were confirmed in the spring of 1943. On April 11, the German news agency Transocean announced the discovery in the Katyn Forest of mass graves
containing the bodies of Polish officers murdered by the Soviets. When Radio Berlin repeated the information two days later, the story gained worldwide attention. The Kremlin reacted immediately. On April 15, the Soviet Information Bureau issued a false statement claiming that Polish officers had been murdered in 1941 by German troops after the Red Army had failed to evacuate them in time from Smolensk. When the Polish Government-in-Exile demanded a full investigation, Moscow accused it of collaborating with Hitler and broke off diplomatic relations.
In September 1943, German troops were forced to withdraw from the Smolensk area before the advancing Red Army offensive. This meant that until January 1944, a Soviet team conducted covert operations to camouflage the facts and fabricate untrue events. Security officials intimidated witnesses and planted fabricated evidence in the mass graves, which was intended to lead to the conclusion of German guilt. On January 24, 1944, the so-called Burdenko Commission — named after its head, surgeon Professor Nikolai Burdenko — announced the official Soviet version of the fate of the murdered Poles stating that the Germans were responsible for the murder. This lie was immediately spread throughout the USSR and among Anglo-Saxon journalists. The leaders of the Allied powers, prioritising wartime alliance with Stalin, refrained from challenging the Soviet narrative and supporting the Poles. The leaders of the communist Polish Workers’ Party also promoted the Soviet version of events.
The Burdenko Commission’s narrative remained official Soviet doctrine for decades. To preserve it, the Kremlin orchestrated propaganda campaigns and made legal and diplomatic decisions. In the Soviet satellite states, secret police services monitored, persecuted, and silenced anyone who questioned the “Katyn lie.” Even the findings of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Select Committee (1951–1952), which unanimously concluded that the Soviets were responsible for the massacre, did not alter the official stance.
Instead, a massive campaign in the Eastern Bloc was launched promoting the fabricated findings of the Burdenko Commission. The campaign took on the largest scale in the Polish People’s Republic, subordinate to the USSR after the war and ruled by communists, where both the authorities and the press published Katyn lies.
Throughout the period of People’s Poland, it was forbidden to talk about the murder in public places, and the word Katyn was removed from every publication by the censor. At the same time, the authorities of the Soviet Union continued to conduct disinformation operations.
For example, in 1969, a war memorial in Belarus was built in the village of Khatyn — a name strikingly similar to Katyn — to commemorate victims of the German occupation, diverting attention from Soviet crimes. In 1983, a Soviet monument was erected in Katyn bearing the false inscription: “To the victims of fascism – Polish officers shot by the Hitlerites in 1941.” Two years later, in 1985, Polishcommunist authorities unveiled a monument at Warsaw’s Powązki Military Cemetery inscribed: “To Polish soldiers, victims of Hitlerite fascism, resting in the Katyn soil – 1941.”
The Soviet Union finally admitted responsibility for the Katyn massacre on April 13, 1990, calling it “one of the gravest crimes of Stalinism.” However, by the mid-1990s, attempts to revive the Katyn lie re-emerged in Russia. Fabricated claims — including allegations of falsified documents released by President Boris Yeltsin — were added to the discredited findings of the Burdenko Commission. To this day, denial of Soviet responsibility for the 1940 massacre persists in Russian academic, political, and media circles. In 2024, former Prosecutor General Yuri Skuratov repeated the false claim that the Germans were responsible for Katyn and called for reopening the case.
Meanwhile, the Russian Federal Security Service presented allegedly new materials, which were to prove that Poles had been killed in Katyń not by the NKVD but by the Nazis. However, these so-called documents are simply scans of materials produced by the Burdenko Commission in 1944, which was supposed to prove the guilt of the Germans. In contemporary Russian history textbooks, the Katyn massacre has been simplified — Polish officers are described not as victims of Soviet repression, but merely as “people buried in Russia.” Thus, the effort to deny and obscure the truth about Katyn continues to this day. For Poles, this remains an enduring challenge: to expose disinformation and to preserve and disseminate the truth about the tragic events of 1940.
By Krzysztof Kierski
The Katyn Massacre of 1940. Extermination of the Polish Elite.
COMMENTS