"Lost Souls" [Thoughts on Katyn recorded after my trip to Russia in 1995]
"Lost Souls" [Thoughts on Katyn recorded after my trip to Russia in 1995]
North of Moscow the regular buses to Torzhok leave the depot in Tver and, about half an hour later, take a side trip West off the main St Petersburg to Moscow road, through Mednoye, up the road over the bridge to Ymok, and then back out to the main road. At the northern end of Ymok, this little village stuck in the endless time warp of rural Russia, is a small side road leading off to the west. Getting out of the bus I walk down towards the woods behind a small cattle feed lot on the edge of the village.
In March of 1991, before the joint Polish/Soviet exhumations in these woods in August of that year, Soviet military prosecutors taped interviews with 89 year old Vladimir Tkaryev, ex head of the NKVD in Kalinin in 1940, and 83 year old Pyotr Soprunenko, a retired senior NKVD officer living in Moscow with his daughters, formerly in charge of prison camps, one of Soviet Power's many Adolf Eichmanns. [1]
It is early morning. I walk along the quiet countryside, wondering if, while in Poland many families are thinking about trips to these woods, in Moscow about now Inna and Elena Soprunenko are getting their father his kasha. I think about Beria and Merkulov, shot with about 100 other MVD bosses in 1953 and Raikhman, arrested in 1951- released and then rearrested in 1954, vanished Serov, survived as KGB chairman to December 1958, then "transferred to other duties", vanished. Then Yegorov, Kruglov, Fyodotov, Kobulov, Rajchman, and so on for the forty-three names of senior NKVD officials known to have been overseeing the murder of the Poles. And what of Blokhin, Sinyegrubov, Krivenko, and the other thirty or so who were so busy during those nights in April of 1940, shooting Poles in the inner prison at the NKVD's Kalinin/Tver headquarters on Sovyetskaya Street. Where are you all now, in quiet retirement somewhere? Perhaps peacefully dead, or shot like Merkulov because you knew too much for your own safety under Soviet Power? [2]
I have heard there is some sort of Russian memorial being built in the woods in a hurry, so I go on in search of activity.
The road wends its way through the wood and I bear left down a narrow lane. In front of me is a typical Russian mesh fence with large gates and the ubiquitous policeman, smoking his cigarette and waving his radio about to keep off the mosquitoes.
The policeman looks at me sternly, I simply walk on and down into the woods. Sure enough, an old building is being hurriedly bulldozed into a large hole in the ground, and, in a clearing apparently made for the purpose, swarms of Russians are busily creating a monument, with surrounding paths and stonework.
A quick look at the inscription confirms my suspicions. Russian workers creating an instant memorial "to the suffering of Soviet people", a sure sign to me that some unwanted publicity is about to be given to another Soviet atrocity nearby, involving non-Russians. I make sympathetic noises, take a photo or two, and wander on.
Around the corner is an enclosed area with Catholic crosses visible from outside the fence. I slip in through a gateway and on through the trees.
All around are recent excavations, and a few mature trees have been cut down. I count the growth rings on the stumps they tally with late 1930's plantings; seems about right for the usual NKVD practice of replanting young trees on Soviet mass grave sites. [3]
Now for the excavations. I wander about checking the ground. There are concrete markers in the ground, some quite recently placed apparently, and also several small bore holes drilled down into the soil between the trees. Then, as I sift through some of the freshly turned soil, I find two old buttons from Polish miliary uniforms. Now I feel sure I am in the right place. But confirmation is coming from another source.
Through the trees comes Soviet Power. "Who are you? What are you doing?" But I know enough about the local ways to take my time about responding, and also how to respond. I stand up and slowly turn towards the intruder and, when I have taken a step or two towards him, I say, "OMON or KGB?".
Now knowledge is usually power, but he has just gained the knowledge that loses him the power. I don't give a stuff about him, so I am not Russian. My pronunciation is appalling so I am not even from a Soviet browbeaten middle European country, and rule number one for Soviet/Russian uniforms is don't get involved with foreigners on your own.
Never answer a question in Russia without including a question of your own so, secure behind my passport and American dollars, I continue, in my execrable Russian "I am a historian and traveller who has come to inspect the Polish cemetery. Do you have a problem with that?" He turns and walks away. I am alone again, in a wood in Russia, with over six thousand dead Poles. [4]
Isn't it lovely, I think, to have grown up in a country that has never been occupied by Soviet Power.
Included amongst those buried at this place there are 2,000 Polish police, 300 Polish border guards, 200 Polish prison guards, military police and officers, 200 Polish civilians including priests, rabbis and protestant ministers, lawyers, businessmen, landowners, professors, public officials and members of the courts. [5]
There are estimates of up to three thousand similar Russian sites involving Soviet Power and Poles. In the period 1939 to 1941 some 1.7 million Polish civilians were deported to Soviet Russia, including the 150,000 elderly people, 560,000 women, and 138,000 children who are estimated to have died of hunger and cold on the way to oblivion. Most headed for 2,500 camps in forty complexes of forced labour camps spread over 3,000 square kilometres of Siberian Russia. People battered, scattered, and brutalised from Kolyma to Kazakhstan. [6]
The endless terror, the screaming green police cars in the streets, and in the night the roundups under the bayonets of Soviet Power, people like Zofia Hoffman and her mother, Maria Neuhoff, forced on to a train at midnight on 13 April, 1940 in Lwow. [7] During that night a large convoy, involving hundreds of wagons, was assembled from Lwow and surrounding villages, under the guards of the NKVD.
Twenty minutes to an hour to pack, everything else lost, frequently the families separated at the station. The trains made up of about sixty goods wagons each, fifty to sixty Poles in each wagon. The green and rust-brown painted wagons, three tiers of slats for bunks on the walls. Four small openings, high up in the walls. A bucket and a toilet hole in the floor. [8]
The doors are sealed shut and the train moves off towards Western Ukraine. All through the railyard is heard "Serdeczna Matko", ["O Loving Mother of All"], later, on the border, "We'll not renounce the land whence we hail", singing silenced by shots from the Soviet guards. [9]
Constant hunger and thirst. Infrequent stops, perhaps every two-three days some black bread and sometimes a bucket of fish or vegetable soup. Perhaps only "kipiatok", boiling hot water. On at least one convoy, one that left Poland on February 10, 1940, nothing, for twenty-seven days; fifty per cent of the Poles on that convoy died on the train. On one train, in 1941, all 1650 Poles frozen to death. [10]
Sometimes down to fifty degrees of frost, and the Soviet guards, their arms full of dead babies, calling to the wagons, "Any more frozen kids in there?" [11]
Many of the dead were thrown from the moving trains by the Soviets. There were desperate attempts to bury family dead at some of the stops. Usually the bodies were simply left in the ditches and at the trackside along the way. [12]
I do not need to read Solzhenitsyn to know about Russian suffering under the yoke of Soviet Power. Any civilised mind is overwhelmed by the pointless sick brutality of the Cheka, the OGPU, the NKVD, the MVD and the KGB etc; so extensively catalogued since the 1920's and proven to all but the most depraved fellow-travellers. [13]
I know that the Polish people's journeys that I have described were also taken in equal conditions with equal results by countless Russians under Soviet Power.
Perhaps the Russian authorities are genuine in their wish to publicly acknowledge the Russian victims of Soviet Power, and have an earnest and genuine commitment to working to repair the personal suffering and damage of the Soviet years. Then let them rip off the signs and change the street names, remove the massive roof-top slogans to Soviet power, knock down some of the thousands of statues to Lenin that still abound in Russia, and put up memorials in large cities and small. Memorials in prominent places to state this intention to the Russian people, as much as to the foreigners. Solzhenitsyn suggested three powerful images of memorials to the Russian zeks and their families in his "Gulag Archipelago"; I have not heard of one of them being planned, let alone built. [14] Russian war memorials are still only Soviet political statements. The Russian people making their frequent pilgrimages to the memorials for the dead of "The Great Patriotic War" deserve the truth in the mawkish displays of militarism that are currently manifested all over Russia. Where is the open acknowledgement that Soviet incompetence meant that three Russian soldiers died for every one German soldier they killed; and that only twenty per cent of Russian POWs returned, usually to die in the Gulags? [15]
Where is the acknowledgement of the thousands of Russian civilian prisoners, and the Russian penal battalions in the Soviet army, who were driven over mine fields to clear them for Soviet troops? Where is the acknowledgement that Russian people under NKVD guns were driven in dark clothing on to the snow to draw German fire, and driven against German machine gun emplacements by NKVD machine gunners, as more expendable than Red Army troops? [16]
I also personally find it extremely offensive and totally inappropriate to have to go past Soviet inspired propaganda driven memorials in order to get to a Polish mass grave created and cynically denied for fifty years by Soviet Power.
For example, to visit the site of the Polish memorial to their dead at Katyn one has to pass a black granite memorial to "500 Russian POWs massacred by the Nazis". Now I know the Nazis used Russians to help with the work of exhuming the Polish dead in 1943. But I also know that they only used about fifty Russians in the exhumations, and seven more as nightwatchmen on the site. [17]
Study the film and photos taken at the time of the German exhumations. Read the accounts of those involved, Germans, Poles and others. Check scale maps, visit the site. Remember the work being done. Try and picture how on earth another 100 people could be working on the site, let alone the 500 Soviet Power say were there. Then consider that the Germans opened the grave site and the surrounding woods to all comers, with no restrictions: nobody reputable ever saw 500 Russian POWs. [18]
There never were "500 Russian POWs" at the site, let alone shot there by the Nazis. This is just another lie by Soviet Power to distract attention from their slaughter of the Poles. [19]
There certainly are a lot of murdered Russians buried in the forest at Katyn. They are buried in numerous grave sites, mainly on the other side of the forest lane from the original Polish grave sites. [20]
These Russian were shot, in the forest and at places such as the cellars of the Smolensk prisons and the Cheka, OGPU, NKVD and MVD offices in Smolensk, from about 1921 until after the German invasion of Russia in 1941. [21]
I am very cynical as to any claim by Soviet power that the Nazis massacred any Katyn workers, who had just been involved in an exhaustive investigation into the circumstances of the deaths of the Poles and Russian buried there.
Why would the Nazis kill propagandists for their cause? I consider it far more likely that, if any Russian workers were killed, they were slaughtered by Soviet Power for knowing too much, and having contact with foreigners. Russians like Ivan Krivozertsov, a witness of the Katyn affair who had escaped from the USSR through Germany, Italy and on to England, only to be murdered by Soviet Power on October 30th 1947 in a "shed in the fields" in England. [22]
An insensitive aspect of the performance of the Russian authorities, which I saw at a Katyn ceremony of dedication, was that there were a bunch of Russian army marionettes performing by the Russian memorial, at the entrance to the Polish memorial, both at the beginning and the end of the official ceremonies which President Walesa attended.
For me it was repugnant to see the successors of the troops who raped, slaughtered and pillaged their way across Poland, in 1939 in support of the Nazis, and again in 1944/45 in support of Soviet Power, making such a blatantly threatening display of Soviet/Russian Power to Polish people.
To give one small example, amongst many other acts of barbarism in the town of Grodno, during the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, 130 Polish pupils and officer cadets were murdered, and 12 year old Tadzio Jasinski was tied to a tank and dragged along the street, by the Soviets angered by the defence of the city by the Poles. I doubt that these Polish families would want any Soviet/Russian presence at any Polish memorials. [23]
If the Russian authorities were genuine in their sentiments about Katyn they would have placed the Russian Orthodox memorial to Russians, not at the entrance to the Polish memorial, but at the entrance to the woods further down the main road towards Gniezdowo railway station, where the graves of Russian people slaughtered by Soviet Power in the Smolensk oblast lie, unacknowledged. Instead they shifted the memorial to the mythical Russian POWs, from where I first saw it erected, and put it opposite the new Russian Orthodox cross, at the new entrance to the Polish memorial.
Another effect of the new Russian arrangements for the Polish memorial I saw is that they are being none too subtly taken further away from the site of the original graves created by Soviet Power. The current site of the Catholic cross, symbolic graves and memorial for the Polish dead is some 250 metres away from the site of the original graves.
The initial entry I saw to this Polish site was some 100 metres up the main Vitebsk-Smolensk road from the side road entry to the NKVD "summer house" by the river Dnieper; the side road down which the Poles were carried to their graves in 1940. The new entry I saw is still further up the road. [24]
If Soviet Power has collapsed and gone away there is little sign of this in Russia to a traveller and personal enquirer.
In my view Russia is again between revolutions. It is just that this time, instead of ripening between February and October in one year, the results of this revolution are taking a few years to mature.
Many in the West have deluded themselves that statues, slogans and other public manifestations of the propaganda efforts to maintain power in a dictatorship have gone, by popular effort in the Eastern occupied countries which are divesting themselves of Soviet Power, and from Russia itself.
In my view the reverse is true. From Murmansk to Moscow I saw only one instance of the removal of Lenin, and this was in an educational institute, in the foyer of which stands a plinth minus its bust of Lenin. He is only in storage however, not gone beyond recall.
Everywhere in Russia signs and slogans of Soviet Power remain untouched. The signs are simply turned off. The statues remain in the parks and squares. There are still plenty of Lenin Squares and Dzerzhinsky Avenues in Russia. The hammer and sickle emblem still hangs all over Russia like a modern sword of Damocles.
I saw and heard little public manifestation of any popular movement to confront or even to expunge the past; denial and selective amnesia are still the order of the day.
The real power brokers in Russia are busy stripping out the last of anything of value and salting it down in the West, before another repressive power structure that many Russians expect is placed over them, with the borders shut.
Enquire of the locals in any Russian town about ownership of the new buildings, frequently behind security fences and systems that would do credit to Fort Knox. Owned by Soviet Party hacks and "Mafiosi and banditos", the Russian names for organised crime, usually with contacts in the old party structure and/or the KGB was the only answer I got.
To placate the plebs while this pillaging is going on, to encourage the inflow of aid dollars to misappropriate for personal gain, and to provide the consumer goods the Russians have never been able to produce or purchase themselves, a 1990's version of Lenin's 1920's NEP programme has been permitted.
Speculators abound, but businesses which actually produce anything tangible are few and far between. Small traders and wheeler-dealers are flourishing, and inflation is rampant. In 1990 200 roubles was a monthly salary for a professional person, now it is the refund on an empty beer bottle, not even the price of a bus or tram ticket in the larger cities. [25]
Russia now has more than its fair share of short haired, frequently scarred, young men with silly dark glasses and heavy gold chains, going about in new Mercedes and various other expensive non-Russian cars.
Tragically real, but looking like bit players in bad American movies, they can be seen hanging about the banks and money changing places, leaning on the sides of the kiosks in the streets and metros, and sitting in the new bars and restaurants that have sprung up everywhere.
Meanwhile the prudent Russians are keeping enough of Lenin and his apparatus in place, warm and dry, in case they are needed again.
One can only talk of Russia old and now, Russia will never be new. The Soviet Union and all the trappings of Soviet Power are only twenty minutes away if the chance arises; and the more the West interferes in Russian affairs, for idealistic or materialistic reasons, the quicker the chance will come.
When one hears the ordinary Russian people saying that the Baltic states should watch their step and mind their manners, or Russia will have to teach them their place again; how is one to deduce that Russia has changed?
I saw and heard nothing during my time in Russia which would lead me to even hope that the country was headed down a path which will make her politics acceptable. Rather it is from sad comments from native Russians that my conclusions come. I was told,
"We do not have the knowledge or experience of the workings of democracy, or anything like the proper knowledge of the people in power at the moment. We do not have the time, or the prospect of obtaining such information in time to be of any use.
The average Russian is too busy surviving to be more than occasionally bothered by thoughts of the political future of his country. He is too bound up in the pressures of day to day existence and struggling to keep his family together and fed. For these reasons we are doomed to relive the past, be it under organised crime or a resurgence of some form of totalitarianism.
Remember that for all the faults of the Soviet power, it did deliver something to many people who now have nothing, and no hope for their future."
Those who suffered personally under Soviet Power and Nazi Germany are fading from the world stage. Their families, who have heard the reminiscences of those who lived through these times, are growing old themselves. The wheel is coming full circle. We have large numbers of people all over the world to whom the events of the thirties and forties are as relevant as the Peloponesian Wars; and just as interesting.
The League of Nations in 1939, discussed the codification of level-crossing signs as Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland. The UN, demonstrating its impotence in places such as Rwanda and Bosnia, Tibet and East Timor, is no better, little more than a "jobs for the boys" forum for the already rich and powerful, bankrupt morally and financially, it will be of no practical use in any serious crisis. [26]
Germany is reunited, the Balkans are in their usual unstable state, beckoning the opportunists in world politics with the sectarian influences as well as the political problems of old. Russia is grumbling, threatening and sabre rattling towards Poland, Ukraine, Chechenya and anyone else who dares to look like wanting to truly establish a way of life out from under Soviet Power.
Russia has not yet earned, and does not deserve, any economic or political accommodation, and should not be offered any placation until it demonstrates its sincerity by acts rather than words. The constant failure of Russia to face the questions of history, usually by indignantly trying to turn away any enquiry with a question involving victim blaming behaviours rather than a reasoned response, is typical of Soviet Power.
Yes, as Soviet power occupied them, all the countries of eastern Europe were treated as conquered territory;
yes, Soviet Power murdered people and deported both plant and people endlessly from these territories;
yes, Soviet Power murdered dissidents in the West, and kidnapped from the West those they sought to punish or suppress, as and when they felt like it;
yes, Soviet Power murdered the 9,432 people, found in 91 mass graves in 1943, in the town of Vinnytsia, with a dance floor and swings in a children's park built over the graves; [27]
yes, Soviet Power murdered the Poles at Katyn, Mednoye and Kharkov, and many, many other places;
yes, Soviet Power was a tragic mistake, and the more the Russian people are educated about this period from all sources, including from outside Russia, the better will be the chances for a decent future for the Russian people. Some may say, old hat, long known, what is the relevance of all this now?
My reply would be that until such statements are openly accepted as Soviet/Russian history, without victim blaming behaviours and stupid defensive excuses by the Russians, there can be no way any position of the so called new leadership of Russia can gain credibility.
We in the West may be able to say these things and argue their relevance, but the Russian people coming from under Soviet power cannot. For a short time in the current window of opportunity any penalty for debating such questions identifying Russians as non-Soviet may be minimal. However, because the Russians lack the sources of knowledge like uncensored libraries, and any tradition of international association of questioning minds over time, to build a wide and disparate knowledge base from which to debate and discourse, there is little hope of such issues getting a proper airing in Russia.
A tragedy for countries such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia is that out of the wreckage, the dross and detritus, must necessarily come the new ruling forces and controlling bureaucracies. An additional tragedy for Russia is that Soviet Power was not physically defeated, so the lies and myths endure largely unchallenged. Many think they have lost a battle, not the war.
The great tragedy of Gorbachev was that he was stuck in his own limited paradigm. Married to a doctrinaire Marxist lecturing in Maxism-Leninism, trapped by his education and experience being so limited, he threw away a chance for the Russian people, by giving them glasnost. Only one generation out from slavery the Russian people cannot yet cope with it. If they had had several years of perestroika, during which glasnost would have seeped out, there was a chance that a politically aware, economically productive and educated middle class could have developed as a stabilising influence. [28]
We are seeing some historical documents from Russia. How about us seeing from Western sources who advised that the West's gutless reaction to the Warsaw crisis be limited to sacrificing a few aircrews on hopeless sorties from places like Italy? Must not risk upsetting Stalin.
Who made sure that no Poles marched in the victory parades after the war in England? Must not risk upsetting Stalin.
Were they the same people who made sure that, during the Cold War, mention of Katyn was forbidden in "Voice of America" broadcasts to Soviet occupied Europe? Did they ensure the constant refusal of the Western governments to sheet home the blame for Katyn, at Nuremberg and later? Did they have an active part in the Western cowardice in 1956 over Poland and the other occupied countries of Eastern Europe? Where were they in the Prague Spring? [29]
Britain won the Second World War, by sacrificing everything. The tragedy is that by the way Britain handled events like Katyn she even sacrificed the moral high ground. I do not think that Churchill's betrayal of Poland and the Polish people ended at Yalta. For instance, after the Second World War, who ensured that whenever the subject of Katyn came up in government circles, it was suppressed? Must not risk upsetting Stalin. [30]
Were these people still in the "Establishment" in 1971 and 1976, when the British government and the Anglican Church bowed to direct Soviet interference in efforts to erect a memorial to the victims of Katyn in England? Must not risk upsetting the Soviet leaders who followed Stalin. [31]
As long as these questions are ridiculed and unanswered no-one will convince me that the event we call Katyn is not very relevant to the political machinations over NATO and the UN, and problems with international ramifications like Cambodia, Yugoslavia and Chechenya, Rwanda, Tibet and East Timor.
If the Germans decide not to expose the Stasi and their informers, not to try them in open courts under the glare of publicity, if the Russians decide not to try the KGB and its predecessors, that is their business. But if it is okay by the West, and the Soviets/Russians, to chase Nazi war-criminals to the end of the earth until the end of their days; why is it not also simple justice to call the Soviet murderers of Katyn to account? Must we find oil under the graves? Until Katyn is properly addressed by the international community I say the war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia are merely selective hypocrisy.
In addition to the military prisoners over 1.7 million civilian Poles were deported into Soviet Russia between 1939 and 1941. Why should the Polish people be satisfied with the belated paltry Soviet/Russian acknowledgements about 15,500 of these, whose fate has long been known anyway? [32]
I do not want blood on the floor, I know that most of the Nazis walked free. I have seen the May Day parades in Russia and the ceremonies to remember their war dead. I know that the Stalin portraits, the Lenin banners and the Hammer and Sickle emblems will all be around for a long time to come on such occasions.
To help forestall the resurgence of the brutal totalitarianism that Russia seems to me to be doomed to suffer again, with all the resultant misery and oppression that portends, what I want is the Soviet system called to public account before the world as the Nazis were.
To quote one of the oracles on this subject, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
"Not to put them on trial so much as their crimes. And to compel each one of them to announce loudly; `Yes, I was an executioner and a murderer."' .........
"It is unthinkable in the twentieth century to fail to distinguish between what constitutes an abominable atrocity that must be prosecuted and what constitutes that `past' which `ought not to be stirred up.'
We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. It is for this reason, and not because of the 'weakness of indoctrinational work', that they are growing up 'indifferent'. Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity. It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!" End of quote. [33]
Perhaps there have been all these "significant, fundamental, irreversible, ideological, positive changes from the days of the Soviet regime," that fellow-travellers and other naive people press me to believe.
Then, for example, let one of these dreamers name a Russian Embassy where other nationals have access and work with Russian staff in support of the embassy functions, in the same way and to the same extent as the numerous Russians in the embassies of other countries in Russia. To get into the New Zealand Embassy in Moscow I had to pass the Soviet/Russian policeman on the gate who demanded my passport, and then the unsupervised receptionist was a local Russian. I would be prepared to bet that most drivers, cleaners and others often inside our Moscow Embassy are Russians.
Try to find the locals in a Russian Embassy in a Western country. Local input is conspicuously absent from all Russian embassies throughout the world. Changing such practices as this will help to convince me that significant change has really started in Russia. Until then I will continue to believe that what we see is only a facade while the forces of evil regroup behind the screens.
Russia has enormous problems, but she also has enormous potential, for both good and evil. If Russians can learn to value human life, and perhaps later even individual freedom of thought and expression, there is hope for us all. The main problem is that, as Gladstone once said, only freedom can educate man in freedom. [34]
I have many Russian friends I like very much. I wish Russia and her people well. I love the country and its people dearly, but not blindly, and certainly not at any risk to my personal freedom.
Let me leave you with this question. If Katyn had not been found and exploited by the Nazis, would Soviet Power, or the current Russia, ever have disclosed its very existence to us, let alone its whereabouts?
Notes
[1] "The Observer", 6 October 1991, 119 Farrington Rd, London
[2] Ibid; J Zawodny, "Death in the Forest", Macmillan, 1971, pp 199-200, 148 "Moscow News" No's 24 & 37, 1990, English editions.
[3] Allen Paul, "Katyn", Charles Scribner's, New York, NY, 1991, p 112 John Lauck, "Katyn Killings", Kingston Press, USA, 1988, p 19-24 "Moscow News" No 32, 1989, English edition "The Crime of Katyn", facts and documents 5th edition. Polish Cultural Foundation, London 1989, p 236 Joseph Mackiewicz, "The Katyn Wood Murders", World Affairs Book Club, London, 1951?, p 200 J Zawodny, op cit, p 24.
[4] 6295 ex plaque on site as photographed by the author in 1995 6287, "The Observer", op cit 6570, "Isvestia", Russian edition, Moscow, 19 November 1992.
[5] John Lauck, op cit, p 113
[6] "The Crime of Katyn", op cit, p 301-2
[7] Allen Paul, op cit, p 85 et seq
[8] Ibid, p 119
[9] Ibid, pp 33, 122
[10] "The Crime of Katyn", op cit, p 302-3 Allen Paul, op cit, p 180 Nikolai Tolstoy, "Stalin's Secret War", Jonathan Cape, London, 1981, p 13
[11] "The Crime of Katyn", op cit, p 302
[12] Allen Paul, op cit, p 125
[13] Robert Conquest, "The Great Terror- a reassessment", Century Hutchinson, London, 1990.
[14] A Solzhenitsyn, "The Gulag Archipelago", [parts i & ii] William Collins, London, 1980, p 550
[15] Nikolai Tolstoy, op cit, p 282 Dmitir Volkogonov, "Stalin- triumph and tragedy", Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London. 1988, p 505.
[16] "Stalin's Secret War", Nikolai Tolstoy, op cit, p 282
[17] Allen Paul, op cit, p 205 Joseph Mackiewicz,, op cit, p 190 J Zawodny, op cit, p 25 "The Crime of Katyn", op cit, p 237
[18] Joseph Mackiewicz, op cit, p 142-149 Louis Fitzgibbon, "Katyn Massacre", Corgi Illustrated, London, 1977, p 146 et seq
[19] J Zawodny, op cit, p 51 Joseph Mackiewicz,, op cit, p 225-8
[20] J Zawodny, op cit, p 20
[21] John Lauck, op cit, p 252
[22] Ibid, p 250 J Zawodny, op cit, p 126-194 Joseph Mackiewicz, op cit, p 173 et seq "The Crime of Katyn", op cit, p 239-40
[23] Allen Paul, op cit, p 289 J K Zawodny, op cit, p 131 "The Crime of Katyn", op cit, p 300
[24] Joseph Mackiewicz,, op cit, p 143
[25] Author's personal experiences of conditions on his trips to Russia.
[26] Malcolm Muggeridge, "Chronicles of Wasted Time: volume two," William Collins, London, 1973, p 14
[27] J Zawodny, op cit, p 192
[28] Donald Morrison [ed.], "Mikhail S Gorbachev", Time Book, New American Library, 1988, p 202
[29] J Zawodny, op cit, p 186 et seq
[30] Ibid, p 186-8 W Churchill, "The Second World War" Vol 4, Cassell & Co, London 1951, p 678-81
[31] Louis Fitzgibbon, op cit, p 184 et seq
[32] John Lauck, op cit, p 96
[33] A Solzhenitsyn, op cit, p 176-8
[34] Rudolf Gerhardt, "The censorship of propaganda films", "Index", Writers and Scholars International, London, Autumn/winter, 1972. P 84
David Paterson Mirams, PO Box 17-141, Karori, Wellington, New Zealand asserts the moral right to be recognised as the author of this work. [1995].
The text of the order to shoot the Poles
A map of the Katyn massacre site
Katyn related books and videos
Articles about the Katyn Massacre on this site.
"Separate memories, separate sorrows"
The Anglo-Polish agreement of 25 August 1939
A page which explains the photos used in this site
Katyn related photos which people have sent me
Information on the rebellion of Russian troops at Courtine in 1917
Early German/Soviet co-operation: the Treaty of Rapallo
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