Russia opens more Katyn files in gesture to Poland

RUSSIA HAS granted full public access to once-secret files on the 1940 murder of 22,000 Polish officers by Soviet forces, just weeks after Poland’s president and 95 other prominent figures died in a plane crash near the site of the massacre.

Moscow’s refusal until 1990 to admit responsibility for the killings at Katyn, and its subsequent failure to complete an investigation into the atrocity, has been a major obstacle to any improvement in relations between Russia and Poland.

But the death of president Lech Kaczynski and many senior Polish political and military officials on April 10th – as they tried to land at an airport in western Russia on their way to a commemoration ceremony at Katyn – has been recognised by Moscow and Warsaw as an opportunity for rapprochement.

Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said he had ordered the publication of the documents on the website of the Russian state archive because his country “owed it to the world” and must “learn the lessons of history”. The file was declassified in 1992 but was previously accessible only to researchers.

The dossier includes a letter from Soviet secret police chief Lavrenty Beria to dictator Josef Stalin, recommending the execution of Polish prisoners of war, whom he described as “sworn enemies of Soviet power, filled with hatred towards the Soviet system”.

“Each of them is just waiting for liberation so as to actively join the struggle against Soviet power,” Beria wrote, before requesting for them “the sentence of capital punishment – execution by shooting”.

Stalin approved and signed off on the request in blue pencil on the first page of the letter, as did senior members of his politburo.

It is marked as “top secret” and dated March 5th, 1940 – less than a month before the executions began.

“We can surely call the decision a breakthrough, because it seems that for the first time a website that is generally accessible to everyone in the Russian Federation publishes three very important documents concerning the Katyn massacre,” said Polish historian Andrzej Kunert.

For half a century Moscow blamed Nazi troops for the Katyn massacre, and only under reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 did the Kremlin admit Soviet responsibility for the killings.

Poland and Russian human rights group Memorial want officials to release files from a criminal investigation into Katyn that was abruptly closed in 2004.

Russia declared most of the documents from the investigation classified.