Russia To Review Assessment Of NKVD Crimes In Katyn

• 9.11.2023, 17:00

They want to blame the Nazis for the shooting of the Polish officers.

On the instructions of the Russian State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, a working group was created on the issue of a possible review of the assessments of the circumstances of the NKVD crimes in Katyn. It was chaired by the vice-speaker of the lower house of the Russian parliament, Pyotr Tolstoy. This happened after the appeal of Nikolai Ivanov, a deputy from the CPRF, who accused the Nazis of shooting Polish prisoners of war in Katyn, Interfax reports.

Ivanov stated that “the teaching community was outraged that the Goebbelsian claim that the shooting of 22,000 Polish servicemen in Katyn was the work of the NKVD of the USSR had been included in the new textbook”. According to the deputy, “it was convincingly proven by the Nuremberg Tribunal on the basis of numerous testimonies that it was the Germans who shot the Poles near Katyn.”

The deputy also proposed “to change the information in history textbooks for high school students that Polish servicemen were shot in Katyn by Soviet troops of the NKVD, and replace it with the fact that the shooting was carried out by German fascists and this fact was established by the Nuremberg Tribunal.”

Note that in 1990, when Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski was in Moscow on an official visit, TASS published an official statement in which the USSR admitted its guilt in the Katyn tragedy.

In 1992, Boris Yeltsin partially declassified documents related to the tragedy and handed them over to Polish President Lech Wałęsa, and a year later, with the words “forgive us”, he laid a wreath at the monument to the victims of Katyn in Warsaw.