THE KATYN MASSACRE

THE KATYN MASSACRE:

AN ASSESSMENT OF ITS SIGNIFICANCE AS

A PUBLIC AND HISTORICAL ISSUE

IN THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN, 1940-1993

A Thesis

Presented to the

Department of History

Western Illinois University

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

Louis Robert Coatney

December 1993

THE KATYN MASSACRE:

AN ASSESSMENT OF ITS SIGNIFICANCE AS

A PUBLIC AND HISTORICAL ISSUE

IN THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN, 1940-1993

An Abstract of

A Thesis

Presented to the

Department of History

Western Illinois University

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

Louis Robert Coatney

December 1993

Abstract

The Katyn Massacre: A Assessment of Its Significance As A Public

and Historical Issue in the United States and Great Britain, 1940-1993.

The purpose of this research is to assess the public, political and

historical, scholarly significance of the Katyn Massacre--the extermina-

tion of 26,000 Polish officers, cadets, and other officials at Katyn and

other killing sites in Russia in Spring 1940. Specifically, the study

surveys the historical and contemporary treatment of the Katyn Massacre

in the public press and scholarly literature of the United States and

Great Britain, 1943-1993.

The struggle to uncover and establish the truth about Katyn, in the

face of denials, counteraccusations and/or equivocations by various

Soviet governments and by some opinion leaders in Great Britain and the

United States--including the leaders and bureaucracies of various Anglo-

American governments--is, itself, significant. The Katyn Massacre and

its coverup challenged the integrity of our political, academic, and

media leaders and institutions. My thesis is that Katyn was obviously

significant to those who knew the facts about it, and too many of those

leaders and institutions remained indifferent to the issue and failed to

grasp its importance.

Specifically, the Katyn Massacre's horrendous significance and the

Soviet Union's responsibility for it was widely disbelieved or ignored,

following the Second World War. Until Congressional hearings in 1952, a

lack of public information about the massacre can be cited to explain

and excuse the scanty coverage and widespread skepticism about Soviet

guilt for the killings. After 1952--and certainly after the publication

of Dr. Janusz K. Zawodny's book, Death in the Forest, in 1962--Katyn

should not have been neglected as it was in many relevant studies: of

of the politics and diplomacy of the Second World War; of the national

diplomacies of Poland and the Soviet Union; or of the Cold War.

Many journalists and scholars were unable or unwilling to report

accurately on Katyn and its importance--even in the 1960s and 1970s--for

reasons ranging from honest confusion or actual ignorance about the

massacre and its implications to motivations that may have been rooted

in ideological bias. I describe the implications of this oversight, in

respect to the effectiveness and integrity--or lack thereof--of

historians, journalists, and government officials in Great Britain and

the United States.

Chapter one describes the killings at Katyn. Chapter two deals

with the discovery of the Katyn site as a Second World War war crimes

issue. Chapter three analyzes its treatment as a postwar public and

political issue in the United States and Great Britain. Chapter four

considers Katyn's postwar historical and scholarly treatment in these

countries. Chapter five summarizes the historical and political

implications for the West of Katyn and similar episodes. A chrono-

logical listing of Katyn-related books and articles is appended.

APPROVAL PAGE

This thesis, by Louis Robert Coatney, is accepted in its present

form by the Department of History of Western Illinois University, as

satisfying the thesis requirement for the degree Master of Arts.

________________________

Nicholas C. Pano

Chair, Examining Committee

________________________

Sterling J. Kernek

Member, Examining Committee

________________________

William L. Combs

Member, Examining Committee

____________________

Date

DEDICATION

To Richard Wartman,

my Russian professor at Augustana College (Rock Island, IL),

1971-72, who used wit and kindness to spark an appreciation for Russian

language and history among his students, even though he had lost an

uncle and cousin at Katyn

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the members of my Western Illinois University

thesis committee--committee chair Professor Nicholas Pano, a specialist

in Eastern European and Albanian history and affairs; diplomatic history

scholar Dr. Sterling Kernek; and German and Nazi history expert Dr.

William Combs--for all of their time, criticism, and guidance. I also

thank Polish-American leader Roman Pucinski, Soviet history authority

Robert Conquest, U.S. State Department Soviet affairs strategic analyst

Martha Mautner, Katyn scholars Dr. Janusz Zawodny and Robert Szymczak,

and many others left unnamed for sharing their time, interest, and

resources. Finally, I thank former Alaska Governor Steve Cowper for his

unhesitating political courage on the issue of Katyn in Spring 1988.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii

MAPS

1. KOZIELSK, OSTASHKOV, AND STAROBIELSK, WITH KILLING SITES . . . iv

2. KATYN AND GRAVES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

3. THE "CURZON" LINE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vi

PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .vii

CHAPTERS

1. INTRODUCTION: THE KATYN MASSACRE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2. KATYN AS A SECOND WORLD WAR ISSUE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

3. KATYN AS A POSTWAR PUBLIC AND POLITICAL ISSUE IN THE WEST . . 40

4. KATYN AS AN HISTORICAL AND SCHOLARLY ISSUE IN THE WEST . . . . 81

5. THE HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF KATYN . . . . . .137

ENDNOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .147

SOURCES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .177

APPENDIX

COVER PAGE OF L. BERIA'S 5 MARCH 1940 MEMORANDUM . . . . . . . . A-1

iii

Map 1. Kozielsk, Ostashkov, Starobielsk

and the killing sites

Map 2. Katyn and graves*

*U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, The Katyn Forest

Massacre, Hearings before the Select Committee to Conduct an

Investigation of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances of the Katyn

Forest Massacre, Eighty-second Congress, Second Session, on

Investigations of the Murder of Thousands of Polish Officers in the

Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia, Part 6, (Exhibits 32 and 33

Presented to the Committee in London by the Polish Government in Exile,

(Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952), 1742.

Map 3. The "Curzon" Line*

*Edward J. Rozek, Allied Wartime Diplomacy: A Pattern in Poland, (New

York: John Wiley & Sons, 1958), 347.

PREFACE

Fifty-three years ago, over 4,000 prisoners of war were taken out

into a forest in small groups where they were methodically murdered.

The victims, encumbered in greatcoats and with their hands tied behind

their backs, were forced face down onto the fresh corpses of their

comrades, to be likewise shot through the back of the head. A younger

few who attempted to resist had self-strangulation knots tied from their

hands to their necks. Sawdust was rammed down the gullets of those who

screamed and struggled, or their overcoats were tied down around their

heads. The small groups became vast, neat stacks of human refuse.1 At

the time, these men and 11,000 others who suffered the same fate at

similar killing sites were only known to be missing.

The victims were Polish officers and cadets, about half of whom

were reservists from key civilian professions: doctors, lawyers,

teachers, clergymen, and the like.2 They represented the leading,

educated elements--"the best and the brightest"--of Polish society. The

place and time of their slaughter was the Russian forest village of

Katyn near Smolensk in the Spring of 1940. At that time, their

families' contact with them (by mail, to the Soviet internment camps

where they were being detained) ceased with no explanation. They simply

disappeared, until their mass graves were discovered and publicized by

the Nazi government, whose troops occupied the area in April 1943.

vii

viii

The intended purpose of this study is not to condemn the Russian

people (or any other former Soviet peoples) for the Katyn killings, or

to promote the punishment of any surviving executioners. It should be

remembered that over 30,000 of the best and most forwardthinking Soviet

officers of the Red Army were similary exterminated in the late 1930s--

greatly facilitating the Nazi German invasion in 1941.3 Before the

Katyn Massacre, the Russian people themselves had suffered far worse

holocausts from Stalinism, numerically.4 Forcing the now-aged NKVD

executioners to remember and relive the details of their crimes and

victims is far more vital and justice-serving, historically and morally,

than punishing them in the conventional sense.

Nor, in an age of a cheapening surplus of human life which is

critically over-burdening an increasingly exhausted and fragile natural

environment, is it the primary purpose of this paper to condemn mass

killing as an unnecessary and immoral instrument of state policy.5

Rather, the purpose of this study is to assess the public and political

and the historical and scholarly significance of the Katyn Massacre and

its prolonged coverup. Specifically, the study will survey the

contemporary and historical treatment of the Katyn Massacre episode and

will assess its significance, both in the public press and the scholarly

literature of the United States and Great Britain.

"Significance" can be defined in two ways. One interpretation of

the "significance" of an event can be the public recognition of its

importance. Some may claim that something is not significant if its

importance is not generally known. It is easy to believe this in our

present age which has been dominated by news media which seem so all-

pervasive and omnipotent. "Damage control" and "spin control" have

become essential, recognized survival skills for a political leader or

institution.

Until the early 1950s, for reasons described later in this study,

Katyn's power and danger were realized only by the Poles, the Soviet

leadership, and a few political and intellectual leaders around the

world. It is true that there are episodes in history that become known

and significant because they are politically useful and used. Some-

times, it is difficult to tell whether history begets political events

or political events beget history. (Indeed, the two often cannot be

separated.) However, an event (and the truth about it) is sometimes so

historically and politically powerful and compelling--intrinsically

significant--that it cannot be controlled, contained, or ignored.

The Katyn Massacre has proven to be a sterling example of this.

Its nature and implications exerted this kind of inexorable power and

impact on the peoples and institutions of Poland, of the Soviet Union

and other nations under its control, and of the West. The Katyn

Massacre was a politically motivated, mass ethnic killing that has

important political relevance and ramifications, for academic as well as

civic spheres.

The struggle to uncover and establish the truth about Katyn, in the

face of denials and counteraccusations by various Soviet governments and

by some opinion leaders in the West--including leaders and bureaucracies

of various Western governments--is, itself, significant. The Katyn Mas-

sacre and its coverup challenged the integrity of political, academic,

and media leaders and institutions in the United States and Great

Britain. In retrospect, we see that too many failed the test of Katyn.

The horrendous significance of the Katyn Massacre and of the Soviet

Union's responsibility for it was widely disbelieved or ignored during

the immediate postwar years. Until Congressional hearings in 1952, a

lack of public information about the massacre can be cited to explain

and excuse the scanty coverage and widespread skepticism. After 1952--

and certainly after the publication of Dr. Janusz K. Zawodny's book,

Death in the Forest, in 1962--Katyn should not have been neglected as it

was in many studies of Poland or the Soviet Union; of the politics and

diplomacy of the Second World War; of the national diplomacies of

Poland, the Soviet Union, Germany, Great Britain, or the United States;

or of the Cold War.6

I also intend to demonstrate that many reputable scholars were

unable or unwilling to report accurately on Katyn and its importance--

even in the 1960s and 1970s--for reasons ranging from honest confusion

or actual ignorance about the Katyn Massacre and its implications to

motivations that may have been rooted in ideological bias.

Finally, I shall describe the grave and enduring implications of

this oversight, regarding the effectiveness and integrity--or lack

thereof--of historians, journalists, and government officials in the

West.

CHAPTER 1.

INTRODUCTION: THE KATYN MASSACRE

Documents found only recently, in 1992, have certified the identity

of those who ordered the Katyn Massacre of April-May 1940. They point

the finger of guilt to the collective membership of the Soviet Polit-

buro, dominated by Communist dictator Iosif Vissarianovich Stalin. The

killings resulted from the recommendation of Politburo member Lavrenti

Beria, the dreaded chief of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD.1

There were a number of motives for the killings. Foremost was the

"liquidation"--the Communist euphemism for extermination--of the social

and intellectual leadership elites of Poland, as the initial step to

eliminating that independent, anti-Soviet (and, historically, frequently

anti-Russian) nation, permanently. In 1939, Soviet Foreign Minister

Molotov had gloated, "One swift blow to Poland, first by the German Army

and then by the Red Army, and nothing was left of this bastard of the

Versailles Treaty."2

Specifically, Beria suggested to the Soviet Politburo that the

Polish officers be exterminated, since they were ". . . involved in

anti-Soviet propaganda. Each of them is only waiting for his release

from imprisonment in order to enter into a struggle against Soviet

power."3

Indeed, the Poles were hardly model prisoners and imprudently

ridiculed their Soviet guards and indoctrination cadre members to their

faces.4 Their attitude now seems incredibly naive--even arrogantly

stupid, considering that the Bolsheviks' record of atrocities was well

known to them. Yet, the Poles apparently believed that the West--

specifically, the British and French--were actively concerned about

them, being interested in their future usefulness, and would not abandon

them. A "white paper" submitted to the 1952 U.S. Congressional hearings

on Katyn by the Polish Government-in-Exile describes this misassumption:

With a few exceptions, the morale of the prisoners at Kozielsk

appeared to be good. Firmly believing in the ultimate victory of

justice and trusting implicitly in Poland's Western Allies, the

prisoners hoped for a quick release from Soviet captivity and the

granting of facilities either to return to Poland or to make their

way through a neutral state to join the forces fighting in the

West.5

A rumour circulated in the camp that General Zarubin himself

had said to one of the prisoners. "You have too many protectors,

so you cannot go". The prisoners interpreted this remark as

meaning that Britain and France did not want them to be returned

to German-occupied Poland, as they were anxious to get them to the

West. It was even said that Britain had asked the Soviets to send

the Poles to the West and had offered to pay the expenses of their

detention in Russia and that the Soviets were bargaining over the

price. Rumours of this kind, which made the prisoners feel that

they were an object of concern to the outside world helped

considerably to keep up morale in the camp.6

Their faith in the West proved to be pathetically ill-advised.

Although the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941--

"Operation Barbarossa"--forced Stalin to obtain material assistance from

the West and concede the reestablishment of a postwar Poland independent

in name (if not in fact), the extermination of the Polish intelligentsia

facilitated another motive for the Soviet crime, the intended (and even-

tual) Soviet subjugation of Poland. As former National Security Advisor

Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1960, "The Nazi and Soviet extermination

policies, which had decimated the Polish intelligentsia, the usual

source of the political elite, had badly weakened the nation as a whole,

decreasing its capacity for resistance."7

Stalin himself had a deep grudge against Poland and its intelli-

gentsia. It stemmed in part from that nation's military victories over

Bolshevik armies, to which Stalin was attached as a political commissar,

in the Russo-Polish War of 1919-20.8

Another motive for the extermination of the Polish officers was

Stalin's effort to appease his Nazi ally, Hitler. The second, secret

protocol of the Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact of 23 August 1939 had

provided for the fourth partition of Poland, dividing it between Nazi

Germany and the Soviet Union. While the Germans invaded Poland, in

defiance of the British and French, and effectively began the Second

World War on 1 September 1939, the Soviets did not attack the Poles

until 6:00 AM, 17 September 1939.9 Although the Poles were by then

already collapsing under the weight of the German onslaught, Polish Army

units in the East fought, and in a few cases won, some pitched battles

with the Red Army units advancing from the East. Against such over-

whelming military odds, though, there obviously could be only one

result, and Poland surrendered on 27 September 1939.

While the British reaction to the German invasion of Poland had

been to declare war, their reaction was noticeably more circumspect and

indulgent toward the Soviet invasion. One example was this quote from

The Times of London:

Lloyd George, who had always been regarded by the Poles as

hostile to their cause, justified his reputation with a suitable

piece of invective in the Sunday Express. Under the heading "What

is Stalin up to?" he criticized the "class-ridden Polish government"

and praised the Soviet government for "liberating their kinsmen from

the Polish yoke."10 At a somewhat later stage, on 11 November 1939,

Picture Post captured the careful distinction fostered by many

British officials, in referring to "The Nazi Army of invasion and

the Russian Red Army of intervention . . . ."11

The Katyn Massacre occurred in the context of a Polish holocaust on

a par with the Jewish Holocaust. It is estimated that 5,384,000 Poles,

including Polish Jews, died during the German occupation through slave

labor exhaustion, disease and starvation, repression of resistance, or

outright extermination. The first victims of the Auschwitz-Birkenau

death camp were Polish. The first gassing at Auschwitz was performed

upon 300 Polish and 700 Soviet prisoners of war.12 An estimated total

of 6,028,000 Poles--22 percent of Poland's population--died in the

Second World War. Half of the victims were Jewish.13

The Nazis launched a calculated campaign to exterminate the

educated elite of Polish society and racially undesirable elements. The

German Army perpetrated this massacre, as well as the more intently

genocidal Nazi SS.14 There were plans to exterminate the Poles entire-

ly, after they had outlived their usefulness and the Jews had already

been annihilated. Polish children were not allowed to go to high school

or college. The Catholic Church in Poland was suppressed.15 Ironi-

cally, though, many of the Polish officers who were Jewish did avoid the

Holocaust and survive the war, having been in the custody of the regular

German Army Wehrmacht, rather than that of the Nazi SS.16

The method of capture, detention, and extermination of Poles by the

Soviets is also important to consider. These victims were not just

Polish officers and cadets who had surrendered to the Red Army in the

field. They also included reservists and other officials who had been

arrested in their homes in the Soviet-occupied zone of Poland.17 As it

was, many Polish officers had been murdered immediately upon their

capture, in spite of Soviet assurances of good treatment, particularly

when their units had successfully battled against the Soviet invasion.

Polish civilians suffered many Red Army atrocities as well.18

Conditions in the Soviet-held territories were so ghastly that some

resident Jews actually petitioned--a few successfully, tragically--to be

transferred to the German-occupied zone.19 In the Ukraine during the

confusion of the changeover, Ukrainian nationalists occasionally took

revenge on the ethnic Poles in their region. In time, these killings

were investigated and punished by the Soviets who had as little use for

Ukrainian nationalists as for Poles.20 Later, during the German

occupation, the Ukrainians and Poles fought pitched battles against each

other.21

There were approximately 15,000 Polish officers and cadets captured

by the Soviets in September-October 1939. Many of them were reservists

who in civilian life were professionals such as doctors, lawyers,

college professors, etc. They were incarcerated in three internment

camps: Kozielsk (southwest of Moscow), Ostashkov (between Moscow and

Leningrad), and Starobielsk (southeast of Kharkov). At the Kozielsk

camp there were 262 Poles of Jewish descent.22 There was also one

woman, Polish aviatrix Janina Lewandowski.

Of the captive Poles, only 448 seemed to the Soviets to be

receptive to political collaboration. Initially, and during the winter

(of 1939/40), the NKVD appeared to be trying to convert the Poles to

Stalinist Communism. However, the interrogation and indoctrination

sessions were too crude, dogmatic, and alien for most of the loyal,

sophisticated Poles to accept. Eventually, the NKVD separated the

potential collaborators from the thousands of loyal Poles. Then, in

April-May 1940, having been given food and assurances that they were to

be repatriated home, the Poles were shipped out by train, in groups of a

hundred or so at a time.

The destinations of most of these prisoners were three separate

killing sites. Katyn was the terminus for the Kozielsk inmates. The

other points were similarly railheads, near Kalinin for the Ostashkov

prisoners and near Kharkov for the Starobielsk captives. Only recently

have the locations of these other mass graves been verified.23 The 448

potential collaborators were transported by train to Pawlishtchev Bor,

located between Kozielsk and Smolensk.

The NKVD executioners were brutally efficient, having refined their

methods on many thousands of Russian social, political, and military

purge victims in the previous decades. It was simply an occupational

routine for the killers, and some wore special attire, similar to that

of butchers.24 Apparently, there were also a few especially vicious or

fanatical thugs who took delight in sadistically abusing these members

of the Polish elite, as they murdered them.25

Until Spring 1940, some of these officers' families had been

corresponding with them. Thereafter, the families' mail was returned as

undeliverable. Inquiries about the missing officer prisoners from the

Polish Government-in-Exile, in London, and from the British government

went unanswered by the Soviet government. In December 1940 (after the

German overrunning of France in the Summer of 1940) at a reception for

the leaders of the pro-Soviet Polish officers, NKVD chief Beria and his

deputy, Vsevolod N. Merkulov, both enigmatically admitted that a "great

mistake" had been made in the case of the other Polish officers.26

There had been meetings in March 1940, during which the Soviet NKVD

shared its well-practiced terror and extermination technology with the

Nazi SS. (The only Nazi "improvement" over Soviet extermination methods

was the use of poison gas.) Professor George Watson has concluded that

the fate of the interned Polish officers may have been decided at this

conference, which according to him was held in Cracow.27 In his 1991

book, Stalin: Breaker of Nations, historian Robert Conquest stated that

the conference had taken place at Zakopane in the Winter of 1939/40.28

While it may seem to be grimly amusing and fair justice that the Nazis

would ultimately turn these extermination techniques against the NKVD,

political commissars, and other Stalinists that they caught, the

terminal horror suffered by so many millions of innocent Jewish, Slavic,

and other European peoples as a result of this meeting of evil minds is

an indelible stain on the history and integrity of Western "civiliza-

tion," with all of its humanitarian pretensions.29

According to Watson, the fate of the Polish officers in Soviet

custody was probably discussed during the conference. This would have

been a significant factor in Stalin's decision to exterminate them,

considering how slavishly he adhered to his pact with Hitler. (In spite

of warnings from the British and Americans of imminent Nazi attack,

trainloads of Russian raw materials were being faithfully sent to the

Germans, right until the very moment of Hitler's 22 June 1941 invasion

of the Soviet Union.30 The NKVD even turned over, to the German

Gestapo, German Communists who had been living in the Soviet Union.31)

However, considering Stalin's predilection for mass murder as a

political tool and his hatred of the Poles, he certainly would have had

no hesitation about annihilating them, anyway. Even Stalin's daughter,

Svetlana, noted his peculiar obsession with a much earlier forest death

of Polish officers in the Russian folk opera, "Ivan Susanin."32

From Soviet-occupied Poland, Poles considered potentially

subversive--including women and children--were shipped off in the 1940-

41 period to live in primitive camps in the Soviet Union. According to

Polish sources, these captives numbered over a million. The categories

of Poles considered potentially subversive even included stamp collec-

tors and Esperantists.33 Two- or three-hundred-thousand Poles, an

estimated quarter of the number exiled to the Soviet Union, perished in

the Soviet Union.34

In contrast, in his recent, critical biography of Stalin, General

Dmitri Volkogonov, quoted a 2 November 1945 NKVD memorandum to Stalin

giving 494,310 as the figure of "former Polish citizens arrived in the

Soviet Union." Later, the NKVD document mentioned 389,382 "men" being

held in Soviet "prisons, camps and places of exile." Volkogonov added

to this account that "None of the documents I have seen on Polish

citizens, who were on Soviet territory at Stalin's will, contain

accurate figures of those who were either killed or died."35

In any case, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov's remark about "wiping

out all remains of this misshapen offspring of the Versailles treaty,"

during a session of the Supreme Soviet in October 1939, was indicative

of the annihilatory nature of Soviet intentions toward the nation of

Poland.36

Initiating the destruction of a nation by exterminating its

leadership classes is consistent with the standard definition of

"genocide."37 The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the resulting,

initially desperate need for cooperation and assistance from Great

Britain and the United States would later force Stalin to accept the

continued existence of a Poland in some political form and in some

westward, displaced location. However, the original, genocidal intent

of the Katyn Massacre remains evident. The current Polish government

apparently agrees, judging by the title, Katyn. Dokumenty Ludobojstwa

(Katyn: Documents of Genocide), of its reprinting of the 1940 Soviet

documents authorizing the massacre.38

CHAPTER 2.

KATYN AS A SECOND WORLD WAR ISSUE

Following the German invasion of the USSR on 22 June 1941, the

Polish Government-in-Exile in London pressed on its new Soviet ally its

inquiries about the location of its missing officers and cadets. In the

Soviet Union itself, a Polish general who had been in Soviet custody,

General Wladyslaw Anders, raised the issue in his efforts to staff a

Polish army being formed from survivors of the Soviet labor camps. (The

studied, smiling ingenuousness on Stalin's face, photographed as he

received a list of 15,000 missing Polish officers from Anders and Polish

Government-in-Exile chief, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, during their

meeting with him 3 December 1941, is macabre.1) He told the Poles that

he did not know what had happened to their officers, but he thought that

they were last known to be in Manchuria. Such evasive Soviet answers to

their questions about the men led General Anders to conclude in 1942,

after leading an exodus of 70,000 Polish soldiers and 44,000 Polish

civilians out of the USSR, that tragedy had befallen the vast majority

of Polish officers in Soviet custody.2

On 27 April 1942, the U. S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Admiral

William H. Standley, also formally requested the Soviet government to

clarify the fate of missing Polish pisoners of war. The request was

received and rebuffed by no less a personage than Andrei Vyshinsky, who

had been the Soviet prosecutor of the victims of the Stalinist purge

trials of the late 1930s. Inquiries were also made by the British at

this time.3 All these questions remained unanswered for another year.

At every diplomatic opportunity, Stalin had been pressuring the

Western Allies to recognize his demands for the western Soviet border

with Poland to be moved farther west, to the 1941 border--the "Curzon

Line." (See Map 3.) Stalin brought the matter to a crisis in January

1943 by declaring that all Polish residents who lived east of that 1941

border were Soviet citizens. Naturally, the Polish Government-in-Exile

protested.4 General Sikorski was under heavy pressure. He knew that he

would lose his countrymen's support--particularly that of the Polish

underground army, the "Home Army"--if he did not resist the Soviets'

efforts to move the Russo-Polish border westward from the 1939

boundary.5

Then, on 13 April 1943, Radio Berlin announced the discovery of a

mass grave (at the Russian forest village of Katyn) of thousands of

Polish officers who had been murdered, it stated, by the Soviet NKVD.

After a two-day delay, the Soviet government responded on 15 April 1943,

suddenly remembering and declaring that the Polish officers had been

captured by the Nazis in late Summer 1941 and countercharging that the

Germans had killed the Poles.6

Finally, on 16 April 1943, both the New York Times and the Times of

London dutifully reported the dispute.7 Twelve days later, the Times

editorialized on the damage this episode posed to Allied cooperation in

the war against Nazi Germany.8 Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels

was gleeful about the divisive developments, noting in his diary, "One

can speak of a complete triumph of German propaganda. Throughout this

whole war we have seldom been able to register such a success."9

Indeed, Hitler was giving instructions that "the affair be given widest

possible use."10

Under bitter pressure from its people within and outside of Poland,

the Polish Government-in-Exile demanded an investigation and called on

the International Red Cross to examine the site. The Red Cross agreed,

but only on the condition that such an investigation would be acceptable

to all governments. The Soviet government vetoed the proposal, of

course, and broke off diplomatic relations with the London Poles on 25

April 1943, accusing them of "a hostile attitude towards the Soviet

Union."11

However, it should be noted that the Poles had not specifically

accused the Soviets of the murders. They had only asked for an

impartial inquiry. The Soviet reaction was excessive and suggestive of

a guilty party attempting to bully and bluff its way out of an indict-

ment: in effect it seemed self-incriminating. This was noted at the

time by the British Ambassador in Moscow, Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, who

observed in official dispatches, "the anger and unconvincing terms of

Russian denials suggests [sic] a sense of guilt."12

Moreover, Soviet credibility had already been undermined by

revelations of the NKVD's acknowledged execution of two Poles who were

leaders of the socialist Bund--the All Jewish Workers' Union--Henryk

Ehrlich and Wiktor Alter. Because these men were Jewish, the Soviets

would not recognize their Polish citizenship. Ehrlich and Alter had

warned the Polish Embassy in Moscow of Soviet attempts to play off

Polish Jews and Christians against each other. To justify killing

Ehrlich and Alter, the Soviets accused them of being spies in the

service of Polish and German(!) intelligence services.13

During 1943, a number of articles addressing Katyn and the border

dispute appeared in American magazines. The 3 May article in Newsweek,

"Row with the Reds," quoted the German propaganda accusation that the

Katyn victims were executed by "Jewish OGPU Commissars."14 Newsweek's

10 May 1943 article, "Poles vs. Reds: Allied Unity Put to Test by Row

over Officer Dead," described the effect of Katyn on the Allied war

effort and was considerably more sympathetic toward the Russians than

toward their Nazi-alleged victims, the Poles. For example, it offered

the following speculation:

The Poles' mistaken tactics may have been due to that curious

trait of unrealism that led Polish lancers to charge German tanks

and that still permeates Polish politics. The violence of the

Russian reaction was probably due to the sensitivity of the

Soviets in their dealings with foreigners.15

Time magazine's 10 May 1943 article was somewhat more considerate

of the Poles. It described General Sikorski's moderate approach to the

difficult task of attempting to reach a compromise between Poland's geo-

political situation, on the Soviet Union's doorstep, and ultra-national-

ist emigre elements. Time also understood Poles' anxiety about the

possibility of a postwar political disappearance of Poland entirely.16

Ironically--considering it was a photograph magazine--Life's 10 May

1943 article was the most insightful, and it was startlingly candid.

Life stated that the allegations needed to be investigated before any

conclusions could be drawn, but pointedly observed that "Russians as

well as Germans have shot plenty of Poles."17

Meanwhile, the London Poles were being accused by left-of-center

commentators of using the Katyn atrocity to support their arguments with

the Soviets over postwar Polish boundaries.18 In his 3 May 1943 "Back-

stage of the War" column, Waverley Root--American journalist and

international cookery expert--typically concentrated on the political

implications of the Katyn-precipitated Soviet-Polish rift, maintaining

that the Poles' principal motivation for demanding an investigation of

Katyn was geopolitical, rather than moral or legal. He suggested:

The Polish reason for agitating this issue was the desire dominant

in the Polish government-in-exile to get an immediate pledge of

the retention of Poland's eastern frontier. It saw in this

incident a means of applying pressure to Russia. It neglected to

consider the detail that one nation cannot apply pressure to

another unless it possesses superior force--whether that force be

military, moral, economic or psychological.19

"Progressive" Western intellectuals disputed the Nazi charges, and

commentators in the West--such as Max Lerner, for example--agreed with

the charge that the Polish Government-in-Exile had been duped into

undermining the alliance with the Soviet Union by seconding the German

call for an impartial investigation.20

Although British Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not dispute

the Nazi charges, he told General Sikorski, "If they are dead nothing

you can do will bring them back."21 American President Franklin D.

Roosevelt was unwilling to accept the validity of the Nazis' charges.

When Captain George Earle, a personal friend of Roosevelt and a former

naval attache to Bulgaria, later expressed to the president his desire

to publish evidence implicating the Soviets (which he had received in

Sofia), Roosevelt gave him a written order not to do so. After Earle

indicated he might "go public" about Katyn anyway, he was soon there-

after abruptly and otherwise inexplicably posted to the Samoan Islands

for the remainder of the Second World War.22

The Western Allies at this time were primarily concerned with

keeping the Soviet Union in the war against the Nazis. The Soviets were

maintaining the biggest land front against the Germans, and the Russians

(and other peoples of European Russia) had suffered terribly. As

importantly, in August 1939 Stalin had demonstrated that he was capable

of doing a complete about-face in international relations, if it suited

his ruthless and seemingly inscrutable interests.23 In his book, Allen

Paul recently referred to this bewilderment of the Western Allies about

Eastern Europe and Stalin's intentions toward it:

The crisis dramatized how little the world knew about the plight

of the Poles. The war had begun as a fight to preserve their

independence. But by 1943 it had become a war to defeat Germany

and the initial objective was rapidly falling from view. Polish

leaders were certainly powerless to prevent such a fundamental

change and the Katyn crisis demonstrated how little political

latitude they had in adapting to it.24

Churchill's complicity in the Katyn coverup went deeper. On 23

April 1943, he assured Soviet Ambassador Maisky in London, "We shall

certainly oppose vigorously any `investigation' by the International Red

Cross or any other body in any territory under German authority. Such

investigation would be a fraud and its conclusions reached by

terrorism."25

This proved to be a strategic diplomatic error. An emboldened

Stalin not only broke with the London Polish Government diplomatically

on 25 April 1943, but he also followed this by beginning to practice

diplomatic relations with the embryo of his own Communist Polish

government, the "Union of Polish Patriots." This committee of Polish

Communists had been officially created only a few weeks before the Katyn

discovery.26 This was an indication that, with the Soviet victory at

Stalingrad in Winter 1942/43, Stalin was beginning to feel less

dependent upon the Western democracies' and less solicitous of their

political aspirations for Eastern Europe.27

One of the most morally significant and saddening episodes in the

Katyn affair was a lengthy, secret memorandum authored by the British

Ambassador to the Polish Government-in-Exile, Sir Owen O'Malley. It was

circulated among senior members of the British Cabinet and Foreign

Office who attached cover comments, such as "This is a brilliant,

unorthodox and disquieting despatch . . . ."28 It confronted the

British government with a basic question about the moral integrity of

its declaration and conduct of the Second World War. As Paul observed,

O'Malley's memorandum stirred the consciences of senior

statesmen deeply for two reasons. First, his evidence against the

Soviets was overwhelming. And second, he developed a persuasive

argument that the crime could cause the British enduring "moral

repercussions."29

The memorandum pointed out that collaborating with the Soviets in

the coverup of their atrocity would destroy the Allies' claim to moral

ascendancy in their crusade against Nazi Germany and could compromise

the moral credibility and the legitimacy of the expected postwar war

crimes trials. Also--as importantly for Goebbels in his propaganda

exhortations--the refusal by supposedly democratic and humanitarian

Western countries to consider the evidence and condemn such a massive

and hideous Soviet atrocity could serve as further proof of a special,

persecutory malevolence toward the German people in the Allied

prosecution of the war.

Not only was the O'Malley document circulated in Britain, it was

also circulated within the upper echelons of the U.S. government. In

early September 1943, the White House staff confirmed President

Roosevelt had been given the document.30 Whether or not the President

actually took the time to read it has not been established.

What Winston Churchill failed to understand, though, was that by

this time in the war Britain had lost much of its power and credibility

in Stalin's eyes, anyway. In 1935, according to Churchill in his 1948

volume of his history of the Second World War, The Gathering Storm,

Stalin had openly scoffed at French Prime Minister Pierre Laval, "Oho!

The Pope! How many divisions has he got?"31 In terms of manpower,

industry, and technology, the United States was far outpacing Britain

and, in the latter two categories, even the Soviet Union.

Indeed, the most powerful weapon Britain had in the Second World

War was its moral ascendancy. Along with France, it had met its moral

and treaty obligations to Poland and had declared war on Nazi Germany's

crusade of racist aggression. Britain had stood alone and battered, but

unbending, in the darkest hours of the war, when the Soviet Union was

Nazi Germany's ally. Britain had been a goading example and inspiration

to Americans and to the rest of the world of a democracy which was

prepared to fight and endure for its--for our--survival and moral

principles.

Stalin knew well the power of ideas and speech. In a 19 April 1923

speech, he declared, "Print is the sharpest and the strongest weapon of

our party."32 If Churchill and Britain had roared outrage about Katyn,

instead of mewing caution and restraint, the American public would have

had to take notice and, after bitter debate, could have pressured

Congress and Roosevelt to face the truth about Katyn and to get firm

with the Soviets about Allied war aims at a critical juncture in the

war, when the Soviet Union was still heavily dependent on any equipment

and other help the Western Allies could provide.

By this time in the war, also, not even Stalin could have made a

separate peace with the Germans. The Soviet peoples were too consumed

with rage and vengeance over German atrocities. With his capitulation

on the truth about Katyn, Churchill and his government unnecessarily

forfeited much of Britain's real power--its moral greatness.

In fairness to Churchill (and Roosevelt), though, it should also be

pointed out that at this time reports of the Nazi extermination of Jews

and other Eastern Europeans, in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere, were

coming out of Occupied Europe. Any disruption in Allied effort--and a

major row could have profoundly disrupted supply shipments, as well as

military cooperation among the multi-tiered ethnic and political strata

of Allied forces--would have given the Nazis additional time to extermi-

nate these enslaved peoples and to rebound militarily and industrially.

The Nazis exterminated half the Jews of Europe, as it was.

As to the Poles' justification for demanding an investigation into

the murder of 15,000 of their finest people, George Kennan (the famous

diplomat and policy planner) offered an objective judgement in 1961:

The German government, in announcing the discovery, asked for an

investigation by the International Red Cross. The Polish

government-in-exile, after some anguish, associated itself with

this request. The Allies were furious at them for doing this,

correctly fearing that it would anger the Russians. It is hard,

in retrospect, to see how the Poles could have done less.33

The Germans saw their opportunity to disrupt Allied relations

further and pressed on with an independent investigation conducted by

leading forensics experts, principally from occupied Europe. These men

were leaders in their field and were not coerced in their research. The

Swiss representative, Professor Francis Naville, was a proven anti-

Nazi.34

Following its inquiry, the Commission presented its findings. The

men had been killed in their winter coats, indicating a cool season.

Their uniforms were in relatively good condition at the time of their

execution, indicating a period of captivity of months rather than years.

Their hands had been tied behind their backs using rope of Russian

manufacture. The mail and diaries left in their clothing indicated that

their deaths had occurred during Spring 1940, when they were in Soviet

custody. Several of the diaries even described the Poles' detraining at

the railway station near Katyn and their growing concern about their

impending fate.35 Local inhabitants testified that Katyn had been used

by the NKVD as a killing site for years.36

The Poles executed at Katyn were all from the internment camp at

Kozielsk. However, not all of Kozielsk's internees had been murdered,

and those Polish officers who survived to join Anders' army had compiled

sequential lists of the Spring 1940 departures of their campmates. The

corpses identified at Katyn were buried in groups in the order of their

departures from Kozielsk.37

Other evidence uncovered included tree saplings planted over the

graves. Although they were five years old, biological analysis

indicated they had been planted three years before the Spring 1943

German-sponsored investigation.38

The only evidence contrary to a conclusion of Soviet guilt was the

ammunition used. It was 7.65 mm caliber and of German manufacture. One

of the provisions of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 was a trade agreement

whereby Soviet raw materials--especially oil--would be exchanged for

finished German goods. Among the types of finished products the Germans

traded to the Soviets were pistols and ammunition. German pistols and

ammunition were preferred by the NKVD for their superior efficiency.39

While the Katyn controversy was in the news, the Nazis were exter-

minating Jewish people in the Warsaw Ghetto. To prevent Katyn from be-

ing used as a distraction from that atrocity, on 30 April 1943 a Polish

Government-in-Exile delegate in London spoke out in support of the

beleaguered Jews. On 5 May 1943, General Sikorski himself went on radio

urging Poles "to give [Jews] all possible aid and to resist this

terrifying barbarity." Indeed, some Polish Home Army guerrillas were

meanwhile fighting pitched battles with the Nazis in Warsaw, attempting

to break through the Ghetto's walls to the Jews.40

Meanwhile, in the United States, the large Polish-American

community was slowly becoming agitated over Katyn. Polish-Americans

distrusted Russians categorically. An article in reference to Katyn

appeared in the 28 April 1943 Chicago Tribune, entitled "American and

Polish Leaders Brand Russia a Nation of Liars and Old Conspirators."41

In Congress, members sympathetic to Poland entered items mentioning

Katyn in the appendices of the Congressional Record. In the Record,

itself, there is no direct mention of Katyn. There is, however, intri-

guing mention of the Office of War Information (OWI) on 19-20 April

1943. On 19 April, Senator Robert Taft (R--Ohio) submitted a bill

regulating the OWI's activities.42 On 20 April, Congressman Roy O.

Woodruff (R--Michigan) asked for the floor for one minute. In his brief

diatribe, he demanded an investigation into Communist infiltration of

the OWI, concluding "the man in charge of the Polish Overseas Unit of

O.W.I. has not lived in Poland for 15 years and has been active in

French Communist circles, coming recently to America." More interesting

were some of his earlier remarks:

For 3 years the Polish Government in exile has been working to

keep morale within Poland alive against the time of liberation.

But now reports are constantly reaching me and other Members of

Congress that the propaganda activities of the Polish Unit of

O.W.I.'s Overseas Division are destroying rather than building the

morale of the helpless Polish people.

These reports tell us that much of this propaganda follows the

American Communist Party line and is designed to prepare the minds

of the Polish people to accept partition, obliteration, or

suppression of their nation when the fighting ends. The same is

true of Yugoslavia, where, I am told, the name of the great

Mihailovitch is blocked out by O.W.I. radicals.

If it is true that Communists have infiltrated into the

O.W.I.'s Overseas Division and are following the party line in

their propaganda to Poland, as well as other countries, then it is

an outrageous violation of the faith that is reposed in Elmer

Davis and Robert Sherwood.43

It is a significant coincidence that Woodruff would have made such

animated accusations at the time when the U.S. Government was trying to

control coverage of Katyn. It reflected the volatility of the atrocity

as a political issue. It also demonstrated that at least one member of

Congress concerned enough to speak openly about the implications and

consequences of the OWI's ability to censor valid public issues during

the war.

The appendices of the Congressional Digest included copies of

inserted newspaper articles, some of which mentioned Katyn. Congressman

John Lesinski (D--Michigan) submitted articles from the Chicago Tribune

and the Washington Times-Herald on 16 April 1943. The first accused the

Soviet Union of holding hundreds of thousands of Poles in the USSR

hostage to its territorial demands. The second attacked a suspected

attempt by British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden to get President

Roosevelt's agreement to the postwar concession of Eastern Poland to

Stalin.44

On 19 April, Lesinski confronted Congress with the 18 April 1943

Washington Times-Herald account of the Nazi charges and demands by the

Polish Government-in-Exile that its prisoners in Soviet captivity be

protected.45 On 29 April, Senator Burton K. Wheeler (D--Montana)

submitted the Washington Times-Herald article of the same day, "Again

the Polish Question." The article pointed out the logic of Soviet guilt

for killing the Polish officers, considering past Communist use of

"liquidation"--mass murder--in class warfare.46

There were indications at the time that some American politicians

were willing to overlook a Soviet mass murder for the sake of wartime

expediency. On 7 May, Congressman B.J. Monkiewicz (R-Connecticut)

inserted the article "We'd Better Watch Him," which had been published

in the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel. The paper quoted Wendell Wilkie's

statement, "Russia is our ally, and . . . even if the Polish officers

were murdered by Russia, we must have her help to win against Germany."

The author of the article then went on to wonder when the Poles had

become enemies of the Western Allies.47

Congressman Lesinski inserted another article into the

Congressional Record. It was entitled "Stalin's Sweet Note," and it

concluded with the following three significant and prescient points:

8. A tacit admission that we must flatter Russia out of fear

that she may yet make peace with Hitler or Hirohito equals the

whipping of public opinion, of American dignity and realism, into

a Munich fever which undermines the morale and consciousness of

Americans.

9. The propagated fear to criticise [sic] anything that Stalin

does has created a temperature of hypocrisy and submission which

may prove to be more harmful than it is apparent.

10. Russia should be helped--but should be informed now that she

is only one of many elements of an allied commonwealth, equal and

not ruling, interdependent and not isolated, responsible to the

democratic world and not irresponsible.48

The Roosevelt Administration did whatever necessary to suppress the

outcries. When a Polish-American radio announcer in Detroit quoted

London Polish sources' evidence of Soviet guilt, he was silenced by the

Foreign Language Division of the Office of War Information.49

Specifically, in a May 1943 meeting in New York, division chief Allen

Cranston (lately a U.S. Senator from California), with the presence of

FCC representative Hilda Shea, expressed concern about the anti-Soviet

broadcasts to the station owner who then removed the commentator.50

The reaction in the Macomb, Illinois, daily newspaper was typical

of a small town. There were many brief reports on local servicemen, and

the news reflected a completely American perspective. Only on 27 April

1943, soon after the Soviet Union severed diplomatic relations with the

London Poles, did syndicated war news columnist Donald MacKenzie mention

(in that context) the "10,000" murdered Polish officers at Katyn.51 On

the front page of the 29 April 1943 edition of the Macomb Daily Journal,

an Associated Press article discussed British attempts to restore those

relations and the implications of the breakoff.52

Facts on File, the annual news summary which had begun publication

in 1941, included a number of items about Katyn in 1943. For 16 April

1943, it had the German report of the discovery of the mass grave of

10,000 officers "near Smolensk."53 Subsequent entries described the

Soviet counteraccusations and the Soviet severance of diplomatic

relations with the Polish Government-in-Exile in London. This was

followed, on 2 May, with a plaintively titled article, "Churchill

Predicts Free Poland."54 Former Berlin correspondent and world affairs

authority William L. Shirer wrote the introduction to Facts on File for

that year.

In Great Britain, Keesing's Contemporary Archives, Vol. 4, 1940-

1943, contained a detailed rendering of the official statements made by

the various governments at the time of the Katyn controversy and the

rupture in Russo-Polish diplomatic relations. The documents republished

in Keesing's, which included Polish Government-in-Exile releases, did

not exonerate the Soviets, suggestively leaving the question of guilt to

its readers to judge for themselves.55

After the Soviet retraction of recognition of their government,

Free Poles were dealt another blow when General Sikorski died in a

mysterious crash of his personal aircraft, on 4 July 1943, upon his

departure from Gibraltar. To this day, many Poles and Polish-Americans

are convinced Sikorski was assassinated by sabotage.56 On 12 November

1952, former Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles stated, in regard to

Sikorski's death, "I have always believed that there was sabotage."57

The questionable circumstances of Sikorski's death were even the subject

of a book written by the iconoclastic British historian David Irving,

Accident: The Death of General Sikorski.58

In seeking to account for Sikorski's untimely death, Katyn

historian Allen Paul has also noted the coincidence of Kim Philby's

responsibility for the British intelligence operations in North Africa

at the time:

A more likely explanation was that Stalin himself had issued

Sikorski's death warrant. At the time of the crash, Soviet

superspy Kim Philby was in charge of British security for North

Africa. Philby's knowledge of Sikorski's route and schedule, as

well as his contacts along the way, could have greatly aided any

Soviet plot to engineer the crash. No evidence has ever been

found to link Philby to Sikorski's death.

. . . Coming when it did, only weeks after the discoveries at

Katyn, Sikorski's death seemed too convenient. Evidence of

sabotage was not found, but conclusive proof of an accident was

not found either.59

Although there were many politicians and journalists in the West

willing to defend the Soviets from incrimination, the Soviets felt

compelled to hold their own investigation of Katyn in 1944, once the

site had been retaken from the Germans. There was even a tour of Katyn

conducted for interested Western journalists, including Kathleen

Harriman--American envoy Averell Harriman's daughter.60

The Soviet investigating commission had only Russians as members.61

Predictably, it produced evidence--such as the testimony of local

residents--to convince Miss Harriman and her friends at the time that

August 1941 was when the Poles had been killed and that the Nazis had

actually done the killing.62

Despite Soviet efforts to deny responsibility for Katyn, by Spring

1944 concern in the United States over Stalin's overall intentions

toward Poland had become serious, as evidenced by Time magazine's

republication of an appeal of some prominent Americans made to "Soviet

Russia." Growing doubt about the fate of Poland was evident.63

Nevertheless, the Polish plight became the butt of humor for some

editors. For example, such titles as "Poles Apart" and "Poles in a

Hole" were given to 1944 Newsweek articles.64 In retrospect, the tone

of these titles seems cruel and mocking.

Just as Katyn would later become the emotional fuse to rally anti-

Soviet sentiment in Poland and, in 1980, the political movement known as

"Solidarity," it triggered the political mobilization of Polish-Ameri-

cans in May 1944 in Buffalo, New York, when some 2000 delegates from

twenty-two states met to plan efforts on behalf of Polish-Americans and

Poles. The conference was highlighted by a parade of 25,000 Polish-

Americans through the center of the city. Coincidentally, 1944 was an

election year, and the Roosevelt Administration's OSS (Office of

Strategic Services) intelligence service warned that the Polish American

Congress (PAC) might be a serious political factor in the upcoming

election.65

Nevertheless, President Roosevelt would not meet with Polish-

American leaders until there occurred another tragedy as rending as the

Katyn Massacre. This was the Warsaw Uprising, 1 August-2 October 1944.

On 29 July 1944, the Soviet-backed Union of Polish Patriots, attached to

Red Army units advancing on the city, broadcast to the people of Warsaw

the exhortation that they rise up and throw out the Nazis before the

latter could fortify the city.66

The Polish Underground and Home Army, under the command of General

Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski did just that, expecting the Red Army to lift the

Nazi siege of the city within a few days--much as Paris would be

liberated by the Free French and American armies on 25 August 1944.

However, despite the intense pleas of the Americans and British, the Red

Army did not advance and the Nazis were allowed to shatter the Free

Polish military and political groups that were attempting to defend the

Polish capital and to establish a credible, independent government.

Stalin claimed that the Vistula River was a tremendous obstacle, defying

fording by tanks.

It is true that the western banks of the rivers of Eastern Europe

and European Russia are much higher than the east banks, and the Germans

were defending the western banks. However, by this time the Red Army's

"artcorps"---mobile, corps-sized massings of rocket and gun artillery--

could obliterate any German defensive strongpoint or concentration.

Also, considering how bitterly Stalin had criticized his Anglo-American

allies for waiting so long to launch the invasion across the English

Channel, his protestations about crossing a river verge on mockery.67

More significantly, the Soviets would not cooperate in the Western

Allies' efforts to supply the defenders of Warsaw by air. Crushed by

its Nazi SS besiegers, the Home Army surrendered on October 5th.68 When

the Red Army finally rolled into Warsaw, the NKVD rounded up and

deported to slave labor camps or exterminated outright as many surviving

members of the Polish Home Army as it could find.69

These events were duly noted in the American press. Newsweek

publicized the Poles' accusation of duplicitous Soviet inaction in a 16

October 1944 article. Subtitled "Soviet Failure to Aid Bor[-Komorowski]

Is Barrier to Rapprochement with Mikolajczyk Government," the article

described the London Poles' accusations that the Red Army had called

upon the Home Army to act, and the Soviets' accusations that the Home

Army had acted without consulting the Red Army.70

Polish-Americans traditionally supported the Democratic Party--

being, for the most part, working class--and loyal to President

Roosevelt, but they were now outraged. Nevertheless, during his visits

with PAC leaders in October 1944, Roosevelt quickly and easily averted

their new, naive political activism with a few of the vague, expansive

presidential blandishments for which he was famous.71

The issue of Katyn faded with the progress of the war. The London

Poles had lost political influence with the Western Allies, in spite of

the valor displayed by their troops in Italy and Northwest Europe, and

in spite of the large emigre communities long in the U.S. and growing in

Great Britain.

However, all this abuse of the Poles by the Soviets did not go as

unnoticed by the American people as it was by their government. Before

and during the war, there had been a number of attempts to gauge

American public opinion about European affairs and Stalin's Russia. In

January 1939, a poll was taken to ascertain whether Americans would

prefer Germany or Russia to win a war between those two nations.

Eighty-three percent of the respondents indicated that they wanted

Russia to win.72

On the other hand, in a poll taken in March 1940, after Stalin's

collusion with Hitler and the Soviet invasion and defeat of Finland and

the Baltic republics, fully 34.2 percent of Americans considered Russia

the "worst influence in Europe," second only to Germany which was

censured by 55.3 percent.73 Nor did Americans have any charitable

feelings toward Communists. In May, 1941, two-thirds of those surveyed

wanted the U.S. Communist Party suppressed.74

In July 1941, soon after "Operation Barbarossa" had begun, another

poll was taken of Americans' preference for a victor in that already-

bloody war. This time, only 72 percent wanted Russia to win--11 percent

fewer than in the January 1939 poll--while 24 percent were indifferent

or undecided.75 More revealing about the U.S. popular attitude toward

the nature of Stalinist Russia was the October 1941 poll wherein 32

percent considered the "Russian" government only slightly better than

the "German" government, 35.1 percent thought the Soviet and Nazi

governments equally bad, and 4.6 percent thought the Soviet government

worse than the Nazi version--for a total of 71.7 percent considering the

Soviet government to be only slightly better or worse than the Nazi

government. Even in October 1941, with the Russians maintaining the

biggest front against the Nazis, fully 19.8 percent of Americans were

undecided which government was better or worse.76

However, polls taken in March 1942 and February 1943, and on 29

April 1943, showed the effect of Katyn on American public opinion about

whether the USSR could be trusted to cooperate after the war was over.

In March 1942, 39 percent trusted Russia, while 39 percent did not. In

February 1943, at the time of Soviet victory at Stalingrad and general

inter-Allied goodwill, 46 percent of Americans expected Russia's postwar

cooperation, while only 29 percent did not. However, on 29 April 1943,

after the controversy about Katyn and the Soviet breakoff of diplomatic

relations with the Polish government in exile in London, the number of

doubters rose back to 34 percent (although the number of optimists

remained at 44 percent). The inference that may be drawn is that the

Katyn epidsode and the ensuing diplomatic controversy had catalyzed some

previously undecided Americans into distrusting the Soviets.77

Katyn's significance as a public issue was cited in an article by

Warren B. Walsh, "What the American People Think of Russia," in the

Winter 1944-45 issue of Public Opinion Quarterly magazine.78 After

describing the increase in trust of the Soviet Union, thanks to the

Stalingrad victory, Walsh wrote:

There was a minor increase in trust, soon reversed, and a greater

increase in distrust with the curve of the latter rising ever more

steeply as new shocks disturbed American-Soviet relations.

Ambassador Standley accused the Soviet Government of concealing

from its people the facts about American aid and supplies. On top

of that, the Russians broke off diplomatic relations with the

Polish Government-in-Exile over the masterly Nazi propaganda

charges of mass murders in the Katyn forest. The dissolution of

the Comintern in May, 1943, momentarily reversed the trust and

distrust curves, but caused a sharp rise in the "no opinion"

group. Many people did not know whether to take that dissolution

at its face value or whether it was merely "another clever

Communist trick."79

Walsh then went on to chart the ups and downs of Americans' trust

of Stalin's Russia and concluded:

Opinion has remained relatively stable in recent months. At

the present writing (November, 1944), 47% believe that Russia can

be trusted; 35% feel that she cannot; and 18% don't know. Neither

the continuing Russo-Polish quarrel and the Papal condemnation of

Communism on the one hand, nor the Red Army advances and Stalin's

praise of the second front on the other hand, seem to have

affected the American attitude materially.80

Among Walsh's closing analyses was the following point:

There is a hard core of distrust about Russia. Roughly one out of

three does not trust Russia, and this group clings stubbornly to

its opinion. There is a smaller number--roughly one out of five--

which is more pliable and whose opinion can be changed.81

Apparently, Katyn and similar Soviet transgressions--such as the NKVD's

executions of Henryk Ehrlich and Wiktor Alter, in March 1943--had helped

solidify the anti-Soviet feeling of roughly one-third of Americans.82

The Facts on File volume for 1945 did not reflect this distrust of

the Soviets and contributed another misleading entry on the Katyn

mystery. A 27 June 1945 entry, titled "Massacre Fraud Disclosed," said

"Stockholm reports that a close collaborator of Heinrich Himmler told

Allied authorities in Germany two days ago . . ." that Katyn was

actually a Nazi massacre contrived to appear as a Soviet killing for

propaganda purposes.83 Neither the reporter nor the source was named.

Journalist William L. Shirer was now officially responsible for world

affairs entries.

At the Yalta Conference in February 1945 (and later at the Potsdam

Conference of July 1945), the future of Poland was a major point of

discussion. At Yalta, Churchill and Roosevelt conceded that the Soviets

had a right to ensure the safety of their western border with the Poles.

Roosevelt agreed to the westward shift of Poland's borders, with the

Curzon Line as the basis for the Polish Soviet border.84 Everyone

agreed that postwar Poland should be "free and independent." Stalin,

adeptly reversing his 1939 plans, even stated:

That is why Russia today is against the Tsarist policy of

abolition of Poland. We have completely changed this inhuman

policy and started a policy of friendship and independence for

Poland.85

Churchill and Roosevelt accepted Stalin's vague assurances of

respect for an independent Poland. However, in April 1945, sixteen

leaders of the Polish underground who had accepted Soviet invitations to

conferences and cooperation were arrested, tortured, and (with one

exception) forced to sign confessions of anti-Soviet subversion.86

Poland had become a political embarrassment to Western politicians,

throwing into doubt the genuineness of the Allied victory for world

peace and freedom--evidencing a half-finished crusade to rid the world

of exterminatory totalitarianism. Uneasiness about Katyn bubbled to the

surface of the American public's consciousness again, early in 1945.

The American journalist, William L. White raised uncomfortable questions

about Katyn in his travelogue, Report on the Russians.87 White pointed

out the obvious inconsistency of the victims being found in winter

clothing--even during the Soviet reinvestigation--according to the

Soviet version that had set the time of their deaths as Summer 1941. He

also wondered why the Soviets could not locate the Polish officers prior

to the German invasion, when requested to do this.88

The reaction to White's book in the leftwing--"progressive"--press

in the West was savage and shrill. Pro-Soviet Westerners signed a

statement attacking White's book and accusing him of "warmongering"--a

serious charge at a time when the issue uppermost in the mind of the

American public was "bringing the boys home" as soon as possible. Also,

as was recently observed by Roman Pucinski of Chicago, Chief Investiga-

tor of the Congressional Katyn hearings in the early 1950s, the United

States and its people were utterly exhausted by the Second World War by

mid-1945 and did not want any confrontation with the Soviet Union.89

Most reviews of White's book--which was remarkably prescient concerning

the impending, souring fate of Soviet-American relations--were

hostile.90

Three reviews specifically mentioned White's coverage of Katyn in

his book. In his Saturday Review of Literature review, author John

Hersey castigated White for comparing the wartime plight of the Russians

to an American standard of living. He then went on to say, "His account

of the Katyn Forest massacres is obviously from sources sympathetic to

the London Poles, and makes no pretense at being impartial; it sounds

very much like the Berlin radio."91 (Note that Hersey did not attempt

to defend the Soviets from the Nazis' charge about Katyn: he only

faulted White for repeating it.) Interestingly, in his own, lead review

in the Saturday Review of Literature coverage of White's book, renowned-

-and recently returned--Moscow correspondent Louis Fischer omitted any

reference to White's treatment of Katyn in his generally favorable

analysis of the book.

In its otherwise critical review of the book, The Christian Science

Monitor stated, "Sometimes the author is evidently trying to be fair-

minded--even in the chapter on the disturbing affair of the Katyn

atrocities, which is surely an inflammable topic to broach on such a

mission as this."92 The description of Katyn as a "disturbing affair"

epitomized its place in Western consciousness at this point in time.

The hideousness of the charges against the Soviets and the confidence

with which the Nazis obviously levelled them had profound and ominous

implications about the true nature of the Soviet regime and the postwar

world.

In the New Republic, journalist Bruce Bliven's coverage of White's

treatment of Katyn was similarly ambivalent.

In regard to the famous case of the 10,000 Polish officers who

were murdered in the Katyn Forest, either by the Germans or the

Russians, White gives at great length all the arguments in favor

of the theory that they were killed by the Russians, and no

evidence whatever on the other side. Then, with a poker face, he

announces that the evidence is overwhelming that the Germans did

it. Anyone who has no other information on the subject than this

book is bound to believe that White in his final verdict was under

some sort of pressure--or had suddenly gone off his head.93

This is not an accurate description of White's treatment of Katyn.

White did outline the Soviets' arguments in their defense. He did not

"announce that the evidence is overwhelming that the Germans did it."

What White did say was:

The evidence of German guilt gathered by the Soviet Commission is

detailed, complete, damning, and it answers all questions but this

one: if the Polish officers were still alive in the summer of

1941 and could be captured by the Germans, why were the Poles not

told this at once?

A few lines later, White stated that the evidence of German guilt,

as presented by the Soviet commission, was overwhelming, not that the

objective evidence was. He pointed out that spring being the time of

execution was more consistent with the victims' heavy clothing than late

summer would have been, and he wondered why the Soviets had said nothing

about a German execution of the Poles until the discovery of the victims

in 1943. Otherwise, White left his readers to draw their own

conclusions.94

White's credentials were too sound for him to be accused of being

pro-Nazi or fascist. His father, William A. White, was one of the most

influential journalists of the 1930s. The elder White was also the

director of the CDA, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the

Allies. On behalf of the Roosevelt Administration, this organization

had taken the offensive in the public forum against the America First

Committee, which had sought to discourage the United States from aiding

the Allies and from getting involved in another world war in any way.95

The elder White died in 1945.96

Perhaps in reaction to White's book, which had been pre-released in

condensed, two-part article form in the Reader's Digest--omitting his

coverage of Katyn, incidentally--a flurry of books were soon published

defending the Soviet Union and, in a few cases, directly criticizing

White's book.97 One outstanding example is Edmund Stevens' 1945

account, Russia Is No Riddle. Stevens and his books are worth examining

in detail, because of the complete about-face which he, as a journalist,

took--or, because of increasingly anti-Soviet public opinion, he had to

take--between his 1945 and 1950 books.

At the beginning of the 1945 book, Stevens mentioned his Russian

wife's adjustment to America. Later, he described his January 1944 trip

with Kathleen Harriman to Katyn and presents the Soviet version of

Katyn, even mentioning the "537th Construction Battalion" as being the

duplicitous designation of the Nazi extermination unit. His description

of his acknowledged Soviet friends--"the distinguished looking chairman,

Alexander Potyomkin, scion of a famous Russian family" and "Chief of the

Commission . . . Nikolai Burdenko, Surgeon General of the Red Army and

one of the world's most distinguished brain surgeons"--reeked of

cronyism. (Nonetheless, in 1946 Burdenko confided to a close friend

that the Polish officers had obviously been murdered in 1940--i.e., by

the NKVD.)98

At the end of Stevens' book, in a chapter entitled "Friendship or

Else," he condemned White's account of the Soviet Union by concluding

that the "abuse of Soviet hospitality is the shabbiest aspect of the

White episode."99 He did not, however, mention White's own treatment of

Katyn, specifically.

A startling contrast, then, was Stevens' 1950 book, This Is Russia:

Uncensored. In his preface to the book, retired U. S. Army general

Walter Bedell Smith stated, "Years have passed since the first book on

the Soviet Union by the young correspondent, Edmund Stevens, appeared in

print. These have been years of disillusionment.100"

In his 1950 book, Stevens was even more critical of the Soviet

Union than White had been in 1945. Although Katyn went unmentioned this

time, Stevens' description of an NKVD arrest in his Moscow apartment

house which he witnessed during the purges of the late 1930s is searing:

My most vivid recollection is that of a young mother. Across the

years, I still can hear her screams as they took her two-month-old

baby away from her and she and her husband were led off to the

"Black Crow"--Russian equivalent of the "Black Maria," or police

wagon. Only three weeks previously her husband had returned from

an assignment to Japan with all sorts of lovely presents for his

wife and child.101

Stevens then concluded the purges had "undermined public morale and

impaired the country's economic and military strength."102 Later, in

the chapter "Will the Slaves Revolt?," Stevens opined, with character-

istic sympathy and optimism,

It is essential that the West learn to distinguish between the

police state and the Soviet people, for if the former are

implacable foes, the latter, unless stupidly antagonized, are

potential friends and allies.

And it is they who eventually will decide their country's

destiny.103

While these words were all very impressively prescient (in light of

the political developments of the late 1980s and early 1990s), Stevens

himself certainly hadn't helped Westerners to make that vital distinc-

tion between terror state and Russian people when it counted, in 1943-

45. Indeed, in his 1945 book he had written:

Even people in America who are strongly opposed to the Soviet

system, if not blinded by prejudice, must admit that in its

preparation for the Nazi attack and in its conduct of the war, the

Soviet Government has shown considerable foresight and a capacity

for leadership. It is impossible, as some writers attempt, to

distinguish in this respect between the Government and the people.

Without this preparation and leadership, not all the heroism of

the Russian people would have availed against the Nazis.104

That he could write this while at the time he personally knew what

the purges were like--and must have known how they had decimated the Red

Army officer corps (and decapitated the Red Army) immediately prior to

the Nazi invasion--was reflective of the sympathetic predisposition many

Western commentators had toward the Soviet Union in 1945. However, by

1950 (Stevens') anticommunism was fashionable, unlike in 1945 when

William L. White's measured questions about our Soviet allies unleashed

such a torrent of abuse from his pro-Soviet colleagues.

Indeed, White's treatment by his fellow journalists provoked The

Saturday Evening Post to print an article in May 1945 examining the

significance of the episode. The following excerpt addresses this anti-

White crusade by some journalists:

This almost unanimous chorus of denunciation alarmed us a little,

for two reasons. The first is that there seems to be a

disposition to put Russia in a special category as the

nondiscussible Ally.

. . . The other reason why the anti-White "line" taken by

critics and intellectuals worries us is that it suggests that too

many of the people who tell the public what kind of books it ought

to read are a little touchy about having the nature of the

Communist setup understood by the rank and file of Americans.105

In the following year, 1946, the Soviets attempted to raise Katyn

as a Nazi war crimes issue at Nuremberg. The Soviets formally charged

the Nazis with the Katyn Massacre and put it on the agenda for

prosecution. They may have assumed, after the apparent acquiescence of

the West on the matter of Katyn during the war, that the court would be

inclined to support the Soviet position regarding this episode.

In any case, a Nuremberg finding of German guilt for Katyn would

thereby make the Western powers officially subscribe to the lie. As Sir

Owen O'Malley had foreseen, the Katyn episode at Nuremberg did indeed

become a particular embarrassment, especially for the Western Allies who

were actually claiming to believe in the humanitarian ideals for which

violation the Nazi war criminals were being prosecuted.

The Nuremberg war crimes trials, with their condemnation of mass

murder and other totalitarian and/or criminal misdeeds had been

intended to be a moral cornerstone of the postwar world. However, Katyn

would reemphasize the trials' one-sided nature and leave an inescapable

impression of hypocrisy. The handling of Katyn made evident the fact

that the trials certainly did not uphold the ideal of "justice for all."

Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess removed their headphones in disgust and

many of the other Nazi war criminals laughed in derision as the judicial

triumvirate (which included a Soviet prosecutor, General Rudenko)

solemnly intoned against the German defendants for planning military

aggression against Poland in 1939--which they had indeed done, with the

active collaboration of their Soviet cosignators to the 1939 Stalin-

Hitler Pact.106

A leading witness for the Soviet case was Dr. (M.D.) Markov from

Bulgaria, who had served on the German-sponsored "International Commis-

sion" which had investigated Katyn.107 Since the Soviet takeover of

Bulgaria, Dr. Markov had recanted his previous opinion that the Soviets

were guilty of Katyn. Coincidentally, the death sentence which had been

decreed for Dr. Markov by the Soviet-backed Bulgarian government was

suspended. At Nuremberg, Dr. Markov claimed his earlier statements

indicating Soviet responsibility for the crime had been made under Nazi

coercion.108

The German defense attorney produced testimony from other members

of the German commission that their findings had not been made under

German intimidation. Even more embarrassing for the Allies, there

voluntarily appeared at Nuremberg Colonel Ahrens, the former commander

of the German communications unit--the 537th Signal Regiment--accused of

performing the Katyn Massacre by the Soviets. He quickly and convinc-

ingly denied the Soviet charges of his guilt, proving that he was not

commanding the unit or even in the area at the time of the killings

alleged by the Soviets. When the Soviets then tried to accuse his

predecessor, Colonel Bedenk, that gentleman also promptly appeared to

deny and refute his guilt with equal alacrity. The only alternative to

the Germans being guilty for Katyn was embarrassingly obvious, and,

significantly, Katyn was omitted from the list of Nazi war crimes in the

final Nuremberg judgement.109 Nonetheless, the 1946 Facts on File

coverage of the issue of Katyn at Nuremberg only described the Bulgarian

Dr. Markov's pro-Soviet testimony.110

CHAPTER 3.

KATYN AS A POSTWAR PUBLIC AND POLITICAL ISSUE IN THE WEST

With the conclusion of the Second World War in Europe, Soviet

behavior toward Eastern European peoples and German civilians raised

concerns about the actual intent of our Soviet ally in these areas. The

17 June 1946 issue of Time magazine included an article entitled "`You

Cannot Shoot Us All.'" Time documented the Communist-dominated Polish

government's intensifying campaign of terror against the Polish Peasant

Party led by Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, who had taken over the Polish

Government-in-Exile after General Sikorski's death in July 1943.

According to Time, Mikolajczyk had sent the following message to his

wife and son in Britain, "You may let them know that I do not know what

can happen to me. I may be killed. I may be deported."1

Mikolajczyk was actually quoted telling Communist Vice Premier

Wladislaw Gomulka, "You cannot shoot us all." This was rather rash,

considering that he must have been aware that Stalin's exterminatory

methods had already obliterated millions of Russians, as well as

hundreds of thousands of his fellow Poles. However, like Katyn, such

massive murders had been disputed in the Western press by its Moscow

correspondents.2

Also appearing in 1946 was the third volume of Waverley Root's The

Secret History of the War, entitled Casablanca to Katyn. Root devoted

forty-six pages to defending the Soviet version of Katyn.3 Gamely, Root

even included Merkulov's admission that a "great blunder" had been made

concerning the Poles, rationalizing that Merkulov was referring to the

Poles being left behind to the advancing Germans.4 However, Root had

already betrayed his naivete about the Soviets when he stated:

According to the German report, bodies of Russian civilians were

found beneath those of the Poles. Was it the German contention

that the Russians had murdered their own nationals as well?

Russians might be expected to murder Poles, perhaps, but not

Russians. Germans had systematically murdered both.5

During the war, in his 3 May 1943 "Backstage of the War" column,

Root had been only slightly more responsible when he concentrated on the

political implications of the Katyn-precipitated Soviet-Polish rift--as

noted on page 14 of this study.

Whatever the opinion of Western journalists and the confusion among

their publics back home on the issue, the staff at the U.S. Embassy in

Moscow after the war well knew that the Soviets had killed the Poles at

Katyn, according to Martha Mautner, a new foreign service officer

assigned to the Moscow post at the time.6

In 1947, the book The Dark Side of the Moon, authored by General

Sikorski's widow, Helena Sikorska, was published. It was her account of

the suffering of Polish people in Soviet custody and exile, written and

completed in manuscript form during the war. Although the mystery of

the missing Polish officers was mentioned, Sikorska did not accuse the

Soviets of the crime.7 Only in the "Epilogue," authored by "an

Englishman," was Katyn mentioned--and then only to defend General

Sikorski's request for the Red Cross investigation.8 Nonetheless, the

victimization of Polish captives by the Soviet regime was compellingly

portrayed.

Then, in 1948, I Saw Poland Betrayed, a book by former U.S.

Ambassador to Poland Arthur Bliss Lane, was published. In his initial

coverage of Katyn, Lane did not directly accuse the Soviets of the Katyn

Massacre.

The identity of the perpetrators of the outrageous massacre of

Katyn, contrary to all laws of war and of humanity, has never been

definitely established. Perhaps it never will be. But I was to

obtain evidence in Poland from Poles whose veracity I had no

reason to distrust, which leads me to question seriously the

sincerity of the outburst of Soviet indignation over the Polish

Government's approach to the International Red Cross.9

Later in the book, Lane finally and directly challenged the Soviet

denials of guilt, stating:

Even though the Soviet Government has tried to avoid responsi-

bility for the Katyn incident, with violent protestations of

innocence, the accusing finger of public opinion in Poland is

still pointed at the Kremlin; for that liquidation of ten

thousand Polish officers would be consistent with the Soviet

policy of systematically destroying all elements representative of

Polish nationalism. Not only were the Nazis and Soviets in

agreement on the annihilation of the Polish state, but they

employed similar police-state measures to snuff out the spirit of

Polish independence.10

There were also postwar accounts by Polish survivors of Soviet

captivity, such as Lieutenant General Wladyslaw Anders and Josef

Czapski, who directly challenged Soviet denials of guilt for Katyn.11

The Nazis and the Soviets had not succeeded in eliminating all the

Polish intelligentsia, and the survivors fought back with the one, very

potent weapon they had: the pen.

Also in 1948, the wartime memoirs of Polish Peasant Party leader

Stanislaw Mikolajczyk were published. He had escaped Poland and death

at the hands of the NKVD, after all. In The Rape of Poland: Pattern of

Soviet Aggression, Mikolajczyk devoted an entire chapter to Katyn,

leaving no doubt that he was convinced that Stalin was guilty of the

executions, saying, "But the order--`Liquidate'--was signed by Stalin

himself." He based this contention on remarks made by a Red Army

military attache in London.12

In his 1949 book, An Army in Exile: The Story of the Second Polish

Corps, General Anders recounted his reconstruction of the Polish Army

from the labor camps of the Soviet Union and its subsequent political

betrayal by the Allies. Time magazine titled its review of Anders'

book, "Polish Tragedy." Without mentioning Katyn, the review described

Stalin's "feigned innocence" as he accepted from Anders and General

Sikorski the list of "4,000" missing Polish officers, many of whom were

later disinterred at Katyn.13 This was not necessarily in reference to

the Katyn Massacre itself, but to the aforementioned list of missing

officers.14 Later in the book, Anders had mentioned the total number of

15,000 missing Polish officers in detail, and described his growing

anxiety about them as he left the Soviet Union.15

In Anders' book, the chapter titled "The Katyn Murders" clearly

indicated his certainty that the Soviet Union was guilty of Katyn:

On April 13, 1943, the Germans broadcast a report that the corpses

of thousands of Polish officers had been found buried at Katyn.

The German radio was naturally suspect, but nevertheless we were

already well aware that something dreadful had happened to the

missing officers; our efforts to trace them in Russia had been

unavailing, and the Russians had been suspiciously silent about

their fate. There was therefore unfortunately only too much

reason to believe the German report, for we well knew the Russians

were quite capable of committing a crime of such magnitude.16

Anders later cited Stalin's anti-Semitism and a Soviet attempt to

smear Poles with the taint of anti-Semitism (during the evacuation of

Polish refugees from the Soviet Union in 1942).17 Nonetheless--

remarkably, considering the fact that that his son was missing somewhere

in Eastern Europe--Anders was trying to accept the situation as

positively as possible:

I and other Polish soldiers had, in spite of our personal

experiences, entertained some hopes at first that after the defeat

of Germany, Russia, free from any menace from the West, would not

only change her attitude towards her neighbours but transform her

internal regime into a more liberal and democratic one. We were

influenced by the pledges given by the heads of the N.K.V.D., though

we received these with natural caution. We wanted to forget the

past. But our confidence resulted not only from a kind of wishful

thinking, but also from our insufficient knowledge of Russia and our

tendency to judge things in Russia by European standards.18

Also in 1949, the book The Katyn Wood Murders, by Joseph

Mackiewicz, was published in London. Mackiewicz, a Polish journalist,

was brought by the Germans (with the approval of the Polish underground)

to Katyn in 1943, to record the disinterment.

Among other items, Mackiewicz described the eighth, and last, mass

grave which contained the final one hundred officers murdered in May

1940. These victims were distinguished by their lighter, warm-weather

clothing. German propagandists, unaware of the other two killing sites,

had claimed there were ten to twelve thousand Polish officers buried at

Katyn, and the total figure of 4,243 was an embarrassment to their

case.19

Mackiewicz's book is interesting in that it detailed the murders of

Polish, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian civilians by the NKVD at the time of

the Soviet withdrawal from the German invasion in Summer 1941. The NKVD

was even executing Soviet airmen, presumably in retaliation for the

successful German knock-out attacks on the Red Air Force early in the

invasion.20 (Like the execution of commanders of the Western Special

Military District, this may have been to eliminate embarrassing wit-

nesses, since the NKVD had been responsible for airfield construction

and preparedness on the USSR's western frontier.) This was further,

important evidence that the NKVD's extermination of the Polish officers

and cadets was consistent with Soviet policy toward captured territories

and populations.

At the end of the book, Mackiewicz theorized that if the Germans

had murdered the Poles at Katyn in August 1941, they would have

attempted to accuse the Soviets of the crime immediately, to confuse

their own crime with the Soviet atrocities they were discovering.

Furthermore, he went on--bravely, in a book published during Stalin's

lifetime--to observe:

But for once, with the Katyn crime, the Germans did not need to

conceal any clues. They were not guilty and they were only too

anxious that the world should know the truth. It is a strange

paradox and a very sad conclusion that this truth is still

unbelieved or wholly unknown. Furthermore such ignorance contains

a danger for the future. Because if the culprit of such a crime

[Stalin] is not brought to the dock--what will his next crime be?

Or should we not rather ask--who will be his next victim?21

Also in 1949, journalist Julius Epstein assembled a private

committee--with former Ambassador Lane as president--to conduct public

hearings on Katyn, collecting any evidence and testimony possible about

Katyn.22 In addition to Epstein and Lane, the committee included such

notables as former OSS chief William Donovan, former foreign intelli-

gence operative Allen Dulles, Polish American Congress president Charles

Rozmarek, and journalists Max Eastman and Clare Booth Luce, among

others.23 Although the committee gathered much testimony and evidence,

its credibility suffered from a lack of legal procedure.

In 1950, the fourth volume of Winston Churchill's wartime memoirs

and history of the Second World War, The Hinge of Fate, was published.

Churchill, presumably mindful of British national secrecy and Foreign

Office credibility, did not directly declare the Soviets guilty of the

Katyn Massacre. He instead candidly stated that General Sikorski had a

"wealth of evidence" to support the German accusation against the

Soviets and that, in reply, he told Sikorski, "If they are dead nothing

you can do will bring them back."24 Discussing the credibility of the

1944 Soviet re-investigation of Katyn and counter-charge that the Nazis

killed the Poles, Churchill ruefully commented:

This version, to be believed, involves acceptance of the fact that

nearly 15,000 Polish officers and men, of whom there was no record

since the spring of 1940, passed into German hands in July, 1941,

and were later destroyed by the Germans without one single person

escaping and reporting, either to the Russian authorities or to a

Polish Consul in Russia or to the Underground Movement in Poland.

When we remember the confusion caused by the German advance, that

the guards of the camps must have fled as the invaders came

nearer, and all the contacts afterwards during the period of

Russo-Polish co-operation, belief seems an act of faith.25

Even after the war, in the late 1940s, the U.S. State Department

(as well as the British Foreign Office) continued to suppress official

mention of the Katyn Massacre.26 Nonetheless, interest in Katyn and its

significance began grew in the West during the early 1950s.

On 18 September 1951 the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously

adopted House Resolution 390, which created the "Select Committee to

Conduct an Investigation and Study of the Facts, Evidence, and

Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre." There were three apparent

motives for the resurrected Congressional interest in Katyn. First,

Communist atrocities against U.S. prisoners of war in Korea had enraged

the American people and were similar in method to the Katyn killings.27

Second, the Epstein-Lane committee's investigation of Katyn had raised

national concern and a sense of guilt about America's postwar betrayal

of East Europeans. Finally, Democrat Congressmen needed a 1952 election

year issue to prove their opposition to Leninist-Stalinist Communism to

American voters who had seen the loss of Eastern Europe and China to

Communism under Democrat administrations.28 It also gave supportive

Republicans a chance to court American voters of East European

descent.29

The Katyn hearings began, unexpectedly, on 11 October 1951.30 John

J. Mitchell--no relation to Attorney General John Mitchell of the Nixon

Administration--was chief counsel. Young lawyer Roman C. Pucinski of

Chicago, Illinois, was the committee's chief investigator. Congress-man

Ray J. Madden (D--Indiana) was the chairman. Hearings were to be held

in Washington DC, Chicago, London, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Naples. The

London hearings were held, despite resistance and difficulties presented

by the British Foreign Office.31 Scores of witnesses were interviewed,

exhibits studied, and depositions taken.

Additional revelations had occurred during the hearings. During

their investigation, the Germans had brought in captured American and

British officers to verify the forensic conclusions. U.S. Army Lieu-

tenant Colonel John H. Van Vliet, Jr.--a fourth-generation West Point

graduate, Class of 1937--was the senior American prisoner-of-war taken

to Katyn by the Germans to witness their investigation. Immediately

upon his arrival in Washington, D.C., on 22 May 1945, after his release

from German captivity, Van Vliet had filed a personal report with Chief

of Staff General George C. Marshall's Assistant Chief of Staff for

Intelligence, Major General Clayton Bissell. Bissell immediately

classified the report "Top Secret" and, at Van Vliet's own request,

issued him an order not to discuss the report with anyone. Sometime

after that, the report vanished--inexplicably.32

The input of the American Army officers was termed "the most

significant testimony of the independent witnesses."33 Van Vliet stated

that although he hated the Germans, he was convinced of the 1940 killing

date by the excellent condition of the victims' boots at the time of

their original burial. Personal experience had convinced these American

prisoners of war that boots could not survive more than a few months of

prison camp life in such fine condition.34 The suppression of Van

Vliet's judgement was given larger, strategic implications in the second

conclusion of the Committee's Final Report: "In justifying his actions

for designating the Van Vliet report "Top Secret," General Bissell said

he was merely carrying out the spirit of the Yalta agree-ment.35" and,

later, ". . . this committee believes that had the Van Vliet report been

made immediately available to the Department of State and to the

American public, the course of our governmental policy toward Soviet

Russia might have been more realistic with more fortunate postwar

results."36

Despite the Committee's efforts, no link could be established

between General Marshall and the disappearance of the Van Vliet report.

General Bissell's responses to intensive questioning do raise doubts

about this, though. After having acknowledged that he classified the

report "Top Secret," because it was a potential political bombshell

which might wreck U.S.-Soviet relations and disrupt Soviet cooperation

in the final military defeat of Japan, General Bissell stated,

concerning the report:

There is a possibility that I may have mentioned it to General

Marshall or to the Secretary [of War]. I have no distinct

recollection of having done so, and I don't see much reason why I

should have.37

Such studied credulity from a career intelligence officer sorely tested

the good faith and patience of his Congressional listeners, and his

questioning was the bitterest of the hearings.38

Van Vliet has always supported General Bissell's decision to

suppress the report, in consideration of the Soviets' contribution to

victory over the Nazis and the overriding need for their pinning of the

powerful Japanese forces in Manchuria in 1945.39 However, it is well

beyond credence that General Bissell would permanently suppress such a

strategically political report on the basis of his own judgement and

authority alone, without consulting the political judgement of General

Marshall or someone else.

In its final report published on 22 December 1952, the Committee

concluded, on the basis of all the evidence amassed and "beyond any

question of reasonable doubt," that the Soviet NKVD "committed the mass

murders of the Polish officers and intellectual leaders in the Katyn

Forest near Smolensk, Russia." The Committee was "equally certain" that

the 11,000 other Polish officers had been similarly murdered by the NKVD

elsewhere.40

The relevance to the Korean War was emphasized in the sixth, and

final, conclusion of the Committee:

6. This committee began its investigation last year, and as the

committee's work progressed, information, documents, and evidence

was submitted from all parts of the world. It was at this same

time that reports reached the committee of similar atrocities and

violations of international law being perpetrated in Korea. This

committee noted the striking similarity between crimes committed

against the Poles at Katyn and those being inflicted on American

and other United Nation troops in Korea. Communist tactics being

used in Korea are identical to those followed at Katyn. Thus this

committee believes that Congress should undertake an immediate

investigation of the Korean war atrocities in order that the

evidence can be collected and the truth revealed to the American

people and the free peoples of the world.41

American news magazines recorded the progress of the hearings. A

photograph used by the magazines was of a hooded witness holding a

pistol to the back of the neck of a man whose hands were held behind his

back, to describe how the prisoners had been "bound and shot." In an

article which pointed out that 6,000 American soldiers were missing in

Korea, a Special Committee member was quoted as saying that "Katyn may

well have been a blueprint for Korea."42

One typical article, titled "Who Is Guilty of the Katyn Massacre?,"

appeared in the July 1952 issue of The Readers Digest In this piece,

Oxford history professor G.F. Hudson, whose April 1950 scholarly article

on Katyn is described in the following chapter, assessed the evidence

and pronounced the Soviets guilty of the crime. As to the significance

of Katyn, he concluded:

No one knows better than the Communist leaders how deeply the

truth about this bestial crime can hurt their cause. But the more

the Soviet Union obstructs the uncovering of the truth, the more

certain it becomes that the men who lie dead in Katyn Forest lie

also on the conscience of the Soviet Union.43

Coverage of the Katyn hearings, even the one held in London, was

much more circumscribed in Britain. No journal article on this matter

was listed at all in the (British) Library Association's Subject Index

to Periodicals annual volumes for 1951, 1952, and 1953. The Times of

London did publish several small articles, particularly in 1952. One

was on 21 April 1952, a week after the London hearing, and was titled,

"Katyn Forest Massacre: Alleged Statement by Mr. Stalin's Son." It

referred to a Polish emigre's claim that Yakov Stalin had told him that

the Polish officers had been "liquidated" and that doing so "was

necessary, but that the Russians would do it in a humane way."44

Facts on File covered the development of the Katyn case in the

early 1950s. In the 1950 volume, the 18 September 1950 publication of

Lieutenant Colonel Van Vliet's report by the Department of the Army was

recorded.45 The 1951 volume recorded the unanimous 18 September 1951

U.S. House of Representatives vote authorizing the hearings.46

The 1952 volume covered the Committee's visit to Europe, the Soviet

counter-charges of U.S. germ warfare in Korea, and the acknowledgement

(to some Allied officers) of Stalin's responsibility for Katyn by

Stalin's own son (Yakov) in a German prisoners-of-war camp. More

sensational was Congressman Thaddeus H. Machrowicz's charge that Anglo-

American commander (and 1952 Republican Presidential candidate) Dwight

D. Eisenhower had ignored reports of Katyn. (Eisenhower was recorded as

promptly replying on 29 April 1952 that he had been "fairly busy" with

other matters at the time of the political, diplomatic controversy

wrought by Katyn.)47 What would be the last coverage of Katyn in Facts

on File until 1988 was the report of the Committee's unequivocal

findings that the Soviets were responsible for the Katyn Massacre.48

Also interestingly, even though Committee hearings were held in

London and throughout Western Europe, the British-published Keesing's

Contemporary Archives would continue to omit any mention of Katyn until

1988.

After the Congressional hearings and final report, little

transpired in the Katyn case. The Soviets and the pro-Soviet Polish

government continued to attempt to blame the Germans for the massacre.

Under Soviet occupation, the Polish people seethed with hatred and

frustration about Katyn and other Soviet atrocities and injustices.

In 1956, the Polish people's uprising against a hardline Communist

regime was motivated in part by continuing anger about Katyn. In a

chapter entitled "Legacy of Hate," Anglo-Polish author Konrad Syrop

described in his 1957 book, Spring in October: The Story of the Polish

Revolution, 1956, the significance of Katyn for Poles enduring Soviet

Cold War domination:

The horrible crime at Katyn became a symbol of Polish-Soviet

relations. In vain the Russians tried to shift the blame for it

on the Germans; they failed to produce any convincing evidence to

support this charge and the International War Crimes Tribunal at

Nuremberg made no reference to Katyn in its findings. . . . In any

case the responsibility lay in the cruel and ruthless Soviet

system, and the mass graves at Katyn containing the bodies of more

than four thousand Polish officers strengthened the already

existing wall of hatred between Poles and Russians.49

At the moment of the Poles' victory--evidenced by a Soviet agreement to

a more moderate Polish leadership--the "insistent" chant, "Katyn!

Katyn!" was heard in the streets.50

Also in 1956, the popular, influential book, Deliver Us from Evil,

by U.S. Navy doctor Tom Dooley, was published. Dooley chronicled the

atrocities inflicted on Vietnamese by Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh Communists

during the Communist takeover of North Vietnam in the early 1950s.

Dooley described such Viet Minh barbarities as the ripping off of left

ears of children of a Catholic province who were caught listening to the

"evil words" of the Lord's Prayer.51

Dooley's description of the bungling attempts by an International

Control Commission (CIC) to enable refugees to escape safely from the

Communist North contained an echo of Katyn. He wrote:

Within the CIC committees there arose the same problems that

arise in all conference bodies containing representatives of

Communism. The Poles seemed determined to be stumbling-blocks and

I personally witnessed their obstructive tactics many times.

I would take a refugee to the CIC, a refugee who had been

horribly beaten up by the Viet Minh. There would be a council

meeting. The refugee would tell his story. After hours of

wrangling, he would be sent back to the camp. It seemed that the

Polish representatives always wanted proof that obviously was

unobtainable. Certainly this poor peasant had been beaten--that

could not be denied--but what hard-and-fast proof did he have that

the bullets which had torn into his arm were Communist bullets?

The peasant would have to present something substan-tial in the

way of proof, which of course he couldn't do, and not just his

maimed body and feeble voice.52

Perhaps a proven ability to rationalize away Communist atrocities

against fellow Poles--as in the case of Katyn--uniquely qualified these

Polish Communists for their membership in the CIC, to represent

Communist interests.

In 1960, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Un-American

Activities produced for the public record the illustrated booklet, Lest

We Forget! A Pictorial Summary of Communism in Action, to remind

Americans of the methods of terror practiced by the Soviets. In

addition to commentary and photographs of the Ukrainian Famine of the

early 1930s, of the starved condition of Polish survivors of Soviet

Siberia, and of the political exterminations hastily executed by the

NKVD during the 1941 Soviet withdrawal from the Baltic states, Katyn was

included with the following comments by the principal author and

researcher, Klaus Samuli Gunnar Romppanen:

May I call your attention to exhibit No. 49, which is a view

of an incident, if we can call it an incident, that the free world

has long known but appears to have quickly forgotten. (P. 35.)

It is the view of the mass graves in the Katyn Forest, where

4,242 Polish Army officers were murdered, not in armed conflict on

the field of battle, but murdered in cold blood because they were

not regarded as trustworthy by the Communists.53

In the West, Polish emigre communities observed the anniversary of

Katyn. In journal articles and books, a few writers pieced together

more testimony and evidence as it became available.

The carefully researched book about Katyn which is usually cited as

the most credible, scholarly source is Janusz Zawodny's Death in the

Forest, published in 1962. In popular reviews, it was well-received.

For example, in Saturday Review of Literature reviewer H.C. Wolfe

opined:

An objective, painstakingly documented report that, unless

additional information is revealed some day from Moscow's secret

files, will remain the definitive work on the subject. . . .

Scrupulously sifting every shred of available evidence from far-

flung sources, interviewing numerous survivors of Polish prison

camps in Russia, and weaving a tortuous way through tangled

wartime politics and propaganda, Dr. Zawodny pieced together a

mosaic of facts that shaped themselves into a finger of

accusation.

. . . The murder victims were . . . the very men who would

have provided leadership for postwar Poland. Their loss was

tragic both for their families and the new Poland. Dr. Zawodny's

findings indict the Kremlin.54

Further discussion of Zawodny's book appears in the following chapter of

this study which deals with academic coverage of the issue in the West.

In 1962, New York Herald Tribune journalist Seymour Freidin

mentioned Katyn in his book, The Forgotten People. Freidin's

description of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe included this

introductory passage about Poland:

The man, now in Britain, was not a Jew. On the cinders of the

old Ghetto, however, it was hard to reconcile anti-Semitic

feelings with the Polish plight. Under the Germans, they had both

suffered as inferior peoples. There also was the concentration

camp, Auschwitz, in Poland, which will live forever infamous in

man's memories. At the same time, Poles, even the younger ones,

never forget that their officer corps was liquidated in the Katyn

Forest during the war.

"The Russians did it, of course," Polish students have told me

repeatedly.

"It was the Nazis, but they left a suspicion of doubt," was

the way a Polish [Communist] central committee member described

the episode to me.55

More significant to the public record was the U.S. Government's

1963 publication of Foreign Relations of the United States, 1943, Vol.

III, Diplomatic Papers. These documents revealed that even before the

Katyn controversy, U.S. State Department officials had been aware of

anti-Polish Soviet activities. Concern about the Soviets breaking off

diplomatic relations with the London Polish government had been

expressed by General Sikorski, and President Roosevelt had felt moved to

send him, on 12 April 1943, a letter reassuring him of American

support.56

The Katyn affair, itself, consumed many pages. Its diplomatic

repercussions were felt through the summer of 1943. Significant was

President Roosevelt's 26 April 1943 telegram to Stalin, wherein he

stated, "In my opinion Sikorski has in no way acted with the Hitler gang

but instead he has made a mistake in taking up this particular matter

with the International Red Cross."57

Russia at War: 1941-1945, by wartime Moscow correspondent Alexan-

der Werth, was published in 1964. Werth clearly indicated his opinion

that it was "more than probable, if not absolutely certain" that the

Soviets had been responsible for Katyn. Werth was strongly sympathetic

to the wartime suffering of the peoples of the Soviet Union, and his

verdict about Katyn carried considerable weight.58

In 1965, an English translation of the 1948 book, The Crime of

Katyn: Facts and Documents, was published in London by the Polish

Cultural Foundation. The 1948 preface and 1965 foreword were both

written by General Anders. In careful detail, the book reviewed the

sequence of events and evaluates the evidence of the German and Russian

investigative commissions. It contained first-person testimonies,

including that of one Ivan Krivozertzev, a local Katyn resident who had

worked as a laborer for the occupying Germans. Krivozertzev first drew

the Germans' attention to the Polish graves, in 1943. He later fled the

returning Soviets and in Autumn 1946 finally arrived in Ancona, Italy,

at Polish 2nd Army Corps headquarters, where he reported his experience.

(In 1947, he was found hanged in a barn outside a "displaced persons"--

refugee--camp in Britain.)59

The 1965 edition of The Crime of Katyn includes material not in the

1948 version. For example, the testimony from U. S. Army Lieutenant

Colonel Van Vliet during the Congressional committee hearings is

mentioned.

In 1971 there appeared Khrushchev Remembers, the first volume of

the memoirs of post-Stalin Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev. Although

Khrushchev refrained from any mention of Katyn, a prefatory note by

Sovietologist Edward Crankshaw to the "Advance into Poland" subchapter

mentioned the NKVD's killing of the Poles at Katyn and the deportation

of hundreds of thousands of Polish people to Siberia.60

A veritable crusader on the issue of Katyn was Louis Fitzgibbon,

who had a number of books published in the 1970s bringing forth the

contemporary evidence accumulated. In 1971, his book Katyn presented

some of the most graphic and compelling evidence of Soviet guilt. While

he acknowledged the Western Allies' reluctance to embarrass their Soviet

ally with an inquest about Katyn during the war, Fitzgibbon's comment on

the postwar silence in the West reflected the Soviets' continuing,

extreme sensitivity to the issue:

After the war Russia greatly increased its strength, its

territorial possessions and its potential danger to the other

powers in Europe. It would have seemed, and still does appear,

imprudent to irritate or provoke so powerful a country, and

further mention of Katyn would have done just that. So a

conspiracy of silence descended on the matter, and various

efforts, presented as appendices to this book, have failed to

produce a clear and positive international proclamation of the

truth.61

In 1972, British Foreign Office records declassified (after the

standard thirty-year waiting period) included wartime British Ambassador

to Poland Owen O'Malley's secret report on Katyn. This resulted in a

Time magazine article titled, "Poland: Death in Katyn Forest,"

describing the moral significance of the Western Allies' wartime coverup

of the Soviets' killings.62

Also in 1972, journalist Louis Fischer's new book, The Road to

Yalta, devoted an entire chapter to Katyn, "Murder in the Forest."63

Fischer left no doubt about his conviction that Stalin was guilty of the

crime. This is especially significant, since Fischer was a respected

Sovietologist who had been sympathetic to Stalinism in his reporting as

a correspondent in Moscow during the 1930s and the early part of the

war. Along with New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, Fischer

was later accused of having had omitted reports of the Ukrainian Famine

in the early 1930s, to maintain his favored status with the Soviet

regime.64

Two books by Soviet emigres appeared in 1972, as well. Watchdogs

of Terror: Russian Bodyguards from the Tsars to the Commissars was

written by Peter Deriabin, a former NKVD counterintelligence officer.

Deriabin mentioned Katyn, in the context of the wholesale deportations

and exterminations of Poles in 1940-41. However, he used the inaccurate

Nazi figure of 10,000 as the toll of victims at Katyn.65 Boris

Levytsky, who dedicated his book--The Uses of Terror: The Soviet Secret

Police, 1917-1970--to his liquidated parents and brothers, murdered by

the Soviets, did not mention Katyn, even though he did describe the

incarceration, suffering, and eventual release (of some) of the Polish

deportees.

One interesting postwar development--viewed by some commentators as

an example of how far the Soviets would go in their attempts to blot out

the memory of Katyn--was the erection of the Soviet war memorial at

"Khatyn," to 149 Russian villagers massacred by Nazi German troops in

Spring 1943--the same time of the announcement of Katyn by the

Germans.66 This was chronicled in (the 1983 English translation of) the

1978 edition of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia. The "Khatyn" article

gave the opening date of the "complex" as 5 July 1969. Its centerpiece

statue, "The Defiant Man," won a Lenin Prize in 1970.67 There was, of

course, no mention of Katyn--as a geographical place or even as the site

of a "fascist atrocity"--in the Encyclopedia.

In 1974, U. S. President Richard M. Nixon--attempting to salvage

his tottering presidency with a collegial visit to Soviet leader

Brezhnev at Minsk--visited the Soviet Khatyn memorial and obligingly

refrained from any mention of Katyn, on up the road to Moscow, which

could have embarrassed his hosts and hampered continued progress toward

detente. Nonetheless, and to its credit, the New York Times felt

constrained to point out the difference in a separate article.68

Of the hundreds of villages massacred by the Nazis, it was

suspicious that the Soviets chose one having a name so similar to Katyn

for their memorial. In 1987, the accusation was made that "Khatyn" was,

in part, "an Orwellian memory hole" intended to disinform the Western

tourists and peace activists taken to it by their Soviet guides.69

In September 1976, the erection of a Katyn memorial in London was

boycotted by the British government, because it had the inscription,

"Katyn, 1940," indicating Soviet guilt. The British weekly, The

Economist, acidly observed, "Last week the British foreign office made a

diplomatic but ill-judged and unsuccessful attempt to protect the

reputation of Joseph Stalin."70 An accompanying article indicated The

Economist's own opinion with the title, "Almost Certainly by Russia."71

Even the Royal British Legion, a veterans' organization, was refused

permission to send a bugler, until protests by a "Mr. Winston Churchill

MP"--the former Prime Minister's grandson--proved compelling.72

Katyn became an issue of controversy again during 1980. In the

Gdansk shipyards, according to British journalist Timothy Garton Ash,

its mention epitomized and steeled the uncompromising anger which

produced Polish Solidarity.73 A Solidarity monument to Katyn, speci-

fying the date of the killings as 1940--and, therefore, the guilt for it

being the Soviets'--was raised in Warsaw and then torn down by the

Polish Communist government.74

Indeed, the Soviet massacre of the Polish leadership in 1940--of

which Katyn was only one instance, albeit the best known--was the crime

which underlay and made illegitimate Poland's Soviet-installed Communist

government. Katyn's memory (or, worse yet, any Soviet admission of it)

was a direct threat to that government's continued existence. Realizing

this, an earlier Polish leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, had once even

declined Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's offer to admit Soviet

responsibility for Katyn.75 Katyn was the "Achilles Heel" of Soviet

domination of Poland, and control of Poland was the keystone of Soviet

domination of Eastern Europe.76

The 1982 book, Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, by

former Polish Army counterintelligence officer Michael Checinski,

described the postwar persecution of Jews by the Polish Communist regime

and by anti-Communist rebels who held Jews responsible for the Communist

takeover. Checinski estimated that the takeover cost as many as 100,000

lives, and that 8,000 pro-Communists--about 20 per cent of whom were

innocent Jews--were killed in return or revenge.77 As to the reset-

tlement of some of the lands Poland lost to the Soviet Union, Checinski

wrote:

True to the Stalinist doctrine of collective guilt and organized

genocide, over 150,000 civilian Ukrainians were forcibly deported

from their land and "resettled" in the Recovered Territories in

western and northern Poland. During this "resettlement action,"

known as "Operation Wisla," thousands of children, women, and old

people were killed, sometimes being burned alive in their

villages.78

In his only reference to Katyn, Checinski wrote that the Polish

Army officer corps had been so decimated by Katyn and postwar Stalinist

purges, that "some 15,000 Soviet officers, including at least 40

generals, served in the Polish armed forces."79 The coincidence of that

number with the military toll of Stalin's Spring 1940 massacres of

Polish officers at Katyn and elsewhere is noteworthy.

Nonetheless, the Polish people nurtured the memory of Katyn. On

pages 166-67 of the 1982 picture book, Portrait of Poland, there was a

photograph with the caption,

`Poland is not yet lost . . .'--the first line of the national

anthem stands over the patch of grass in the Warsaw municipal (and

formerly military) cemetery which in 1981 was spontaneously made

into an unofficial memorial to the victims of the Katyn massacre.

A cross that was set up here was removed overnight by the secret

police, and the Mayor of Warsaw thereupon issued a public appeal

for donations to institute an official memorial. The bodies of

more than 4000 Polish officers were found in 1943 in a mass forest

grave at Katyn (now in Soviet territory). [Actually, Katyn has

always been in Russian-Soviet territory.] The officers had been

captured by Soviet forces when they occupied Eastern Poland in

October 1939, and the Russians stand accused of the massacre; but

they have never, even in periods of de-Stalinization, acknowledged

responsibility. The Poles have not forgotten.80

In August 1982 some Scandinavian peace marchers, who were sympathe-

tic to the Polish Solidarity movement, had the moral courage to boycott

the Soviet "Khatyn" memorial, citing "unanswered questions" regarding

Katyn. This enraged their Soviet hosts, including propagandist Yuri

Zhukov, who accused the Scandinavian peace group of containing "Nazi

sympathizers" who had instigated the boycott.81

Typically, though, American visitors were more naive and pliant.

An example of this was a 1984 account of a visit to the Soviet memorial

at Khatyn, by Reverend James O. Watkins Jr. of the Presbyterian Peace-

making Program.82 Subsequently informed about Katyn and requested to

distinguish between the two placenames in his "Peace Notes" column, he

only did so under considerable political pressure.

In the 1984 book Fearful Warriors, author Ralph K. White bewailed

the probability of thermonuclear war and had challenged the motives and

mindsets of the opposing Western and Eastern blocs, much as English

author A.A. Milne had done in his book Peace with Honour, in the 1930s.

After beginning the book with a chapter entitled "Empathizing with the

Soviet Government," White rendered his version of a comparative history

of the East-West conflict. Although he mentioned the border dispute

between the London Polish government and the Soviets, he omitted any

mention of Soviet guilt for the Katyn Massacre or of Soviet inaction

during the Warsaw Uprising being two of the early causes of anti-Soviet

feeling in the West.83

However, the Poles were carefully escalating their opposition to

the Soviets, and in 1985 Soviet Communist Party General Secretary

Mikhail S. Gorbachev agreed to respond to some Polish concerns, in an

attempt to defuse the anti-Soviet rancor. During a meeting with Polish

First Secretary Wojciech Jaruzelski, Gorbachev agreed to set up a joint

Russo-Polish historical commission to examine what Solidarity leaders

had called the "blank spots" of their two nations' mutual histories.

Items to be studied included Stalin's 1938 extermination of the Polish

Communist Party leaders, the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact which eliminated

Poland, mass deportations of Poles to Siberia and other regions of the

Soviet Union in 1939-40, and the Red Army's failure to relieve the siege

of Warsaw in August 1944. The blank spot initially considered too

sensitive to examine was Katyn.84

This ill-advised omission only infuriated the Poles. Finally, in

March 1988, one member of the Polish national political assembly, the

Seym, even had the audacity to break the taboo against the use of the

word "Katyn." Even more explosively, Ryszard Bender raised the Katyn

issue as a test of "Glasnost"--Soviet leader Gorbachev's new policy of

openness--demanding to know, in regard to the unknown fate of the other

Polish officers, "Where are their graves? Do we have `glasnost' or

not?"85 Bender specifically stated that the truth about the Katyn

Massacre had to be divulged before Poland and the Soviet Union could

have genuinely friendly relations.86

Meanwhile, in February 1988, fifty-nine prominent Polish dissidents

had submitted a letter to the principal Soviet press agencies, demanding

an open Russo-Polish investigation of Katyn and the truth.87 At the

same time, Soviet members of the historical commission became noticeably

more intractable on the issue of Katyn.

Responding to its people, and to the heat of their outrage, the

Polish government stopped blaming the Germans for Katyn in March 1988.88

At the Poles' instigation, Katyn became a formal agenda item for the

"blank spots" commission. Polish commission members simply demanded

more documents from the Soviets about the Polish officers and cadets who

had been in their care.

The Katyn issue had now become the "blank spots" commission's most

important issue.89 On his June 1988 visit to the Soviet Union, Polish

Cardinal Glemp emphasized the importance of the truth about Katyn to

Russo-Polish relations. As RAND/UCLA Center for the Study of Soviet

International Behavior analyst, Thomas S. Szayna, commented:

In doing so, he cut to the very heart of the matter: as horrible

as the massacre was, it was not so much the event as the deceit,

the lies, and the official falsification of history surrounding it

that caused Polish bitterness toward the Russians.90

The book Katyn Killings: In the Record, by U.S. Marine officer

John H. Lauck, appeared in 1988. This was largely a compilation of

facts and documents which had been previously published, particularly

pertinent excerpts from the Congressional hearings.91

The issue of Katyn was so powerful and compelling that it could be

utilized as a potent political weapon even by an individual citizen.

This was demonstrated when I used it to temper the anti-military, pro-

Soviet fervor in Alaska in 1988. On 21 April 1988, the very day before

the arrival in Juneau of longtime Gorbachev friend and "glasnost"

spokesman, Gennadi Gerasimov, the Juneau Empire published my article,

"Sunday, April 24th: A Day to Remember Katyn." Basically, I asked my

fellow Alaskans to pause to consider that despite Soviet promises of

good will and good faith--epitomized by the "Glasnost" concept of

openness--the Soviets still had not admitted their responsibility for

Katyn.92

The article was well received and, with local support, Alaska

Governor Steve Cowper--a Democrat--responded by issuing his back-dated 1

April 1988 executive proclamation making 30 April 1988 "A Day to

Remember Katyn" in Alaska.93 Chicago Alderman Roman Pucinski called

Governor Cowper to express his thanks. (Copies of both the article and

proclamation followed Mr. Gerasimov back to Moscow.)

One method used by some journalists and intellectuals in the West

to dispute Katyn and other examples of Communist exterminations--thus

assisting the coverup of such atrocities--was to demand unnecessarily

high standards of proof. Typical of "experts" who have rationalized

their denial of the extent of Stalin's crimes is Alexander Cockburn. In

his 3 March 1989 New Statesman and Society article, "Purging Stalin,"

Cockburn mocked Russian historian Roy Medvedev's claim that 20 million

people died in Stalin's purges and exterminations. Cockburn contrasted

that with revisionist historians' claims that the dead from collectivi-

zation were as few as 3.5 million--half the conservative figure--and

vaguely surmised that an estimate of "tens of thousands" of 1930s

political purge victims (which he attributed to George Kennan), rather

than (many) more than a million, was "quite conceivable, maybe even

probable."

While Cockburn attempted to trivialize the importance of total

numbers, he also claimed "Evil though he was, Stalin did not plan or

seek to accomplish genocide, and to say that he and Hitler had the same

project in mind (or as right-wing German historians now argue, that

somehow Lenin and Stalin put Hitler up to it) is to do disservice to

history and truth." Cockburn specifically attacked the contention of

"Bukhtain" [sic]--Bukharin--biographer Stephen Cohen that "Judged only

by the number of victims, and leaving aside important differences

between the two regimes, Stalinism created a holocaust greater than

Hitler's."94

What is at stake is the still-significant question of whether or

not mass murder on the basis of race or nationality--the classic

definition of genocide--has killed significantly more people in this

century than mass murder on the basis of political correctness. For

example, more people were murdered in Cambodia by their own fanatically

Maoist-Communist Khmer Rouge countrymen than have been murdered by the

ethnic strife in what was Yugoslavia--so far.

Cockburn's own working figure is reflected in his statement "The

task is obviously to arrive at truth, but many such estimates evidently

have a regulatory ideological function with an exponential momentum so

great that now any computation that does not soar past ten million is

somehow taken as evidence of being soft on Stalin."95

Nevertheless, Soviet leader Gorbachev still refrained from mention-

ing Katyn, as hoped, during his July 1988 visit to Poland. Gorbachev's

own position in the Soviet Union could have been jeopardized by a

premature concession of the truth about Katyn, now--finally--recognized

as a pivotal act of Soviet terror.96

Evidence of Soviet guilt continued to accumulate, inside and

outside the commission. In September 1988, the U. S. government

disturbed its silence on Katyn when the National Endowment for the

Humanities agreed to fund a printing of a translation into Polish of

Janusz K. Zawodny's book, Death in the Forest--for mass, covert

distribution within Poland, apparently.97

Eventually, international media pressure on Jaruzelski and

Gorbachev proved overwhelming. In February 1989 the official Polish

weekly magazine, Odrodzenie, published evidence of Soviet guilt in an

article titled, "Report from Katyn: The Confidential Report of the

Polish Red Cross," and early in March 1989 the Polish government

publicly blamed the Soviet Union for the massacre.98

Once again, Katyn had again become a public issue in the West. In

addition to coverage by the larger newspapers, small town papers were

running articles about it. The Macomb Journal published the Associated

Press article, "Historian: Soviets behind Massacre," on 22 August 1989.

The article quoted Polish co-chairman of the Polish-Soviet "blank spots"

historical commission, Jarema Maciszewski, officially stating there was

"no doubt" the Soviets were responsible for Katyn.99

By summer 1989, even Soviet officials were beginning to acknow-

ledge, unofficially, Stalin's responsibility for Katyn. In March 1990,

The Moscow News quoted Soviet historian Natalya Lebedeva's findings that

all 15,131 Polish officers and cadets had been executed by the NKVD

between April and May 1940.

She also stated the apparent motives. She cited Stalin's

longstanding grudge toward the Polish officer caste that had defeated

the Bolsheviks in 1920. She further noted the intent to erase Poland as

a nation. Finally, she discovered that the Soviets also needed the

detention camps to house leadership-class prisoners of the newly

occupied Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.100

In early April 1990, in a "Special Report," the May 1990 issue of

the internationally circulated Reader's Digest had another article on

Katyn, concluding with a call to Soviet President Gorbachev to acknow-

ledge Soviet responsibility and express his regret. The article

included a map and color illustrations, with one drawing graphically

depicting a bespectacled Soviet executioner pointing his pistol at the

back of the head of a bound and hooded prisoner kneeling at the edge of

a corpse-filled pit.101

Also in April 1990, U.S. Senator Allen Cranston's role in the

Office of War Information's wartime suppression of the facts of the

Katyn Massacre was detailed in the conservative political magazine, The

American Spectator.102 (Under attack for a number of reasons, including

the savings and loan scandal, Cranston did not run for re-election in

1992.)

Finally, on 13 April 1990, President Gorbachev handed over to

Polish President Jaruzelski some indirectly incriminating NKVD documents

and officially acknowledged Stalin's responsibility for the Katyn

Massacre with an expression of regret.103 After fifty years of Soviet

denial, stonewalling, and disinformation, the historical truth of the

Katyn Massacre had finally won out--but not completely.

While Soviet credibility recovered a bit, with Gorbachev's revela-

tion, the British Foreign Office was severely criticized by reporters

for its complicity in the Katyn coverup. In the 15 April 1990 Sunday

Times, the well-respected Oxford historian Norman Stone emphasized the

central importance of Katyn by titling his article, "Katyn: The Heart

of Stalin's Darkness," and stating, "Katyn . . . became the greatest

symbol of Polish-Soviet enmity."104

In the 23 April 1990 Times, columnist Bernard Levin's article,

"Britain's Complicity in a Chronicle of Shame," censured Foreign Office

handling of Katyn during and after the Second World War. Levin charac-

terized that handling as "giving off each time a stink of appeasement

that could make a hippopotamus retch half a mile upwind." Wrote Levin:

I have not the smallest doubt that the FCO is at this moment

urging the Foreign Secretary to say nothing on the subject; after

all, Kaganovich, the very last of Stalin's closest entourage, is

still alive at the age of 98, and he might be greatly offended.105

Late in 1991, a popular, but well-documented account of the effect

of Katyn on three Polish families, Katyn: the Untold Story of Stalin's

Polish Massacre, was published. Author Allen Paul produced a well-

researched account of the massacre and of its manifold implications.

Commenting on the diplomatic rift directly caused by Katyn, Paul wrote:

Both men [Churchill and Roosevelt] were accustomed to constant

quarreling between the Poles and the Soviets, but neither expected

a rupture. Its timing was particularly disturbing. The war had

barely taken a favorable turn and dangerous distractions were to

be avoided at all cost. The Soviet break with the Poles was the

first such rift within the United Nations and had the potential to

cause great embarrassment. The war effort might suffer.106

Paul also attempted to expand public understanding of the

significance of Katyn:

This book is an attempt to present the crime in a complete

context. To do that, the murders must be examined as part of a

massive effort to Sovietize Poland. The executions at Katyn came

to symbolize that effort in all its horrible consequences, for two

reasons. First, the Katyn murders were the most dramatic and

clear-cut example of the brutal methods Stalin used to eliminate

Poland's educated class; . . . . Second, Stalin cleverly

manipulated the circumstances in which the Katyn murders were

finally discovered in 1943 to deal the legitimate government of

Poland a lethal blow. . . . Katyn thus became a complex symbol of

Polish suffering at the hands of Stalin. Existing work on the

subject does not, in my view, approach the crime in this

manner.107

The 6 October 1991 issue of the London Observer contained a lengthy

feature article by journalist Nicholas Bethell, titled "The Cold Killers

of Kalinin." It described NKVD execution methods at the final killing

site identified: Kalinin--previously, and now again, named "Tver"--to

the northwest of Moscow.108 (In his 1993 book, Vladimir Abarinov

specified the site as "Mednoye near Tver."109) Bethell's article also

described Red Army investigators' efforts to interrogate the surviving

NKVD commanders and executioners responsible.

That Katyn remained a delicate, explosive issue for the Polish

people was a fact apparent from the May 1992 public outcry in Poland at

the omission of any mention of Stalinist crimes against the Poles and

Poland, discovered in the draft of a Russian-Polish friendship treaty.

The 22 May 1992 New York Times article reporting the uproar to Western

readers described the essence of the debate between Poles who do not

want the grim Russo-Polish past forgotten and other Poles who want a new

beginning in Russo-Polish relations.110

The book Truman was published in 1992 and was authored by American

historian David McCullough. McCullough quoted the opinions of others,

regarding Truman's performance at the Potsdam Conference in July-August

1945:

. . . Kennan, who was not present at Potsdam, would later despair

over Truman's naivete. Harriman, who was present throughout,

found himself so shut out of serious discussions by Byrnes that he

decided it was time for him to resign.111

As to Katyn, McCullough described the episode where Truman had

raised the question of what had happened to the Polish officers, Stalin

had icily replied, "They went away." McCullough then wrote:

Still--still--Truman liked him. "I like Stalin. He is

straightforward," he wrote to Bess near the windup of the

conference. Stalin could be depended upon to keep his word, he

would later tell his White House staff. "The President," wrote

Eben Ayers, "seemed to have been favorably impressed with him and

to like him." Stalin was a fine man who wanted to do the right

thing, Truman would tell Henry Wallace. Furthermore, Truman was

pretty sure Stalin liked him. To Jonathan Daniels, Truman would

say he had been reminded of [Kansas City, MO, political boss] Tom

Pendergast. "Stalin was as near like Tom Pendergast as any man I

know."112

British journalist Mark Frankland's book, The Patriots' Revolution:

How Eastern Europe Toppled Communism and Won Its Freedom, was published

in 1992. Katyn was mentioned most poignantly in reference to an invita-

tion extended by Poland's last Communist Prime Minister:

. . . The Communists' contribution to the resistance, the Armia

Ludowa (People's Army), had been puny by comparison. For many

Poles the Communists were usurpers who could never be forgiven,

and the bitterness scarcely faded over the years as was shown in

early 1989 when Poland's last Communist Prime Minister, Miecz-slaw

Rakowski, invited a ninety-eight-year-old hero, General Stanislaw

Maczek, to return to Poland from exile in Britain to attend

ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversary of the war's outbreak.

Maczek and others like him who had fought on the Western side in

the war had been pronounced traitors by the post-war Polish

Government. The General had been wronged, Rakowski now wrote in

his letter, but he himself had always considered Maczek "a paragon

of a patriot and a soldier." If he came back he would be greeted

"with all due reverence, as a national hero." The old soldier's

family declined politely. "What did Rakowski expect? A general

fraternisation? It's impossible," was the comment of Jozef

Czapski, who as a survivor and then researcher of the long-denied

Soviet massacre of Polish officers at Katyn was an authority on

truth that is told too late.113

Later in the book, Frankland noted Poles' disappointment in

"Gorbachev's avoidance of the matters that interested Poles, above all

the Soviet NKVD's massacre of the Polish officer corps at Katyn, . . ."

during his July 1988 visit to Poland.114

Still missing was any actual document, signed by Stalin (or Beria),

which directly authorized the killings of the Polish officers. It was

not until 15 October 1992 that this was discovered. At that time,

Russian President Boris Yeltsin took over the office buildings which

former Soviet President Gorbachev's "foundation" had been allowed to use

after his departure from office. Documents embarrassing to Soviet

Communism, including Stalin's 1940 approval of the extermination of

"20,000" Polish officers and officials in Soviet internment camps like

Katyn, were found.115

Again, Katyn's power as a political weapon was demonstrated:

According to [Russian presidential spokesman Vyacheslav]

Kostikov, Mikhail Gorbachev has long known about the real

organizers and instigators of the tragedy. Kostikov said that the

Sixth Division of the Central Committee archives, which held

documents relating to the Katyn tragedy, had become Gorbachev's

personal archive. But Gorbachev kept silent and thus helped

delude public opinion. Moreover, Kostikov quoted some papers of

recent years, including the ordinance of the Soviet President of

March 3, 1990, in which he instructed the Procurator General's

office and the K.G.B. to continue investigations although he knew

where all the archival documents were kept and what was in

them.116

A 26 October 1992 Newsweek article amplified the importance of

these final revelations about Katyn:

But that was what made the lie about Katyn all the more infuri-

ating: the authorities insisted on it while knowing perfectly

well that no one believed them. As Vaclav Havel spelled out in

his early dissident essays, the communist system was based on lies

that did not have to be believed, so long as people felt compelled

to participate in public rituals that affirmed accep-tance of

those lies. It is no exaggeration to say that Eastern Europeans

liberated themselves once they summoned the courage to proclaim

historical truths in public as well as private.117

Concluding, author Andrew Nagorski quoted a Czech emigre's gloomy

observation that ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.

Nagorski, in contrast, quoted a poem by Polish emigre poet, Czeslaw

Milosz:

You who wronged a simple man

Bursting into laughter at the crime,

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.

You can kill one, but another is born.

The words are written down, the deed,

the date.

It was all there last week--the deed, the date. For Poles and

everyone else who fought against the system of lies, this was the

ultimate moral victory.118

As 1992 drew to a close, Katyn continued to make headlines, and

finally in Russia itself. The Constitutional Court, judging (among

other things) whether or not the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

(CPSU) committed sins so grave as to deny it eligibility for political

participation in the new Russian state, was examining the alleged

coverup of Katyn by former Soviet Communist President Gorbachev.119

In her January 1993 article, Radio Free Europe analyst Louisa

Vinton made a number of observations on the contemporary significance of

Katyn:

For Poles, Katyn thus became what Polish President Lech Walesa

has called a "test of truth," a measure of Soviet willingness to

respect Polish sovereignty. In the years after Mikhail

Gorbachev's assumption of power as the general secretary of the

Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), it became an

international litmus test for his policies of glasnost and

perestroika. Without an unequivocal admission of Soviet

responsibility for Katyn, Gorbachev's efforts to fill in the

"blank spots" in the history of relations between the two

countries remained little more than hollow declarations.

Gorbachev's eventual acceptance of Soviet responsibility for

Katyn--in April 1990--came only after the communist system had

collapsed in Poland, and thus after the admission had lost much of

its political relevance. Moreover, Gorbachev's was only a partial

admission that limited blame to the NKVD. The official admission

of the communist party's responsibility had to wait two years.120

Citing the approving signatures of Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov, and

Mikoyan on the first page of the memorandum from Beria which proposed

the extermination of the Poles--actually, 25,700 in number--Vinton

echoed the Yeltsin government's accusation that the true guilt lay not

just with Stalin and his henchman, Beria, but with the Soviet hierarchy

and system itself.121 Russian President Boris Yeltsin had accused Com-

munist leader and former President Gorbachev of concealing the memoran-

dum to conceal the responsibility of the CPSU for the Katyn killings.

This accusation seems unfair and overeager. Any Politburo member

refusing to sign the memorandum could have confidently expected to have

been "liquidated" by Stalin. Katyn was the actual responsibility of

Stalin and Beria--the partnership which produced "Stalinism" at its

homicidal worst--alone. A more relevant accusation or question might be

about whether or not Stalinism itself is an inevitable culmination of

Marxist-Leninism.

Vinton drew further analogies to contemporary affairs:

What made the Katyn massacre so horrifying was not simply the

total loss of life but what the killings revealed about the nature

of Soviet policy toward Poland. The 1940 documents offer further

evidence to support the theory that Stalin was, to use

contemporary terminology, engaging in a combination of "ethnic

cleansing" and "class cleansing." The object of this policy was

to dispose physically of an entire elite dedicated to the

reemergence of an independent Polish state. . . . Moreover, only

the Poles among the 18,632 prisoners of various nationali-ties in

Poland's occupied Eastern territories were marked for death.122

As to the history of the Katyn issue and the question of Soviet

guilt, Vinton claimed (questionably), "It is important to note that the

facts of the case were indisputable as early as 1943; the truth was

accessible to anyone willing to contemplate the possibility of Soviet

guilt." Vinton then described reports indicating that the NKVD's

individual personal files of the Poles exterminated in Spring 1940 were

apparently destroyed by the KGB in late 1959 with Soviet Communist Party

General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev's permission.123

Vinton asserted that the recently released documents, concerning

Katyn, were significant because they portrayed the breakdown of the

Katyn coverup and the desperate, defensive political maneuvering of the

Gorbachev government. She described a futile Soviet effort to transform

Katyn into an "archival"--academic--question, rather than to allow it to

continue to grow out of control as an emotionally charged political

issue. The Soviet moves were transparent to the Polish people and

actually only aggravated Polish outrage.124

While such Polish unrest and impudence would have been ruthlessly

suppressed by Stalin--and possibly even by Khrushchev or Brezhnev, at

that advanced stage--Vinton noted that "Gorbachev's passive acceptance

of Poland's transformation did indeed represent a major departure in

Soviet policy."125 She then went on to quote selections from a 6 March

1989 report by Soviet Communist Party International Department chief,

Valentin Falin:

The Katyn problem has grown more acute. A majority of Poles

is certain that the death of the Polish officers came at the hands

of Stalin and Beria and that the crime itself was committed in

1940. . . .126

Also concerned that an emotional issue like Katyn could become a

personal threat to the members of the Polish Communist Party, Falin

specifically stated, "The problem nonetheless remains. In the event of

a further complication of the domestic political situation in Poland,

the Katyn problem could become a pretext for settling accounts."127

Vinton also described a 22 March 1989 report co-authored by a

special CPSU Central Committee subcommittee on Katyn composed of Falin,

Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, and KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov.

Their joint recommendation was to reconsider the usefulness of the Katyn

coverup, in view of the worldwide knowledge of Soviet guilt. As to the

importance of the Katyn issue in that spring of 1989, they wrote:

The Katyn topic is now artificially forcing into the back-

ground even questions associated with the outbreak of World War II

and the German attack on Poland. The subtext of the campaign is

obvious--to suggest to the Poles that the Soviet is not better,

and perhaps even worse, than the Germany of the time; that it has

no less responsibility [than Nazi Germany] for the outbreak of the

war and even for the military defeat of the Polish state of the

time.128

The committee members then outlined a schedule of half-truths and

semi-revelations to acknowledge indirectly Soviet guilt for Katyn and to

slow down the pace and intensity of the issue. These phases went into

action in early 1990, so that Gorbachev could acknowledge the basic

truth of Katyn on its fiftieth anniversary, in April 1990. However,

Vinton then described how in Summer 1992 an information "leak" from

members of the Russian Memorial Association (serving as experts in the

Russian Constitutional Court's hearings on the CPSU) discovered evidence

of Politburo Resolution 144 of 5 March 1940, which was the document that

directly sealed the fate of the Polish officers.129

Vinton concluded her article by noting the growing importance of

Katyn to the Russian people's own efforts to face a terrible past:

In contrast to his predecessors, Yeltsin had understood that

revealing the full truth about the criminal nature of communism

[with the example of Katyn] was essential in order to keep moving

forward and forestall nostalgia for the past. "The truth about

Katyn and the concept of reformed socialism are incompatible,"

Walesa said.130

Also published in 1993 was the English translation of a 1991

Russian book by Literaturnaya Gazeta special correspondent Vladimir

Abarinov, The Murderers of Katyn. Abarinov's chronicle of the Katyn

killings from the perspective of the Soviet NKVD was based on his

research of Soviet archives. His book included the sensational

allegation that U.S. State Department functionary Alger Hiss was "the

Soviet agent" who "lost" Lieutenant Colonel Van Vliet's report.131

In contrast, the memoirs of Reagan Administration Secretary of

State, George P. Shultz, published in 1993, include no mention of the

significance of Katyn in the breakdown of Soviet control over Poland and

Eastern Europe generally. The omission is inexplicable.132

Katyn-related articles continued in the public press with Bernard

Levin's 13 April 1993 follow-up article in the Times of London,

"Stalin's Authorised Massacre." Levin hammered home the significance of

Katyn's reflection of flawed Western institutions:

The British Foreign Office had had sufficient evidence of the

truth since 1943, and possessed conclusive proof by 1952. But the

traitors there (what, you thought Philby, Burgess and Maclean were

the only ones, you dear sweet innocents?) sat tight, and as decade

followed decade, and the baton was handed on, the story and the

mendacity marched shoulder to shoulder, saying every time: there

is insufficient evidence to decide the matter.

True, 25,421 murders are nothing when put beside Stalin's

hecatombs, which ran into many millions, but somehow this crime

stands out from the rest; it was so cold-blooded and so wicked,

and so ghastly were the words used to order the massacre. Some

time ago, I told in detail the infinitely shameful story of how

both Tory and Labour governments, together with the Church of

England, conspired to stifle the truth, and to prevent any

commemoration of the 25,421 Poles slaughtered by the communists.

. . . Then, when Gorbachev admitted the truth, claiming that he

had just discovered it (he had known it since 1970), the Foreign

Office told its most monstrous, final lie, in these words: "We

have long called for everyone to be open about this incident. We

therefore now welcome the revelations from Moscow." (Yes, they

did call the slaughter of 25,421 innocent men "this incident.")133

The subtitle to Levin's article, "History Will Not Believe That

Men of Our Century Could Organise Mass Murder in Cold Blood as the

Russians Did at Katyn," seems fanciful, considering the many other,

graver holocausts of this century.

In that same month, there was an article in Time magazine about the

discovery of a North Vietnamese report in Communist Party archives in

Moscow, which indicated that more than 600 American POWs had disappeared

while in North Vietnamese custody. The similarity to Katyn was noted:

When news of the report's discovery broke last week, several

old Vietnam hands, including former Secretary of State Henry

Kissinger and former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezin-

ski, said they were impressed with its apparent authenticity.

Brzezinski went even further, publicly speculating that the

Vietnamese were guilty of a massacre similar to the infamous

execution of 4,500 Polish officers by the Soviet secret police in

the Katyn Forest in 1940.134

Finally, there appeared in the 26 August 1993 New York Times a

photograph of Russian President Boris Yeltsin kneeling before a Polish

priest and kissing the ribbon of the wreath he had lain at the foot of

the Katyn Cross in Warsaw. According to the accompanying article,

Yeltsin and Polish President Walesa issued a joint statement pledging

that the perpetrators of Katyn would be punished and that families of

the victims would receive compensation.135

As to any news summary coverage since 1952, only the final, recent

developments of the case of Katyn have been covered. In 1988, thirty-

five years after the last coverage of Katyn during the Congressional

hearings, Facts on File noted the significance of Gorbachev's refusal to

acknowledge Katyn during his visit to Poland of that year.136 In 1989,

it reported the Polish government's accusation that Stalin was respon-

sible for the crime.137 In 1990, it described the Soviet government's

admission and expression of regret for Stalin's massacre of the Poles,

and it included the discovery of the second mass grave in a forest

outside Kharkov.138

The 1991 volume of Facts on File described the article in the

British newspaper Observer about the executioners of Kalinin, the third

killing site to be identified.139 In 1992, there was an article about

Russian President Yeltsin's release of Stalin's Katyn execution order.

Significantly, it was titled "Polish Genocide Orders Revealed."140 Most

recently, in 1993, Facts on File described Yeltsin's visit to the Katyn

Memorial in Warsaw and his laying of the memorial wreath as "a symbolic

gesture of Russian penance."141

In Britain, Keesing's Contemporary Archives also resumed its

coverage of Katyn in 1988, with coverage of the Russo-Polish historical

commission's treatment of Katyn. In the case of Keesing's, the gap of

coverage of Katyn had been forty-five years. The article gave the wrong

number of victims at Katyn.

The most controversial matter to be investigated was the

massacre at Katyn Forest near the Soviet city of Smolensk, where

more than 14,000 [sic] Polish officers were executed and buried in

many graves, apparently by their Soviet captors in 1940.142

In 1989, Keesing's reported the Polish government's official

accusation of Soviet NKVD guilt and, in 1990, Soviet President Mikhail

Gorbachev's acknowledgement of Stalin's responsibility for the execu-

tions.143 Ironically, there is no mention of Katyn--not even of the

historically important Observer article published in Britain--in

Keesing's in 1991. However, the 1992 Keesing's, described Polish

President Lech Walesa's visit to the Katyn shrine, while he was in

Russia in May, and the October release of the Katyn execution order

bearing Stalin's signature.144

The sparseness of coverage of Katyn by these news summaries, Facts

on File and Keesing's, in the intervening years typified most Western

journalists' general lack of understanding of Katyn and its political

and historical significance, until the 1980s when the Polish people

themselves would no longer accept the lies about Katyn, and its coverup.

In retrospect, though, special mention should be given to the

reporters and editors of The New York Times. While the newspapers of

Chicago, Detroit, and other major cities with a large Polish-American

population could be expected to publish articles about Katyn periodi-

cally, The New York Times has long been the newspaper of national record

in America. From 1974 on, it consistently published significant

articles about Katyn, in contrast to its rival, The Washington Post.

CHAPTER 4.

KATYN AS AN HISTORICAL AND SCHOLARLY ISSUE IN THE WEST

The consideration of the Katyn Massacre as an intellectual and

scholarly issue in the West is important for three reasons. First, it

raises serious questions about the integrity and effectiveness of

intellectual and scholarly discourse and institutions in the United

States and Great Britain. Indeed, in their sympathy toward Soviet

"social engineering" some Western intellectuals became virtual

accessories to Soviet genocide.1 To quote Vladislav Krasnov,

Regardless of whether Stalin was a true Marxist-Leninist or a bona

fide criminal (or both), it was the Marxist sanction of violence

that not only opened the bloodgates for his reign of terror, but

also assured the applause or consenting silence of the only

influential group whose protest could have staved it off or

minimized it--the Western intellectuals. Alas, the lat-ter were

more interested in the "progressive" march of history than in the

fate of their Russian counterparts, much less in the fate of

Russia's "ignorant and reactionary" masses. (Kozhinov was right

that Western intellectuals shared responsibility for Stalin's

crimes, but he did not explain why.)2

This bitterness about the gullibility and de facto collaboration of

Western intellectuals is fully shared by author and Great Terror expert

Robert Conquest.3 In his recent book, Stalin: Breaker of Nations,

Conquest says,

But the Marxist, or at least "socialist," phraseology was also

the instrument by which Stalin's dupes, foreign and local, were so

easily conditioned to accept his delusional universe.

And how easily the spell often worked! C.S. Lewis wrote of "the

stupidity of evil," and if one is to use this phraseology, it

clearly could apply in some sense to Stalin. But of his dupes in

the West--and in particular when one thinks of the results of

their infatuation--one might surely speak in terms of "the evil of

stupidity."4

The second reason for the importance of the Katyn Massacre is that

it was one of the most disturbing seeds of suspicion sown in the minds

of Western peoples and political leaders, from Spring 1943 onward, about

the Soviet Union's nature and objectives. This accumulating doubt,

distrust, and--finally--fear served as the foundation of our side of the

"cold war." In the case of the Soviet Union, for anyone having an

humanitarian value system, coming to know it meant coming to fear and

loathe it. Moreover, the Soviets themselves immediately and clearly

understood the importance of Katyn as a revelation of Soviet intentions

and methods in Poland and Eastern Europe, even if Western leaders were

slow to do so. To quote George Kennan,

The Western governments never did willingly acquiesce in this new

Soviet bid to dominate entirely the political life of the future

Poland. They seem in fact never to have realized how burning a

challenge the Katyn charges were for Moscow, for the effect they

had on Soviet diplomacy.5

Third, now that the truth and significance of Katyn is becoming

known and acknowledged, it is a good "reality check" by which we can

judge what our reactions in the future should be to similar allegations

of genocide and other atrocities, no matter how unpopular or politically

inexpedient such concerns may be at the time. In many areas of life,

humanity must become more objective and effective. Because of the power

and waste of advancing technology, we can no longer wait for hindsight

from which to learn terrible lessons.

Katyn's role in the postwar world was being considered by scholars

as early as 1945. In their short 1945 book, Poland and Russia, 1919-

1945, Columbia University professors James T. Shotwell and Max M.

Laserson (on behalf of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)

considered Katyn as one of the wartime incidents leading to the wartime

diplomatic crisis and postwar East-West confrontation over the fate of

Poland. They considered Katyn as a sensational revelation which brought

to a crisis the deepening disputes over the political and territorial

future of Poland.

Although they did not specifically state that the Soviets were

guilty of the killings, Shotwell and Laserson included this quotation

from a statement made in early 1944 by the Polish Government-in-Exile as

an apparent attempt to explain why it had joined the Nazis in demanding

an investigation in Spring 1943:

Had this [16 April 1943 Soviet] explanation of the capture of

the Polish officers by the Germans near Smolensk been given to the

Polish authorities at any time during the many conversations and

diplomatic exchanges in 1941 and 1943, Poland's appeal to the

International Red Cross [for an investigation] would not have been

made.6

The April 1950 issue of the British journal, International Affairs,

contained an article about the Katyn Massacre titled "A Polish Chal-

lenge: A Review Article." Author G.F. Hudson made a very strong case

for the significance of Katyn for Americans and Britons:

It is natural to think that the question of responsibility for

the Katyn massacre is of interest primarily to the Poles; the rest

of the world has plenty of other things to think about and cannot

share the emotions of the nation which was the victim of this

atrocity, by whomsoever it was committed. But what the world

thinks about Katyn must inevitably affect what the Poles

themselves think about it, and there is a reason why public

opinion in Britain and America, at any rate, has a moral obliga-

tion to consider the evidence on the subject. In 1943 the

behaviour of the British and American Governments, albeit in

extenuating cirmcumstances, amounted to what is called in criminal

law conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice. . . . The British

and American Governments at this point definitely sided with

Russia against Poland, both diplomatically and through officially

inspired publicity. . . . But the adverse attitude of the British

and American Governments was due not to a simple faith in Russian

innocence or to doubts about the International Red Cross--this was

the first and last time that either its impartiality or its

competence for an investigation concerning prisoners of war was

called in question by the Western Allies--but to the information

in their possession, not then available to the public, showing how

strong was the prima facie case against Russia.7

Noting the significance of Katyn to wartime and postwar diplomacy

and implying a reason for a thorough investigation, Hudson wrote:

. . . Relations between the Kremlin and the London Polish

Government, once broken off, were never resumed, and Britain and

America, having once endorsed the Russian case against the Polish

Government, found no firm ground on which to stand until they were

driven to their final betrayal of the Polish national cause at

Yalta. Thus the Katyn case was decisive for the whole course of

events concerning Poland from 1943 onward, and Poland suffered a

double disaster, first in having had several thousands of officers

and other prisoners of war massacred, and secondly in being

universally condemned for suggesting that the matter called for

impartial investigation. Now that the war is over, however, the

question of responsibility for the massacre still remains, and it

is hardly decent to argue that the truth which it was in 1943 too

dangerous to seek is today of too little importance to be worth

discussing.8

Without specifically accusing the Soviets of being guilty of the

crime, Hudson then went on to describe the absurdity of the Soviet claim

at Nuremberg that the Germans were responsible:

. . . If Russia was innocent of the Katyn massacre, it can only be

explained on the assumption that the man chosen by the Soviet

Government to prosecute at Nuremberg was a complete fool,

incapable of appreciating the legal bearing of evidence. If, on

the other hand, Russia had anything to hide, then the Russian

prosecutor's selection of witnesses can be easily explained on the

sound principle that it is unsafe to submit perjured wit-nesses

with too definite stories to skilled cross-examination.9

and, later:

. . . It only remains to add that in August and September 1941,

when the Germans are supposed to have killed the prisoners, great

battles were being fought between Smolensk and Moscow, and a

signal regiment on active service would have had other calls on

its time than shooting 11,000 men individually with revolvers in

the back of the head, a sure, but extremely leisurely, method of

mass execution much more suitable for the inhabitants of a

N.K.V.D. "rest home" in time of peace.10

Hudson finished his examination of the massacre, compellingly:

. . . Fortunately for Russia, [Katyn] turned out less embarrassing

than might have been expected. The Nazis' many known atrocities

and the notorious mendacity of the German Propaganda Ministry

rendered the new Russian version plausible, and the western

democracies, engaged in a life and death strug-gle with Germany,

were not interested in ascertaining the truth, but only in

covering up an inconvenient scandal. The danger that the Polish

Government would raise the matter again after the war was averted

by the Yalta Conference, which abolished the Polish Government and

transferred international recognition to Soviet puppets.

Nevertheless, even now Russian virtue is not quite safe from

critical questioning, least of all among Poles. The unquiet dead

of Katyn still walk the earth.11

The development of Katyn as a scholarly issue was greatly assisted

by the legal nature and the concern with objective proof of the U.S.

Congressional hearings. Despite possibly being motivated for political

reasons, in part, the hearings established Soviet guilt for the massacre

through due process and beyond a reasonable doubt. Thereafter, most

academic examinations of Katyn in the West were in the context of the

discussion of wartime diplomacy, the origins of the Cold War, and the

rightness or wrongness of the West's prosecution of it--rather than any

debate about whether or not the Soviets were responsible for the crime.

One of the most credible books to question how the Cold War began--

or, as asked by William H. McNeill, "How did the Grand Alliance break

up?"--was first published in 1953, and then again in 1970, as part of

the Royal Institute of International Affairs' "Survey of International

Affairs, 1939-1946" series.12 This was America, Britain, & Russia:

Their Co-operation and Conflict, 1941-1946, which Arthur Schlesinger,

Jr., cited in 1970, saying, "Every student of the Cold War must

acknowledge his debt to W.H. McNeill's remarkable account. . . ."13

The 1953 edition included a laudatory introduction by Arnold

Toynbee, the editor of the series, who pointed out that McNeill was one

of the first recipients of the overseas scholarships intiated by U.S.

Senator J. William Fulbright (D--Arkansas). McNeill devoted most of a

page (of the book's 819 pages) to Katyn. He put Katyn in its wartime

diplomatic context, saying

The outbreak of a new, public quarrel between the Poles and

the Russians at the end of April 1943 did not at the time

seriously affect the newly cordial relations between the Allied

Great Powers. This was at least partly due to the fact that the

German radio and propaganda services played a critical role in

precipitating the Russo-Polish dispute. When the Germans

announced that they had discovered a mass grave at

Katyn . . . .14

In the footnotes, however, McNeill made the Soviet responsibility

for the crime very clear:

At the time there was a strong tendency in America and Britain

to discount the Katyn affair as the work of German propaganda,

but, in light of post-war records and reticences on the part of

the Russians, there seems much less doubt that the Russians were

in fact responsible for the slaughter. A fuller account of the

Katyn affair will be found in the Survey for 1939-46: The

Realignment of Europe.15

Accordingly, that book appeared in 1955, coedited by the famous

British historian, Arnold Toynbee.16 Citing the works of Sikorska,

Mackiewicz, and Hudson, Professor Toynbee traced the development of the

Katyn issue in wartime diplomacy. In footnotes, he described the key

affidavit of Col. Van Vliet that the Soviets had committed the crime, as

reported by the New York Times in September 1950.17 Finally, Toynbee

quoted the findings of the U.S. Congress select committee on Katyn that

the evidence "proves conclusively and irrevocably the Soviet NKVD . . .

committed the massacre of Polish Army officers in the Katyn Forest

. . . ."18

In 1957, Professor Herbert Feis mentioned Katyn, without definitely

declaring the Russians guilty, in his lengthy book, Churchill, Roose-

velt, Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Sought. However,

judging from his description of the "Soviet schemers" and their intent

to gain postwar control over Poland, the omission may have merely been

an oversight.19 Feis' series of books on the Cold War was later des-

cribed by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., as "brilliant and

indispensable . . . ."20

An early contribution to the question was Allied Wartime Diplomacy:

A Pattern in Poland, a 1958 book by Edward J. Rozek, a political science

professor at the University of Colorado. Rozek described the Soviet

government's maneuvering to discredit the Polish Government-in-Exile in

London and presented the diplomatic confrontation about Katyn as a

decisive moment.

Rozek detailed the efforts of the Polish government to locate its

missing officers and then to verify the circumstances of their execution

by the Soviets, once their corpses had been found at Katyn. 21 In

evaluating the Polish government's decision to pursue an investigation

of Katyn, Rozek wrote:

The Poles were convinced, however, that the Soviets were

guilty of this crime. They were prepared for the worst. If the

Polish Government in London had chosen any other course of action,

it would have been immediately repudiated by all Poles at home and

abroad. It had no choice.22

In the book's conclusion, though, Rozek pointed out that Katyn was

one of many acts of Soviet perfidy which should have opened the eyes of

Churchill and Roosevelt before the Yalta conference of February 1945,

wherein the political fate of Eastern Europe was essentially entrusted

to Stalin. Rozek's bitterness is apparent:

Against such a background, it is difficult to understand how

Churchill and Roosevelt could believe in Stalin's promises to

carry out the terms of the agreement, for both Churchill and

Roosevelt had unrestricted access to the Soviet record. The

enslavement of Poland was the price the Western Powers had to pay

for their belief that Soviet verbal promises could be trusted.23

George Kennan's 1961 book, Russia and the West under Lenin and

Stalin, noted the importance of Katyn, as described above. Also

published in 1961 was the book by an Hungarian academic and government

official during the 1956 uprising, Dr. Ferenc Vali. (In September 1961,

after he had escaped Hungary, Vali became a professor of government at

the University of Massachusetts.)

Vali described Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev's secret 24-25

February 1956 speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow and the

lack of impact it had on the status of the Soviet-dominated Eastern

European countries, such as Hungary and Poland.

Though Khrushchev gave full details of the paranoic misdeeds

of his former master against loyal Party members after World War

II (omitting those committed during the Great Purges of 1934-

1938), he made no accusations against Stalin for terroristic mass

arrests, tortures, and executions in Hungary, Czecho-slovakia,

Bulgaria, Rumania, Poland, and Albania, ordered or at least

approved by the Soviet leader. Neither did he say anything with

regard to the rigged trials (Rajk, Kostov, Slansky, and others)

organized by General Bielkin under the orders of Beria and,

naturally, the orders of Stalin himself. This silence is most

significant. Stalin's crimes in the international field, such as

the Katyn affair and the actions in the Baltic states, Finland,

and the East European satellite area, were not to be mentioned,

for the sake of Soviet international prestige and for reasons of

foreign policy. It was left to the individual Communist bosses in

the satellite countries to cope as best they could with the

analogies drawn from Stalinist excesses. The Soviet Union and the

Soviet Party were not to be blamed for whatever sins had been

committed at the behest of Stalin and his lieutenants. This

concept of irresponsibility for acts committed outside the Soviet

Union, acts for which Stalin might have been blamed, eventually

led Khrushchev to a contradictory position: anti-Stalinism within

the Soviet Union, and neo-Stalinism in most of the satellite

countries. The neo-Stalinism was to become particularly manifest

after the events in Hungary in the fall of 1956.24

Later, Vali signaled the relevance of Katyn to Soviet-occupied

Hungary in describing the political killing of the deviant Communist,

Laszlo Rajk.

. . . The Politburo decided to act swiftly and to arrange the

reburial of the victims of the anti-Titoist campaign in Hungary.

But first the bodies had to be found. They had been buried by the

AVH [the Hungarian version of the NKVD] in a deserted forest

clearing near the town of Goedoelloe. A party, guided by a former

major of the AVH (who had selected the original burial ground) and

including members of the victims' families, proceeded there.

Rajk's dentist was able to identify his skeleton; similarly other

corpses were recognized in this Hungarian Katyn.25

D.F. Fleming's "revisionist" interpretation of Cold War history,

The Cold War and Its Origins, 1917-1960, was also published in 1961.26

Historian Norman Graebner reviewed favorably:

Without question this massive endeavor is a significant

contribution to the study of American diplomacy in the twentieth

century. Its tendency to explain all conflict in terms of Western

aggressiveness toward the Soviet Union creates an ines-capable

impression that the USSR comprises really no military threat at

all. This reduces the cold war to a conflict of attitudes and

words. . . . Undoubtedly the conflict is more persistent than

this. Even by traditional standards the rivalry between great,

ambitious, and expanding nations cannot be exorcised that easily.

Perhaps these volumes are more cumbersome and detailed than a

study of the cold war and its origins require [sic]. The research

is adequate without being meticulous. . . . At any rate,

Professor Fleming has placed the burden of proof on his

detractors, for they will find it difficult, given the fog that

continues to hover over Soviet intentions, to document with equal

profusion any competing concept of the cold war.27

In 1962, Professor Zawodny's book, Death in the Forest, addressed

the reality and implications of Katyn in a scholarly manner. In the

preface to the excerpts of reviews of his book in Book Review Digest,

1963, Zawodny was described as "a former Polish anti-Nazi underground

fighter, now associate professor of political science at the University

of Pennsylvania."28 In reference to the year of 1943, which was pivotal

on the Russian Front, Zawodny made it plain that he was not anti-

Russian: "During this time the Red Army had been repulsing the German

invaders. It is not important whether the Red Army soldier fought as a

communist or a Russian; he fought magnificently."29

Probably Zawodny's most disturbing conclusion was his depiction of

the reaction of President Roosevelt and his administration:

Viewing Roosevelt's attitude toward the Soviet Government from the

narrow sector of the Katyn affair, one is forced to the conclusion

that the President decided not to be concerned with the truth of

the matter.

The policy of muzzling those who blamed the Soviet Government

for Katyn extended downward. . . .30

Zawodny then went on to describe the efforts of the Roosevelt

administration's Office of War Information, to suppress any examination

of Katyn which was unfavorable to the Soviets in the American press.31

Zawodny's book ended in an appeal for the humane treatment of

prisoners-of-war, describing that issue as the "lesson of the Katyn

affair." He concluded:

Perhaps in the future, nations will have the courage and wisdom to

establish a court to examine all crimes--those of the victorious

as well as the defeated. It may be that this is the only means of

insuring the protection of prisoners-of-war.32

Zawodny's was the most important book, scholarly or otherwise, to

be published about Katyn. Reviews were highly respectful and complimen-

tary. For example, Charles Morley, a professor of history at Ohio State

University in 1963, wrote:

Professor Zawodny's book is far from pleasant reading. New,

incredible details are revealed in this gruesome narrative of the

liquidation of between four thousand and five thousand Po-lish

prisoners of war, mostly officers, in the forest of Katyn. . . .

Only the discovery of new Katyns or the opening of the NKVD

archives will make it possible to tell the full story. Until then

Death in the Forest will serve as a grim reminder of one of the

worst crimes of the Stalin era--a crime, incidental-ly, that

Khrushchev failed to mention at the Twentieth Party Congress.33

In the September 1963 issue of Annals of the American Academy of

Political and Social Sciences, reviewer Simon Wolin wrote:

[Dr. Zawodny] has combined factual and political analysis of the

material, realizing, as have earlier students of the case, that

both Germany and the Soviet Union might have been prompted by the

same motive: the desire to exterminate Polish intel-lectuals, who

constituted the majority of the officer corps and were the

potential leaders of a Polish fight for independence . . . .

Dr. Zawodny's presentation and analysis of the material throws

important light on the case and proves Soviet guilt.34

In the September 1963 edition of American Political Science Review,

Radio Free Europe staff member R.V. Burks had much more to say about

Zawodny's book:

Death in the Forest is surprisingly dispassionate, considering

the subject matter and the national origin of the author. It is

based on careful study of official and unofficial sources in four

languages and reviews for the first time the formal positions of

all the governments involved. . . . The event itself will for

many years to come serve quietly to poison and inflame

international relations.

Death in the Forest leaves the reader with three lessons. The

first--if indeed he needs to learn it--is that the deed was done

(as the Nazis asserted) by the Soviet security police, the NKVD.

The evidence presented and evaluated by Zawodny convinces far

beyond any reasonable doubt. . . . (In May 1940, the governor of

the Ukraine was N.S. Khrushchev. Was he aware of or involved in

the slaughter?)

The second lesson is a moral one. Zawodny points out that the

Soviet regime had considered the death of three millions of its

own citizens as an acceptable price for the collectivization of

agriculture. Why should it hesitate to exterminate a mere 15,000

prisoners of war, aliens and Poles at that, if in so doing it

could eliminate the flower of the professional classes of an

hereditarily inimical nation? The USSR was not even a signatory

to the Geneva Convention Relating to the Treatment of Prisoners of

War of 1929. Zawodny makes clear that the treatment of the

prisoners prior to execution was relatively--we stress the word--

humane. Before being loaded onto railway trains for their final

journey they were provided a special hot meal!

The third and most profitable lesson concerns the political

stupidity of the Soviet leadership. The prisoners were shot in

April and May of 1940. At that time the Soviet leaders could not

have foreseen that three years later an invading army would

stumble on one of the three impromptu burying grounds. But

apparently neither did they conceive, and this was their blunder,

that in a year's time their relationship to the Nazis would change

from one of alliance to one of war, automatically awarding the

Polish government-in-exile the status of an ally entitled to

recover its prisoners. Already in the fall of 1941 Moscow was

having to manufacture lame explanations as to the fate of the

15,000.35

More recently, the credibility of Zawodny's Death in the Forest has

been attested not only by the U.S. government's 1988 decision to print

Polish-language copies for distribution in Poland, but also by its

continuing citation as a principal source in the most recent books and

articles, such as in analyst Louisa Vinton's 22 January 1993 article,

"The Katyn Documents: Politics and History."36

In 1965, Yale professor Gaddis Smith, in his book American

Diplomacy during the Second World War, 1941-1945, clearly cited the

Soviet Union for its guilt for the Katyn Massacre.

In April 1943 a major crisis erupted when the Germans announced to

the world the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn forest

containing the bodies of 8000 Polish officers allegedly murdered

in 1940 by the Russians who held them prisoners. The charge was

crude German propaganda, but the Poles suspected correctly that it

was true. . . After the Katyn crisis, the issue of Polish

frontiers became less important than the question of who would

rule in postwar Poland: a Soviet satellite regime or freely

elected successors to the London exile government.37

Martin F. Herz's oft-cited book, Beginnings of the Cold War, was

published in 1966. Herz devoted an entire chapter to the critical

importance of Poland in the origins of the Cold War, entitling it

"Poland: Roots of Conflict." Herz stressed that Stalin was continu-

ously pushing Western leaders to move the eastern borders of Poland to

the west. Herz described the Katyn controversy and pointed out the

feebleness of the Soviet attempts to blame the atrocity on the Germans.

He then described how Katyn was used by the Soviets as an excuse to

break off diplomatic relations with the Polish Government-in-Exile.38

However, there is nothing about Katyn in the 1966 book by John

Lukacs, New History of the Cold War. More startling is that Katyn is

mentioned only once, in a footnote, in Zbigniew Brzezinski's 1960 book,

The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict.39 One interpretation of the

neglect of Katyn in these books could be that their authors considered

it to be only a subsidiary issue.

It is also possible that they were hesitant to include Katyn,

concerned that the significance of Katyn was generally unappreciated in

the West and that doing so would be considered ethnocentric and

compromise their credibility. In conversation with me, Dr. Zawodny

noted that his own interest in Katyn was frequently attributed by others

to his Polish heritage, rather than to the killings' historical

significance itself.40

From 1967 and on, revisionist historian Walter LaFeber's text

America, Russia, and the Cold War has been published. In this book

LaFeber has made no mention of Katyn or of the Warsaw Uprising as causes

of Western distrust toward Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe.41

In 1967, in one of the more influential books about the Cold War,

The Cold War as History, author Louis Halle stated, in regard to Katyn,

"Even today we still do not know conclusively whether it was Stalin's

Russians or Hitler's Nazis who did the deed."42 Why Halle stated this

is left unexplained and is highly questionable, considering the U.S.

Congressional hearings and the 1962 publication of Zawodny's book.

In 1970, there appeared the intriguing book American Images of

Soviet Foreign Policy: An Inquiry into Recent Appraisals from the

Academic Community, by William Welch. The author attempted to

systematically categorize, by approach and degree, the various accounts

of Soviet external behavior. He did not mention Katyn, or much else of

history, but instead attempted to document and classify the rationales

with which selected authors analyzed the motives and methods of Soviet

foreign policy.

In Welch's book, the first of the authors mentioned under the

chapter, "The Ultra-Hard Image: The Great Beast," was Elliot Goodman.

In his "ultra-hard" 1960 book, The Soviet Design for a World State,

Goodman had nonetheless omitted any mention of Katyn.

Another of the books so categorized by Welch was Protracted

Conflict, by Robert Strausz-Hupe (and others), published in 1959. Katyn

was not mentioned in that book either. However, the Soviets' cynical

encouragement of the Poles to begin the Warsaw Uprising (in 1944), so

that the Germans could crush the Polish Home Army, was described and

deplored.43 Neither did Katyn appear in Bertram Wolfe's 1961 book,

Communist Totalitarianism: Keys to the Soviet System.

The omission of Katyn by principal detractors of the Soviets would

undermine the thesis that one reason for the omission of Katyn from

appropriate studies was (leftwing) political bias, except that the

Soviets understood the danger of Katyn better than most people in the

West. Accordingly, those intellectuals sympathetic to them in the West

would better understand Katyn's significance as well.

The 1970 republication of William H. McNeill's book, America,

Britain, & Russia: Their Co-operation and Conflict, 1941-1946, was

additionally important for its new introduction which commented on the

condition of Cold War scholarship at that time. McNeill cited Fleming's

The Cold War and Its Origins, 1917-1950 as "the first of the revisionist

histories to be published in the United States; revisionist in the sense

that it challenged the official United States interpretation of world

events by arguing that the Cold War arose in large part from American

fears and American aggressiveness."44

McNeill went on to describe how, to justify their political

opposition to the Vietnam War specifically and to the Cold War in

general, many American scholars began questioning the causes of and need

for the Cold War. McNeill noted the change in understanding and

attitudes of the American public from 1948-50 to 1968-70. He then wrote

One obvious explanation was the stupidity and/or moral

degradation of everyone over thirty; and many youthful rebels felt

satisfied with this explanation. Others were attracted to

interpretations that cast either big business or American

militarism or both in the role of villain. Such historians as

William A. Williams, Walter LeFeber, and Gar Alperovitz conveyed

the message that powerful special interests had thrown up a smoke

screen of propaganda and half-truths, misleading the American

public in order to forward their own, narrowly conceived, private

advantage.45

In 1971, the book The Rivals: American and Russia since World War

II, by Harvard professor and eminent Sovietologist Adam Ulam, was pub-

lished. In describing the 1943 break in Soviet-Polish relations, Ulam

wrote, "While the direct cause of the breach was the notorious Katyn

Forest massacre of Polish officers and men by Soviet forces, the

original cause was the Poles' unwillingness to acquiesce in the loss of

their eastern lands."46

Also in 1971 The Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947: A Historical

Problem with Interpretation and Documents, edited by Walter LaFeber, was

published. LaFeber saw the Cold War developing from "the tensions that

developed between the United States and Russia during the first half of

that [Twentieth] century and particularly during the 1941-1947

period."47 Apparently, he considered Katyn a significant factor in

these tensions. In his prefatory comments to "Chapter IV: Poland, the

Symbol," he mentioned Polish evidence of Soviet guilt for Katyn and

Stalin's use of the diplomatic episode regarding Katyn to sever

relations with the Polish Government-in-Exile.48

In 1972, Princeton former Ambassador George F. Kennan's second

(1950-1963) volume of memoirs was published. Although he had not

mentioned Katyn in his first (1925-1950) volume, even in the context of

wartime diplomacy, Kennan now noted the Congressional hearings on Katyn

were apparently one reason for the particularly vicious Soviet propa-

ganda attacks against the United States in 1952 (during Kennan's tenure

as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union). Kennan wrote:

After the issuance in February 1952 of the report of a committee

of the House of Representatives, in Washington, on the Katyn

Massacre, a report which threw the blame for this incredible act

of cruelty squarely on the Soviet police authorities, where it

belonged, the anti-American propaganda was further stepped up. A

high point of sorts had been reached in April, the main theme

being already the charge that we were conducting bacteriological

warfare in Korea. . . .49

John Lewis Gaddis' 1972 book, significantly titled The United

States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947, included a brief,

obligatory mention of Katyn, also in the context of the Soviet break in

diplomatic relations with the London Polish Government-in-Exile.50

However, there was no mention at all of the impact on Western govern-

ments and peoples of the Soviet nonsupport of the Warsaw Uprising in

1944.

Also published in 1972 was The Uneasy Alliance: America, Britain,

and Russia, 1941-1943, by University of Maine history professor Robert

Beitzell. Covering Katyn's role as a temporary irritant in Allied

relations, Beitzell alluded to the British government's message to

Washington on 26 April 1943--citing Foreign Relations of the United

States, 1943, Vol. III--that its Moscow ambassador was of the opinion

that the Soviet government had broken off diplomatic relations with the

London Polish government to cover up its guilt for the Katyn massacre.51

Finally, Oxford professor John Wheeler-Bennett and historian

Anthony Nicholls co-authored the book The Semblance of Peace: The

Political Settlement after the Second World War, published in 1972. In

describing the context of Katyn, the authors wrote

Now `Fascism' was the great enemy, and it could plausibly be

argued that the Poles were not free of an anti-democratic taint.

This criticism of the Polish Government, together with a human if

not altogether heroic desire to avoid difficulties with Russia,

contributed to a Press campaign in London against the Poles. The

intransigent behaviour of some exiled Polish leaders did not

improve matters.

The Russians well knew how to exploit this situation. When,

in 1943, the Nazis made known the horrifying details of the Katyn

massacres, Polish demands for an independent inquiry were used by

the Soviet authorities as a pretext to withdraw recognition from

the Polish Government in London.52

They clearly indicated Soviet guilt, writing "There seems little

doubt that the murders were, in fact, the work of the Russian security

forces." The aggressiveness of the Soviets was typified by their 23

June 1944 demand that the Polish Government-in-Exile accept the Soviet

position on the Curzon Line as their border and that it publicly

acknowledge Soviet "innocence" of the Katyn Massacre.53 That was, of

course, politically impossible for the London Poles to do.

In 1973, the significance of the treatment of Katyn by historians

was assessed by Professor Robert James Maddox in his seminal and

controversial book, The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War.

Maddox pointed out that while one leftist historian seethed about the

"naked repression" of Communists in Greece during the civil war there,

another actually disputed the Soviet motives and responsibility for the

Katyn Massacre.54

Maddox was referring to the treatment of Katyn in Canadian

professor Gabriel Kolko's 1968 book, The Politics of War: The World and

United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945. Kolko was downplaying the

moral importance of Katyn as a crime. Ignoring the human anguish of the

victims' families and the Poles as a people, Kolko accused the Poles of

cynically using Katyn as a device to press their demands for their 1939

territorial borders to be respected after the war.

This accusation--a frequent assumption in other books--reflects its

source's own cynicism. To claim that an outcry against a mass murder,

particularly of countrymen who may include friends or relatives, was

actually motivated by political or economic self-interests is contempt-

ible. Would Kolko then claim that the outrage of Jews (and of humanity

in general) about the Jewish Holocaust is primarily motivated by a

cynical intent to establish the moral and legal justification necessary

to petition for monetary or territorial compensation for the vast wealth

and property confiscated by the Nazis from the murdered European Jews or

to obtain continued aid for Israel?

To attack the morality of the Polish case, Kolko accused the London

Poles of having racist and class-conscious motives for their concern

about the missing officers:

Whoever destroyed the officers at Katyn had taken a step toward

implementing a social revolution in Poland, and on the basis of

class solidarity, the London Poles felt one officer was worth many

Jews or peasants.55

Incredulously, Kolko then claimed:

Yet insofar as Soviet culpability is concerned, of the by now

endless lists of complaints the Poles made about the treatment of

their nationals in Russia, mass murder was not one of them.

Indeed, the U.S.S.R. permitted a much more formidable Polish

military force to organize with Soviet weapons, and then finally

to leave, and no one ever attributed a similar incident to the

Soviet Union in Eastern Europe during the period 1940-1945.

German mass liquidation, by contrast, was a common occurrence.56

That, to me, seems culpably dishonest. Edward Rozek's book, which

Kolko actually cited in his footnotes, included frequent statements like

the following description of the Soviet political conquest of Poland in

1944-5:

Next the [Polish Home Army] commanding officers and their staffs

were arrested. . . . Then the officers would usually be shipped

to concentration camps located either in the U.S.S.R. or in

Poland. In many cases the unit commanders were shot or

hanged. . . .

Soviet treatment of the civilian population followed a similar

pattern. Those people who had assisted the Home Army were

subjected to various forms of terror, often being arrested.

Officials of the underground government, especially mayors, were

arrested by the NKVD as soon as they revealed their status .

. . . The NKVD concentrated its prisoners in the notorious Nazi

death-factory at Majdanek, often beating and otherwise maltreating

its prisoners. . . .

It was obvious that the Soviets were eliminating the Home Army

as an organized force and taking steps to liquidate or nullify all

actual or potential anti-communist

leadership . . . .57

Similarly, the NKVD massacres of thousands of politically suspect

Eastern Europeans, at places like Lvov and Riga during the Red Army's

withdrawal--rout--from the frontier regions in 1941, were highly

publicized by the "liberating" Germans and by Baltic and Ukrainian

emigre organizations, at the time of the crimes and since.

Of course, in political or academic debate the extremism of a Kolko

can be useful to lend more moderate proponents of his spectrum credi-

bility by comparison. Maddox included Fleming in this book about New

Left revisionist historians. However, he stated that he did so not

because he thought Fleming to be ideologically leftwing, but because

much of what Fleming had written was used by the New Left historians.58

(This was a contrast to the opinion of McNeill, described above.)

Fleming's coverage of Katyn in his 1961 book, The Cold War and Its

Orgins: 1917-1960, did not contradict Maddox's assessment of him.

To his credit, or maybe to appear moderate, Fleming allowed that

the Poles' desire for an investigation was understandable. He wrote:

In their defense the Polish officials maintained that Polish

opinion all over the world was in such a high state of indigna-

tion that they simply had to take some action. Undoubtedly they

felt that way, but the action taken could have no good result for

the Polish cause.59

However, he then disregarded the contemporary preponderance of

testimony and evidence pointing toward Soviet guilt for Katyn, even

entitling a subchapter, "Who Was Guilty?" In that, Fleming invoked

Waverley Root's book, The Secret History of the War: Vol. 3, Casablanca

to Katyn, containing the specious defense of the Soviet version of

events. Fleming also quoted an Hungarian who claimed to be an eye-

witness to the "machine-gunning"--which Fleming acknowledged was wrong--

of "10,000" Polish officers at Katyn by the Germans. Fleming gives

little space to all the testimony and evidence compiled by Polish exiles

and the U.S. Congress, subsequent to Root's commentary, other than to

state that U.S. Army witness Lieutenant Colonel Van Vliet had offered no

"positive evidence."60

Indeed, Fleming's obfuscation of the truth about Katyn and of its

significance to the advent of the Cold War was epitomized by his state-

ment that "Root's examination of Death at Katyn and other literature

published by the Poles also elicited no direct or credible evidence of

Russian guilt."61 Obviously, the only "direct," satisfactory evidence

of Soviet guilt for Fleming would have been the detailed admission of

the crime by the Soviet perpetrators themselves, and these individuals

did not feel compelled to such candor for another thirty years, until

their interrogation by Red Army investigators in 1991.

If the shallowness of research and the lack of balanced judgement

Fleming displayed about a significant wartime East-West episode like

Katyn reflects his overall treatment of other key episodes of the Cold

War and its advent, it becomes difficult to take him seriously as a Cold

War scholar.

Another historian scrutinized by Maddox was David Horowitz.

Horowitz's 1965 tome, The Free World Colossus: A Critique of American

Foreign Policy in the Cold War, omitted entirely any mention of Katyn.

Horowitz also overlooked other wartime Soviet atrocities against Poles

and other Europeans that created the climate of fear in the West which

motivated and justified the Cold War confrontation.

Similarly, University of Chicago professor Gar Alperovitz made no

reference to Katyn in his 1965 study of the origins of the Cold War,

Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam. Although Alperovitz invoked

the importance of Poland as a divisive issue between the Allies, and

although he devoted an entire, 27-page appendix to the details of "the

Polish question," he said nothing about Katyn, the Soviet military

inaction during the Warsaw Uprising, or the various Soviet atrocities in

Eastern Europe being causes of Western suspicion, distrust, and

defensiveness toward Stalin's Soviet Union.

Although Lloyd C. Gardner briefly mentioned the Warsaw Uprising in

his 1970 book, Architects of Illusion: Men and Ideas in American

Foreign Policy, 1941-1949, Katyn was left unmentioned. Ignoring the

impact of revelations about Communist atrocities in the Korean War and

the Congressional hearings on Katyn in the early 1950s, Gardner made the

odd statement that "There was a growing feeling in the early 1950s that

while Russia was obviously responsible for most of the evil in the

world, American mistakes and shortsightedness had brought on the Cold

War." Gardner's apparent intent was to find culprits responsible for

the "mistakes" in Western governments, which he proceeded to do,

oblivious to sound reasons (like Katyn) for the distrust of Stalin and

the Soviets by Western peoples.62

Finally, William Appleman Williams, in his 1962 edition of The

Tragedy of American Diplomacy, said nothing of Katyn and little of

Allied differences about Poland and Eastern Europe contributing to the

onset of the Cold War. Williams questionably emphasized Western

economic motives as the cause of the Cold War and could see little else.

Neither had there been mention of Katyn or the Warsaw Uprising, even in

the context of the substantial treatment of Poland as a wartime Russo-

American issue, in Williams' 1952 book, American Russian Relations:

1781-1947.

Lynn Etheridge Davis's 1974 book, The Cold War Begins: Soviet-

American Conflict over Eastern Europe, began with quotes from other

authors who shared Davis's opinion that conflict over the future of

Eastern Europe--specifically Poland, according to Adam Ulam--triggered

the Cold War.63 In the chapter, "Poland 1941-1943," Davis had described

the role of Katyn in the disruption of diplomatic relations between the

London Polish government and the Soviet Union. Davis pointed out that,

in their diplomatic correspondence, neither the Americans nor the

British seriously questioned the Nazi charges that the Soviets were

guilty of the crime.64

Considering their highly selective treatments of the causes of the

Cold War, Maddox's impatience with "revisionist" historians is

understandable. However, in fairness, Katyn was also omitted by most of

the mainstream, more conservative Cold War historians listed as such in

Kenneth W. Thompson's thin 1978 book, Interpreters and Critics of the

Cold War. (Thompson discussed few specifics about the Cold War and

omitted any mention of Katyn or the Warsaw Uprising.)

Neither, for example, was there any mention of Katyn in Paul

Seabury's 1967 book, Rise and Decline of the Cold War. Nor was there

any in Marshall Shulman's influential little 1966 book, Beyond the Cold

War. In keeping with the presumption reflected by its title, Herbert

Feis omitted any mention of Katyn from his 1970 book, From Trust to

Terror: The Onset of the Cold War, 1945-1950. Even Hans J. Morgenthau

and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.--along with Lloyd C. Gardner--omitted any

reference to Katyn in their respective papers which composed the 1970

book, The Origins of the Cold War.

Adam B. Ulam again mentioned the Katyn incident in his biography,

Stalin: The Man and His Era, published in 1973.65 Ulam also included

mention of Katyn in his second, 1974 edition of Expansion and Coexis-

tence: Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-73. He left no doubt as to the

importance and role of the Katyn Massacre in wartime diplomacy, as

indicated by the following quote from the two pages he devoted to it:

The actual breach of relations between Moscow and the Polish

government-in-exile occurred in April 1943. Its direct cause was

the Germans' discovery, in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk, of the

corpses of thousands of Polish officers who had been captured by

the Russians in 1939 and kept in prisoner-of-war camps. . . .

A careful weighing of the evidence [Ulam here cites Zawodny's

book in a footnote] leads to an almost unavoidable conclusion that

the murders had been committed by Soviet security forces in the

spring of 1940.66

British researcher Bill Jones, in his book The Russia Complex: The

British Labour Party and the Soviet Union (based on his "doctoral

thesis"), described the significant impact of Katyn on the British Left.

He credited Katyn with schocking Aneurin Bevan, the editor of the "left-

wing" weekly journal Tribune into becoming "the most prominent and out-

spoken critic of the Soviet Union." Moreover,

Tribune's concern [about the Soviets' postwar political and

territorial intentions] was shared by the Socialist Commentary and

by a body of Labour MPs with Bevan's friend Richard Stokes to the

fore in the debate on the Teheran proposals in February 1944.67

In 1978, Richard Lukas' book, The Strange Allies: The United

States and Poland, 1941-1945, was published. Lukas chronicled the ups

and downs of U.S.-Polish wartime relations. The importance of Katyn as

a provocative incident is cited throughout the book.

Lukas described the pressure exerted on General Sikorski by the

Polish emigre community, to expose the truth about the genocidal

policies of Stalinist Russia.68 He also described the concurrent

dissolution of the Comintern--the Communist International administrative

apparatus promoting worldwide revolution--as a sop to Roosevelt

Administration envoy Joseph E. Davies and the Western Allies, with the

qualification:

Actually, the dissolution of the Comintern was totally

meaningless. The functions of the Comintern were simply turned

over to the Foreign Department of the Central Committee of the

Soviet Communist party [sic] and George Dimitrov remained in

charge. About the only tangible thing Davies came back to

Washington with was the information that Stalin shared Roosevelt's

desire to meet as soon as possible.69

Also in 1978 another book by John Lukacs, 1945: Year Zero,

discussed the leaders, foreign relations, and events of the year of the

conclusion of the Second World War and the beginning of the postwar

world. Lukacs examined the physical and character weaknesses of the

Western leaders, in particular Roosevelt. In the chapter, "Roosevelt

near Death," he wrote:

He did not merely procrastinate; he refused to admit the existence

of certain problems as such.70 Both his denial of the existence

of the problem and his procrastination were the results not of

naivete or of feebleness but of calculation--not of his inability

but of his unwillingness to recognize them. He was--very much

unlike Churchill, but very much like the entire circle of his

friends--loath to change his mind.

There is the accepted legend according to which Roosevelt was

on the verge of changing his mind about Stalin, of getting tough

with Stalin, when death cut him down. There is very little

evidence for this. Most of the evidence, literal and

circumstantial, points to the contrary.71

There was no mention of Katyn in Lukacs' book, even in the context of

plans for postwar Poland.

In 1979, presumably on the eve of the Soviet invasion of Afghani-

stan, the Institute for Policy Studies published a book authored by

(University of California) Berkeley "visiting scholar" Alan Wolfe. He

concluded his The Rise and Fall of the `Soviet Threat': Domestic

Sources of the Cold War Consensus with the pulsating words, "If

Americans wake up to the danger posed from those within their midst who

would destroy the best features of their country in order to militarize

it against an illusory enemy, they have a chance to create the kind of

future that they will then deserve."72 There was, of course, no mention

of Katyn nor of any other unsavory Soviet practices toward conquered

peoples.

It is grimly amusing, considering the timing of the book, that

Wolfe had previously written, "I will argue that in the past, U.S.

perceptions of hostile Soviet intentions have increased, not when the

Russians have become more aggressive or militaristic, but when certain

constellations of political forces have come together within the United

States to force the question of the Soviet threat onto the American

political agenda."73 [Italics his.] In the case of the Congressional

hearings about Katyn, held during (and partially in reaction to) the

Korean War, this shaky proposition seems to fail completely. While the

Katyn hearings may have enabled Democrats to assume an anti-Communist

posture in the 1952 election year, the atrocities against American

prisoners of war in Korea and the other tension points with the Soviets

were sufficient motivation for the American public's concern about this

example of Soviet intentions and methods.

It is worth considering that Americans might have indeed gotten the

world we deserved, if we had followed Wolfe's lead, discounted the

Soviet threat, and de-militarized our society further at the onset of

our great strategic confrontation with the Soviet Bloc in the 1980s.

In contrast, Professor Vojtech Mastny authored a 1979 book,

Russia's Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of

Communism, 1941-1945. He described the Soviets' use of Katyn to break

off diplomatic relations with the Polish Government-in-Exile.74 About

the perplexed reaction of the American and British peoples and

governments toward Soviet unhelpfulness to the Poles during the Warsaw

Uprising, Mastny wrote "As in the case of Katyn, the British and

Americans did not come to grips with what was happening to Warsaw

because they did not want to."75

Mastny also attacked revisionist historians and their attempts to

blame the U.S. for the Cold War. He described how they overlooked many

of the Soviet transgressions which precipitated the Cold War by claim-

ing, on the basis of their own linguistic or research shortcomings, that

verification of Soviet culpability lay in "sources beyond reach."76

In 1980, Yale University professor Piotr S. Wandycz's book, The

United States and Poland, was published. Katyn appeared as a signifi-

cant episode in the subchapter, "The Road to Teheran." The attitude of

President Roosevelt was portrayed as sympathetic to "the OWI [Office of

War Information] and OSS [Office of Strategic Services] memoranda,

reinforced by opinions of [Harry] Hopkins, Jonathan Daniels, and

[Joseph] Davies," which "represented the [Polish] government in London

as a clique of reactionaries and inveterate russophobes who sought to

arouse the Polonia [the Polish-American community] against Roosevelt's

Russian policy."77 Wandycz described the role of these organizations in

influencing presidential thinking and U.S. policy.

After 1980, once Polish Solidarity had again made Katyn an active,

public political issue, the "Battle of Katyn" continued apace in

scholarly circles. University of Surrey professor Roy Douglas' 1981

book, significantly titled From War to Cold War, 1942-48, described the

Soviet-Polish political rift of 1943 as an origin of the Cold War, and

Katyn as the incident which actually precipitated the diplomatic

confrontation and rupture.78 His accounts of the reactions of Churchill

and other members of the British government at the time clearly

reflected the realization of those gentlemen in 1943 that the Soviets

were guilty of the atrocity.

Meanwhile, Stalin's Secret War, by Russian-born researcher Nikolai

Tolstoy, was published in that same year. Tolstoy emphasized the high

priority of Katyn for Stalin's regime:

The Katyn Massacre, for example, was more than just a hideous

example of Soviet barbarity. It was a para-military operation,

involving a month's large-scale disruption of major sections of

the Soviet strategic railway system . . . .79

Tolstoy devoted an entire chapter to the Katyn Massacre, and titled

it "Forest Murmurs."80 Later in the book, although not specifically

mentioning Katyn, he quoted Khrushchev's description of how all Eastern

European matters were decided entirely by Stalin himself.81

Tolstoy also discussed in detail the Soviet anti-Allied effort to

subvert and sabotage the French war economy in 1940.82 Even British

prisoners-of-war who escaped German custody to a supposedly neutral

Soviet Russia found themselves brutalized and imprisoned by the NKVD.83

These were some of the lengths the Soviets were prepared to go in their

collaboration with the Nazis.

Kenneth W. Thompson's 1981 book, Cold War Theories, Volume I:

World Polarization, 1943-53, described how the Soviet government used

Polish outrage about Katyn as an excuse for its moves against the pro-

Western Polish Government-in-Exile. Thompson agreed that the Soviets

were responsible for Katyn, and referenced Janusz Zawodny's book Death

in the Forest for corroboration in a chapter entitled "Historic Origins

of the Cold War."84

Scholar Terry H. Anderson fleetingly mentioned Katyn, in his 1981

book The United States, Great Britain, and the Cold War, 1944-1947, as

one of the wartime anti-Polish Soviet acts which the United States

attempted to overlook as it planned and prepared the postwar world order

and organization.85 Judging from his book's title, though, Anderson

apparently did not classify Katyn as a Cold War incident.

There was no mention of Katyn at all in the 1981 collection of

papers, titled Soviet-East European Dilemmas: Coercion, Competition,

and Consent, edited by British professors Karen Dawisha and Philip

Hanson.86

In 1982, Russian-born scholars contributed to the historical

research on Stalin's Russia. Authors Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr

Nekrich, at the beginning of their lengthy book, Utopia in Power: The

History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, began by quoting

British writer George Orwell that "Whoever controls the past controls

the future."87 In a chapter titled "The Katyn Tragedy," after

summarizing the information available at the time regarding the NKVD's

extermination operation at Katyn, they concluded with the observation

that:

The Katyn massacre was entirely in keeping with Stalin's political

aims--to purge Poland of all patriotic elements, to wipe out the

intelligentsia, and thus to clear the ground for a pro-Soviet

regime. This was the policy he later pursued, at the time of the

Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and after that, when the Red Army was

extending its control over all of Polish territory.88

In his book about Stalin's American Policy: From Entente to

Detente to Cold War, also published in 1982, Amherst professor William

Taubman mentioned Katyn only in the context of the Polish-Soviet

boundary dispute. In this context, he observed, "The London Poles

triggered the next step themselves by requesting, in April 1943, that

the Red Cross investigate Nazi charges . . . ."89

Thomas T. Hammond, University of Virginia history professor,

authored a collection of writings, titled Witnesses to the Origins of

the Cold War and published in 1982. In his introduction, Hammond

outlined the purpose of his book and described the controversy raging

between the revisionist historians who put the principal blame for the

Cold War on the West and traditionalist historians who held the Soviet

Union responsible for this development because of its despotic designs

and policies toward Europe.

Hammond quoted Vojtech Mastny's observation that the revisionists'

strength was in (criticizing) American foreign policy and behavior,

whereas their knowledge of Soviet history, motives, and methods was

weak.90 Hammond also emphasized the importance of Eastern Europe as a

precipitating factor in the onset of the Cold War:

A second point of contention between the revisionists and the

traditionalists--one that we are particularly concerned with in

this book--has to do with Eastern Europe. Both sides tend to see

the conflict between Russia and the West over Eastern Europe as

the most important factor in triggering the Cold War, but they

differ completely as to which side was more at fault.91

However, Katyn went unmentioned in Hammond's book, by him or in any of

the works he chose for his collection.

In 1983, Soviet responsibility for Katyn was not made clear in the

second volume of University of Edinburgh Professor John Erickson's

military history of the Russo-German campaign, Road to Berlin. Erickson

was at that time the premier authority in the West on the Red Army and

Soviet military affairs and a confidant of retired Red Army generals.

His treatment of Katyn was ambivalent, describing the German accusations

and the diplomatic consequences, but also confining his examination of

evidence to the fact that the pistol cartridges used were German.92

A possible reason for this stance may have been reflected by his

later discussion of Soviet inaction during the Warsaw Uprising.

Referring to Stalin, Erickson wrote:

It is possible that he thought the rising in Warsaw would be

quickly liquidated or else would peter out when only rifles were

available against tanks; his minimizing of the rising seems to

suggest this. What is clear is that the very fact of a large-

scale rising in Warsaw, a general rising, came as a surprise to

the Soviet command . . . .93

Erickson's expertise and research emphasis were in Soviet military

history, not political or diplomatic affairs. He may also have been

mindful of his position of trust among the Red Army generals and

marshals who had befriended him in his research on The Great Patriotic

War--the Russian Front in World War II.

In 1983, the book Hungary, 1956, Revisited: The Message of a

Revolution--A Quarter of a Century Later was published. Australian

scholars Ferenc Feher and Agnes Heller elaborated on the significance of

the Hungarian Uprising. They noted that, typically, the stimulus which

triggered the revolt in Hungary was the Poles' successful demand for a

liberalized regime.94 Later in the book, describing the historical

illegitimacy of the Soviet satellite regimes in Eastern Europe, they

traced this back to Katyn:

To begin with, it was the Soviet government who, after being

publicly accused by the Polish Government-in-Exile (in London) of

perpetrating the Katyn massacres of 1940, after the Germans had

uncovered the corpses of murdered Polish army officers, undertook

in consequence of these developments to break off all relations

with the representatives of a Poland fighting in a common cause.

That government might not necessarily have been reelected, but it

undoubtedly stood in a relationship of some legitimacy with the

Russians.95

One would think so, since Poland--unlike Hungary--was a Soviet ally from

very early in The Great Patriotic War (1941), as well as a Soviet

victim. The authors were incorrect, of course, in their contention that

the Polish Government-in-Exile had actually accused the Soviets of the

crime during the war.

The book American Diplomatic History: Two Centuries of Changing

Interpretations, by Jerald Combs, was also published in 1983. There was

one mention of Katyn in Chapter Nineteen, "Cold War Historiography in

the Age of Vietnam." Describing the thinking of "new revisionists" in

the American diplomatic history, Combs wrote:

The new revisionists were in general agreement on several

basic propositions. They saw the United States rather than Russia

as the primary villain in the origins of the Cold War. . . .

Thus, according to the new revisionists, American warnings of

Russian expansionism had been nothing but a smoke screen to

disguise the expansionism of the United States. America was

seeking to open the world's markets and resources to its own trade

and investment. . . . Thus, revisionists saw the imposi-tion of a

full-fledged Russian dictatorship in Eastern Europe as Stalin's

response to American aggression rather than as a pre-conceived

Russian plan. Revisionists mitigated or deemphasized Russian

conduct in the Katyn Forest massacre, the Warsaw uprising, the

arrests of Polish underground leaders sympathetic to Britain, and

the other actions that defenders of Western policy had seen as

justification for distrust and containment of the Soviet regime.96

In the 1983 collection of papers, titled Foreign and Domestic

Policy in Eastern Europe in the 1980s: Trends and Prospects, edited by

Michael J. Sodaro and Sharon L. Wolchik, Katyn was mentioned in the

article "Intellectuals and Their Discontent in Hungary," by Rudolf L.

Tokes. He wrote:

. . . The trauma of 1956 still seems to dim the hopes of the

Hungarian dissidents. In Poland armed struggle, military defeat

and foreign occupation were avoided in 1956 and at least twenty-

five years thereafter. In the absence of recent first-hand

experience with bloodshed and direct foreign rule, nationalistic

anti-Soviet sentiments in Poland still focus on the Katyn massacre

and Stalin's abandonment of the heroic fighters of the Warsaw

uprising in August 1944.97

Bernard A. Weisberger briefly mentioned Katyn, as occurring in

"1944" and as being a source of East-West tension, in his 1984 book Cold

War, Cold Peace. Weisberger did not confirm Soviet guilt for Katyn in

his book, which had an introduction by longtime journalist and commen-

tator on Soviet affairs, Harrison Salisbury.98

The journal Polish American Studies published Polish-American

historian Robert Szymczak's article, "A Matter of Honor: Polonia and

the Congressional Investigation of the Katyn Forest Massacre," in spring

1984. The article documented the belated effort of Polish-Americans to

have the truth about Katyn recognized by the world and to force the

American people and government to face their responsibility for and the

consequences of the wartime coverup of the Katyn Massacre and betrayal

of the Poles at Yalta.99

Significantly, Szymczak--who has made Katyn a research specialty--

described Katyn, in this 1984 article, as "an inflammatory if short-

lived Cold War issue and a potentially destructive weapon in the

American propaganda arsenal against the Soviet Union in the early

1950s."100 This was before the developments of 1988 (and after). For

even Szymczak to view Katyn as having limited importance at that time

emphasizes the significance of the Katyn issue to the controversy about

it which was soon to arise within Poland and the Soviet Union.

In his 1985 book, Soviet Foreign Policy since World War II:

Imperial and Global, Alvin Z. Rubinstein described the significance of

Katyn as the precipitating incident which directly led to the break in

Russo-Polish diplomatic relations. On the other hand, he indicated that

the more important factor in that breach was the Soviet-Polish border

dispute. Rubinstein did, however, clearly state that the Soviets were

guilty of the crime.101

In 1986, Richard C. Lukas authored another book related to wartime

Poland. Titled The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German

Occupation, 1939-1944, it emphasized German atrocities. It mentioned

Katyn, however, in the context of the Soviet Union's political threat to

Polish independence. Also, Lukas made a special effort to challenge

postwar accusations that the Poles as a nation had collaborated with the

Nazis in the extermination of the Jews.102

Also in 1986, Canadian scholar Martin Kitchen's book, British

Policy towards the Soviet Union during the Second World War, appeared.

Katyn figured significantly in the discussion. In discussing what he

considered to be the bewilderment of the British government in its

dealings with the Soviets during the war, Kitchen wrote:

Churchill now believed that Stalin was his friend, but this was

not a view shared by all of the British delegation. Colonel

Jacob, a sound judge of character, remarked that making friends

with Stalin was like making friends with a python, and he was

unable to forget the story that General Anders had told him. When

Anders asked Stalin what had happened to some 8000 Polish officers

who had been imprisoned in 1939 he shrugged his shoulders and

suggested that they all had run away. The discovery of the mass

grave at Katyn in April 1943 was soon to reveal the grim truth.

The British delegation were also unable to decide who was really

in charge in the Soviet Union. Desmond Morton told Dalton that he

was convinced that Stalin was merely the tool of the Politburo,

and Churchill frequently put this view forward whenever he wished

to explain away some of Stalin's more outrageous behavior. The

British were thus as mystified as ever by the behaviour of the

Russians, and the attempt to explain their behaviour by thinking

of them as a bunch of peasants who had not had the good fortune to

be educated at either Eton or Harrow did little to clarify the

situation.103

Later in the book, describing the pro-Soviet British Foreign Office

Research Department's 1944 denial of nonpublic Polish accusations of

Soviet culpability for Katyn, Kitchen described Ambassador O'Malley's

fierce denunciations of the coverup. Kitchen included a quote invoked

by O'Malley, "What in international affairs is morally indefensible

generally turns out in the long run to have been politically inept."104

Early in 1987, in the scholarly journal East European Quarterly,

there appeared an article by authors Crister S. and Stephen A. Garrett

of the Monterey Institute of International Studies entitled "Death and

Politics: The Katyn Forest Massacre and American Foreign Policy." The

Garretts conclusion was:

. . . that the ostensible American commitment to Eastern European

interests and that of Poland specifically has always been a

hostage to larger concerns. This phenomenon presents itself not

only in the contest [sic] of Katyn--the United States was

essentially a passive bystander to the Russian crushing of the

Hungarian revolt in 1956, and President Johnson was only dissuaded

with great difficulty from going ahead with a planned visit to the

Soviet Union shortly after Moscow's intervention in Czechoslovakia

in 1968. The essential gap between American aspirations for

Eastern Europe and the felt constraints on American policy toward

the region does not, however, provide much consolation to the

Poles who still vividly recollect one of the most calculated and

tragic assaults on their national identity. Perhaps symptomatic

of the sensitivity of Katyn for the Polish nation is the effort by

the Soviet Union itself to erase the historical memory of

Katyn.105

The Garretts then went on to describe the Soviets' peculiar

selection of "Khatyn" as the site of their war memorial to massacred

Soviet villages. They pointed out the doubts about the placename's

wartime existence and the fact that it was the only one of 9,200

Belorussian villages leveled--and the only one of 136 entirely

massacred--so lavishly memorialized. The Garretts monitored the

existence of "Khatyn," after its unveiling in 1969, as follows:

1954--A map of the Minsk Region in the Large Soviet Encyclopedia

does not show Khatyn at all.106

1956--A map of the Smolensk area in the Large Soviet Encyclopedia

shows Katyn.

1959--A large atlas of the USSR shows neither Khatyn nor Katyn.

1974--A map of the Minsk Region in the Large Soviet Encyclopedia

shows Khatyn but not Katyn.107

In fairness to the Soviets, I should point out that "Khatyn" had

been identified as a village placename, 60 kilometers North-Northeast of

Minsk, on a 1:1,000,000 British War Office map published in 1954.108

The Garretts' credibility was not helped by their statement that--

according to former Roosevelt aide John F. Carter--President Roosevelt

had told Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles on or about 15 April 1943

that he believed that a German-born intelligence analyst's appraisal

(that the Nazis were telling the truth about Katyn and that the Soviets

were therefore guilty of Katyn) was "on the level."109 The Garretts'

next sentences read:

One year later, however, the President's opinion seemed

altogether different. Presidential aide George Earle presented

Roosevelt with evidence suggesting once again Russian guilt.

Roosevelt commented, according to Earle, that "this is entirely

German propaganda and a German plot. I am absolutely convinced

the Russians did not do this."110

Actually, Carter had testified to the Select Committee on 13

November 1952 that Sumner Welles had told him that both Welles and

Roosevelt believed that the analyst was "on the level," in the sense of

the analyst reporting what he--the analyst--believed to be the truth.

There was no confirmation, by Carter or Earle, that Roosevelt himself

agreed with the analyst's report--in 1943 or later.111

Nonetheless, the Garretts began their following paragraph "Whatever

Roosevelt's private views eventually were with respect to the Katyn

affair, . . . ," as though Roosevelt had changed his mind before talking

with Earle. However, contrary to the Garretts' misrepresentation of

Roosevelt's public and private statements about Katyn, there is no

evidence that he ever really admitted Soviet guilt for Katyn, to himself

or to anyone else. Whatever the motive, Roosevelt had closed his mind

on this matter, and he would never allow it to be reopened.

Armed Truce: The Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945-46, by Hugh

Thomas of the London-based Centre for Policy Studies, was published in

1987. It included a number of references to Katyn, citing its

importance as a wartime issue. Although the title of Thomas' book

reflected his opinion of when the Cold War started, he related the

obscure incident at Potsdam which may have irritated Soviet-American

relations significantly. On July 17, 1945, at Potsdam, new U.S.

President Harry S. Truman was frustrated by Stalin's refusal to discuss

international access to inland waterways, like the Volga River system.

Truman then had the gall to ask Stalin to his face what had happened to

the Polish officers at Katyn. Stalin, unaccustomed to having to account

for his homicides, coldly answered, "They went away."112

Thomas confirmed Soviet responsibility for Katyn in his book,

giving 1940 as the year and describing the plight of the persecuted

Poles in the Soviet Union prior to the German invasion. He noted that

captured members of the pro-Western Polish Home Army were being

incarcerated by the Soviets in Maidanek, the old Nazi death camp, as

early as summer 1944.113

Also in 1987, the carefully researched book, In the Shadow of

Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939-1942,

appeared. Author David Engel accused the London Poles of treating

Polish Jews as a secondary priority, both during the evacuation from the

Soviet Union and in the beginnings of the Holocaust. Engel was particu-

larly critical of the Polish generals Anders and Sikorski, and the word

"Katyn" appeared only in the index.114 His depiction of a latent Po-

lish anti-Semitism later seemed to be verified during the September 1990

Jewish-Catholic strife about the Carmelite convent near Auschwitz.115

A vengeful hostility toward the Poles and their suffering, on the

part of some Jews--justified or not--may have been one factor in the de-

emphasis of Katyn as a significant East vs. West postwar issue. It is

true that Polish Jews lost everyone in the Holocaust. However, Jewish

resentment of Christian Poles should not be allowed to distract from the

true perpetrators of the Holocaust or from all Poles' suffering. More-

over, the temptations to blame Bolshevism and its atrocities on Jews, in

whole or in part, were considerable for other Europeans.

Throughout history, the Germans and Russians played off the Poles,

Ukrainians, Jews, and other Eastern European peoples of the borderlands

against each other. Some of these peoples--as, for example, the Polish

commander of the Cheka, Feliks Dzerzhinskii, or Lenin's Latvian guard--

proved to be useful as political troops or police and apparently enjoyed

personal revenge on Russian people for their own past suffering. As

Harvard University professor Richard Pipes wrote in his 1990 book, The

Russian Revolution,

Dzerzhinskii was a Pole, and many of his closest associates

were Latvians, Armenians, and Jews. [There was also a certain,

high-ranking Georgian!] . . . Latvians were considered more

brutal and less susceptible to bribery.116

Having suffered persecution and pogrom killings at the hands of

Russians and Ukrainians, some Jews welcomed Communism in Russia, in view

of its anti-racist doctrines. Jews were prominent in the Soviet leader-

ship: Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoniev, to name a few. In his book, Pipes

noted that at one point three-fourths of the Kiev Cheka were Jewish. It

is thus understandable, unhappily, how many Ukrainians--who had suffered

their own, NKVD-administered holocaust in the early 1930s--and some

Poles could be led so easily (by their early impressions of Jewish col-

laboration with Bolshevism and by subsequent Nazi propaganda exploiting

those impressions) to support or participate in the persecution and even

extermination of Jews. The vast majority of Jewish people were entirely

and tragically innocent of any interethnic wrongdoing, of course.117

In 1988, Canadian historians Lawrence Aronsen and Martin Kitchen

pointed out the importance of Katyn in their book, significantly titled

The Origins of the Cold War in Comparative Perspective: American,

British, and Canadian Relations with the Soviet Union, 1941-48. They

observed that the Soviets indirectly used the Katyn episode to pressure

the Polish Government-in-Exile to accept the Curzon Line as the eastern

border of a postwar Poland, thus conceding to the USSR the substantial

lands of Eastern Poland. They also noted how the Soviets refused to re-

establish diplomatic relations with the Polish Government-in Exile after

its wartime capitulation on the Katyn issue, until their territorial

demands were accepted.118

One startling revelation in the book was that Canada's Prime

Minister Mackenzie King was generally unsympathetic to Poland. King

felt that the Poles shared responsibility for starting the war, because

they had not been as amenable to Hitler's territorial wishes in 1939 as

he felt they should have been!119

Also in 1988, Edward Mortimer's book, The World that FDR Built, was

published. In a footnote, Mortimer makes clear his conviction that the

Soviets were responsible for Katyn, quoting wartime British diplomat Sir

Frank Roberts' observation that Katyn was one of the causes of

Churchill's disappointment with the Soviets about Poland.120

Robert James Maddox's book, From War to Cold War: The Education of

Harry S. Truman, also appeared in 1988. Consistent with the importance

he had attached to Katyn in his 1973 critique, The New Left and the

Origins of the Cold War (discussed previously), he described its

significance for the wartime negotiations concerning the future of

Poland:

Talks about Poland revealed a dilemma that would plague

Roosevelt. The Atlantic Charter he and Churchill had issued in

August 1941 condemned territorial changes imposed by force and

endorsed the right of all peoples to choose their form of

government. Although Stalin had given a hedged endorsement of the

charter, Roosevelt understood he was adamant about retaining

Polish territory occupied in 1939--roughly corresponding to the

Curzon Line--and also meant to establish a "friendly" government.

How could FDR agree without incurring the criticism, particularly

from voters of Polish extraction, that he had betrayed the charter

to placate Stalin?

Roosevelt took refuge in silence. He said little in discus-

sions during which Churchill and Stalin agreed that Poland should

be compensated for losses in the east by gaining German territory

up to the Oder River. They were far apart on who would govern

Poland. Churchill hoped to work out an arrangement between the

London-based Polish government in exile and the Soviets, but their

relations had been poisoned six months earlier when the former

publicly accused the USSR of murdering nearly 5,000 Polish

officers in the Katyn Forest in 1940. FDR told Stalin privately

that he was sympathetic to Soviet desires, but that he could not

be a party to any agreements until after the 1944 elections

because he was afraid of alienating the Polish vote. Stalin said

he understood.121

There were a couple of questionable points in Maddox's coverage of

Katyn. The London Poles had not accused the Soviets of the crime; they

had only asked for an impartial, Red Cross investigation. Also, in

fairness to Roosevelt, he seemed to think he could better the chances of

the nonaligned government that Churchill (and Polish-Americans) wanted

by privately reassuring Stalin with a sympathetic attitude.

Emory University professor Jan T. Gross's book, Revolution from

Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland's Western Ukraine and Western

Belorussia, was published in 1988. The book was originally based on

thousands of surveyed personal accounts of the ordeals of Poles in

Soviet captivity. Most of the accounts were destroyed by Soviet

authorities upon the Polish exodus from the USSR in 1942. The following

quote indicates the Poles' determination to get the rest of the

completed forms out to the West:

Indeed, the Soviet authorities tried to intercept the archives

accompanying the Polish ambassador as he was boarding a ship to

Iran. This loss was prevented only by the determination of a

junior officer escorting the ambassador's luggage, Lieutenant

Ksawery Pruszynski, a famous writer, who drew a gun in defense of

the papers in his custody.122

Uninterested in Katyn's role as a disruptive factor in wartime

diplomacy and border-bargaining, Gross mentioned Katyn only in the

context of the killings of Poles (which he estimated to be as high as

115,000) in Soviet-occupied territory from 1939 to 22 June 1941. (He

estimated another 300,000 Polish dead in Soviet labor camps.)

Contrasting the death toll of Poles from Nazi versus Soviet killings,

Gross wrote:

These very conservative estimates show that the Soviets killed or

drove to their deaths three or four times as many people as the

Nazis from a population half the size of that under German

jurisdiction. This comparison, I repeat, holds for the first two

years of the Second World War, the period before the Nazis began

systematic mass annihilation of the Jewish population.123

In a footnote to this passage, Gross quotes author Stephen Cohen that,

"judged only by the number of victims and leaving aside important

differences between the two regimes, Stalinism created a holocaust

greater than Hitler's."124 (This, of course, was the conclusion

Alexander Cockburn was trying so hard to discredit in his New Statesman

and Society article.)

Gross was troubled to discover that he had to be careful when using

the typed copies of the personal survey, because the junior member of

the wartime Polish Army transcription team had persuaded his superior to

let him embellish the accounts, in order to promote the Polish Govern-

ment-in-Exile's cause. In this connection, Gross noted:

This is precisely the kind of creativity that a historian can

do without. Regrettably, Major Swiecicki seems to have yielded to

[Lieutenant] Telmany's arguments. . . .

How weak the relative merits of the Polish case must have

seemed to these misguided defenders of the Polish "vital interest"

who were ready to commit forgery for its sake! The Soviet claims

to the Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia were founded on

lawlessness and outright lies. No doctoring of the original

testimonies was necessary to make the point. . . .125

In 1989, the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society contained

University of Liverpool professor Phillip M.H. Bell's article,

"Censorship, Propaganda and Public Opinion: The Case of the Katyn

Graves, 1943." Bell's article noted the pressure on General Sikorksi to

request an International Red Cross investigation and to do it publicly.

The Polish government for its part faced the grim evidence of

the list of names, which tallied with names on their own rolls of

those missing in Russia. Already, through diplomatic channels, by

direct appeal to Stalin, and by the tireless investigations of

Captain Czapski, the Poles had done all they could by private

enquiry to trace their missing officers. They now had to face the

reaction of General Anders' army in Iraq, which had only recently

left the Soviet Union and in which these officers were known as

comrades in arms and fellow prisoners. There were already ominous

reports from the British authorities in the Middle East that

Anders' troops were losing confidence in the Polish government;

and the Foreign Office believed that, with the news of Katyn,

there was danger of serious trouble among these troops. These

warnings were known to the Polish government. Recent reports

reaching London from Poland indicated that any concessions by the

Polish government to the Soviet Union would mean that it no longer

represented the nation: these referred to territorial questions,

but were likely to apply equally strongly to the Katyn graves. In

Britain, General Sikorski, the Prime Minister, was already under

attack from those who claimed that he was unduly compliant towards

the Russians. In these circumstances the Polish government had to

be seen to be taking action to investigate the stories about

Katyn. Inquiries behind the scenes would not do. So the Poles

acted publicly, rapidly and independently.126

Because Goebbels had made Katyn a public issue, the responses by

the Polish, Russian, and British governments had to be public in return,

according to Bell:

Whatever the real reason [for severing diplomatic relations with

the Polish Government-in-Exile], the Soviet government moved

swiftly to publish a decision which could have been kept quiet for

a time, to give British diplomacy a chance to find a way out of

this phase of the Soviet-Polish problem.

The three governments all used publicity as a weapon, and the

British were caught in the crossfire of statements and

accusations. Their problem was very public, and its handling had

to be a matter of publicity.127

Writing about the British government's efforts to muzzle the

domestic and Polish emigre press, Bell indicated mixed success, stating,

"In effect, the tone of the Polish papers seems to have been generally

moderate in May and June; but that was due to diplomacy and self-

restraint, not to new regulations."128 The Poles were quartered in

Scotland, and Bell described a very pro-Polish treatment of Katyn by the

Scotsman (Edinburgh) newspaper:

There was some dissent. The Polish case attracted strong

sympathy in the Scotsman, which on 27 April published a long

leading article pointing out that some one-and-a-half million

Poles had been carried off to concentration camps in Russia,

because Stalin did not want them in his new territories. The

whereabouts of most of them, and of 10,000 officers, remained

unknown. While this article attributed no specific responsi-

bility for Katyn, its inference was unmistakeable; and it also

strongly supported the Polish case on the frontier question.129

Bell's comments on the overall treatment of Katyn by the British

government and press were illuminating. He specifically cited the

previously discussed 1 May 1943 New Statesman and Society article which

did not deny Soviet responsibility and which stated, "this is not to say

that many Polish officers may not have been shot or relegated to Siberia

by the GPU . . . the Soviet Government, often with reason, would regard

the landed aristocracy and the officer class of Poland in the light of

Fascists and class enemies."130 Bell wrote:

This chilling comment illustrates a striking fact about the

general attitude of the British press: the almost complete

absence of a moral stance. This was in sharp contrast to the

treatment of the deal with Admiral Darlan a few months earlier,

when the press wrote freely of honour and dishonour, of the ideals

for which the Allies were fighting and how they were tarnished by

association with a quisling. On Katyn and Polish-Soviet

relations, on the other hand, the press spoke the stern language

of realism and power politics. . . . It is said that the British

press is subject to periodic fits of morality, sometimes induced

by stories of massacres. On this occasion, there was a

concentrated attack of Realpolitik.131

Bell concluded his article with the insightful assessment:

Damping down remained the order of the day, and indeed the crisis

passed, as most crises do. In the long run, however, damping down

was not so easy. Katyn reappeared in 1944; then at the Nuremberg

trials; and later still in the question of a memorial to its dead.

The story of censorship, propaganda and public opinion in relation

to Katyn has not ended yet.132

In 1989, Zbigniew Brzezinski's book, The Grand Failure, described

the meteoric rise and fall of Communism in the twentieth century.

Discussing Gorbachev's 1988 de-Stalinization efforts, Brzezinski noted

the omission of any "glasnost" revelations about the 1939 partition of

Poland or the 1940 Katyn Massacre and mass deportations of Poles to

Siberia.133 He also chronicled a joint statement by Polish-

Czechoslovakian "oppositionist groups, on the occasion of the twentieth

anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia" demanding that the

sovereignty of Warsaw Pact nations be respected by the Soviet Union and

that documents be published about the Katyn Massacre and other examples

of Soviet repression of Eastern Europeans.134

There was mention of Katyn in Walter LaFeber's 1989 American

diplomatic history textbook, The American Age: United States Foreign

Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750, as well as of Soviet unrespon-

siveness to the Warsaw Uprising.135 Perhaps the recent media coverage

of Katyn had finally prompted LaFeber to appreciate its significance.

The 1 June 1990 English-language issue of the Soviet monthly

journal, International Affairs, contained Russian historian Natalya

Lebedeva's article about the Katyn-related documents in the Soviet

archives which implicated the NKVD as responsible for Katyn. The

article had a preface by the USSR Academy of Sciences Institute of

General History director, Alexander Chubaryan, who described Katyn as

"one of the grave crimes perpetrated by the Stalin regime."136

In 1990, P.M.H. Bell authored the book, John Bull and the Bear:

British Public Opinion, Foreign Policy and the Soviet Union, 1941-1945.

Bell described and analyzed the manipulation of British public opinion

toward the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Bell devoted an

entire chapter to Katyn, discussing it as a case study of a public

relations crisis which imperiled pro-Soviet sentiment during the war.

As he stated, "The subject of this chapter is not the graves themselves

nor the issue of who killed the officers; though it must be said at once

that the evidence of Soviet guilt leaves no room for doubt."137 Later

in the book, Bell (again) mentioned the "chilling" nature of the article

in the 1 May 1943 New Statesman.138

Bell traced a prior wartime concern about Soviet trustworthiness,

expressed in a British Broadcasting Corporation audience research

inquiry conducted in September 1942. The Katyn episode could have

touched off a public explosion about the matter in Britain and else-

where. However, Britain's Political War Executive (PWE), the watchdog

agency which (like our OWI) combatted internal political divisiveness on

war issues, stated in a 28 April 1943 directive, "It is our job to help

to ensure that history will record the Katyn Forest incident as a futile

attempt by Germany to postpone defeat by political methods."139

In Bell's judgement, the PWE was entirely successful:

The threat posed by the revelation of the Katyn graves to the

Anglo-Soviet alliance was almost entirely averted. The episode

appears to have had little effect on British opinion about the

Soviet Union. There were already doubts and anxieties set against

the general popularity of the USSR, which were sharpened by Katyn,

but only partially brought into the open: only a few elements in

the press raised public questions, and MPs remained quiet.140

It should be noted that, while Bell maintained that Katyn was neutral-

ized as a wartime issue by government influence over the British media,

he acknowledged Katyn's importance as a reinforcement to the underlying,

longterm public distrust of the Soviets. That distrust was the basis of

the Western democracies' Cold War response to the postwar Soviet

political and military threat.

When contrasting the Katyn issue against the public furor in

Britain in 1942-43 about the Western Allies' cooperation with Vichy

French Admiral Darlan, Bell concluded:

Public opinion was much more obviously stirred by the Darlan deal

than it was to be by Katyn a few months later. . . . The main

reason for this was presumably the overwhelming nature of the need

for the Soviet alliance . . . . This aspect was certainly real;

but it is also tempting to speculate as to whether most of the

press allowed a greater moral latitude in dealings with the Soviet

Union than in those with Darlan--or even with the United

States.141

. . . .

It is of some interest that, in the affair of Admiral Darlan, the

government (including Churchill) was more willing to deflect

public hostility against the United States than they ever were to

do so against the Soviet Union. If this were generally true, it

would raise some intriguing questions.142

Princeton University historian Robert C. Tucker's 1990 book, Stalin

in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941, included an obligatory

mention of Katyn--albeit inaccurate in detail. Tucker also quoted a

Moscow News article, claiming Soviet prisoners of war were also mass-

murdered at Katyn:

Special note must be taken of one Stalinist crime that

received worldwide attention when, in 1944 [sic], the then

retreating German occupants announced their discovery in the Katyn

forest near Smolensk mass graves containing the remains of 4,443

executed Polish officers (the fates of another 10,000 Polish

officers interned after Soviet conquest of eastern Poland in 1939

are still unknown). . . . The Katyn forest was the mass grave not

only for those murdered Polish officers, but also for thousands

upon thousands of Soviet terror victims whom the NKVD transported

there, from 1935 to 1941, for execution, and for 135,000 Soviet

prisoners of war executed by the Nazis during the occupation.143

Also in 1990, the second edition of British professor Karen

Dawisha's book, Eastern Europe, Gorbachev and Reform: The Great

Challenge, was published. The reference to Katyn was the same as it had

been in the first edition:

The Poles' hatred of Russians and their cynicism about Soviet

intentions were reinforced by the experiences of World War II,

when, for Poland, Hitler was not the only aggressor. The Soviet

counterinvasion of Poland in September 1939, the probable Soviet

responsibility for the massacre in the Katyn woods of almost the

entire Polish officer corps, and the slowness with which the

Soviets liberated Warsaw (first allowing indigenous resistance to

be crushed) are all deeply felt and widely discussed in Poland.

Dawisha went on to quote a sermon delivered by a Polish bishop

on the thirty-seventh anniversary of the outbreak of the war. The

bishop said:

In August 1939, an infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was signed,

that meant the fourth partition, pre-planned by Hitler and Stalin.

. . . And we know how Molotov triumphantly said "the bastard of

the Versailles Treaty has disappeared from the earth's surface."

We all remember that, and the Nation remem-bers and waits for the

grievance to be repaid. . . . We remember those who were killed,

we remember concentration camps, we remember removals, we remember

Katyn.144

Despite the building interest in Katyn in the late 1980s,

Washington and Jefferson College history professor James L. Gormly

omitted mention of Katyn from his 1990 book, From Potsdam to the Cold

War: Big Three Diplomacy, 1945-1947. Gormly's portrayal of the Soviet

Union during the war was apologist. Rationalizing Stalin's pro-German

about-face on the eve of the war, he wrote "Finding little willingness

on the part of France and Britain to stand firm against the Nazis, he

hastened in August 1939 to associate the Soviet Union with Fascist

Germany."145

Gormly's very next sentence was "He [Stalin] hoped that his nonag-

gression pact with Hitler would keep his country out of the war, at

least temporarily."146 This is an embarrassingly obvious self-contra-

diction, unless Gormly was trying to claim that the intent of Britain

and France to declare war on Nazi Germany (when it invaded Poland)--

which Gormly was also claiming Stalin knew and believed--was "little

willingness . . . to stand firm against the Nazis . . . ."

While Gormly mentioned the divisive importance of the 1944-45,

wartime Russo-Polish disputes about the Polish borders, he downplayed

the poisonous impact of the Soviets' own 1939 invasion and partition of

Poland with the Nazis and of the other pre-1945 Soviet behaviors which

laid the foundation for the Cold War--as previous historians had pointed

out. Specifically and indefensibly, he entirely omitted any mention of

the Katyn Massacre, the Polish Government-in-Exile, and the events

surrounding the Soviet suspension of diplomatic relations with the

legitimate Polish government in London. Indeed, the Gormly book does

not add to a balanced understanding of the origins of the Cold War, even

within its narrow chronological scope.

Even within his own 1945-1947 parameters, Gormly's 1990 exclusion

of any mention of Katyn is a particular oversight. Stalin would have

regarded Truman's needling of him at Potsdam about the "missing" Polish

officers as a serious personal provocation, judging from Stalin's own

fixation with Katyn (as described by his daughter), his cold response to

Truman at the moment, and the later, enraged Soviet reaction to the

Congressional hearings on Katyn.

Katyn was just one of the more earthshaking "glasnost" revelations

coming out of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Desperately, the academic Left in the West tried to counterattack. For

example, in 1990, the Great Terror bodycount issue resurfaced in some

scholarly journals. In 1990 issues of Soviet Studies, Sovietologist

Alec Nove and British professor S.G. Wheatcroft estimated Soviet 1930s

deaths at approximately 10 and 6 millions, respectively. Wheatcroft

contrasted his "professional, objective" methods with what he described

as the more "literary" approaches of Robert Conquest and various other

Sovietologists.147

Conquest immediately replied in Soviet Studies, tracing his sources

and tallying of the 20 million dead figure. He also pointed out that

Wheatcroft's "professional, objective" sources were official, Stalinist

government sources of far more dubious objectivity and credibility.148

In the 1991 translation of his 1988 biography of Stalin, the anti-

Stalinist, "revisionist" Russian military historian, General Dmitri

Volkogonov--briefly Boris Yeltsin's Minister of Defense--confirmed the

existence of documents proving NKVD responsibility for the Katyn

Massacre. However, in Volkogonov's account of Stalin's mass murders,

Katyn's mention was comparatively brief.149

That same year, the sixth edition of Peter Calvocoressi's book,

World Politics since 1945, was published. Although the wartime Katyn

controversy was not in the book's announced scope, Calvocoressi

mentioned it in the background of his chapter, "Communist Europe." He

wrote, "The discovery in April 1943 of the Katyn massacre (only

implausibly ascribed by the Russians to the Germans) reminded the Poles

that, for them, the choice between Russians and Germans was a hopeless

one, but the Germans were at that time the present pest from which the

Russians were future liberators."150

Also in 1991, Hoover Institution researcher Arnold Beichman's book,

The Long Pretense: Soviet Treaty Diplomacy from Lenin to Gorbachev,

described the inherent inability of a totalitarian state to deal

honestly with the rest of the world. Although his book was devoted to

criticism of all Soviet regimes, Beichman specifically censured Allied

governments' collaboration in the coverup of Katyn.151

Another 1991 book of note, The Soviet Takeover of the Polish

Eastern Provinces, 1939-41, edited by Keith Sword, cataloged Katyn as

just one of the Soviet atrocities against Polish residents of the area

occupied by the Red Army in 1939-41. Red Army scholar John Erickson

(mentioned above), in his contributed narrative of the military events

of September 1939, clearly stated that "Polish officers were separated

from their men, isolated in their own prison-barracks though their final

destination proved to be the mass graves of Katyn."152 Further

references to Katyn by other authors appeared in other contributions.

Career diplomat Thomas W. Simons, Jr., authored the book Eastern

Europe in the Postwar World, also published in 1991. In describing the

background to postwar Eastern Europe, Simons described the massacre of

intellectuals by both Nazis and Soviets. Regarding Katyn, Simons wrote:

The Soviets helped: all of the nearly 15,000 Polish officers

butchered in 1940 by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, had the

matura that marked the intellectual. At the most famous site, in

Katyn Forest, 4,200 fell.153

Later in the book, describing Hungary's efforts to keep pace with

the political emancipation of Poland in 1989-90, Simons wrote:

The Hungarians were in the midst of a phase of politics from

which the Poles were emerging. Of course the Poles had not worked

the historic issues through to the end either, for there is never

an end. The issue of the Katyn massacre of 1940, for instance,

did not end with Gorbachev's admission of Soviet guilt in April

1990. Some Poles will insist that the guilty be specifically

named and punished. But by 1989 the Poles had sufficient

experience with the politics of history and morality to shift

toward a politics of programs, constituencies, bargaining, and

compromise.154

In a collection of writings about Eastern Europe, Bronislaw Gere-

mek--Solidarity floor leader in both houses of the Polish legislature

and historian of medieval France--observed the place and importance of

Katyn to the democratic, anti-Soviet revolution which had taken place in

Poland:

. . . When in addition the experiences of the last war are

considered--the secret protocols to the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact,

the invasion of Poland by the Red Army on September 17, 1939, the

mass deportations of Poles, not to speak of the crimes committed

on the Polish population, the best known, perhaps, the Katyn

forest massacre of several thousand interned Polish officers that

has become such a symbol in recent years--the Polish attitudes

take on a new meaning. . . .

. . . .

Still, the rank injustice of the post-Yalta order, the memory

of the Katyn massacre, the agony of the Warsaw uprising, fought in

complete isolation, could never disappear from the Poles' social

consciousness. . . .155

Accounting for Poles' postwar submission to Soviet rule, Geremek

made another, very insightful observation:

The attitudes of Polish society toward the new political

order, especially among opinion-making circles and intellectual

groups, reflected not only a feeling of resignation, stemming from

the fact that Poland had been deserted by her Western allies, but

from the conviction that it was absolutely necessary to change the

country's social and political structures.156

In the meantime, Katyn's status as a significant historical event

was certified by its inclusion in the basic reference source, Facts on

File Encyclopedia of the 20th Century, published in 1991.157

In 1991, there was a spate of Poland-related articles in the

Russian journal, International Affairs. N. Lebedeva authored another

article, "Documents: Stalin, Sikorski, et al," appearing in the January

1991 issue.158 These were Soviet transcriptions of the 1941 Moscow

meetings described previously. When, on 14 November 1941, Polish

Government-in-Exile Ambassador Kot offered Stalin a list of the missing

Polish officers known to have been at Starobielsk, Ostashkov, and

Kozielsk, Stalin irritably brushed him aside with the (counter-)accu-

satory retort that the Soviets had "released all the Poles, even those

who had been coming to the USSR as Sikorski's agents to blow up bridges

and kill Soviet people." Kot hastily changed the subject.159

Later, on 3 December 1941, after vaguely claiming to Sikorski and

Anders that the missing Polish officers and cadets were somewhere in

Manchuria and accepting a list of their names, Stalin said, "I am a bit

of a brute, not a diplomat."160 Stalin's glibness is all the more

remarkable, considering that the Battle for Moscow, 1941--and his own

fate--was being decided only a dozen miles away, as he well knew.

The January 1991 issue of International Affairs also included an

article titled "View from Warsaw," by Krzysztof Skubiszewski, the Polish

Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time. This was an analysis of

current Soviet-Polish relations and what was necessary to improve them.

Skubiszewski observed:

It is in the interest of Polish-Soviet relations to relieve

them of problems burdening them. A major advance in this respect

was the Soviet Union's statement recognising [sic] Soviet

responsibility for the military crimes committed against Polish

military officers, in particular for the Katyn crime.161

In the June and May issues, Stepan Radevich's two-part series of

articles, "The Case of Sixteen," was published. This dealt with the

sixteen high level members of the Polish Government-in-Exile who were

arrested, tortured, and imprisoned in 1945.162 Later, in December 1991,

Radevich had his own article about Katyn in International Affairs,

"`Mute Witnesses' Speak Up."163 Such interest in Polish affairs and

reconciliation in a Russian foreign policy journal indicates Russians'

clear recgonition of the vital significance of these contentious matters

and the need to reconcile them.

In 1992 the book The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal

Memoir, by Telford Taylor, was published. Taylor had been Chief

Prosecutor for the Nuremberg war crimes trials and has since been a

practicing attorney and Columbia Law School professor.164 Taylor spent

a number of pages describing how the defense attorneys for the Nazi

German defendants defeated Soviet efforts to convict their clients of

guilt for the Katyn Massacre.165

According to Taylor, the Russian Chief Prosecutor, General R.A.

Rudenko, even accused the Nuremberg Tribunal of "gross error" and

violating its duty by allowing German defense attorneys to bring in

witnesses to clear their nation of responsibility for Katyn. In fact,

Rudenko so incensed the Tribunal's Western judges that the American

judge, Francis Biddle, suggested that such language would have been

cause for Rudenko being cited for contempt of court in the United States

and that Rudenko should have been sent to prison for his impudence.

Such an unexpectedly truculent Western defense of due process shocked

the Russians and enabled the Germans to mount their successful effort to

stalemate the Katyn charge.166

To understand in quantitative terms the recent realization of the

importance of Katyn to 20th Century Polish and Soviet history and to the

history of wartime and postwar foreign relations, a cursory survey of

Katyn-related scholarly articles abstracted in the index Historical

Abstracts is illuminating. Prior to the late 1980s, an article on Katyn

appeared only once every five or so years. In the first half of 1992,

alone, ten articles were indexed and abstracted.167

One of the most intriguing--and heartening--of these titles was

"Niurnbergskii Bumerang [The Nuremberg Boomerang]," which appeared in

Voenno-Istoricheskii Zhurnal [Military History Journal] in 1990, written

by a pair of Red Army military historians.168 Red Army military

historians attacked Stalin's regime for its legal attempt at Nuremberg

to bury the truth about the extermination of 15,000 Polish officers and

cadets. Although this was consistent with much earlier revelations

about and condemnations of the purges of the Red Army officer corps in

the late 1930s, the historians' concern for victimized Poles was note-

worthy. So, as we have seen in this and the previous chapters, the

recognized significance of Katyn continues to grow in importance and

widen in scope.

It is important to note that the "historical revisionists'" sin has

not been that they protested incompetent and/or criminal American con-

duct in, for example, Vietnam or (more recently) in Central America--in

those instances when it has occurred. (Doing so is no sin, of course,

unless they have exaggerated or distorted--or falsified or uncritically

disseminated falsifications of--such instances.) As long as any histo-

rian sincerely seeks historical truth and finds it--no matter how ugly

it may be--s/he has done credit to historical scholarship and his/her

society and may also be helping to prevent recurrences of tragedy.

However, in cases of which Katyn and Indochina are but two

examples, some modern revisionist commentators and historians in the

West (for political or other ulterior reasons, possibly) have uncon-

scionably ignored, denied, or discounted--and thereby abetted--

calculated evils perpetrated by Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries and

totalitarians. At best, in the case of Katyn, they may have overlooked

a significant historical event because it seemed at the time of their

writings to be only incidental, or for the same reason they may have

used whatever information about it seemed most convenient to their

concessionary theses.

At worst, those historians who did understand the facts and impor-

tance of Katyn, and were knowingly attempting to deny or undermine them,

were consciously assisting the coverup of a heinous crime against a

noble and victimized Western nation--and against humanity, in general--a

coverup which was to become an intrinsic part of the crime itself and

instrumental to its effectiveness.

CHAPTER 5.

THE HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF KATYN

For the West, the Katyn Massacre was a signal, inceptive incident

in the wartime doubt in Western minds about the motives and methods of

the Soviet Union. The visualized image of prisoners-of-war, bound and

gagged, being forced down onto stacks of fresh corpses of their murdered

friends--heaped like so much garbage--then to be shot through the back

of their heads was a specter which could not be comfortably or complete-

ly ignored and forgotten. Such wartime disturbance and distrust served

as a foundation for the postwar East-West antagonism which became known

as "the cold war." Katyn was also important for its subsequent,

periodic use as a compelling example of Marxist-Leninism's threat to

liberal, Western society and institutions. Finally, it was significant

as a professional, ethical challenge to Western intellectuals and to

their institutions of inquiry.

There is as well a perceptible parallel (and there may be a direct

link) requiring further study, between the West's official and intellec-

tual abandonment of Poland and indifference to the ultimate fate of its

prisoners of war and the United States' similar abandonments of the

Indochinese, the cause there for which so many young Americans died,

and, possibly, of our MIAs, both in Korea and Vietnam.1 Particularly

137

poignant is the comment of former Soviet interrogators of American

Korean War POWs:

. . . Korotkov says he twice interrogated Americans, mainly about

their backgrounds. He remembers talking to one American for over

an hour: "Our plain goal was to try to recruit him, to get him to

work for us. We didn't have any luck with the Americans. They

were very secure and were sure they would be rescued and get back

to the States."2

In most cases, these Americans' security and faith in their country

would prove to be as false and ill-advised as that of 25,700 Poles in

similar straits a decade earlier. Judging by the newest revelations

about the apparent fate of many of our POWs in Vietnam and by how much

political and economic expediency and self-interest drive American

politics and policy, young American prisoners of war in the future can

expect to be similarly abandoned and forgotten: victims of this

perceptible pattern of coverup and betrayal.

As Sir Owen O'Malley had profoundly observed in his June 1943

memorandum, when morality becomes separated from a nation's policies--in

the name of Realpolitik and expediency--that nation loses its sense of

purpose and legitimacy.3 (Indeed, one basic reason for the Nazis'

dramatic, initial political and military successes was their strong

sense of "moral purpose," albeit a transvalued one.) The coverup of

Katyn--and, as Czech dissident intellectual (and later President) Vaclav

Havel has realized and written, the coercion of subject peoples to

repeat such lies, whether or not they actually believed them--came to be

an integral part of the grisly crime itself.4 The knowing complicity of

the West's governments, media, and intelligentsia in suppressing the

truth about Katyn during the war and in often evading confrontation with

the Soviets about it afterwards, for various reasons of expediency, was

a conscious collaboration in the coverup--and, therefore, in the crime.

It is worth speculating that much of the postwar Communist aggres-

siveness and inhumanity--possibly not just against prisoners of war--

might have been deterred, if we in the West had earned Stalinists'

respect by more assertively standing up for the human rights of the

Poles, amidst the Second World War, as only we were able to do.

There has been a perceptible pattern in the written interest in the

Katyn Massacre in the West, described in the preceding sections of this

thesis. Among Polish exiles in the West, interest in--rather, outrage

at--the Soviets' extermination of their "best and brightest" was high,

continuous, and well-documented in English as well as Polish sources.5

Among Poles in their own country, the interest was also intense and

continuous, but until the late 1980s it was unwritten, except for pre-

vious Soviet Bloc documents and publications accusing the Nazis of the

killings.6 With the exception of a few anti-Stalinist intellectuals,

Soviet responsibility for Katyn was generally disbelieved or unknown by

Russians until "glasnost" and democracy forced a moral and public

reckoning with the truth of that and other Stalinist exterminations.

In the West, public interest in Katyn was high in 1943 (with the

initial shock of the killings and their diplomatic implications), during

the U.S. Congressional hearings in 1952, and from 1980 onward, when

Katyn became a Polish Solidarity issue and an ultimate test of the

credibility of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's program and promise of

"Glasnost." However, from the mid-1950s to 1979--despite Professor

Janusz Zawodny's seminal book, Death in the Forest, published in 1962--

Katyn, the truth about it, and its importance were largely forgotten or

ignored by the public and even by many historians. In Britain, there

was the momentary interest in the early and middle 1970s, when the

O'Malley memorandum was declassified and when the Labor Government

refused to send a representative to attend the unveiling of the Katyn

memorial in London.

It was not until the late 1980s, when Katyn became the "litmus

test" of the credibility of Gorbachev's policy of "Glasnost," that the

pivotal, political (and therefore historical) significance of this 1940

massacre finally came to the fore and was fully understood and estab-

lished. Indeed, it was in March 1989 that the leaders of the Communist

Party of the Soviet Union recognized the powerful and profound threat to

their crumbling empire posed by the truth of Katyn. Desperately, they

created the special committee of Falin, Kryuchkov, and Shevardnadze to

deal with Katyn by attempting to keep it an "academic" issue. Indeed,

on 20 October 1992 Polish President Lech Walesa described on Polish

television how Katyn had become a "test of truth," indicating the

sincerity of the Soviets in their relations with the Poles.7 Katyn was

so powerful an issue that it could even be readily and effectively used

at the level of local American politics for educating and cautioning

citizens about Soviet methods and intentions.8

In fact, Katyn may be an example of a "domino effect" of history

affecting subsequent political movements and affairs, rather than the

record of history being written according to the desires and expedi-

encies of subsequent political powers and intellectual fashions. The

efforts of Communist governments and the 1960s and 1970s generation of

"revisionist" historians to minimize or deny the truth of Katyn failed

completely. Indeed, the apparent ploy of "Khatyn," actually backfired.

In the case of the Katyn Massacre, the past proved to be too powerful to

be censored or otherwise "controlled."

As a scholarly issue in the West, Soviet guilt for the Katyn

Massacre was thoroughly investigated and conclusively established as a

Soviet atrocity by Professor Zawodny's book in 1962. Thereafter, Katyn

was mentioned in insightful and/or comprehensive treatments of Second

World War diplomacy, histories of Soviet foreign policy, and surveys of

the origins of the Cold War--by many "traditionalist," and even some

"revisionist," historians. However, even when the latter type of histo-

rians actually tried to deny, confuse, or minimize Soviet responsibility

for Katyn (and the implications of it), their efforts to do so were only

substantiating the massacre's moral and historical significance.

To their everlasting discredit, there was never any genuine,

concerted demand by Western historians and other intellectuals for any

Soviet--or even Western!--government to tell the truth of Katyn.

Moreover, as attested by public opinion polls, a significant percentage

of the peoples of Great Britain and the United States--at the time of

the massacre--suspected the Soviets were capable of such killings and of

further such behavior, far sooner and more realistically than many of

their politicians and intellectuals.

Indeed, the apparent attempt by certain "revisionist" scholars in

the West to deny or obscure--to thereby collaborate in the coverup of--

the truth of Soviet guilt for Katyn qualifies them, in my view, for

consideration as "accessories after the fact" in a moral and intellec-

tual (if not legal) sense. The Soviets could not have gotten away with

their coverup of Katyn for as long as they did without their active (or

passive) complicity. Whether or not these "revisionist historians"

approved of mass murder, for whatever political cause, their disservice

to the scholarly pursuit of truth was most grave. In the case of Katyn,

the Soviets were simply operating (ruthlessly, covertly, and duplici-

tously) in accord with their Marxist-Leninist principles; whereas

complicitous Western intellectuals were apparently betraying theirs.

Many in the West, particulary scholars, may feel smug that the

historical truth about--if not justice for--Katyn has finally won out.

However, Katyn (with the other, related killings in the Soviet Union,

totalling 26,000 Polish victims) was a very effective NKVD extermination

of a significant portion of the anti-Communist, nationalist leadership

element of Polish society--thoroughly in keeping with Marxist-Leninist

theory and practice about the "liquidation" of class enemies. Since the

Soviet NKVD's elimination of the backbone of Poland's prewar, anti-

Soviet leadership at Katyn facilitated the Soviet subjugation of Poland

for more than forty years, it seems to have been a highly successful

genocidal act of statecraft as well. As writer Mark Frankland said,

Katyn indeed was, for too many, "a truth that is told too late."

Although references to Katyn in the context of Hungary's struggles

have been documented in this study, further research will be required to

substantiate my hypothesis that the NKVD extermination of the Polish

intelligentsia in 1940 was significant not only to the postwar subjuga-

tion of Poland, but also served as the unspoken and understood example

to would-be anti-Communist activists throughout the Soviet empire of the

grim, anonymous fate that awaited them if they misbehaved.

The Bloc-wide intimidating effect of the Katyn Massacre, and the

importance of the enforcement of its coverup by the Soviet NKVD/KGB, is

indirectly evidenced by the issue's key role in undermining the politi-

cal credibility of the Polish Communist government and Soviet political

and military control over Poland after the Poles realized they no longer

had to fear retribution for raising the issue. By summer 1989, the

Polish people had thus succeeded in defying Soviet terror and had

regained their moral and political sovereignty, and the rest of the

Eastern European satellites could no longer be contained. Even the

Germans realized they could then reunite with impunity.

For the West, however, Katyn serves as a grim indicator of the

moral weakness and practical impotence of the West's political and

intellectual leaders and institutions in dealing with a careful,

calculating totalitarian regime prepared to use mass extermination as a

tool. In the United States, Katyn eventually became one of many grim

goads and reminders which provoked the successful resistance to and

containment of Soviet Bloc aggressions. However, if democratic,

humanitarian leaders and institutions are to be productive and

respected--if they (and we) are to survive with our open societies and

market economies--they must be able to recognize and to punish or

prevent injustices and injury against humanity and, no less importantly,

against the environment. Katyn, and unremitting episodes of genocide as

have since occurred in Cambodia and in what was Yugoslavia, bear more

bleak witness that the West's liberal philosophy and institutions, and

its leadership of the world, may be inadequate to address effectively

the increasingly critical challenges and crises confronting us.

Indeed, the true moral horror of the Katyn Massacre (for those who

may subscribe to humanitarian values) is that, as an active measure to

exterminate permanently a nationalist Polish leadership class trouble-

some to the Soviet empire--and later, to compromise the integrity of

Western authorities by gaining their collaboration in the coverup of

that--Katyn was so entirely effective and successful. Only in the

1980s, when the Soviet juggernaut had been coincidentally halted by

Western solidarity and force in places like Afghanistan, Angola, and

Nicaragua--as well as in the European nuclear confrontation--did Soviet

repression of Eastern Europe weaken to the extent that truth and freedom

could finally win out.

The Katyn episode has been symptomatic of how the West's ethical

crisis is rooted in the intellectual professions' misvaluation of argu-

mentation and form over truth and content. In some cases, ulterior

political motives may have prompted demands for unreasonably high stan-

dards of proof in the case of Katyn--demands which paralyzed any momen-

tum toward a recognized consensus on the facts of the historical case.

Only recently, in the outrage against "revisionists" who have attempted

to minimize and deny the Jewish Holocaust, have we seen an increase in

concern about the ethical and social dangers of irresponsible history.

Katyn also demonstrates a lack of concern about the fate of

(Allied) military professionals on the part of Western intelligentsia

and governments. Our society's apparent, subsequent abandonments of

American MIAs in Korea and Indochina for the sake of political expedi-

ency were entirely consistent with our ready, wartime abandonment of the

Poles.9 A society cannot long survive the realization, by its defenders

and/or allies, that betrayal will be their ultimate reward--nor does it

deserve to.

With the developments of the late 1980s and early 1990s and the

advantage of hindsight, it should now be obvious to anyone that the

Katyn Massacre was significant enough that its mention is merited in

forthcoming studies of twentieth century Poland or the Soviet Union, of

the politics and diplomacy of the Second World War, of the national

diplomacies of Poland, the Soviet Union, Germany, Great Britain, or the

United States, or of the Cold War. It is also apparent that this should

have been realized much sooner, after the 1962 publication of Janusz

Zawodny's book, Death in the Forest.

As to the final significance of Katyn for the Polish and former

Soviet peoples themselves, Louisa Vinton eloquently observed:

. . . the purifying power of the final truth about the Katyn

Massacre. Yeltsin's gesture [of releasing the conclusive Katyn

documents] may have begun transforming Katyn from a negative

symbol of oppression and deception into what [Polish President]

Walesa has called a positive "symbol of sincerity between our

nations."10

NOTES

PREFACE

pp. vii-xi

1. Louis Fitzgibbon. Katyn. (New York: Scribner's, 1971), 102-

2. Stewart Steven, The Poles, (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 135;

and Allen Paul, Katyn, The Untold Story of Stalin's Polish Massacre,

(New York: Scribner's, 1991) 224.

3. David M. Glantz, Soviet Military Operational Art: In Pursuit

of Deep Battle, (London: Frank Cass, 1991), 88-90.

4. The most reputable estimate, thus far, was done by Dr. Iosif

(Joseph) Dyadkin, a geophysicist in Kalinin, in 1976. From birth and

death rates, Dyadkin conservatively estimated that up to twenty million

people had died of political persecution from 1927 to 1940. The post-

Soviet examination of NKVD/KGB archives may drive that figure up much

higher. Iosif G. Dyadkin, Unnatural Deaths in the USSR, 1928-1954, (New

Brunswick NJ: Transaction Books, 1983), 60.

For his statistical efforts, Dr. Dyadkin was sentenced in 1981 to

three years in a labor camp. In the conclusion of his introduction,

Nick Eberstadt--a translator of Dyadkin's little book and a faculty

member at the Harvard Center for Population Studies--observed, "Iosif

Dyadkin has become a victim of the terror apparatus whose results he

attempted to quantify." Ibid., 9-10.

5. Specifically, this author believes that the relative priority

of worldwide concern about human rights and (economic and social) jus-

tice will decline precipitously, as our environmental and social crises

(resulting from human overpopulation and wantonness) become more acute.

6. Janusz K. Zawodny, Death in the Forest: The Story of the Katyn

Forest Massacre, (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame, 1962).

CHAPTER 1. Introduction: The Katyn Massacre

pp. 1-9

1. Vera Tolz, "The Katyn Documents and the CPSU Hearings," Radio

Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Report, No. 44, 6 November 1992, 27-

38.

2. Isvestiya, 1 November 1939; as quoted in Paul, 64.

3. Tolz, 31.

4. U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. The Katyn Forest

Massacre, Hearings before the Select Committee to Conduct an

Investigation of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances of the Katyn

Forest Massacre, Eighty-second Congress, Second Session, on

Investigations of the Murder of Thousands of Polish Officers in the

Katyn Forest near Smolensk, Russia, Part 6, (Exhibits 32 and 33

Presented to the Committee in London by the Polish Government in Exile,

(Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952), 1651.

5. Ibid., 1651.

6. Ibid., 1651n.

7. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict,

(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 9.

8. "Stalin also hated the Poles. They had defeated Lenin in 1920

when the Red Army had been humiliated before Warsaw and forced to

retreat far into White Russia and the Ukraine." (Norman Stone, "Katyn:

The Heart of Stalin's Darkness," The Sunday Times [London], 15 April

1990.)

9. Edward J. Rozek, Allied Wartime Diplomacy: A Pattern in

Poland, (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1958), 34. By invading Poland,

the Soviets violated their 1932 nonaggression pact with Poland (which

had been extended to 31 December 1945), as well as the 1929 Treaty of

Paris, outlawing war, which they had signed. Ibid., 18-9, 35.

10. Times (London), 23 September 1939, as cited in Keith Sword,

"Soviet Occupation of Eastern Europe," Slavonic and East European

Review, January 1991, 93.

11. Sunday Express, 24 September 1939, as cited in Keith Sword,

"Soviet Occupation of Eastern Poland," Slavonic and East European

Review, January 1991, 81-101.

12. Lukas, Forgotten Holocaust, 38.

13. Richard C. Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under

German Occupation, 1939-1944, (Lexington KY: University Press of

Kentucky, 1986, 38-9.

14. Ibid., 8-9.

15. Ibid., 5.

16. Simon Schochet, An Attempt to Identify the Polish-Jewish

Officers Who Were Prisoners in Katyn, (New York: Yeshiva University,

1989), 16.

17. Zawodny, 5.

18. Wladyslaw Anders, An Army in Exile, (London: Macmillan,

1949), 10-1.

19. Rozek, 50.

20. Israel Goldfliess, "Outbreak of the German-Russian War," in

B.F. Sabrin, Alliance for Murder: The Nazi-Ukrainian Nationalist

Partnership in Genocide (New York: Sarpedon, 1991), 44.

21. Joseph Einleger, "The Annihilation of the Trembowla Jewish

Community," in Sabrin, 138-9.

22. Schochet, 3.

23. Robert Conquest, interview by Louis R. Coatney, 18 June 1992.

24. Nicholas Bethell, "The Cold Killers of Kalinin," The Times

(London), 6 October 1991, 23.

25. Eugenjusz Andrei Komorowski, Night Never Ending, (Chicago:

Henry Regnery, 1974), 120.

26. Zawodny, 149-50.

27. George Watson, "Rehearsal for the Holocaust?," Commentary,

June 1981, 60. Watson was a Cambridge University history professor.

28. Robert Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations, (New York:

Viking, 1991), 229.

29. A couple of the principal histories of the Russian Front--The

Great Patriotic War, as the Russian people remember it--provide

interesting contrasts, regarding the order to execute captured Soviet

political commissars: "The directive dated May 12, 1941, requiring

instant killing of all captured political workers, is one of the most

disgraceful documents issued by the German High Command." P.N. Pospelov

and others, eds., Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, 1941-1945: A

General Outline (Moscow: Progress, 1974), 28; "The liquidation of the

commissars, communist intelligentsia, gypsies, Jews and civilian

hostages in the early stages of the war was to be followed by

Fuehrerbefehle, . . . . The Soviet High Command and Red Army troops

were of course equally guilty of similar barbarity. Never in modern

times was a war to be waged so piteously." Albert Seaton, The Russo-

German War 1941-45 (New York: Praeger, 1970), 55.

Stalin's prewar trials and executions or enslavements of "enemies

of the people" were no secret, particularly to those who supported him--

in the Soviet Union or in the West.

30. John Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad, (New York: Harper &

Row, 1975), 107n.

31. Boris Levytsky, The Uses of Terror: The Soviet Secret Police,

1917-1970, (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1972), 150.

32. Svetlana Alliluyeva, Only One Year, (New York: Harper and

Row, 1969), 390.

33. Rozek, 39.

34. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above,

1928-1941, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 612.

35. Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, edited and

translated by Harold Shukman, (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 360-

36. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The

History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, (New York: Summit

Books, 1982), 341-2. This quotation is an interesting contrast to

another, similar one by Molotov on Page 1 of this study.

37. "1: the use of deliberate systematic measures (as killing,

bodily or mental injury, unlivable conditions, prevention of births)

calculated to bring about the extermination of a racial, political, or

cultural group or to destroy the language, religion, or culture of a

group . . . ." Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the

English Language, Unabridged, (Springfield MA: Merriam-Webster, 1986.

38. Katyn. Dokumenty Ludobojstwa (Katyn: Documents of Genocide),

(Warsaw: Instytut Studiow Politycznych PAN, 1992); as cited in Louisa

Vinton, "The Katyn Documents: Politics and History," Radio Free Europe/

Radio Liberty Research Report 2, January 1993, 19n.

CHAPTER 2. Katyn as a Second World War Issue

pp. 10-39

1. Polish Cultural Foundation, The Crime of Katyn: Facts &

Documents, with a Foreword by General Wladyslaw Anders, (London: The

Foundation, 1965), facing 80, 87.

2. Polish Cultural Foundation, vi-vii.

3. Zawodny, 10.

4. Martin F. Herz, Beginnings of the Cold War, (Bloomington IN:

Indiana University Press, 1966), 43.

5. Martin Kitchen, British Policy towards the Soviet Union during

the Second World War, (New York: St. Martin's, 1986), 152-3.

6. Zawodny, 15.

7. "General Sikorski with Mr. Churchill," The Times, (London), 16

April 1943, 3; and "Nazis Accuse Russians," New York Times, 4.

8. "Russia and Poland," [editorial], The Times, (London), 28 April

1943, 5.

9. As quoted in Paul, 224.

10. Zawodny, 31.

11. Rozek, 128.

12. Clark-Kerr to Foreign Office, 21 April 1943, FO 371/34569, fo.

64; quoted in Roy Douglas, From War to Cold War, 1942-48, (New York:

St. Martin's, 1981), 18.

13. Rozek, 98-101.

14. "Row with the Reds," Newsweek, 3 May 1943, 44.

15. "Poles vs. Reds: Allied Unity Put to Test by Row over Officer

Dead," Newsweek, 29 May 1943, 29. Actually, surprise cavalry attacks on

unsupported German tank formations by gasoline bomb-toting cavalry

troopers were often successful and not at all as absurd as conventional

wisdom assumed.

16. "Lesson in Maneuver," Time, 10 May 1943, 35.

17. "Soviet-Polish Break: Old Border Quarrels Should Not Tempt Us

to Turn Our Back on Europe's Problems Again," Life, 10 May 1943, 30.

18. Waverly Root, The Secret History of the War, Vol. 3,

Casablanca to Katyn, (New York: Scribner's, 1946), 445-7; and, much

later, Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States

Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, (New York: Random House, 1968), 104-6.

19. As quoted in Root, (1946), 447.

20. William L. O'Neill, A Better World: The Great Schism:

Stalinism and the American Intellectuals, (New York: Simon and

Schuster, 1982), 98-99.

21. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 4, The Hinge

of Fate, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), 759.

22. Paul, 314-15.

23. Rozek, 133.

24. Paul, 227.

25. As quoted in David Irving, Accident: The Death of General

Sikorski, (London: William Kimber, 1967), 33. See the following

chapter for Churchill's comments on Katyn in Hinge of Fate, vol. 4 of

his history of the Second World War.

26. Zawodny, 38.

27. Rozek, 132-82.

28. As cited in Paul, 303.

29. Ibid., 302.

30. "One week later, the White House staff confirmed that the

document had been handed to Roosevelt." Ibid., 307.

31. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 1, The

Gathering Storm, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), 135. Churchill

presented this tidbit in The Gathering Storm, writing that it had been

"heretofore" unknown. He didn't say when he heard it or from whom.

However, later in that same volume, he described his discussion of

Russia's prewar defense treaty maneuvering in depth with Stalin during

their August 1942 meeting in Moscow. Ibid., 391.

32. John Bartlett, comp., Familiar Quotations: A Collection of

Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and

Modern Literature, (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 766.

33. George F. Kennan, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin,

(Boston MA: Little, Brown, 1961), 360.

34. Fitzgibbon, 155-8.

35. Zawodny, 91-3.

36. Ibid., 110, 114.

37. Ibid., 91.

38. Ibid., 90-1.

39. Michael Binyon, "Katyn Veteran Tells of Secret Police

Murders," The Times, 7 October 1991, 8.

40. Lukas, 179. However, see the commentary later in this study

on the recent books by David Engel, for a different view of Polish-

Jewish relations.

41. "American Polish Leaders Brand Russia a Nation of Liars and

Old Conspirators," Chicago Tribune, 28 April 1943, 19.

42. U.S. Congress. Senate. Congressional Record (19 April 1943),

3543.

43. U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Congressional

Record (20 April 1943), 3607.

44. U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Congressional

Record (16 April 1943), A1885.

45. U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Congressional

Record (19 April 1943), A1933-4.

46. U.S. Congress. Senate. Congressional Record (29 April 1943),

2067.

47. U.S. Congress. Senate. Congressional Record (7 May 1943),

A2247.

48. U.S. Congress. House of Representatives. Congressional

Record (7 May 1943), A2309.

49. Zawodny, 184.

50. Buck Long and Lawrence V. Cott, "Allen Cranston's Big Lies,"

The American Spectator, April 1990, 16-8. Cranston's pro-Soviet

behavior in this and other episodes was recently chronicled, although he

adroitly evaded censure during the Congressional hearings in 1951.

Hearings, Pt. 7, 2022-35, 2174-96,2272-93.

51. Donald MacKenzie, "The War Today," Macomb Daily Journal, 27

April 1943, 4.

52. "British Try to Patch up Polish-Red Rukus," Macomb Daily

Journal, 29 April 1943, 1.

53. "Foreign Affairs," Facts on File, 1943, 123K.

54. "Churchill Predicts Free Poland," Facts on File, 1943, 140D.

55. "A. SOVIET UNION--POLAND.--Detailed description," Keesing's

Contemporary Archives, Vol. 4, 1940-1943, 5731.

56. Roman Pucinski, interview by Louis R. Coatney, 20 March 1992.

57. Hearings, 2080.

58. David Irving, Accident: The Death of General Sikorski,

(London: William Kimber, 1967).

59. Paul, 239.

60. "Russia: A Day in the Forest," Time, 7 February 1944, 27-8.

61. John H. Lauck, Katyn Killings: In the Record, (Clifton NJ:

Kingston, 1988), 79.

62. Zawodny, 82.

63. "Russia Must Choose," Time, 20 March 1944, 20.

64. Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, July 1943-April 1945,

1307.

65. Szymczak, 145.

66. Rozek, 235.

67. Herbert Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: The War They

Waged and the Peace They Sought, (Princeton NJ: Princeton University

Press, 1957), 389.

68. Lukas, 218-9.

69. Rozek, 263-4.

70. "Defeat of Patriots at Warsaw Widens Polish-Russian Breach,"

Newsweek, 16 October 1944, 48.

71. Zawodny, 152-3. With similar, disarming alacrity in Spring

1942, Roosevelt had easily deflected reporters' questions about the

source of the Dootlittle Raid on Japan with a charmingly airy reference

to "Shangri-La."

72. Public Opinion Quarterly, October 1939, 600.

73. Public Opinion Quarterly, June 1940, 357.

74. Public Opinion Quarterly, Fall 1941, 471.

75. Public Opinion Quarterly, Winter 1941, 675.

76. Public Opinion Quarterly, Spring 1942, 152.

77. Public Opinion Quarterly, Summer 1943, 334.

78. Warren B. Walsh, "What the American People Think of Russia,"

Public Opinion Quarterly, Winter 1944-45, 513-22. Dr. Walsh was at the

time Assistant Professor of History at Syracuse University and Chairman

of its Board of Russian Studies.

79. Public Opinion Quarterly, Winter 1944-45, 518.

80. Ibid., 520.

81. Ibid., 522.

82. Rozek, 98-102.

83. "Massacre Fraud Disclosed," Facts on File, 1945, 207M. The

index entry read "fake Russian massacre;" Facts on File, 1945, Annual

Index, 60.

84. Rozek, 338-9.

85. As quoted in Rozek, 340.

86. Rozek, 370-1.

87. White had already authored They Were Expendable, the

definitive wartime account of early U.S. Navy patrol torpedo (PT) boat

operations in the Pacific War.

88. William L. White, Report on the Russians, (New York:

Harcourt, Brace, 1945), 127-34.

89. Roman Pucinski, interview with Louis R. Coatney, 20 March

1992.

90. O'Neill, 90-2.

91. Saturday Review of Literature 28, 14 April 1945, 21.

92. Christian Science Monitor, 20 March 1945, 12.

93. New Republic 112, 19 January 1945, 392.

94. White, 133.

95. Charles F. Croog, "FBI Political Surveillance and the

Isolationist-Interventionist Debate, 1939-1941," The Historian 54,

Spring 1992, 455.

96. There is further indication that William L. White himself was

no rightwing extremist. In 1948, his book Lost Boundaries was

published. It was the anti-racist account of the effect on a youth of

his discovery that his family was Black.

97. William L. White, "Report on the Russians," in two parts,

Reader's Digest, December 1944, 102-22, and January 1945, 106-28.

98. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The

History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, (New York: Summit

Books, 1982), 407.

99. Edmund Stevens, Russia Is No Riddle, (New York: Greenberg,

1945), 294-5.

100. Edmund Stevens, This Is Russia--Uncensored, (New York:

Didier, 1950), vii.

101. Ibid., 98.

102. Ibid., 99.

103. Ibid., 196.

104. Stevens, 1945, 299.

105. "Why Young Bill White Became Expendable," Saturday Evening

Post, 26 May 1945, 112.

106. Zawodny, 65.

107. There is confusion about Dr. Markov's first name. Not even

intials are given in the Polish Government-in-Exile's report to the

Select Committee. Hearings, pt. 6, 1733. Furthermore, the photograph

of his signature on the German-sponsored forensics commission document

of findings shows no first name or initials, as reproduced in S.L.

Mayer, Hitler's Wartime Picture Magazine: Signal, (Englewood Cliffs,

NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976), sixth (unnumbered) page from the end.

In The Murderers of Katyn, Vladimir Abarinov lists his name as

"Marko" Markov. Vladimir Abarinov, The Murderers of Katyn, (New York:

Hippocrene Books, 1993), 298.

In The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir,

Telford Taylor lists Markov's first name as "Antonov." Telford Taylor,

The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir, (New York:

Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 471.

108. Fitzgibbon, 175-7.

109. Zawodny, 64-74.

110. "July 2: Nuremberg," Facts on File, 212K-L.

CHAPTER 3. Katyn as a Postwar Public and Political Issue in the West

pp. 40-80

1. "`You Cannot Shoot Us All,'" Time, 28-9.

2. See James William Crowl, Angels in Stalin's Paradise: Western

Reporters in Soviet Russia, 1917 to 1937, A Case Study of Louis Fischer

and Walter Duranty. Washington DC: University Press of America, 1982.

3. Root, 419-64.

4. Ibid., 459.

5. Ibid., 456-7.

6. Martha Mautner, interview with Louis R. Coatney, 20 May 92.

7. Helena Sikorska, The Dark Side of the Moon, (New York: Charles

Scribner's Sons, 1947), 226.

8. Ibid., 277-8.

9. Arthur Bliss Lane, I Saw Poland Betrayed: An American

Ambassador Reports to the American People, (Belmont MA: Western

Islands, 1948), 19.

10. Ibid., 255.

11. Wladyslaw Anders, An Army in Exile: The Story of the Second

Polish Corps (London: Macmillan, 1949); and Josef Czapski, The Mystery

of Katyn (Bombay: The Indo-Polish Library, 1946).

12. Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, The Rape of Poland, (New York:

Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill, 1948), 38.

13. "Polish Tragedy," Time, 25 July 1949, 82.

14. Anders, 85.

15. Ibid., 119-20.

16. Ibid., 140.

17. Ibid., 90, 112-3.

18. Ibid., 118.

19. Joseph Mackiewicz, The Katyn Wood Murders, (London: Hollis &

Carter, 1951), 168.

20. Ibid., 56.

21. Ibid., 230-1.

22. Robert Szymczak, "The Unquiet Dead: The Katyn Forest Massacre

as an Issue in American Diplomacy and Politics," Ph.D. diss., (Carnegie-

Mellon University, 1980), 189.

23. Zawodny, 196n.

24. Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 4, The Hinge

of Fate, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), 759.

25. Ibid., 760.

26. Zawodny, 186.

27. Ibid., 187, 190; and Szymczak, 195, 198.

28. Szymczak, 212.

29. Zawodny, 257-66.

30. This was sooner than February 1952, as planned, because

testimony had to be taken hurriedly from Lieutenant Colonel Donald

Stewart before he left for duty in Japan; Hearings, Pt. 1, 1.

31. Roman Pucinski, Interview by Louis R. Coatney, 20 March 1992.

32. Van Vliet's lineage was determined from the Register of

Graduates and Former Cadets of the United States Military Academy, (West

Point NY: Association of Graduates, 1990), 447, and my 6 November 1992

telephone interview of him. Some of General Bissell's comments on the

mysterious loss of the 22 May 1945 Van Vliet report are in the Hearings,

Pt. 7, 1850-4.

33. Final Report, 29.

34. Ibid., 29.

35. Ibid., 8.

36. Ibid., 11. Interestingly, though, Van Vliet himself still

supports Bissell's 1945 decision to bury the report in the files.

According to Van Vliet, the overriding concern of that moment was the

million or so troops the Japanese had in Manchuria, with which they

could have made an invasion of the Japanese home islands even more

prohibitively expensive than they would have been anyway. The Soviet

land invasion of Manchuria, to pin these troops down--the Soviets did

indeed annihilate the supposedly elite Japanese "Kwantung Army" in a

textbook operation of mobile, armored, "deep battle" that would have

gladdened purged Red Army Marshal and theoretician M.N. Tukhachevsky--

was seen as vital to the success of the impending United Nations

seaborne invasion and to the moderation of Allied casualties. John H.

Van Vliet, Jr., interview with Louis R. Coatney, 6 November 1992.

37. Hearings, Pt. 7, 2309.

38. Paul, 312.

39. Van Vliet, John H., Jr., Interview by Louis R. Coatney, 6

November 1992.

40. U.S. Congress, House, Select Committee to Conduct an

Investigation and Study of the Facts, Evidence, and Circumstances of the

Katyn Forest Massacre, Final Report, 82d Congress, 2d Session, 1952,

House Report No. 2505, 37.

41. Ibid., 12.

42. "Katyn Killings: The Real Story," U.S. News and World

Report, 5 December 1952, 22.

43. G.F. Hudson, "Who Is Guilty of the Katyn Massacre?

Examination of the Evidence Leaves Little Room for Doubt," The Readers

Digest (July 1952): 127-30.

44. "Katyn Forest Massacre: Alleged Statement by Mr. Stalin's

Son," Times (London), 21 April 1952, 5b.

45. Facts on File, 1950, 212P. For reasons he still does not

understand, Van Vliet had been ordered in 1948 or 1949, while stationed

at Fort Lewis, WA, to rewrite his report on Katyn for the Department of

the Army. John H. Van Vliet, Jr., interview with Louis R. Coatney, 6

November 1992.

46. Facts on File, 1951, 297F.

47. Facts on File, 1952, 78M, 125L, 135L-M.

48. Ibid., 206J-L.

49. Konrad Syrop, Spring in October: The Story of the Polish

Revolution, 1956, (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957), 4.

50. Ibid., 146.

51. Tom Dooley, Dr. Tom Dooley's Three Great Books: Deliver Us

from Evil, The Edge of Tomorrow, The Night They Burned the Mountain (New

York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 17-18.

52. Dooley, 78.

53. Ibid., 33.

54. H.C. Wolfe, Saturday Review of Literature 45, 24 November

1962, 39; as quoted in Book Review Digest, 1963, 1106.

55. Seymour Freidin, The Forgotten People, (New York: Charles

Scribner's Sons, 1962), 24.

56. United States, Department of State, Foreign Relations of the

United States, 1943, Volume III, Diplomatic Papers, (Washington DC:

U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963), 372-4.

57. Ibid., 395-6.

58. Alexander Werth, Russia at War: 1941-1945, (New York: E.P.

Dutton, 1964), 662.

59. Polish Cultural Foundation, 229-40.

60. Edward Crankshaw in Khrushchev Remembers, (Boston: Little,

Brown, 1970), 136.

61. Fitzgibbon, 183.

62. "Poland: Death in Katyn Forest," Time, 17 July 1972, 31.

63. Louis Fischer, The Road to Yalta: Soviet Foreign Relations,

1941-1945, (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 76-89.

64. Crowl, op. cit.

65. Peter Deriabin, Watchdogs of Terror: Russian Bodyguards from

the Tsars to the Commissars, (New Rochelle NY: Arlington House, 1972),

218.

66. Crister S. and Stephen A. Garrett, "Death and Politics: The

Katyn Forest Massacre and American Foreign Policy," East European

Quarterly 20, Winter 1986, 443.

67. "Khatyn," The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, Vol. 28 (New York:

Macmillan, 1983), 577b.

68. "Nixon Sees Khatyn, a Soviet Memorial, Not Katyn Forest,"

Time, 2 July 1974, 3.

69. Joseph O. Douglass, Jr., "Soviet Strategic Deception," in

Raymond S. Sleeper, Mesmerized by the Bear: The Soviet Strategy of

Deception (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1987), 225-6.

70. "Katyn Memorial: Cover up," The Economist, 25 September 1976,

26-7.

71. "Almost Certainly by Russia," The Economist, 25 September

1976, 26.

72. "Katyn Memorial: Cover up," The Economist, 25 September 1976,

26-7; and Who's Who, 1993: An Annual Biographical Dictionary (New York:

St. Martin's, 1993), 353.

73. Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity, (New

York: Scribner's, 1983), 40. In the preface to his 1988 book, The

World that FDR Built, Edward Mortimer specifically thanked Ash whose

spoken and written views on Germany and Eastern Europe he found to be

"immensely illuminating as well as entertaining." Edward Mortimer, The

World that FDR Built, (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988), ix.

74. John Darnton, "Polish Dissidents Quietly Mourn Wartime

Massacre," New York Times, 4 May 1980, 3.

75. Thomas S. Szayna, "Addressing `Blank Spots' in Polish-Soviet

Relations," Problems of Communism, November-December 1988, 50.

76. In his 15 April 1990 Sunday Times article, Oxford University

Professor of Modern History Norman Stone wrote, regarding the importance

of Katyn after its discovery, "Katyn then became the greatest symbol of

Polish-Soviet enmity." Norman Stone, "Katyn: The Heart of Stalin's

Darkness," Sunday Times [London], 15 April 1990.

77. Michael Checinski, Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-

Semitism, (New York: Karz-Cohl Publishing, 1982), 64.

78. Ibid., 65.

79. Ibid., 59n.

80. Jan Krok-Paszkowski, Portrait of Poland: With 78 Color

Plates, Photographs by Bruno Barbey (New York: Thames and Hudson,

1982), 166-7.

81. John F. Burns, "Soviet Union Irked by Nordic Visitors: Some

in an Antinuclear Group Boycott Rally over Link to World War II

Massacre," New York Times, 1 August 1982, 4.

82. James O. Watkins, Jr., "Presbyterian Peacemaking Program,"

Auke Talk, October 1984, unp.

83. Ralph K. White, Fearful Warriors: A Psychological Profile of

U.S.-Soviet Relations, (New York: Free Press, 1984), 230-1.

84. Szayna, 38.

85. Andrew Tarnowski, "Poles Challenge Soviets to Open Files on

Katyn Massacre," Washington Times, 23 March 1988.

86. Charles J. Gans, "Polish Official Raises Issue of World War II

Massacre," Juneau Empire, 11 March 1988.

87. "For a Polish-Russian Dialogue: An Open Letter," New York

Review, 28 April 1988, 60.

88. Tarnowski.

89. Szayna, 53.

90. Ibid., 55.

91. John H. Lauck, Katyn Killings: In the Record, (Clifton NJ:

Kingston, 1988).

92. Louis R. Coatney, "Sunday, April 24th: A Day to Remember

Katyn," Juneau Empire, 21 April 1988, 5.

93. Steve Cowper, Governor of Alaska, "Executive Proclamation: A

Day to Remember Katyn, 1 April 1988" (Juneau AK), [30 April 1988].

94. Alexander Cockburn, "Purging Stalin: Revisionists Are out to

Bump up the Number of Stalin's Victims. Alexander Cockburn Recounts the

Millions," New Statesman & Society, 3 March 1989, 17.

95. Ibid., 17. While Cockburn may not have the scholarly stature

of a D. F. Fleming, or even a Gabriel Kolko, his article was published

in a widely read magazine. In fact, he had stirred up enough contro-

versy with his views that, in October 1989, commentator Christopher

Hutchins wrote an article appearing in Nation magazine, purporting to

defend Cockburn from accusations of Stalinism. Christopher Hutchins,

"Minority Report, " Nation, 9 October 1989, 375.

96. William Echikson, "Katyn: The `Blank Space' Soviet Leader Did

Not Fill," Christian Science Monitor, 12 July 1988, 7.

97. Robert Pear, "Book on Massacre of Poles Gets U.S. Funding,"

New York Times, 18 September 1988, 4. During our interview, Dr. Zawod-

ny--who has refrained from direct, partisan involvement in the political

issue of Katyn--shared his scholar's sense of sublime satisfaction that

his book needed no correction for inaccuracies, whatsoever, for its

republication. There was a minor addendum, describing more recent

information on the location of the killing sites for the prisoners from

the other two internment camps, but Zawodny's objective rendering of the

facts of Katyn known in 1962 had proven to be definitive. Dr. Janusz K.

Zawodny, Interview by Louis R. Coatney, 13 December 1993.

98. "Soviets Blamed in '42 [sic] Massacre," Chicago Tribune, 17

February 1989, 4. The title was in Louisa Vinton's article, "The Katyn

Documents: Politics and History," Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

Research Report, Vol. 2, No. 4, 27n.

99. "Historian: Soviets behind Massacre," Macomb Journal, 22

August 1989, 11.

100. "Moscow Paper Blames Soviets in 1940 Deaths," New York Times,

23 March 1990, A9.

101. Rudolph Chelminski, "Katyn: Anatomy of a Massacre," Reader's

Digest, May 1990, 73.

102. Buck Long and Lawrence V. Cott, "Allen Cranston's Big Lies,"

The American Spectator, April 1990, 16-8. The political assessment of

The American Spectator is made in Magazines for Libraries: Seventh

Edition, by Bill and Linda Sternberg Katz, eds., (New Providence NJ:

R.R.Bowker, 1992), 859.

103. Paul, 339.

104. Although Stone's article was generally accurate, there were

mistakes in detail. For example, he wrongly associated the Inter-

national Red Cross with the Germans' "international commission." Norman

Stone, "Katyn: The Heart of Stalin's Darkness," Sunday Times (London),

15 April 1990.

105. Bernard Levin, "Britain's Complicity in a Chronicle of

Shame," Times (London), 23 April 1990, 12.

106. Paul, 219.

107. Ibid., xi.

108. Nicholas Bethell, "The Cold Killers of Kalinin," Observer

(London), 6 October 1991, 23.

109. Abarinov, 329.

110. "Pact with Russia Angers Some Poles: Draft Is Silent on

Questions of Stalin's Acts during War," New York Times, 22 May 1992, A7.

111. David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster,

1992), 451.

112. Ibid.

113. Mark Frankland, The Patriots' Revolution: How Eastern Europe

Toppled Communism and Won Its Freedom (Chicago IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1992),

33.

114. Ibid., 163.

115. Celestine Bohlen, "Russian Files Show Stalin Ordered Massacre

of 20,000 Poles in 1940," New York Times, 15 October 1992, 1,6.

116. "Moscow's Statement on Katyn Massacres," 6 October 1991, New

York Times, 6.

117. Andrew Nagorski, "At Last, a Victory for Truth: Moscow

Admits to an Infamous Massacre," Newsweek, 26 October 1992, 41.

118. Ibid.

119. Tolz, 27-33.

120. Vinton, 19.

121. Ibid., 20.

122. Ibid., 21.

123. Ibid., 24.

124. Ibid., 25-6.

125. Ibid., 26.

126. Ibid., 27.

127. Ibid.

128. Ibid., 28.

129. Ibid., 29.

130. Ibid., 31.

131. Vladimir Abarinov, The Murderers of Katyn (New York:

Hippocrene Books, 1993), 287.

132. George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary

of State, (New York: Scribner's, 1993).

133. Bernard Levin, "Stalin's Authorised Massacre: History Will

Not Believe That Men of Our Century Could Organise Mass Murder in Cold

Blood as the Russians Did at Katyn," Times (London), 13 April 1993, 14.

134. "Said Delores Apodaca Alfond, president of the National

Alliance of Families, and organization that has long accused both

Washington and Hanoi of duplicity on the POW-MIA issue: `Finally, we've

found the smoking gun. It all seems to be falling into place now.'"

Stanley W. Cloud, "Who Was Left Behind? A Newly Discovered Document

Fuels the Argument over the Fate of American POWs," Time, 26 April

1993, 39.

135. Jane Perlez, "Yeltsin Seems to Accept Polish Bid for Role in

NATO," New York Times, 26 August 1993, 3. As to what may be the

longterm political effect of the sight of a Russian president kneeling

before a Polish priest, that remains to be seen.

136. Facts on File, 1988, 543B-D2.

137. Facts on File, 1989, 149A-C1.

138. "Poland," Facts on File, 1990, 468D-E2.

139. Facts on File, 1991, 804E-G3.

140. Facts on File, 1992, 883E2.

141. Facts on File 53, No. 2752, 26 August 1993, 636B3.

142. Keesing's, 1988, 35655-6.

143. Keesing's, 1989, 36535; and Keesing's, 1990, 37383-4.

144. Keesing's, 1992, 39155.

Chapter 4. Katyn as an Historical and Scholarly Issue in the West

pp 81-136

1. Institute of Contemporary Studies researcher Stephen Schwartz

had also noted the sociopolitical "heartlessness of intellectuals" in

his 1988 New York Times Book Review article about actual espionage on

behalf of the Soviet NKVD in the late 1930s by Dr. Max Eitingon, one of

Sigmund Freud's closest associates, and other European intellectuals--

often against other intellectuals. In one episode, Eitingon recruited

into NKVD service White Russian General N.V. Skoblin. In 1937, Skoblin

served as the link between the NKVD and Nazi SD (intelligence service)

chief, Reinhard Heydrich, in the joint effort to implicate politically

the Red Army's high command in preparation for the purge of the Red Army

officer corps. Stephen Schwartz, "Intellectuals and Assassins--Annals

of Stalin's Killerati," New York Times Review of Books, 24 January 1988,

3, 30-31.

2. Vladislav Krasnov, Russia beyond Communism: A Chronicle of

National Rebirth, (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1991), 187.

3. Robert Conquest, interview with Louis R. Coatney, 18 June 1992.

4. Conquest, Stalin, 321.

5. Kennan, 360.

6. Polish Facts and Figures, No. 2, March 25, 1944, 21-2; quoted

in James T. Shotwell and Max M. Laserson, Poland and Russia: 1919-1945,

(New York: King's Crown Press for The Carnegie Endowment for

International Peace, 1945), 34.

7. G.F. Hudson, "A Polish Challenge: A Review Article,"

International Affairs, London (April 1950): 215-16.

8. Ibid., 217.

9. Ibid., 219.

10. Ibid., 220.

11. Ibid., 221.

12. William H. McNeill, America, Britain, & Russia: Their

Cooperation and Conflict, 1941-1946, Survey of International Affairs,

1939-1946 (New York: Johnson Reprint Company, 1970), 4.

13. Lloyd C. Gardner, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Hans J.

Morgenthau, The Origins of the Cold War (Waltham MA: Ginn-Blaisdell,

1970), 44.

14. McNeill, 276.

15. Ibid., 276n.

16. Arnold and Veronica M. Toynbee, eds., The Realignment of

Europe, Survey of International Affairs (London: Oxford University

Press, 1955).

17. Ibid., 145n.

18. Ibid., 147n.

19. Feis, Churchill, 192-3.

20. Gardner, Origins, 44.

21. Rozek, 82-133.

22. Ibid., 127.

23. Ibid., 442.

24. Ferenc Vali, Rift and Revolt in Hungary: Nationalism and

Communism, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 213.

25. Ibid., 247.

26. D.F. Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, 1917-1960, (New

York: Doubleday, 1961).

27. Norman A. Graebner, "The Cold War," Bulletin of the Atomic

Scientists, June 1962, 40. Later in this study, I comment further on

Fleming's book, in relation to its treatment in a critical survey in

1973 as well as its questionable merit, as reflected by its coverage of

Katyn.

28. Dorothy P. Davison, ed., Book Review Digest, 1963: Fifty-

ninth Annual Cumulation (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1964), 1106.

29. Zawodny, 45.

30. Zawodny, 183.

31. Ibid., 183-4.

32. Ibid., 191.

33. Charles Morley, American Historical Review 68, July 1963,

1059; as quoted in Book Review Digest, 1963: Fifty-ninth Annual

Cumulation (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1964), 1106.

34. Simon Wolin, Annals of the American Academy of Political and

Social Sciences 349, September 1963, 205; as quoted in Book Review

Digest, 1963, 1106.

35. G.V. Burks, American Political Science Review 57, September

1963, 712; cited (but not quoted) in Book Review Digest, 1963, 1106.

36. Vinton, 24.

37. Gaddis Smith, American Diplomacy during the Second World War,

1941-1945, (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965), 70.

38. Martin F. Herz, Beginnings of the Cold War, (Bloomington IN:

Indiana University Press, 1966), 45-6.

39. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict,

(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 9n.

40. Janusz K. Zawodny, interview by Louis R. Coatney, 15 December

1993.

41. Walter LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-1967,

(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967).

42. Louis J. Halle, The Cold War as History, (New York: Harper

and Row, 1967), 60.

43. Robert Strausz-Hupe, and others, Protracted Conflict, (New

York: Harper, 1959), 156-8.

44. McNeill, 1970, 1-2.

45. Ibid., 2.

46. Adam B. Ulam, The Rivals: America and Russia since World War

II, (New York: Viking, 1971), 42.

47. Walter LaFeber, The Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947: A

Historical Problem with Interpretations and Documents, (New York: John

Wiley & Sons, 1971), 1.

48. Ibid., 85.

49. George F. Kennan, Memoirs: 1950-1963, Vol. 2 (Boston:

Little, Brown, 1972), 122-5. Interestingly, Kennan incorrectly gave the

time of the Germans' announcement of their Katyn discovery as "February

1943." Ibid., 122n.

50. John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the

Cold War, 1941-1947, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 135.

51. Robert Beitzell, The Uneasy Alliance: America, Britain, and

Russia, 1941-1943, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), 157.

52. John Wheeler-Bennett and Anthony Nicholls, The Semblance of

Peace: The Political Settlement after the Second World War, (New York:

St. Martin's, 1972), 94-5.

53. Ibid., 195.

54. Robert James Maddox, The New Left and the Origins of the Cold

War, (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 7-8.

55. Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United

States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, (New York: Random House, 1968), 105.

56. Ibid., 105-6.

57. Rozek, 263-4.

58. Maddox, 39.

59. D.F. Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, 1917-1960, (New

York: Doubleday, 1961), 229.

60. Ibid., 230.

61. Ibid., 229.

62. Lloyd C. Gardner, Architects of Illusion: Men and Ideas in

American Foreign Policy, 1941-1949 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books,1970),

vii.

63. Lynn Etheridge Davis, The Cold War Begins: Soviet-American

Conflict over Eastern Europe (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press,

1974), 3.

64. Ibid., 44-46.

65. Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: The Man and His Era (New York: Viking

Press, 1973), 583.

66. Adam B. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign

Policy, 1917-73, 2d ed. (New York: Praeger, 1974), 343.

67. According to Jones, the Teheran proposals (which were hotly

challenged by Labour Party members in a Parliament debate in February

1944) provided that Poland be "shunted to the west at Germany's expense

and to Soviet advantage." Bill Jones, The Russia Complex: The British

Labour Party and the Soviet Union, (Manchester: Manchester University

Press, 1977), 90-1.

68. Richard C. Lukas, The Strange Allies: The United States and

Poland, 1941-1945, (Knoxville TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1978),

38.

69. Ibid., 40.

70. A footnote now described how Roosevelt prematurely claimed to

Churchill, on the basis of obviously false reports of the collapse of

the Warsaw Uprising in early September 1944, that eleventh-hour airlifts

to the Polish Home Army were "unfortunately . . . solved"--were too

late. John Lukacs, 1945: Year Zero, (Garden City NY: Doubleday,

1978), 100n.

71. Ibid., 100-1.

72. Alan Wolfe, The Rise and Fall of the `Soviet Threat':

Domestic Sources of the Cold War Consensus (Washington DC: Institute

for Policy Studies, 1979), 89.

73. Ibid., 2.

74. Vojtech Mastny, Russia's Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy,

Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941-1945 (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1979), 99-100.

75. Ibid., 186.

76. Ibid., xiv.

77. Piotr S. Wandycz, The United States and Poland (Cambridge MA:

Harvard University Press, 1980), 266.

78. Roy Douglas, From War to Cold War, 1942-48 (New York: St.

Martin's, 1981), 17-9.

79. Nikolai Tolstoy, Stalin's Secret War (New York: Holt,

Rinehart, and Winston, 1981), xiv.

80. Ibid., 163-83.

81. Ibid., 349.

82. Ibid., 187.

83. Ibid., 188.

84. Kenneth W. Thompson, Interpreters and Critics of the Cold War

(Washington DC: University Press of America, 1978), 85.

85. Terry H. Anderson, The United States, Great Britain, and the

Cold War, 1944-1947 (Columbia MO: University of Missouri Press, 1981),

180.

86. Karen Dawisha and Philip Hanson, Soviet-East European

Dilemmas: Coercion, Competition, and Consent (New York: Holmes &

Meier, 1981).

87. Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The

History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present (New York: Summit

Books, 1982), 9.

88. Ibid., 403-7.

89. William Taubman, Stalin's American Policy: From Entente to

Detente to Cold War (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), 53.

90. Thomas T. Hammond, Witnesses to Origins of the Cold War

(Seattle WA: University of Washington Press, 1982), 7.

91. Ibid., 10.

92. John Erickson, Road to Berlin: Continuing the History of

Stalin's War with Germany (Boulder CO: Westview, 1983), 88-9.

93. Ibid., 282.

94. "Once again the ultimate catalyst was Poland." Ferenc Feher

and Agnes Heller, Hungary 1956 Revisited: The Message of a Revolution--

A Quarter of a Century After (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), xiv.

95. Ibid., 4.

96. Jerald A. Combs, American Diplomatic History: Two Centuries

of Changing Interpretations (Berkeley CA: University of California

Press, 1983), 322-3.

97. Rudolf L. Tokes, "Intellectuals and Their Discontent in

Hungary: Class Power or Marginality?," in Foreign and Domestic Policy

in Eastern Europe in the 1980s: Trends and Prospects, ed. Michael J.

Sodaro and Sharon L. Wolchik (New York: St. Martin's, 1983), 177.

98. Bernard A. Weisberger, Cold War, Cold Peace: The United

States and Russia since 1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), 31.

99. Robert Szymczak, "A Matter of Honor: Polonia and the

Congressional Investigation of the Katyn Forest Massacre," Polish

American Studies, Spring 1984, 25-65.

100. Ibid., 25-26.

101. Alvin Z. Rubinstein, Soviet Foreign Policy since World War

II: Imperial and Global, 2d ed. (Boston MA: Little, Brown, 1985), 38-

39.

102. Lukas, 179.

103. Kitchen, 139-40.

104. Ibid., 184.

105. Crister S. and Stephen A. Garrett, "Death and Politics: The

Katyn Forest Massacre and American Foreign Policy," East European

Quarterly 20, 443.

106. Presumably, the encyclopedia's title can also be translated

Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

107. Ibid., 443.

108. Great Britain, War Office, "Vilnyus-Minsk," 1:1,000,000 map

on one sheet, (np: Survey Production Centre, Royal Engineers, 1954).

109. Ibid., 435.

110. Ibid.

111. U.S. House of Representatives, Select Committee on the Katyn

Forest Massacre, The Katyn Forest Massacre: Hearings before the Select

Committee to Conduct an Investigation of the Facts, Evidence and

Circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre, 82d Congress, 1st and 2d

Session, 1951-1952 (Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office,

1952), pt. 7, 2248.

112. Hugh Thomas, Armed Truce: The Beginnings of the Cold War,

1945-46 (New York: Atheneum, 1987), 124.

113. Ibid., 241.

114. David Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish

Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1939-1942, (Chapel Hill NC:

University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 272.

Another book by Engel has just been published: Facing a

Holocaust: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1942-1945

(Chapel Hill NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). According

to reviewer G.P. Blum of the University of the Pacific, Engel maintains

that despite worldwide warnings in late 1942 about the Nazis' genocidal

intent toward the Jews, the Polish Government-in-Exile did not readily

respond to appeals for it to help rescue Jews. According to Blum, Engel

alleges the motive for this inaction was Jewish reluctance to support

Polish efforts (against the Soviet Union) to guarantee its 1939 borders.

Choice, July/August 1993, 1824. This is a serious, significant charge

of political extortion which, if true, would compromise much of the

moral integrity and credibility of the Polish Government-in-Exile.

115. Robin Knight, "Pluralism's Bitter Fruit: Blaming the Jews,"

U.S. News & World Report, 10 September 1990, 56.

116. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf,

1990), 802.

117. Pipes, 824.

118. Lawrence Aronsen and Martin Kitchen, The Origins of the Cold

War in Comparative Perspective: American, British, and Canadian

Relations with the Soviet Union, 1941-1948 (New York: St. Martin's,

1988), 23.

119. Ibid., 159, 201-2.

120. Edward Mortimer, The World That FDR Built: Vision and

Reality (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988), 49-50, 50n.

121. Robert James Maddox, From War to Cold War: The Education of

Harry S. Truman (Boulder CO: Westview, 1988), 5-6. Roosevelt's

conversation with Stalin was drawn from Foreign Relations of the United

States: The Conferences at Cairo and Tehran, 1943 (Washington DC:

United States Government Printing Office, 1961), 594.

122. Jan T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of

Poland's Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia (Princeton NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1988), xvi.

123. Ibid., 229.

124. Stephen Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics

and History since 1917 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 95;

as quoted in Gross, 229n.

125. Ibid., xix.

126. P.M.H. Bell, "Censorship, Propaganda and Public Opinion: The

Case of the Katyn Graves, 1943," Transactions of the Royal Historical

Society 39, 1989, 65-6.

127. Ibid., 66.

128. Ibid., 76.

129. Ibid., 78.

130. New Statesman, 1 May 1943, 1; as quoted in Bell, 79-80.

131. Ibid., 80.

132. Ibid., 83.

133. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death

of Communism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Charles Scribner's

Sons, 1989), 84.

134. Ibid., 131.

135. Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign

Policy at Home and Abroad since 1750 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989),

405, 413. LaFeber also touched on the Ukrainian Famine of the early

1930s, without mentioning the word "Ukrainian." LaFeber seemed to be

explaining Stalin's attempt to exterminate the Ukrainians and their

nationalism by putting the Famine only in the context of collectivi-

zation, saying the "peasants fought to hold their private plots."

Ibid., 362.

136. Natalya Lebedeva, "The Katyn Tragedy," International Affairs,

(Moscow), 1 June 1990, 98.

137. P.M.H. Bell, John Bull and the Bear: British Public Opinion,

Foreign Policy and the Soviet Union, 1941-1945 (New York: Edward

Arnold, 1990), 109.

138. New Statesman, 1 May 1943; as quoted in Bell 1990, 124.

139. Bell, 109.

140. Ibid., 126.

141. Ibid., 201-2.

142. Ibid., 202.

143. "Tainy katynskogo lesa," Moskovskie Novosti, 6Aug89; as

quoted in Tucker, 612.

144. Bishop Ignacy Tokarczuk of Przemysl; quoted in Robert

Zuzowski's paper, "The Dissenting Intelligentsia and the Church in

Contemporary Poland" (Brisbane, Australia: Australasian Political

Studies Association Conference, August 1986); quoted in Karen Dawisha,

Eastern Europe, Gorbachev, and Reform: The Great Challenge, 2d ed. (New

York: Cambridge, 1990), 71.

145. James L. Gormly, From Potsdam to the Cold War: Big Three

Diplomacy, 1945-1947 (Wilmington DE: Scholarly Resources, 1990), 5.

146. Ibid.

147. Alec Nove, "How Many Victims in the 1930s?, Part I," Soviet

Studies, April 1990, 369-73; "Part II," October 1990, 811-4. Nove

estimated the Ukrainian Famine as 6 million dead, the Kazakhstan famine

as 1.75 million dead, and purge and other deaths at over 3 million dead,

for his total of 10 million deaths from Stalinism in the 1930s.

S.G. Wheatcroft, "More Light on the Scale of Repression and

Excessive Mortality in the Soviet Union in the 1930s," Soviet Studies,

April 1990, 355-367.

148. Robert Conquest, "Excess Deaths and Camp Numbers: Some

Comments," Soviet Studies 43, No. 5, 949-52.

149. Volkogonov, 360.

150. Peter Calvocoressi, World Politics since 1945, 6th ed.

(London: Longman, 1991), 233.

151. Arnold Beichman, The Long Pretense: Soviet Treaty Diplomacy

from Lenin to Gorbachev (New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Books, 1991),

83-4.

152. John Erickson; as quoted in Keith Sword, ed., The Soviet

Takeover of the Polish Eastern Provinces, 1939-41 (New York: St.

Martin's, 1991), 21.

153. Thomas W. Simons, Jr., Eastern Europe in the Postwar World

(New York: St. Martin's, 1991), 40.

154. Ibid., 206-7.

155. Bronislaw Geremek, "Between Hope and Despair," in Eastern

Europe ... Central Europe ... Europe, ed. Stephen R. Graubard (Boulder

CO: Westview, 1991), 100-101.

156. Ibid., 101.

157. John Drexel, ed., Facts on File Encyclopedia of the 20th

Century (New York: Facts on File, 1991), 504.

158. N. Lebedeva, "Documents: Stalin, Sikorski, et al,"

International Affairs (Moscow), January 1991, 116-32.

159. "Transcript of Cde [Comrade] J. V. Stalin's Conversation with

the Polish Ambassador to the USSR, Kot," International Affairs, January

1991, 125.

160. "Transcript of Cde Stalin's Conversation with Wladyslaw

Sikorski, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of Poland," International

Affairs (Moscow), 129.

161. Kryzysztof Skubiszewski, "View from Warsaw," International

Affairs (Moscow), January 1991, 56.

162. Stepan Radevich, "The Case of Sixteen," International Affairs

(Moscow), May 1991, 114-27; June 1991, 107-18.

163. Stepan Radevich, "`Mute Witnesses' Speak Up," International

Affairs (Moscow), December 1991, 120-34.

164. Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A

Personal Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 705.

165. Ibid., 466-72.

166. Ibid., 469.

167. Historical Abstracts: Part B, Twentieth Century Abstracts,

1914-1992 43, 1992, .

168. Ibid., 43B: 4032.

Chapter 5. The Historical and Political Implications of Katyn

pp. 137-145

1. There were 6,472 American MIAs left in North Korea--

considerably more than the 600 MIA discrepancy concerning Vietnam.

American authorities "had firm knowledge of at least 500 sick and

wounded POWs who were not returned by the North Koreans." "About 80

Soviet specialists were involved in direct interrogations of Americans."

Douglas Stanglin and Peter Cary, "Secrets of the Korean War: Forty

Years Later, Evidence Points to Stalin's Deep Involvement," U.S. News &

World Report, 9 August 1993, 47.

2. U.S. News & World Report, 9 August 1993, 47.

3. Paul, 306.

4. Nagorski, Newsweek, 26 October 1992, 41.

5. Speaking of Poles' wartime realization that they (and their

dead at Katyn) were about to be betrayed by the Western Allies, Allen

Paul wrote, "And the Poles reacted as would any people who discovered

that the murder of their best and brightest was about to go unpunished."

Paul, 315.

6. For the purposes of this paper, "Soviet Bloc" is defined as the

Soviet Union and any country over which it exerted decisive military and

political control.

7. Lech Walesa, Polish television, 20 October 1992; as quoted in

Vinton, 19.

8. This was demonstrated by my own use of it in Juneau, Alaska, in

1988.

9. The disappearance and ultimate fate of these Polish prisoners

has renewed relevance to the United States. The general lack of Western

concern and action about the mistreatment and extermination of Allied

prisoners of war by the Soviet Union during the Second World War did

nothing to discourage such practices from continuing through the Korean

War and later. (The Associated Press, "U.S. Report Says Airmen Taken to

Soviet Union," Springfield Star Journal-Register, 28 September 1993, 2.)

During the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, Communist Viet Cong massacred

a thousand or more South Vietnamese civilians, members of the

intelligentsia, in Katyn-like fashion. (Alje Vennema, Viet Cong

Massacre at Hue, (New York: Vantage Press, 1976), 136, 152.) When the

United States deserted its Indochinese allies, over a million pro-

Western (and/ or educated) Cambodians and an estimated 65,000

Vietnamese, principally military officers and other members of the South

Vietnamese intelligentsia, were exterminated for their political

uncooperativeness. (Edward Doyle, Terrence Maitland, and the Editors of

Boston Publishing Company, "Indochina Blood Baths," The Vietnam

Experience: The Aftermath, 1975-85, (Boston: Boston Publishing

Company, 1985), 24; and William J. Duiker, Vietnam since the Fall of

Saigon: Updated Edition, (Athens OH: Ohio University, 1989), 85.)

In 1992, Boris Yeltsin and General Volkogonov disclosed that some

Americans captured during the Vietnam War may have disappeared into the

Soviet GULAG slave labor camp system, never to return. ("Yeltsin

Acknowledges Soviets Held U.S. Prisoners during Vietnam War," Macomb

Journal, 16 January 1992, 8.) In 1993, Harvard University researcher

Stephen Morris discovered in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

(CPSU) Central Committee's archives a document indicating that the North

Vietnamese had 600 more American prisoners of war (POWs) than they had

admitted, expecting to use these men as bargaining chips in their

negotiations with the United States. With the collapse resulting from

our precipitous abandonment of the South Vietnamese, the need for these

men disappeared--as, apparently, did they. (Stephen J. Morris, "The

`1205 Document:' A Story of American Prisoners, Vietnamese Agents,

Soviet Archives, Washington Bureaucrats, and the Media," The National

Interest, Fall 1993, 32.) This article is Morris's convincing

refutation of attacks on the document's authenticity made by various

members of American media and academia and of the Clinton

Administration. If the latter are, as the author describes, engaging in

a heinous coverup of North Vietnamese--and, possibly, Soviet--

atrocities, the political consequences could be seismic.

10. Vinton, 31.

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Van Vliet, John H., Jr. Interview by Louis R. Coatney, 6 November 1992.

Zawodny, Janusz K. Interviews by Louis R. Coatney, 13 and 15 December

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