Russian officials have handed over to Polish colleagues about 20 secret files related to the World War II Katyn Massacre in which thousands of Polish elite were killed by Soviet secret service, officials said on Thursday.
Saak Karapetyan, head of the international legal department at the prosecutor general’s office, gave two boxes of documents to Polish diplomats during a joint press conference at the prosecutor’s office in Moscow.
Seventy years ago, 20,000 Polish officers and members of the intelligentsia were murdered on Soviet territory by the People’s Commissariat Internal Affairs (NKVD) with Stalin’s approval. In 1943, the Germans discovered the mass graves near the camps, as well as prisons in Katyn forest, which have now become a memorial site. Stalin accused the Nazi regime of the crime.
Before the communist regime began to wane, the issue was untouchable. After the fall of the Soviet Union, however, Russia acknowledged the massacre, but its leaders never referred to the incident as a genocide—none of executioner’s names were uncovered, and no one was ever arrested.
Russian officials said that those 20 secret files contained the marching orders of prisoners of war, the lists of Polish officers, and the reports of interrogations of executed prisoners, as well as burial places.
The files could be another turn in revealing more details of the massacre approved by Stalin.
Russia had first published the electronic copies of secret Katyn documents on the Russian federal archive website this year. It came after the tragic plane crash in Russia on April 10, which killed the Polish first couple and 94 others.
The secret documents contained in “Special File No. 1” were originally kept in the archives of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party and were only available to a select few. The archives were later handed over to the political and social department of the Russian federal archive, where Stalin’s main documents are kept.
The Russian military prosecutor’s office suspended the declassification and investigation of the crimes in 2004, saying it was in “excess of officials’ duties.”
Soon after, the Russian international society for human rights Memorial appealed to a Moscow court to allow the process to proceed, but the court refused. They later asked the Supreme Court, which led Moscow to consider the issue.
