Katyn Massacre
One of Kulik's few positive historical anecdotes was his successful (and uncharacteristic) advocacy for the lives of over 150,000 enlisted Polish POWs, captured during the September 1939 Invasion of Poland. Stalin, concerned with invasion from Nazi Germany, had ordered all of the captured Poles to be summarily executed as potential fifth-columnists; his decision was supported by Lev Mekhlis, Polish Front Commissar, and Lavrenti Beria, chief of the NKVD. Kulik, commander of the Polish Front, twice strongly argued with Stalin for their release, eventually extracting the concession that only the officers—26,000—would be executed, with the over 150,000 common enlisted men being let go.
Despite Mekhlis and Beria's protests, the enlisted men were dutifully released. The 26,000 officers were executed less than a month later by Stalin's order (many at the hands of NKVD executioner Vasili Blokhin) in the Katyn Massacre.
Read more about this topic: Grigory Kulik
Famous quotes containing the word massacre:
“It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)