Katyn Massacre - Cold War Views

Cold War Views

In 1951 and 1952, with the Korean War as a background, a U.S. Congressional investigation chaired by Rep. Ray J. Madden and known as the Madden Committee investigated the Katyn massacre. It concluded that the Poles had been killed by the Soviets and recommended that the Soviets be tried before the International Court of Justice. However, the question of responsibility still remained controversial in the West as well as behind the Iron Curtain. In the United Kingdom in the late 1970s plans for a memorial to the victims bearing the date 1940 (rather than 1941) were condemned as provocative in the political climate of the Cold War. It has also been alleged that the choice made in 1969 for the location of the Byelorussian SSR war memorial at the former Belarusian village named Khatyn, a site of a 1943 Nazi massacre have been made to cause confusion with Katyn. The two names are similar or identical in many languages, and were often confused.

In Poland, the pro-Soviet authorities covered up the matter in accordance with the official Soviet propaganda line, deliberately censoring any sources that might provide information about the crime. Katyn was a forbidden topic in postwar Poland. Censorship in the People's Republic of Poland was a massive undertaking and Katyn was specifically mentioned in the "Black Book of Censorship" used by the authorities to control the media and academia. Not only did government censorship suppress all references to it, but even mentioning the atrocity was dangerous. In the late 1970s, democracy groups like the Workers' Defence Committee and the Flying University defied the censorship and discussed the massacre, in the face of beatings, arrests, detentions, and ostracism. In 1981, Polish trade union Solidarity erected a memorial with the simple inscription "Katyn, 1940". It was confiscated by the police and replaced with an official monument with the inscription: "To the Polish soldiers—victims of Hitlerite fascism—reposing in the soil of Katyn". Nevertheless, every year on All Souls Day, similar memorial crosses were erected at Powązki cemetery and numerous other places in Poland, only to be dismantled by the police. Katyn remained a political taboo in communist Poland until the fall of communism in 1989.

In the Soviet Union during the 1950s, the head of KGB, Aleksandr Shelepin proposed and carried out a destruction of many documents related to the Katyn massacre in order to minimize the chance that the truth would be revealed. His 3 March 1959 note to Nikita Khrushchev, with information about the execution of 21,857 Poles and with the proposal to destroy their personal files, became one of the documents that were preserved and eventually made public.