Katyn: The Politics of Mass Murder

The story the Katyn Massacre—the mass murder of thousands of Polish officers by the Soviet regime in 1940—and its subsequent treatment in the news strikingly reveals how the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union shaped public memory of World War II according to their changing political agendas, posited Dariusz Tolczyk, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Virginia. In a recent Kennan Institute lecture, Tolczyk examined the politics surrounding the Katyn Massacre, as well as the reactions of Western media to the 1943 discovery of the atrocities.

The Rupture of Public Memory in World War II Soviet and Western Media

Under Stalin, Tolczyk stated, Soviet public memory resembled a blackboard where today's written truth could be easily erased tomorrow. By the end of 1930s, at a time when the newspaper Pravda continuously cancelled yesterday's truths, Soviet citizens "became well trained in the Orwellian art of forgetting." Not surprisingly, Germany, once loudly praised as the Soviet Union's "eternal friend and ally" since September 1939, easily became a mortal enemy in Soviet newspapers in 1941. A similar rupture of public memory occurred in British and U.S. media after 1941 when Stalin, initially portrayed as cynical dictator, became a benign "Uncle Joe," who "looks like an American, dresses like an American, and thinks like American" according to one Life Magazine article. This change of imagery, noted Tolczyk, had to happen in order for the new political alignment to conform to the "black and white moral paradigm, with clear heroes and villains" which the Allied governments specifically designed for their societies during World War II. The discovery of the mass graves in the Katyn forest challenged this construction by bringing Stalin's good moral status into question.

Facts versus News Coverage

In April 1943, when German radio made public the discovery of mass graves in Katyn and laid the blame on the Soviets, Western leaders were unable to explain away the atrocities in consistency with their moral myth. In truth, the mass execution did take place on Stalin's orders, upon the decision of the Politburo, probably in connection with the "unloading" of Soviet camps in Kozelsk, Starobels and Ostashkov in preparation for newly arrested prisoners of war from Finland. The victims, comprised of Polish officers and members of the intelligentsia, were led to death unaware and shot one by one in NKVD prisons in Tver (Kalinin), Kharkiv, and in the Katyn forest.

In return, the Soviet Bureau of Information accused the Nazi regime of perpetrating the crime, and according to Tolczyk, "the Allied governments played Stalin's game." Despite numerous reports and investigations pointing to the guilt of Soviet authorities (e.g. Sir Owen O'Malley's investigation for Winston Churchill in 1943, George Earle's report to President Roosevelt in 1944, and the Polish Red Cross report, among others), the British and U.S. governments still decided not to part with the myth of Stalin's image as a hero, and pressured (unsuccessfully) the Polish government in exile to abandon the Katyn issue. Likewise, the Western media of the time, "showed little interest in establishing the facts and instead jointly attacked Poles for probing into the Soviet version of Katyn events," asserted Tolczyk. These reactions ultimately allowed the Soviet Union to pursue its Katyn allegations against the Nazis even up to the Nuremberg trials.

Post-War Reassessment

The new moral paradigm of the Cold War brought about another rupture in American "memory." The U.S. Congressional Committee Investigation of the Katyn Forest Massacre from 1951 to 1952 called for the Soviet culprits to be tried at the United Nations Court of Justice. In 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev admitted Soviet responsibility and opened the pertinent secret archives. In 2005, however, the Russian Military Prosecutor's Office decided that "Katyn was neither a crime against humanity, nor a political crime." The Polish government was finally permitted to erect a memorial in Katyn forest. While visiting it, Tolczyk noted, Poles are often told by locals that common graves of Stalin's Russian victims were also discovered nearby, but that hardly anybody in today's Russia seems to remember them.

Written by Lidiya Zubytska