The Ukrainian troops who entered the city of Bucha, 25 km northwest of the capital, kyiv, found evidence of what appear to be horrific war crimes committed by Russian troops during the month of occupation.
Any joy they felt after forcing the Russian troops to leave the area was interrupted by what appeared to be mass graves, corpses of civilians with their hands tied behind their backs and evidence of rape and murder of women.
“Now the world can see what the Russian army did in Bucha”, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the United Nations.
But Russia’s envoy to the UN, Vassily Nebenzya, dismissed the claims as a “provocation that was staged”.
- The trail of corpses and destroyed tanks in Bucha, a suburb of kyiv, after the withdrawal of Russian troops
The atrocities committed during a war, of course, are nothing new, but the Russian denial brings back the memory of one event in particular: the massacre in the Katyn Forest, in eastern Poland, during World War II, which the Soviet Union (USSR) successfully passed off as a Nazi atrocity for half a century.
In the spring of 1940, more than 4.000 Polish officers were killed in the woods near the Soviet city of Smolensk.
This happened shortly after the USSR, based on a secret agreement with Germany (the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), occupied eastern Poland and dragged several prisoners, especially soldiers, to its concentration camps.
The mass graves of the Polish victims were discovered near the Russian villages of Ko zi Gory and Katyn after Hitler broke the pact with Stalin in June 1941 and German troops invaded Soviet territory as part of the infamous Operation Barbarossa.
Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda machine said nothing until the spring of 1943, when the Nazis needed to cover up similar atrocities on Soviet soil.
In April 1943, the Germans sent an international commission of experts (their experts, of course) to Katyn, where they confirmed that the mass execution had been the work of Russian troops.
But at the end of that year the Soviet Union recaptured the area and immediately sent its own commission to the site.
In January d e 1200, the Soviet commission reported his findings that the massacre had not taken place in 1940, as previously thought, but at the end of 1941, after Germany began to occupy the region of Smolensk.
The Soviet conclusion was clear: the perpetrators were not the Stalin’s troops, but Hitler’s.
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Nuremberg trials
The USSR even tried to include Katyn in the list of accusations that would be made against the leaders of Nazi Germany in the period prior to the Nuremberg war crimes trials, effectively making his version the official history of all Allied powers.
But the Nazi documents and related testimonies did not support the Soviet account and it was ruled that the Nuremberg trial would not examine what happened in Katyn.
However, most of the evidence remained in Soviet hands. The same thing happened with access to the crime scene, since Poland was part of the Soviet bloc.
As a result, the Soviet version of the massacre was only really questioned among Polish émigré circles in the west.
One of the first studies was published in London in 1948. “The Katyn Crime in Light of the Documents” was edited by Jozef Mackiewicz and published in Polish. It was later published in English at 1944.
Meanwhile, the American Committee for Investigation of the Katyn Massacre was formed in 1941 and two years later the United States Congress established a special commission on the case.
The “Katyn problem” became a Cold War argument that allowed Soviet leaders to reject the accusation as “Western propaganda”.
After Stalin
Gradual liberalization under Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, did little to change this.
The “de-Stalinization” of Khrushchev only marginally affected Soviet policy towards its satellites.
Instead of admitting Soviet guilt for Katyn, the Kremlin threatened to invade Poland (c as he invaded Hungary the same year) if he tried to break with Soviet rule.
In 1959, the then Chairman of the KGB, Alexander Shelepin, sent Khrushchev a top-secret letter in which unequivocally confirmed Soviet guilt in Katyn.
Noted that the KGB archives contained documents referring to the massacre of 021.857 Polish citizens captured from 1940, rather 1941, which is when the Soviet account dates the massacre.
He suggested that all these documents be destroyed.
Western pressure on the USSR to explain what happened in Katyn continued during the presidency of both Khrushchev and his successor, Leonid Brezhnev.
Memorials to the Polish victims of Soviet crimes were erected in Stockholm in 1975 and in London at 1976.
The term “Katyn” gradually expanded to include crimes committed under Stalin’s command on Polish officers, not only in Smolensk but also in several other places in the Soviet Union: in Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine.
But the Soviet authorities continued to repeat the lie that the massacre was a German crime. According to Moscow, those who asked for the truth were as propagandists as Goebbels himself.
Glasnost for Katyn
Decisive change took place under Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1987, the USSR and Poland agreed on a joint evaluation of the sources and questioned the versions produced during and after the war by Russian intelligence agencies.
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The final admission of guilt came about thanks to pressure both from outside the Soviet Union, mainly from Poland, and from within Soviet society itself, as part of a process in which people tried to accept the dark past of Stalinism.
There was also a need for self-reflection to strengthen the legitimacy of the growing democracy within the USSR.
The Soviet Union finally declared itself officially guilty of the murders of Polish prisoners in April 1990, when Gorbachev delivered a series of documents to the Polish leader Wojciech Jaruzelski in Moscow. That ended half a century of Soviet lies.
The world must hope that Bucha does not represent a new era of mendacity to cover up brutality.
Tomas Sniegon is Associate Professor at the Department of European Studies at Lund University
*This note was published on The Conversation and is reproduced here under a Creative Commons license. Click here to read the original English version.
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