Paul Goble
Staunton, Dec. 15 – Last week, Moscow television showed a four-part series on the Katyn tragedy in which Soviet siloviki murdered more than14,000 Polish soldiers in 1940 and then blamed it on the Germans. The latest programs continue to insist on that version of events, a lie that is “analogous to Holocaust denials,” Sergey Romanov says.
The show – and that is what it was, the chief editor of the Katyn Materials project says – featured many Russians with advance degrees. But most of them showed their ignorance of the past, their willingness to follow the Kremlin line, and their readiness to serve as “apologists for the Stalin regime (novayagazeta.ru/articles/2021/12/15/taina-podlosti-na-ntv).
In so doing, these supposed “experts” showed themselves in one camp with Holocaust deniers and like the latter demonstrated “a nihilistic approach to historical evidence with the single goal of justifying a tyrant.” What they were doing “does not have any relationship to the search for truth,” the investigator says.
In an extensive article for Novaya gazeta, Romanov demolishes their arguments by citing the findings of historians, including some Russian ones, that prove beyond doubt that it was Stalin’s NKVD and not Hitler’s Gestapo that was responsible for this genocidal crime, one intended to deprive Poland of the people who could defend it against totalitarian aggression.
Even in 1940, after occupying much of Poland as a result of his criminal deal with Hitler, the researcher continues, Stalin was thinking about the future and wanted to leave the Soviet Union’s Western neighbor without the possibility of resisting occupation by Moscow after Hitler was defeated.
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