We Remember: 85 years ago today Josef Stalin, and several others of the Soviet Politboro, signed the order that led to the Katyn Massacre.

To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” - Elie Wiesel, Night

Josef Stalin in the foreground, Lavrentiy Beria seated behind him.

On March 5, 1940 the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union passed a resolution to shoot Polish prisoners of war held in the camps in Kozelsk, Starobielsk and Ostashkov and those detained by the NKVD in prisons in Western Belarus and Ukraine. 

Eighty five years ago today Josef Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Mikhail Kalinin signed Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria's order, condemning over  22,000 Polish POWs and civilians to death. Beria was Stalin's  head of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) from 1938 until 1945. He was the head of the secret police in the Soviet Union.

Beria's March 5, 1940 note requested that the cases of the Polish POWs and those arrested in a special manner should be dealt the highest penalty - by shooting them and without a formal trial.

 

This crime would forever be linked to the Katyn Forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered. This dark anniversary was observed five years ago in a conference titled "Generations of Memory - Testimonies."

First panel @CPRDiP Katyń conference on "Generations of Memory - Testimonies" underlining how important it is for families to keep visiting the Katyń cemeteries to keep the memory alive and to promote to Russians how to remember own victims of Stalinism. pic.twitter.com/CaYqaISuKx

— Katyń 1940 (@katyn1940) March 5, 2020

This mass execution was carried out while Communist Russia and Nazi Germany were allies that divided Poland and the rest of Central Europe between the two totalitarian powers in the August 24, 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

During this one year 10 month "honeymoon" between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Stalin's regime also handed over Jewish refugees to the Nazi Gestapo. 

Mass grave in the Katyn forest.

The crimes of Katyn and the Soviet Union's aiding of Nazi Germany's crimes against the Polish and Jewish peoples between September 1939 and June 22, 1941 must not be forgotten at a time that Russia's Vladimir Putin is trying to rewrite history in an Orwellian fashion, while he continues to write new chapters of infamy in Ukraine.

On March 5, 1940, a decision was made in Moscow to murder over 22 thousand Polish war prisoners. May the memory of the Russian lie and Katyń crime be a warning for the world. Let us always call it as it is: a crime is a crime, a victim - a victim, an aggressor - an aggressor.

— Donald Tusk (@donaldtusk) March 5, 2025