Who was it that issued the final order for the genocide in Katyń? How many Polish officers survived this crime? Why did it take so long to uncover the truth about this crime committed by the Soviet Secret Police, the NKVD?

The order, issued on March 5th 1940, sentenced 25,700 people to death by shooting. Those executed included Polish military officers, police officers, civil servants, gendarmes, and prison workers, among others. The order was signed by members of the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee: Joseph Stalin (General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party), People's Commissar for Defense Kliment Voroshilov, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, and Anastas Mikoyan, Deputy Chairman of the USSR's Council of People's Commissars.

Mikoyan, Stalin and Voroshilov signed the resolution in blue pencil, while Molotov used a plain gray pencil. A note written on the original copy, probably by Stalin's personal secretary, reads: “Kalinin — for, Kaganovich — for.” Mikhail Kalinin was at the time Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, and Lazar Kaganovich was a member of the Politburo.

The resolution was then given to Vsevolod Merkulov — Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Leonid Bashtakov — Head of the NKVD's 1st Special Section, and Bakhcho Kobulov — Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, who were to execute the orders.

If we are to believe a memo dated March 9th 1959, written by KGB Chief Shelepin to Nikita Khrushchov, Soviet archives hold documents claiming that the NKVD executed 21,857 people in 1940, meaning that not all of the 25,700 Poles sentenced to death in March 1940 were actually shot. The difference between the two numbers gives us a clue to the number of survivors.

Why did it take so long to uncover the truth?

This question is all the more important in today's times, so my answer is somewhat long, but please bear with me.

The Soviet Union was never interested in revealing the truth about the Katyń Massacre, because it was never interested in revealing the truth about any crime committed during the existence of Soviet Russia, and later the USSR. All the documents on the crimes were kept locked up in top secret archives, with access granted only to the highest echelons of Soviet power — the General Secretaries of the Soviet Communist Party. Historians and journalists weren't allowed to read the documents, and even if they were, their articles or books would be censored, and the authors would be subject to punishment for distributing false information. Examples of this can found in  the history of Communist Poland, where people attempting to reveal the truth about the Katyń Massacre were censored, sentenced and otherwise repressed by the government.

By executing the massacre, the USSR broke the convention on the treatment of POWs, and committed genocide on 22,000 Polish soldiers and policemen. Crimes like this are not subject to time limitations. The USSR, a country that called itself a peace-loving nation and demanded justice in other cases of genocide, did not want to reveal to the world the fact that Soviet officers also committed genocide, by murdering — with no court sentence — Polish soldiers and policemen, as well as millions of other innocent people...

Revealing the truth about the Katyń Massacre — in the opinion of the Soviet government — could set off a landslide of revelations regarding crimes committed against the citizens of Soviet Russia, the Soviet Union, as well as citizens of other countries: Latvia, Ukraine, France, Hungary, Lithuania, Mongolia, Finland, Germany, Belarus, and others. The leaders of the Communist Party of the USSR couldn't even imagine, for over half a century, the possibility of revealing to the world that Russians, not just Germans, murdered POWs and prisoners, that Soviet Russia had concentration camps before the Third Reich did, and that there were over one thousand slave labor camps, called gulags. We should also mention that even today, despite the fact that the true perpetrators of the Katyń Massacre were revealed in 1990, there are still some writers, historians, and politicians who claim that the 1940 massacre was the responsibility of the Germans, not the NKVD.

But the problem isn't just in revealing the truth about the crime. The next step would have had to be the judgment and punishment of those responsible — that is the law. But in the Soviet Union that would have meant that the leaders of the Communist Party and the NKVD would have to be brought in front of a court and punished. Imagine a totalitarian country, ruled by a communist party with the secret police as the base of its power, trying to bring even the former leaders of the party to court.  Even Nikita Khrushchov, who uncovered the crimes of Stalin, failed to prosecute Stalin's henchmen, although they were still alive. And he didn't want to, of course, since as former Secretary of the Communist Party in Ukraine, he himself was responsible for the crimes and deportations committed there.

The Communists didn't want to prosecute the former NKVD leaders because that would simply be impossible in a country in which the secret police — the NKVD — had such strong influences.  Even after the Katyń Massacre was made public in 1990, none of the former NKVD officers responsible for the Massacre were brought to justice. Following a such a high-profile prosecution, public opinion worldwide would begin to demand that the victims of repression be compensated, after all — that is the law. That, in turn, would mean payment for the families of the Katyń Massacre's victims and millions of others. No budget could bear the strain of compensating the millions of victims and their families for which the Soviet Union was responsible.

I highly suggest reading “The Black Book of Communism” by Stéphane Courtois, published in the US by Harvard University Press. In it you'll find information on communist crimes, not just those in the USSR. I must warn you though, that reading this book might make it hard to fall asleep.

Were the NKVD officers directly responsible for the Katyń Massacre ever brought to justice, publicly condemned, or has their personal data ever been made public?

As far as the NKVD officers responsible for the massacre — none of them has ever been officially brought to justice. I'm not sure we can regard listing their names (without detailed information) in one book and one bulletin as condemnation. Their names (not all of them surely, since we historians have not found them all yet) were published in an article titled “Rubles for the Executioners”, published in Polish in a periodical titled “The Katyń Bulletin” (issue 38, 1994), and in a book by Professor Jacek Trznadel, titled “Return of the Executed Army”, also published in Polish (“Powrót rozstrzelanej armii”, Wydawnictwo “ANTYK”, 1994). I wrote about one of them on the Katyń website: Vasiliy Blokhin, who personally murdered several hundred Polish officers.

Has a list of the names of all the executioners been published? If so, where?

“Return of the Executed Army”, by Jacek Trznadel, includes a list of 125 people rewarded for the “special assignment”, i.e. those who took part in murdering the prisoners: executioners (those who pulled the trigger, e.g. Vasiliy Blokhin), drivers who transported the bodies, prison guards watching the prisoners in their cells, those responsible for getting the prisoners to the place of their death, as well as others. The names were also published in the “Katyń Bulletin” (38/1994), but the Bulletin has not been published for years and is not available in libraries, except at the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków, Poland.

To which countries or organizations was the issue of the Katyń Massacre presented?

In 1943, the leaders of the US and the UK were told the truth about the Katyń Massacre. For Churchill and Roosevelt, the truth about the Massacre wasn't as important as the presence of Soviet forces in the front against the Germans. The Soviet ally was more numerous, and therefore more important, than the Polish ally. It was the Soviets who were to attack Japan right after defeating Germany. The International Red Cross in Geneva learned the truth about the Massacre in 1943, as did a few other European countries, such as Italy and Hungary. The truth was also known in German-occupied Czechoslovakia and Denmark, since it was from these countries that experts were sent to the exhumations in Katyń. The Vatican new about it, thanks to Kraków Metropolitan Bishop Sapieha, who had sent his representative, Father Jasiński, to Katyń.

In 1951, a Congressional investigation in the House of Representatives, known as the Madden Committee, was created to investigate the crime. It was discovered during the investigation that the US State Department and the Pentagon had blocked information on the Massacre in 1944, to keep Americans from knowing the truth.

In 1972, while preparations for the erection of a Katyń monument by the local Polish diaspora in London were under way, the British government denied any connection with the initiative and no official representatives of the government or military were present at the opening. Unofficially though, many Englishmen, MPs and high ranking officers of the military were present.

For years, many countries tried to remain officially silent on the issue, in order to avoid upsetting the Soviet Union. Researchers and journalists were forbidden access to archives in Washington, D.C. and London. Few publishing houses in western countries risked publishing books on the crime. Many authors, such as Stanisław Swianiewicz, Aleksandra Kwiatkowska-Viatteau, Janusz Zawodny, and Józef Mackiewicz had trouble getting published.

Why were the victims' heads covered with coats before the execution? Was there some deeper meaning or symbol in this?

The officers' belts were taken to make it easier for the executioners to throw the victims' coats over their heads, which was done to mute any shouts for help or warning to others who had not yet been killed and were nearby (in their cells or in trucks) and could still attempt to fight back and resist. After they had been shot, the victims' heads and throats still bled, but most of the blood would stay in the coat. The idea was to keep a truckload of 20 or 30 bodies from spilling blood out onto the street. According to accounts by former NKVD agents, the trucks would fill up with blood anyway, and would have to be washed down to keep them in “working order” the next day. Or night, rather, as the executions (e.g. in Kharkiv, Kalinin (Tver) and in Smolensk) were conducted at night, in internal NKVD prisons. Only in the Katyń forest were officers shot in the morning, right at the pits to which they had been brought by truck. 

Why were the officers' rings taken?

Rings are made of gold, and gold was always valuable. The executioners didn't want to — and didn't have time — to take the rings off the bodies after they had been shot, and they also wanted to keep their hands clean. They didn't manage, however, to confiscate all the rings and watches, and some of these were found during the exhumations in 1943, and even in 1994. It is also probable that some of the executioners wished to keep a “souvenir”. Most of the NKVD agents who took part in the Massacre were rewarded with 800 rubles, or a month or two's pay, and some were even decorated.

Questions regarding the Katyń Massacre are answered by Stanisław M. Jankowski