Gulag: A History

by Anne Applebaum

Infamously, not all of the Polish POWs even made it to these eastern camps. In April 1940, the NKVD secretly murdered more than 20,000 of the captured Polish officers, shooting each one in the back of the head, following Stalin’s direct orders.37 Stalin murdered the officers for the same reason he had ordered the arrests of Polish priests and schoolteachers—his intention was to eliminate the Polish elite—and then he covered it up. Despite enormous efforts, the Polish government-in-exile was unable to discover what had become of the officers—until the Germans found them. In the spring of 1943, the German occupying regime uncovered 4,000 of the bodies in Katyn forest.38 Although the Soviet Union denied responsibility for the Katyn massacre, as it later came to be known, and although the Allies sided with this interpretation—even citing the Katyn massacre as a German crime in the indictment at the Nuremberg Tribunal—the Poles knew from their own sources that the NKVD was responsible. The affair would undermine the Polish-Soviet “alliance” not only during the war but also for the subsequent fifty years. Russian President Boris Yeltsin admitted Soviet responsibility for the massacre only in 1991.