Russia yesterday published the files on the 1940 Katyn massacre of Polish officers by the Soviets on the Internet, an unprecedented move aimed at intensifying a sudden thaw in Moscow-Warsaw ties.
The publication, ordered by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, comes at a time when Russian-Polish ties have been warming in the wake of the plane crash in western Russia earlier this month that killed Polish president Lech Kaczynski.
“On the order of Russian President D.A. Medvedev, electronic copies of authentic archival documents on the ‘Katyn Problem’ from ‘Packet No. 1,’ which were held for decades in the Communist Party archives, have been published on the Web site of the state archives,” it said in a statement.
The documents in question were declassified in September 1992 on the orders of then-president Boris Yeltsin and shared with Poland, so their contents had been long known, the statement said.
However, until now the originals had only been available to specialized researchers and had never before been shared online, a spokeswoman for the Russian state archives said.
One of the documents posted online is a four-page memorandum from Lavrenty Beria, head of the NKVD secret police, to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin about the fate of thousands of Polish prisoners held by the Soviets.
In the document, Beria proposes that the NKVD “quickly examine the use of the highest means of punishment — death by shooting.”
Stalin’s signature and a red stamp reading “Top Secret” are on the first page of the document, which is dated March 1940.
Poland has long demanded that Russia open all its files on Katyn and the issue has strained ties between the two former Communist neighbors.
The publication of “Packet No. 1” does not have any effect on a separate case in which Russian human rights activists have been waging a court battle to force prosecutors to declassify a 1990s investigation into the Katyn massacre.
Prosecutors closed the investigation in 2004 and have refused to open their files on the case.
Some 22,000 Polish officers were executed by Stalin’s secret police at Katyn, in western Russia, and a number of other places in present-day Russia, Ukraine and Belarus in between April 1940 and May 1940.
The officers were taken prisoner after the Soviet Union invaded and occupied eastern Poland in September 1939, dividing up the country under the terms of a secret pact with Nazi Germany, which seized the rest of Poland.
For decades, Moscow blamed the Katyn massacre on Nazi Germany, until 1990 when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev finally admitted that the Polish officers had been executed as “enemies of Soviet power” by the NKVD.
Meanwhile, Russia’s Federation Council, its upper house of parliament, yesterday ratified a deal with Ukraine that will allow the Russian Black Sea Fleet to stay in Crimea until at least 2042.
Both the Russian lower house, the State Duma, and the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, had approved the deal on Tuesday, but the Ukrainian ratification was marred by scuffles and smoke bombs among deputies in Kiev.
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