Decision to shoot Polish prisoners

On 5 March 1940 the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) adopted a proposal from the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, Lavrentiy Beria. The NKVD was to examine “under a special procedure” the cases of some 14,700 Polish prisoners of war and about 11,000 arrested Polish citizens, and to apply to them “the supreme penalty: execution by shooting”. None of them was to stand before a court, hear any charges or see an indictment. The proposal was signed by Joseph Stalin and three other members of the party’s highest body. It was a death sentence on people the vast majority of whom were prisoners of war. On its basis, in the spring of 1940, the NKVD murdered nearly 22,000 Polish citizens at Katyn, Kharkiv, Kalinin and in prisons in the Kresy.

Prisoners and detainees in NKVD hands

After the aggression of 17 September 1939 hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers fell into Soviet captivity. In the autumn the NKVD separated out the officers, policemen, gendarmes, border guards and prison guards and concentrated them in three special camps (PL): Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov. Throughout the winter officials interrogated the prisoners, compiled files on them and looked for those willing to cooperate. At the same time, in the lands that the USSR incorporated into the Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSRs in November 1939, the NKVD arrested thousands of people regarded as enemies of the new authorities: officers who had avoided captivity, policemen, officials, landowners, political activists, and also those who had tried to cross the border into Hungary, Romania or Lithuania.

At the turn of February and March 1940 several decisions concerning the Poles of the Kresy were taken in Moscow. On 2 March the Politburo resolved to deport the families of prisoners and detainees to Kazakhstan. Three days later it decided the fate of the prisoners and detainees themselves.

Beria’s note

Beria’s proposal, addressed to Stalin as secretary of the Central Committee, bears the number 794/B. The heading of the typescript gives the month and year, “March 1940”, but not the day. The date of 5 March, written by hand on the first page, is the date on which the Politburo adopted the proposal. When exactly Beria prepared the document is not known, which is why different dates from the first days of March appear in the literature.

Beria wrote that the NKVD camps held 14,736 former officers, officials, landowners, policemen, gendarmes, prison guards, military settlers and intelligence agents, of whom more than 97 per cent were Poles. He itemised them man by man: 295 generals, colonels and lieutenant colonels, 2,080 majors and captains, 6,049 lieutenants, second lieutenants and ensigns, 1,030 officers and non-commissioned officers of the police, border guard and gendarmerie, 5,138 rank-and-file policemen, gendarmes, prison guards and intelligence agents, and 144 officials, landowners, priests and settlers. In the prisons of the western regions of Ukraine and Byelorussia, he said, 18,632 detainees were held, among them 10,685 Poles. These included 1,207 former officers, 5,141 former policemen, intelligence agents and gendarmes, 347 “spies and saboteurs”, 465 former landowners, manufacturers and officials, 5,345 members of various “counter-revolutionary” organisations and 6,127 “fugitives”, that is, people detained while trying to cross the border illegally.

The justification was brief. The prisoners and detainees, Beria wrote, were conducting anti-Soviet agitation in the camps, and in the prisons of the western regions they had been active in underground organisations. “All of them are hardened, incorrigible enemies of Soviet power”, and each of them was only waiting to be released so as to take up the fight against it. The NKVD therefore considered it necessary to examine the cases of 14,700 prisoners and 11,000 detainees under a special procedure and to shoot them all.

The second part of the document, beginning with the words “Instruct the NKVD of the USSR”, was a ready-made draft resolution. It specified the procedure: the cases of the prisoners were to be examined on the basis of materials of the NKVD Directorate for Prisoners of War, the cases of the detainees on the basis of files supplied by the NKVD of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSRs, and all this without summoning the condemned, without presenting them with charges, without a decision to close the investigation and without an indictment.

The troika

The sentences were to be passed by a three-man NKVD commission. It was not a court, nor even the ordinary Special Board of the NKVD, although it resembled the latter in its extrajudicial form. Its members were Beria’s first deputy and head of the Main Directorate of State Security, Vsevolod Merkulov, Bogdan Kobulov, one of Beria’s closest associates, and Leonid Bashtakov (PL), head of the NKVD’s 1st Special Department, which kept the records of those arrested and convicted.

The composition of the troika was changed on the document itself. In the original text one name was struck out and Kobulov’s name was written in by hand. The editors of the documents believe that what was struck out was most probably the name of Beria himself, with which the list had begun. As a result, the author of the proposal did not sit on the body that was to carry it out, although he headed the entire commissariat entrusted with its execution. In practice the work of the troika came down to approving lists of names on the basis of files prepared in the camps and prisons. From the beginning of April 1940 so-called dispatch lists, overwhelmingly amounting to death sentences, flowed from Moscow to the camps.

The signatures

On 5 March 1940 the document with the draft resolution came back with signatures. On the first page, diagonally across the text, Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov and Anastas Mikoyan put their signatures. In the margin was added: “Kalinin: for, Kaganovich: for”. Mikhail Kalinin and Lazar Kaganovich thus voted for the proposal, although they did not sign it. The three remaining members of the Politburo, Nikita Khrushchev, Andrei Zhdanov and Andrei Andreyev (PL), were not present at the decision and their signatures are absent from the document. Beria was at the time only a candidate member of the Politburo.

The resolution was entered without amendments in the secret part of minutes no. 13 of the Politburo’s meetings as item 144, “The matter of the NKVD of the USSR”. Extracts with the text of this item were drawn up from the minutes. One, addressed to Beria, who was to carry out the decision, was put away in the archive. The other lay unused for almost two decades.

The resolution of 5 March was a key link, but not the only one. Nine days later, in Kobulov’s office in Moscow, the details of the “unloading” of the camps were discussed with the heads of the regional NKVD directorates, and on 22 March Beria issued an order to transfer the detainees from the Kresy to prisons in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kherson and Minsk. The first transport of prisoners left Kozelsk on 3 April 1940.

The file that survived

A narrow circle of people in the USSR knew of the decision. In February 1959 the second extract from the minutes was handed to the chairman of the KGB, Aleksandr Shelepin. On 3 March 1959 Shelepin wrote by hand to the First Secretary of the CPSU, Khrushchev, a note (PL) in which he stated that “by virtue of a special decision of the NKVD troika of the USSR” 21,857 people had been shot, and proposed destroying their record files as useless to the state and dangerous if revealed. Only the minutes of the troika’s sessions and the documents on the carrying out of the sentences were to be kept. He attached to the note a draft resolution of the Presidium of the Central Committee on the matter. Whether, and to what extent, the files were destroyed has not been established to this day.

On 4 March 1970 pages 9 and 10 of minutes no. 13 of 1940, with item 144, were removed from the minutes and, together with Beria’s note, the extracts and Shelepin’s note, sealed in an envelope. It was called Closed Packet no. 1 or Special File no. 1. It was kept in the Politburo archive, and only the General Secretary had access to it, while the heads of the Central Committee’s chancellery could see it only in his presence. Annotations describing the contents and the circulation of the documents survive on the wrapping.

When on 13 April 1990 the TASS agency admitted that the Polish prisoners had been murdered by the NKVD, and Mikhail Gorbachev (PL) handed General Wojciech Jaruzelski copies of documents from the NKVD archives, Packet no. 1 was not revealed. The Soviet statement laid the blame on Beria and Merkulov, but not on the country’s highest authorities. Gorbachev passed the packet to Boris Yeltsin at the transfer of power at the end of 1991. In the autumn of 1992 Yeltsin’s spokesman accused Gorbachev of having known the truth about Katyn since at least April 1989 and of keeping silent. The dispute over what the last General Secretary knew and when was part of the political struggle between the two men.

The revelation in 1992

In September 1992 a special commission of the presidential archives opened the envelope. The decision to declassify the documents was taken by Yeltsin at a time when the case on the legality of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was being heard before the Russian Constitutional Court, and its representatives on 16 October, two days after copies were handed to Poland, moved to include the Katyn documents in the case file. On 14 October 1992 Russia’s chief archivist Rudolf Pikhoya (PL) handed authenticated copies of documents from the packet to President Lech Wałęsa in the Belweder. Later that same year the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences published them in the collection “Katyń. Dokumenty ludobójstwa” (“Katyn: Documents of Genocide”), and in Russia they were published in 1993 in the journal “Voprosy istorii”. The originals are kept today in Moscow by the state archive of documents of the Communist Party of the Soviet period.

Only then did it become clear that the order to kill the prisoners had been issued not by the NKVD alone but by the leadership of the party and the state with Stalin at its head. The Russian Main Military Prosecutor’s Office commissioned expert examinations of the writing and documents, which confirmed the authenticity of Beria’s note, the Politburo resolution and the signatures. Nevertheless, some Russian communists and commentators maintained for years that the documents from Packet no. 1 had been forged. Already during the proceedings before the Constitutional Court the party’s defenders questioned the date on Beria’s note. In 2010 a deputy of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Viktor Iluykhin (PL), claimed that the documents had been forged by a group in which Gorbachev’s adviser Alexander Yakovlev was said to have been involved. He presented no convincing evidence.

On 28 April 2010, after the crash of the aircraft carrying the Polish delegation to the commemorations at Katyn, Russia’s Federal Archival Agency for the first time placed scans of the documents from Packet no. 1 on its website. On 26 November 2010 the State Duma (PL) adopted, with 324 deputies for and 57 against, a statement that called the Katyn massacre a crime of the Stalinist regime and declared that according to secret documents the order had been given directly by Stalin and other leaders of the USSR. The communists voted against.

Significance

The decision of 5 March 1940 is the most important piece of evidence in the Katyn case. It shows that the mass murder was an act of the state, adopted in the ordinary official manner by its highest authorities, and not the arbitrary act of the security apparatus. Beria proposed, the members of the Politburo decided, the NKVD carried it out. Several thousand prisoners of war, protected by international law, and several thousand detainees were sentenced to death without trial, on the basis of belonging to a group deemed hostile: officers, policemen, officials, landowners. For half a century the packet with the signatures lay in an archive in the Kremlin, while the authorities of the USSR and of the Polish People’s Republic repeated that the Poles had been murdered by the Germans. On its basis, in April and May 1940, the Katyn massacre was carried out.