On the inadmissibility of glorifying war criminals

85 years ago, in April-May of 1940, more than 14.5 thousand Polish prisoners of war were executed on the command of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, issued on March 5, 1940. The executed were army officers, policemen, members of the gendarmerie and border patrol agents who found themselves in Soviet custody after the Soviet invasion of Poland, which was agreed on with Hitler in September 1939. More than 7 thousand other Polish citizens were executed based on the same Politburo order. They were arrested in the spring of 1940 during a socio-political cleanse carried out on Soviet-occupied territories.

It was the first crime of this caliber committed during World War II.

The execution of prisoners of war is a war crime. It is one of the most severe and disgusting war crimes.

This is exactly how Soviet representatives qualified this crime in Nuremberg when they attempted to shift the blame for the Katyn massacre onto the Hitler coalition. However, the International tribunal rejected this attempt to deflect responsibility. After this, the topic of the Katyn massacre was strictly taboo in the Soviet Union and other countries of the “Soviet Bloc” for decades. Those who attempted to tell the truth about this crime were persecuted and accused of “libel” and “anti-Soviet” propaganda.

It was not until Perestroika that the situation changed.

On April 13, 1990, Gorbachev handed over the lists of Polish prisoners of war who were transferred from the Kozelsky, Ostashkovsky, and Starobelsky camps to be executed to the president of Poland, Jaruzelski. In 1992, key documents from 1940 became public: a brief from People's Commissar for Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union Beria to the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Politburo decision from March 5 itself.

However, the investigation that had been started by the Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office in 1990 was stopped in 2004, with the decision to halt the investigative process classified. Only after Memorial’s inquiry into this did it become known that the investigation was stopped “due to the death of the guilty party.” The crime itself was qualified as pertaining to Article 193-17, point “b” – “abuse of power by the senior officers of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, which had grave consequences in the presence of aggravating circumstances.

Hence, this means that those who carried out the crime were named as the guilty party. Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov, Mikoyan, Kalinin and Kaganovich – the people who made the criminal decision – were set aside with no consequence.

The European Court of Justice qualified the Katyn massacre as a war crime in 2012. Nevertheless, this obvious statement never made it to any official Russian documents.

The names of communist party functionaries who decided to execute the prisoners of war are still present in Russian toponymy. Streets and businesses are named after them, the new name of Königsberg is based on one of the criminals’ last names, and monuments to Stalin appear in Russia unrestricted, one after the other. This is nothing other than the glorification of war criminals.

Those guilty are dead, and we cannot punish them. We cannot resurrect those executed, either.

But, for the sake of our future, to not let new atrocities be committed, these crimes need to be qualified as such. Silencing these crimes, justifying these actions and putting war criminals on a pedestal are actions that cannot be accepted in the modern, civilized society.