Moscow, December 25, 1991

Gorbachev then pushed back his chair and went to his office safe, from which he extracted two large envelopes tied with string and with broken wax seals. There was one document they should inspect first, he said when he resumed his seat. He began reading the contents to his two companions. It was a memo, dated March 5, 1940, from Lavrenty Beria, head of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, which recommended the execution of 25,700 Polish prisoners in Katyn Forest near Smolensk. Written on it in Stalin’s blue pencil were the words, “Resolution of the Politburo,” and the signatures of Stalin, Molotov, Mikoyan, and Voroshilov. Gorbachev also read aloud a deposition from Alexander Shelepin, former head of the KGB. In 1959 Shelepin had given the total number of Polish victims shot in 1940 as 21,857, and proposed to Khrushchev the destruction of all incriminating documents.⁷

The file was conclusive evidence that the Politburo ordered the slaughter of the Polish officers. For five years after Gorbachev took office, it had been Soviet practice to continue the postwar fiction of blaming the Germans for carrying out the mass killings after they invaded the USSR in 1941. In April 1990 the exhumation of bodies and other circumstantial evidence had compelled Gorbachev to admit the truth, but only partially. He authorized the Soviet news agency TASS to express profound regret to Poland for Stalin’s “heinous crime,” as if Stalin had acted alone.

Gorbachev had never conceded that the evidence existed of full Politburo approval of one of the worst crimes in European history. Here at last was the absolute proof of the complicity not just of Stalin and the notorious Beria but of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Yakovlev listened with a growing sense of anger. As a historian, he had been seeking these papers everywhere. He concluded at once that Gorbachev knew all along about their existence but had kept them from him.

“Gorbachev in my presence gave Yeltsin the package with all the documents on Katyn [and] when the envelope was opened it turned out that they were notes about the shooting of Polish military and civilians,” he wrote later. “Gorbachev was sitting there stone-faced as if nothing was ever discussed on that matter. Time and time again I asked in the general department of the Central Committee which documents are in the Politburo archives regarding this, and I got the same response each time—there is nothing.” He was bewildered at finding evidence that Gorbachev withheld such material over the years. “Gorbachev would have gained politically and morally if he made them public; he didn’t have good judgment of people but he was an even worse judge of himself.”

Gorbachev subsequently claimed that he had only received the incriminating documents the previous evening from Revenko, who had his attention drawn to them by the director of the archives and insisted that the president look at them. By Gorbachev’s account, it took his breath away to read “this hellish paper which condemned to death thousands of people at a single stroke.”⁸

His former chief of staff, Valery Boldin, would claim in his memoir that he had shown the documents in question to Gorbachev more than two years earlier, prior to a visit to Poland, and that his boss told him not to show them to anyone else, saying, “This is a hanging matter.”⁹ Archive annotations show that in 1989 Boldin did open the file containing the Politburo order to shoot the Poles and that every Soviet leader since Stalin, and not excluding Gorbachev, had read the secret file and knew the truth. According to Gorbachev, the two sets of documents Boldin showed him simply related to a Stalin-era commission pinning the blame for the massacre on the Nazis.

Chernyaev would later take the charitable view that Boldin was trying to discredit Gorbachev and doubted that Gorbachev ever did see the execution command.

The three men agreed that the “smoking gun” documents would have to be delivered to the Poles. “I’m afraid they can lead to international complications. But now this is your mission, Boris Nikolayevich,” said Gorbachev, handing them over. Yeltsin would release the documents to the Russian media the following October.¹⁰

The rest of the secret files were stuffed into boxes. “Take it—now it’s all yours,” said Gorbachev. Yeltsin signed the receipt. Yakovlev was later “dumbfounded” to discover that they included secrets that even he, with his research into Bolshevik atrocities, had not imagined. Among them was an order signed by Lenin for the execution of 25,000 Russian Orthodox priests in the civil war of 1918 to 1921, though it is doubtful if this was carried out. All Russians knew that Stalin’s hands were bloody, but many revered Lenin as the father of the nation and did not associate him with mass killings.