Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

The camps now had space for prisoners from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia as Stalin had delayed his takeover of the Baltic republics until mid-June 1940, when the Finnish war was over. The NKVD had few Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian speakers left, and the Baltic republics had few resident communists to collaborate with the new authorities. The Soviet occupiers needed many months to identify the nationalists, the intellectuals, the property owners who could be deported. Apart from the deportees, some 60,000 Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians were killed; only the outbreak of war halted the slaughter. Until then, western Russia’s railways were crowded with trains. One week before Hitler attacked, over 17,000 Lithuanians and the same number of Latvians left for Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Komi republic; seven trainloads of Latvian and Lithuanian prostitutes went to Uzbekistan. On the previous night, from the territories grabbed from Romania—Bessarabia and the Bukovina—another 30,000 were deported. Until June 20, 1941, Poles and nationalist Ukrainians were still being railroaded east.

No sooner were the killings in Katyn over than the consequences began to emerge. Thousands of letters from wives and children reached Moscow, and some leaked abroad. When Hitler defeated France and Soviet intelligence began to admit to itself, if not to Stalin, the probability of war with Germany, they realized it had been madness to slaughter the cream of the Polish army. In August 1940, first the Hungarian, then the International Red Cross began to ask about missing persons. They got no answers.

The survivors, gathered at Griaznovtsy camp, numbered a few hundred officers. In October 1940 they were suddenly well treated and Lieutenant Colonel Berling was sent first class to Moscow to talk to Beria and Merkulov about forming a Polish army on Soviet soil. Berling said, “Fine, we have magnificent staff for an army in the camps.” Merkulov replied, “No, not those. We made a big mistake with them.” Berling was put in a luxurious dacha near Moscow with other senior Poles. By November Beria dared tell Stalin that he had a nucleus of twenty-four anti-German Polish officers, who would cooperate if Władysław Sikorski’s government in London authorized them. Stalin feared antagonizing Hitler but Beria went on regardless. More Poles, interned in Latvia, were retrieved in August 1940, and although many went to the GULAG, Beria formed two Polish brigades of officers.

After war between Germany and the USSR broke out in June 1941, about two thirds of the Polish soldiers sent to the GULAG were retrieved to fight against the Nazis. Most opted to serve alongside the British in North Africa and Sikorski continued to press for news of the missing officers. Stalin pretended to telephone Beria about them and then claimed that they had walked to Manchuria or had not been reported by lazy camp commandants. Vyshinsky claimed they had been freed in Poland. Stalin told General Anders that the Germans must have captured them. In 1942 100,000 Poles with their families left the USSR through Iran; tens of thousands remained in Russia, increasingly harassed.

On April 13, 1943, the Germans began exhuming Katyn, and Stalin added falsification to prevarication. The Germans called in the Swiss Red Cross, but to their disgrace the British and Americans denounced the Swiss report and concurred with the Russian version, that the Germans had buried old newspapers with the corpses to calumniate the innocent Soviets. In January 1944, the Soviets set up their own special commission, from which the party and the NKVD were conspicuously absent. Two academicians, a metropolitan bishop, the chairman of the Soviet Red Cross, and the writer Aleksei Tolstoi connived to produce “witnesses” to prove German “provocation.” A film was also made. Aleksei Tolstoi, as perceptive as he was unprincipled, warned Nikolai Shvernik, Stalin’s head of anti-German propaganda, that the film “is not only unfit for showing but can even have a negative effect . . . the witnesses seem to be repeating a lesson they have learned by heart . . .”

When in March 1946 at the Nuremberg trials Goering’s defense tried to bring up Katyn, the Soviet commission led by Vyshinsky protested forcibly. Katyn was not discussed. In Minsk, German officers were hanged for allegedly massacring Polish officers at Katyn. The lying went on until 1988.