Word: katyn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ever since the bodies of more than 4,000 Polish officers were found in 1943 in the Katyn forest, near the Soviet city of Smolensk, their fate has been a disturbing blank spot in Polish history. Moscow has maintained that the cold- blooded killings were carried out by the Nazis after they invaded the U.S.S.R. in 1941. But Poles have long suspected that the officers were executed and buried in mass graves by Soviet forces...
...principal address to the Polish Sejm (parliament), Gorbachev profoundly disappointed even many conservative listeners by failing to deal forthrightly with the bitterest chapter in Soviet-Polish relations: the World War II massacre of 15,000 Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk. The Soviets have long maintained that those murders were carried out by invading Nazi forces, but most Polish and many other historians believe they were ordered by Moscow. A joint Soviet-Polish historical commission was formed last year and given access to previously closed Soviet archives dealing with the matter. Many Poles had hoped that Gorbachev...
...Soviet Union is always ready to present the necessary information about Nazi war crimes. That is not true. What about the Soviets' refusal to admit guilt in the Katyn Forest massacre, where more than 4,400 Polish officers were killed during World...
...observer know better than a Pole what the Soviets are up to? All the past of Polish-Soviet relations is marked by violence and treason from the Soviet side. Of course, the official historiography keeps its mouth shut about that. But Polish people remember very well the massacre in Katyn forest, the deportations to Siberia, the betrayed Warsaw Uprising, the means by which Communist rule has been imposed on Poland since 1944. And they also remember three examples of Soviet "brotherly help": Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Afghanistan in 1980. Can anybody seriously maintain that the Poles underestimate...
...determined band of radicals that Moscow imagines, but it is easy to see why the Soviets are wary of it. Terms like "democracy" and "pluralism" crop up frequently in Solidarity conversations. At an outdoor rally late last month, one woman demanded full public disclosure of the Katyn Forest massacre, and another asked about rumors that a new mass grave had been found. Walesa tried to deflect these inflammatory questions, but his answer must have troubled the Kremlin even so: "We do have to have a settling of accounts. Right now we have to work on odnowa." Some Solidarity theoreticians, while...