Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 13, 1990 TAG: 9004131029
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A/1 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MOSCOW LENGTH: Medium
The Tass news agency issued an official statement as Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev met with Polish President Wojciech Jaruzelski.
Western historians concluded years ago that the Soviets were responsible for killing the captive officers, most of whom were shot in the back of the head, but Moscow's refusal to admit it was a barrier to better Soviet-Polish relations. Jaruzelski is scheduled to visit Katyn on Saturday.
Until today, the Soviet Union had blamed Nazi Germany for the massacre. The Katyn Forest, located near Smolensk southwest of Moscow, was captured by Germany during World War II, and later recaptured by Soviet soldiers.
While the Nazis invaded Poland from the west in 1939 to start World War II, the Soviets invaded from the east. Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact that assigned them spheres of influence in Eastern Europe.
The Soviets interned the officers, some of Poland's most talented, at the beginning of the war. The massacre was first disclosed in 1943 by the Nazis, who attributed it to Stalin's secret police. More than 4,000 bodies have been found in a mass grave in the forest.
The Soviet statement said archive material discovered recently allowed officials now to blame Stalin's secret police Chief Lavrenti Beria, his protege V.N. Merkulov and others.
"The Soviet side, expressing its deep regret in connection with the Katyn tragedy, states that it is one of the most horrifying Stalinist crimes," Tass said.
Records indicate that only 394 of the prisoners held at Katyn were transferred to the Gryazovetsky prison camp, and that the rest were turned over to the NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB. They disappeared entirely from NKVD records, Tass said.
"The discovered archive material puts direct responsibility for the atrocities in the Katyn Forest on Beria, Merkulov and their henchmen," it said.
In Warsaw, Poles received Soviet acknowledgement of responsibility with renewed expressions of anger at the delay and tears over the massacre that has seared the national consciousness for 50 years.
"I regret that my mother could not live until this day," said Wanda Zadrozna, crying as she recalled her father's murder in the Russian woods.
"It's good that criminals admit their crimes," Solidarity leader Lech Walesa said in Gdansk. He called the Soviet admission "an act of moral justice which has been awaited for a long time."
He said there must also be "punishment of those guilty of the genocide," reparations stemming from the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939 and free access to Soviet territory that is "emotionally important" for Poles.
Several Soviet newspapers' reports recently have placed the blame for the murders on the Soviet side, but until today, the government had not admitted it.
Viktor Filatov, editor of Voyenno-Istoricheskii Journal, said he plans to publish archives proving that Josef Stalin's secret police killed at least 4,500 of the 15,000 Polish prisoners, the Interfax news agency said Thursday.
"The fate of the rest is yet to be established," he told Interfax, the information agency of Radio Moscow.
But, he said, "the newly surfaced archival documents add to mounting evidence of the repressive policy that Stalin's regime pursued toward both Soviet and foreign citizens."
Filatov said he did not have the documents in hand and he did not give a date of publication.
On March 22, the weekly Moscow News published a two-page report rebutting allegations that Nazi invaders mowed down Polish officers held prisoner just south of the western Russian city of Smolensk.
Other articles have called for the truth about Katyn, and a special government commission was established last year to investigate the massacre. No date has been given, however, for release of its findings.
by CNB