Anti-Stalin Poles and Russians unite over Katyn massacre:
Imperialists stir up Polish anti-communism as usual

by MC5

On September 2nd, the lead story on the British Broadcasting 
Corporation (BBC) web site was the Katyn massacre in World War II. 
Ministers from Poland and Russia attended the 60th anniversary 
commemoration 125 miles from Moscow with the purpose of bashing 
Stalin and repairing Russian-Polish relations.

As MIM explained in MIM Theory #6, the imperialists have been 
making a big deal out of the Katyn massacre of Polish officers in 
order to tarnish Stalin and rally Eastern Europe against 
communism. Just as the bourgeois press flatters the Confederate 
sympathizers of today by making a big story about raising a 
Confederate sub from the ocean floor and honoring Confederate war 
dead, the imperialist press is now flattering reactionary and 
immature Polish nationalism so long as it is anti-communist. BBC 
ran a similar article in July, and of course in September of 1999 
as well.

In 1992, Yeltsin admitted the Katyn massacre was by the Soviets 
and he released declassified Stalin era documents. Before Yeltsin, 
Gorbachev had said the Soviets were to blame for the massacre, not 
the Nazis. Although there continue to be Russians, Poles and 
others who do not believe Katyn was a Soviet massacre -- including 
the Northstar Compass organization in Canada that is undertaking 
to organize ex-Soviet communists -- MIM has accepted that Stalin 
ordered the executions.

For the first time in a bourgeois article, MIM has seen an attempt 
-- albeit one sentence -- to explain why the Soviets would have 
killed the Polish officers, more than 4000 according to the BBC. 
This is all the BBC had to say about the other side of the story 
regarding the Polish officers that: " the Soviets feared would be 
a threat to their control of Poland."(1) There is nothing about 
how the Polish military leaned toward the Nazi side, how it 
refused to side with the Soviets against the Nazis and how it took 
to shooting at Jews and other national minorities within Poland as 
observed by first-hand witnesses including globetrotting 
proletarian writer Anna Louise Strong, who wrote before the Katyn 
massacre.

The following was NKVD head L. Beria's explanation for why the 
Polish officers had to be shot.

***

"5 March 1940 

USSR People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs 

Moscow 

To Comrade Stalin 

A large number of former officers of the Polish Army, employees of 
the Polish Police and intelligence services, members of Polish 
nationalist, counter-revolutionary parties, members of exposed 
counter-revolutionary resistance groups, escapees and others, all 
of them sworn enemies of Soviet authority full of hatred for the 
Soviet system, are currently being held in prisoner-of-war camps 
of the USSR NKVD and in prisons in the western provinces of 
Ukraine and Belarus.

The military and police officers in the camps are attempting to 
continue their counter-revolutionary activities and are carrying 
out anti-Soviet agitation. Each of them is waiting only for his 
release in order to start actively struggling against Soviet 
authority.

The organs of the NKVD in the western provinces of the Ukraine and 
Belarus have uncovered a number of counter-revolutionary rebel 
organisations.

Former officers of the Polish Army and police as well as gendarmes 
have played an active role in all of these organisations.

Amongst the detained escapees and violators of the state borders a 
considerable number of people have been identified as belonging to 
counter-revolutionary espionage and resistance organisations.

14,736 former officers, government officials, landowners, police, 
gendarmes, prison guards, settlers in the border regions and 
intelligence officers [more than 97% are Poles] are being held in 
prisoner-of-war camps. This number includes soldiers and junior 
officers."(2)

***

Poland suffered 6 million dead in World War II, a war which cost 
the Soviet Union 27 million, so there should not be so many 
stories and activities concerning a few thousand Polish officers 
in Katyn. The media focuses on the Katyn massacre without context 
and thereby whitewashes Nazism. Recent generations receive the 
impression that World War II was only so horrible because some 
military officers were executed in camps. That is far from the 
reality of the war.

In the year 2000 the Polish Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek still tried 
to make the matter one of Stalin's crimes. Some ahistorical 
Russians have also bought this interpretation and have asked for 
Polish forgiveness. What is being lost in all the mourning of war 
dead of sixty years ago is the historical truth of right and 
wrong. The real crime was that Poland did not have military 
leaders willing to fight fascism. Today the reactionaries and 
moronic simpletons say that history was a matter of a few mean men 
like Stalin and there was not a widespread fascist movement, only 
German Nazis. The truth is that fascist ideas raged all through 
Europe and the Polish military leaned toward the German side of 
the war.

True, progressive Polish soldiers did fight the Nazis, but that 
resistance only lasted a week. It proved perfectly that Stalin was 
right that Poland should have accepted Soviet aid in 1937 or 1938 
to defend its Western borders and prevent the dismemberment of 
Czechoslavakia. To claim in retrospect that Poland was independent 
when it was unable to stop Hitler in his 1939 invasion and when 
Hitler viewed it as a passageway to the Soviet Union, to make such 
a claim was bad enough in 1939 but to continue to make it after 
history has spoken is to live in a fantasy world, but that is 
exactly the fantasy world that bourgeois Poles live in while 
duping many proletarian Poles who go along with such nationalism. 
Poland was like the other small European countries harboring pro-
Nazi elements speeding up their fall to Nazi Germany.

In many situations in the world, just struggles go without 
proletarian internationalist aid. In Poland in the late 1930s, 
there was no need to reject substantial proletarian 
internationalist aid. Indeed, rejecting Stalin's aid was an 
historical crime on par with Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of 
Hitler, one that emboldened Hitler to continue gobbling up Eastern 
Europe and that made Hitler seem even more godly to his German 
people.

Here is what reactionary British Prime Minister Winston Churchill 
said in 1944 to the Poles: "Without the Russian Army, Poland would 
have been destroyed or brought into slavery and the Polish nation 
itself would have been wiped off the face of the earth. Without 
the valiant Red Army, no other power on earth would have been able 
to accomplish this. Poland now will be an independent, free 
country in the heart of Europe with wonderful and better 
territories than the one she had before. And if she will not 
accept this, Britain removes from itself all obligations and lets 
the Poles themselves work out their own agreement with the 
Soviets.

"I don't think we can be asked to give any further assurances and 
promises to Poland regarding their borders or their attitude 
regarding the USSR. Poland fell in days to German Nazis, while the 
Polish government at that time refused to receive help from the 
Soviet Union.

"Those Poles that are now vying for leadership in Poland must 
think that we, the British, are stupid that we would start a war 
against our USSR ally on behalf of the demands to restore the 
Polish eastern borders which had the majority of non-Poles living 
in those territories. A nation that proved to the world that it 
could not defend itself, must accept the guidance of those who 
saved them and who represent for them a perspective of genuine 
freedom and independence."(3)

It must have been bitter medicine for the reactionary Poles to 
hear the above from their long-time British ally. If things were 
so clear even to Churchill, then the Polish people must have been 
in a truly strange nationalist mist to have rejected Soviet aid. 
The Germans killed 6 million Poles, and still some Poles listen to 
their old leaders and believe the simplistic bourgeois history 
that the war was just about two equally mean men, Stalin and 
Hitler. 

It is not surprising that the imperialist press and bourgeois 
Polish leaders focus on Katyn, because their criminal incompetence 
and sympathy with fascism cost the lives of 6 million Poles. That 
is the real historical crime.

How many Jews, how many Poles, how many Slavs and Gypsy civilians 
had to be executed before these people understand that Hitler was 
about racial genocide? And how stupid can it be to equate that 
with Stalin's harshness with fools? Yes, Stalin executed some 
confused and reactionary Polish officers, who in other countries 
had proved to be leadership material for the Nazis. Stalin 
provided a way for all peoples to live together in the Soviets and 
true he executed opponents because Hitler took advantage of them 
or obtained their direct aid, but that is not the same thing as 
systematic genocide.

The reason the Polish did not fight the Nazis is the same reason 
there was a civil war in Hungary on behalf of Nazis, the same 
reason a former defense minister took power in Norway for the 
Nazis and the same reason that Italy, Spain and Japan went 
fascist. These ideas were not confined to Germany. Merely being 
outside Germany did not make one innocent of fascist leanings 
during World War II. Hungary, Romania and Slovakia also joined the 
Axis.

The claim that there was some kind of third way or independence of 
small nations in Eastern Europe in the 1930s is fiction, a fiction 
that benefited the Nazis then and the anti-Russian imperialists 
and anti- communists today. Certainly by 1939 that was clear from 
Hitler's success in countries to the west of Poland and the only 
ones still propagating the idea of Poles not needing Soviet aid 
were Nazi sympathizers who wanted to make the smaller countries 
easier to conquer. The only use the notion of independence of 
small countries from both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany has is 
to whitewash various fascist forces and Nazi sympathizers.

There were only two sides once Hitler came to power. One either 
fought the Nazis or abetted them. It was a very unpleasant 
reality, one that the Polish people must still learn to accept 
despite their leaders and the continuous bleatings of the 
imperialist press to the contrary. 

Notes:

1. "Stalin's Polish victims mourned," 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_908000/908253
.stm 

2. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/1791/beria.html

3. Secret Documents (Toronto Canada: Northstar Compass, 280 Queen 
St. W., Toronto Ontario), pp. 223-4.