The Russian government is finally officially admitting the massacre by Soviet secret police of thousands of captured Polish army officers in 1940. This is a fact that most of the world, wherever the people were not saturated with war-propaganda, accepted when the Germans discovered it and revealed it to the world in 1943. Yet there are diehard Communists who still deny it.
While AFP emphasizes the admission, to me the continuing denial by the Communists is more striking, since what the Duma is admitting has been considered beyond dispute throughout most of the world for a very long time. The Communist position on this matter is stunningly unreasonable.
The only Communist mentioned by name, Viktor Ilyukhin, seems to be a Russian counterpart to those Americans for whom “revisionist history” is a dismissive term. The Duma’s admission is not based merely, as he purports, on “German evidence” and “Goebbels’ claims” but also on newly released Soviet official documents.
Russia admits Stalin ordered Katyn massacre of Poles
Dmitry Zaks, 26 November 2010
MOSCOW (excerpted from AFP) – Russia’s parliament on Friday declared Stalin responsible for ordering the Katyn massacre of Polish officers in World War II, a crime Moscow spent decades blaming on the Nazis to the fury of Poland. […] The resolution of the State Duma lower house of parliament broke more than half a century of official reluctance to admit that the Soviet leadership under Joseph Stalin ordered the killing of thousands of Polish officers in 1940.[…]The statement was agreed at an unusually stormy two-hour session that featured virulent opposition from the minority Communist Party — whose leaders still say the massacre could have been committed by the Nazis.“I do not understand how we can make conclusions … based on German evidence and (Joseph) Goebbels’s claims,” said a furious top Communist Party official, Viktor Ilyukhin.[…][Source: Agence France Presse]