KATYN - The movie about the Soviet Massacre of Polish Officers

I don't think that I need to re-write this in my own words since the many authors at Wikipedia have written it up so well, with references. I'll include the opening section from the Wikipedia article in this post to provide some background and readers are invited to link to the full and continuously updated article on-line.

Katyn massacre
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
This article is about the 1940 massacre of Polish officers.

The Katyn massacre, also known as the Katyn Forest massacre (Polish: zbrodnia katyńska, 'Katyń crime'), was a mass murder of thousands of Polish military officers, policemen, intellectuals and civilian prisoners of war by Soviet NKVD, based on a proposal from Lavrentiy Beria to execute all members of the Polish Officer Corps. Dated March 5, 1940, this official document was then approved (signed) by the entire Soviet Politburo including Joseph Stalin and Beria. [1][2][3] The number of victims is estimated at about 22,000, the most commonly cited number being 21,768. The victims were murdered in the Katyn Forest in Russia, the Kalinin (Tver) and Kharkov prisons and elsewhere. About 8,000 were officers taken prisoner during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, the rest being Poles arrested for allegedly being "intelligence agents, gendarmes, saboteurs, landowners, factory owners, lawyers, priests, and officials."Since Poland's conscription system required every unexempted university graduate to become a reserve officer, the Soviets were able to round up much of the Polish intelligentsia, and the Jewish, Ukrainian, Georgian and Belarusian intelligentsia of Polish citizenship.

Originally, "Katyn massacre" referred to the massacre at Katyn Forest, near the villages of Katyn and Gnezdovo (ca. 19 km west of Smolensk, Russia), of Polish military officers in the Kozelsk prisoner-of-war camp. It now is applied to the simultaneous executions of prisoners of war from geographically distant Starobelsk and Ostashkov camps, and the executions of political prisoners from West Belarus and West Ukraine, shot on Stalin's orders at Katyn Forest, at the NKVD headquarters in Smolensk, at a Smolensk slaughterhouse, and at prisons in Kalinin (Tver), Kharkov, Moscow, and other Soviet cities.

Nazi Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest in 1943. The revelation led to the end of diplomatic relations between Moscow and the London-based Polish government-in-exile. The Soviet Union continued to deny the massacres until 1990, when it finally acknowledged the perpetration of the massacre by NKVD, as well as the subsequent cover-up. An investigation by the Prosecutor's General Office of the Russian Federation has confirmed Soviet responsibility for the massacres, yet does not classify this action as a war crime or as an act of genocide. This acknowledgement would have necessitated the prosecution of surviving perpetrators, which is what the Polish government had requested. In addition the Russian government also does not classify the dead as victims of Stalinist repression, which bars formal posthumous rehabilitation.

This Wikipedia article continues with an indepth review of historical events that led to the mass murder of over 20,000 prisoners.


Communists preach about a workers paradise but that is only the bait to get themselves in power. They are no different than National Socialists, Nazis, outright dictators, fascists, and other oligarchies interested in only one thing - - - > POWER.

That power eventually comes at the expense of The People - primarily those who opposed them but also their competition.

Hitler rose to power with the SS (blackshirts) by literally eliminating the brownshirts (i.e. the thugs who helped him win power initially but outlived their usefulness to the inner circle of Nazi leaders.

Lenin and his Bolsheviks took power but utilizing the same sort of thugs who became the Cheka (the initial iteration of what would be the NKVD and most recently the KGB). They murdered their oppposition when they took power, created 'class enemies' to give them time to consolidate their power and then once they were fully in power the terror only intensified.

Stalin orchestrated the mass purge (read: execution) of thousands of Soviet military officers, Communist Party Officials, and additional 'class' enemies to maintain control through fear and intimidation. Tens of millions perished through mass deportations to isolated portions of Siberia, starvation by deliberate communist government seizure of food, imprisonment in the gulag for 'thought' crimes and the crime of being a relative of a political foe...

Thank God we live in the United States of America - a REPUBLIC - based on the principles of law built on a democratic foundation.

As the New Hampshire State Motto says:

"LIVE FREE OR DIE"