#Russia is gradually returning to its old Soviet times narrative that #Katyn massacre, where 20’000 #Poland prisoners of war were executed, was actually conducted by Nazi Germany. FSB has just declassified (but not published) an “archive of interrogation protocols of Polish experts who served in German forces” which intends to prove that even these Poles believed the executions took place under German occupation.[^1]
The new Russian narrative is quite clever, because in one sentence they managed to sneak two lies - that Poles collaborated with Germans in Katyń and that the massacre was conducted by the latter.
In reality, Katyń massacre[^2] was conducted by Soviet NKVD in 1940 on personal order of Stalin countersigned by NKVD security apparatus and Russia itself published most of these documents in 1990’s during the wave of glasnost (which Putin apparently now regrets). Further documents were published in 2010, after the Polish presidential airplane crash near Smolensk in Russia and Russian government for a while wanted to show compassion. Putin officially admitted it was a war crime and Duma issued a declaration that “the Katyn crime was carried out on direct orders of Stalin and other Soviet officials”.[^3] The commission that investigated the crime in 1943 indeed operated under German occupation, but it was an International Red Cross Committee (ICRC) commission, not a German one.
But, as Russians say, Russian history is unpredictable, so on the wave of hostility to the West Russian hardliners started to return to the Soviet denialism. They also used it as a form of “punishment” for “unfriendly Poland” - for example, Russia still holds the wreck of Polish Tu-154 that crashed in Smolensk![^4] Publication of these interrogation protocols, whose value as evidence is close to zero and contradicts earlier documents declassified on genuine goodwill, is just another Russia’s step on the revisionist ladder.
P.S. the FSB or TASS even managed to make a stupid mistake in their statement, claiming the massacre was originally conducted in 1939 - in reality it was joint Soviet-German invasion on Poland that happened in 1939, but the executions took place in 1940
[^1]: https://tass.ru/obschestvo/20515213
[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre