We spoke with Professor Grover Furr on the topic of the Katyn Massacre.
The Katyn Massacre was a mass execution of Polish prisoners which happened near the Katyn forest during World War II.
The bodies of thousands of Polish prisoners were supposedly “discovered” by Nazi Germany in 1943.
However this “discovery” happened just after their army had been crushed at Stalingrad and the writing was on the wall that the war was lost for them.
Nonetheless, the Nazi investigation was backed by the Polish government in exile and the International Red Cross.
The 1943 conclusion the Nazis made was emphatically endorsed during the anti-communist crusade of the Cold War, where it was the centerpiece of accusations against the Soviet Union as the best documented ‘crime of Stalin’.
However evidence and investigation since then have shed new light that force us to question who the culprits and who the accusers really are.
In the first part of our interview we asked Grover to to give us an overview of what the “official history” of Katyn is:
Transcript: To give you the standard history of Katyn we should step back to a little bit of the history of Soviet polish relations. The Bolshevik Revolution had taken place, of course in November, 1917. Poland had declared its independence – Polish nationalists had declared the independence of Poland. The Soviets, the Bolsheviks, had agreed with this. But the Polish nationalists, with the aid of the Western Allies, invaded Soviet Russia in 1918. There ensued a war. The tides of war went back and forth. But ultimately the Soviet state was so weakened that in 1920 they signed with the new Polish state the Treaty of Riga. And under the Treaty of Riga a large part of Western Soviet Russia, consisting of the western half of Byelorussia and the western half of the Ukraine were ceded to Poland. Now these areas had never been predominantly Polish in population. They were to the east of the line ultimately called the Curzon line, which the Allies recommended as a border between Poland and Soviet Russia. But the Polish government didn’t agree with that, and so Poland ended up with these two areas in the east of its country — formerly in the west of Soviet Russia — with majorities of non-Polish populations: Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, and so on.
In September, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. And, as everyone had expected, beat the Polish army very quickly. Many Polish troops withdrew to the east away from the advancing Germans. The Polish government and many, many soldiers gathered on the Romanian border and prepared to enter Romania, which they did on September the 17th, leaving Poland without a legal government.
Now around the 10th of September, the Germans told the Soviets that the Polish government had lost control of Poland, and therefore Poland had no functioning government any longer, and therefore there was no longer a Polish state. That’s important, because in August, 1939, before the outbreak of the war, before the German invasion of Poland, the Soviet Union and Germany had signed a non-aggression pact, sometimes called the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact — anti-communists like to call it the Hitler-Stalin pact, because they like to yoke the names of Hitler and Stalin
Together — but it that’s what it was, it was a non-aggression pact, but it did contain a secret codicil. And one of the secret codicils stated that eastern Poland would be in the Soviet sphere of influence. Now it’s pretty clear that what the Soviets wanted to do was to keep the German army as far away from the Soviet border as they possibly could, and so this was a way to do it. The sphere of influence meant that this was a large part of eastern Poland that the German army could not remain in, and therefore would be a buffer between the German army — which is now, of course, much closer to the Soviet border, because the German army had conquered Western Poland — it would be a buffer between the German army and the former Soviet border.
The Germans informed the Soviets that since the Polish state no longer existed, because it no longer had a government– even a government in exile — then new states might be formed — would be formed — in what had been Eastern Poland, unless the Red Army entered that area and took control of it. We know what they meant. What they meant was they would set up a fascist Ukrainian nationalist state in this area a state closely allied with Nazi Germany. And of course that was unacceptable to the Soviets.
So the Soviets sent in the Red Army, and they took prisoner those Polish soldiers who had either been stationed in eastern Poland or had retreated to eastern Poland and had not gone into internment in Romania or elsewhere. So the Soviets, in September / October, 1939, found themselves with a very large number — many tens of thousands — of Polish prisoners of war. They pretty soon let the enlisted men go, and they then had the officers and some other figures, as prisoners and these they kept in three camps: one not too far from Khar’kov which is in the Ukraine, and one not too far from the city of Kalinin, which is now called Tver’, in Russia, and one not too far from the city of Smolensk, and that area was called Katyn.
And that area — that name — becomes the name for all of these — the ensuing story about the massacres — because in march 1943 the Germans unearthed the bodies of, I don’t know exactly, but 4,000 or so Polish soldiers who had been shot and buried, and the Germans claimed that the Soviets had shot them in 1940. The Soviets of course did not agree with this. They said that was a Nazi propaganda lie. But the Polish government-in-exile, which was always extremely anti-communist – more anti-communist in many respects than anti German — and was now in London, the Polish government-in-exile sent representatives to Katyn. The Germans invited them and treated them well. And these representatives agreed with the German story; they also blamed the Soviets.
Now, the Polish government-in-exile was supposedly an ally of the Western Allies plus the Soviet Union, and at war with Nazi Germany. So the Soviets declared that this was unacceptable behavior by an ally, and broke diplomatic relations with the Polish government-in-exile as a result of their agreeing with the German account, really, their collaboration with the Germans — collaboration just means “working with,” and they certainly worked with them.
All right so this was a major propaganda story that the Germans spread throughout occupied Europe that the Soviets were mass murderers and they would commit Katyn massacres if the Red Army were to defeat the Germans. That was essentially the purpose of the German actions here. And around June, 1943, the Germans issued a report printed up back in Germany about this — their story – and documented their version of events.
In September, 1943, the Red Army recaptured Smolensk, and shortly thereafter recaptured the area a little bit to the west of Smolensk known as Katyn, where all of these Polish soldiers’ bodies had been unearthed. The Soviets formed their own Commission called the Burdenko Commission after the doctor, the medical man, who was asked to head it, Dr. Burdenko. They studied the Katyn area, the bodies, did a lot of interviews, as the Germans had done, and in 1944 produced a report that claimed that in fact it had been the Germans who had shot all of these Poles whose bodies were interred at Katyn. That became the Soviet story up until about 1988 or 89 and, as we will see, Mikhail Gorbachev changed it.
The Allies went along with this story. They claimed to agree with it and there were some reports, you know, unofficial reports issued. But as a result of the Cold War, starting in the late 1940s sometime, the Allies reversed themselves and began to state, began to agree with the account of the Polish government-in-exile — that is to say, started to agree that it had been the Soviets who had shot all these Poles and that became not only the Polish nationalists but the Allied, the Western account from then on, there were big Congressional hearings in 1952, which were set up to kind of publicize this view, and that became the Allied story. So the Polish nationalists, of course, produced more literature to support their side. Anti-communist propagandists in the West did likewise. The Soviets continued to repeat that it had in fact been the Germans and stood by the Burdenko report.
In late 1988 or sometime in 1988 Mikhail Gorbachev’s regime in the Soviet Union decided that they would admit to Soviet guilt. It’s interesting that we know now that they had did not have any evidence of Soviet guilt. But they admitted to it, and that was a big story. Around 1989 the Soviets found transit reports, lists of Polish prisoners who had been shipped out of the prisoner of war camps, the three prisoner of war camps where they had been held: the one in Ukraine near Kharkov which is called Starobel’sk, the one not too far from Kalinin now called Tver’, which was called Ostashkov, and the one near Katyn which was called Kozel’sk. Okay, the Soviet regime under Gorbachev uncovered the transit reports, their records of the Polish prisoners who had been shipped out of these camps in the spring of 1940. They had been shipped to Kharkov, Kalinin now Tver’, and Smolensk, and then there were no further records of them.
In late 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev handed over to Boris Yeltsin, who was about to become the first president of independent Russia, right? — the Soviet Union was falling apart — Gorbachev handed over to him a bunch of documents which have become known as closed packet number one. These documents were allegedly found in a top-secret file accessible only to
Soviet leaders, and they purported to prove that Stalin, Beria, and other members of the Politburo, had ordered the execution of all these Poles in 1940, in March 1940. Okay, so those documents are handed over by Boris Yeltsin to Lech Walesa, at that time the President of Poland, they are published in the newspapers, facsimiles are published online published in a Soviet — I should say, a Russian — historical journal. And that seemed to be it, okay? That seemed to be good documentation that the Soviets were guilty. That is the standard history, that remains the standard history. So just to sum up: the standard history is that in March and April, 1940, the Polish prisoners in these three camps –Starobel’sk, outside of Khar’kov, Ostashkov, outside of Kalinin, now Tver’, and Kozel’sk, outside of Smolensk, were shipped to the NKVD — the political police in Soviet times — in those respective cities, Khar’kov, Kalinin and Smolensk, and were shot. They’re executed there and buried nearby. That became the standard story.
The interesting and important detail here is that there’s no record of them being shot, but there’s only records of them being shipped out of the camps and there the record stops. So that’s the standard version. It remains the standard version. It has been elaborated to some extent by some large books, one published by Yale University Press, one published in England, many other accounts.
And it is taken as a “done deal:” this is a “closed issue.” No one is permitted to question this. If you question it then there’s something wrong with you. It’s not legitimate to question this. This is the standard version. And that is the version that I decided to go on to research.
Professor Furr makes the following corrections to this segment:
At 7:24 minutes, I state that the Germans unearthed 4000 or so bodies of Polish soldiers. That is what the Germans claimed.
In fact, it is very likely that the Germans had brought other bodies, from burial sites in the Smolensk region, and reburied them here.
For more details, please see my book The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre: The Evidence, the Solution. (2018)
Next we asked for a summary of the evidence which contradicts this official history:
Well I have not actually discovered any evidence independently. What I have done is to study the evidence that has been produced by others and added it up somewhat differently. I noticed in the, I would say, around the year 2000 that a certain number of Russian researchers had begun to claim that the documents in closed packed at number 1 were forgeries. And just to reiterate, the documents in closed packet number 1 are those documents that were given by Gorbachev to Yeltsin and by Yeltsin to the Poles, and then published online, published in journals, and appeared to claim, appeared to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the Soviets in fact were guilty at Katyn and of course the Gorbachev regime had admitted this and that remains the official position of the Russian government today. It was the official position under Yeltsin of course and since then under Putin, Medvedev, Putin again, this still remains the official Russian version — that the Soviets the evil Stalin and his evil henchmen (in anti-communist language) were guilty and had head the Poles shot.
By about the year 2000 some Russian investigators had published some material that challenged the authenticity of these documents and closed packet number-one. I read their arguments. I thought that they did not persuade me but they made me curious, they made me begin to doubt the mainstream story, now accepted by all professional historians, that they made me doubt that story. But I also doubted the doubters, so to speak. I created a web page and then I put up some information that fundamentally said, “I’m an agnostic on this question, here’s a lot of the information but I’m not ever going to get into this because you know you’ll never convince people on either side. So that was that.
However, in 2011 a joint Polish Ukrainian archaeological group which had been researching a mass grave in the western Ukraine issued a report, or at least the Poles issued a report. And in that report they documented a couple of things that were interesting. I mean many things, but those that concern us here are these:
* Number one: the badge of a Polish policeman who was supposedly shot Oh over a thousand kilometers away in Kalinin (now Tver’) in 1940 was found there.
* And, secondly, it was clear that the victims in this burial pit were shot by the Germans in 1941 because many, many shell casings were found and the Germans very conveniently dated their shell casings and they were all dated 1941. Also, bodies of other people were found including Poles but also including women and children. And so the Polish archaeologist concluded that the victims in this burial pit had been shot by the Germans in after the invasion of the Soviet Union which took place on June 22nd 1941. So sometime in 1941 — conceivably maybe a little bit later, but probably 1941.
So I started to look into that. I downloaded their report which was available on the internet. I had already been studying Polish, so I was able to read it, and also while examining this report and looking around, I found newspaper articles about another badge of another Polish policeman which had been an unearthed in this same area at the same mass burial site, mass murder site. This badge had not been mentioned in the Polish archaeologist’s report, but it had been discovered and publicized in newspaper accounts, because it was pretty spectacular and this badge was of a Polish policeman who had been supposedly killed by the Soviets at Kalinin sometimes in the spring of 1940 and Kalinin is like a thousand kilometers away from this town, Volodymyr-Volyns’kiy, which is now in the western Ukraine, and so you know this raises the question: What were the badges doing there? It was assumed that the bodies were there too. Now, it’s important to note here that this Polish and Ukrainian archaeological team did not do any DNA analysis. There were lots of bodies and of course DNA analysis could have been done. But DNA analysis is slow, and it’s very expensive. In any case they never intended to do any of that to identify exactly who was buried there. And therefore although the badges of these two Polish policemen who supposedly had been killed in the spring of 1940 a thousand kilometers away by the Soviets these badges were never attached to any bodies because no DNA analysis was done.
Well this, of course, caused some people to think that, gee –,maybe the Soviets had not shot all of these prisoners who had been shipped from the Ostashkov camp to Kalinin, because here were the bodies of — here were the badges of — at least two of them and there might be many more. So that sort of opened up the question again for me and for some people in Russia.
At that point I wrote an article which was published in August, 2013 I believe, in the American Journal “Socialism and democracy,” and I gave all the details here, gave the background, and I said well you know, does this refute the official version of Katyn? The official version being that the Soviets had shot all these people in 1940. That article was pretty influential, it was translated into a number of languages, put online elsewhere in various languages, a French publisher – a radical publisher — decided that they wanted to translate it into French and make it into a booklet. I said I needed some time to update it I did updated it in around 2015.
By that time an interesting thing had happened. First of all, the Ukrainian archaeologists, who were at this dig and who had issued their own report in 2011, never mentioned the either badge of these Polish policemen that were found, and they also did not mention in their report the fact that over 98% of the shell casings unearthed that this mass murder site and Western Ukraine were German and were dated 1941 they didn’t mention those things and it wasn’t by accident because the chief Ukrainian archeologist said well it’s a mistake to talk about these things because they could cast doubt on other killings of Poles by the Soviets and of course what he meant clearly was Katyn.
So by 2015 even the Polish story had changed. The Polish report had been taken off the Internet and is no longer available, and the Polish archaeologist who edited that report was now claiming that the victims of this mass grave had been shot by the Soviets, although she gave no evidence of that fact. So she backed off her earlier statement.
That made me suspect then — I still think it’s true — that she had been compelled to withdraw the reported to change her statement because Katyn is a very important component of modern right-wing Polish nationalism — the victimization of Poland, and Katyn being a major example of that victimization — is a major component of Polish nationalism today.
And so I figured that she had just been instructed to change her story and in any case she did change her story. So I updated this article it was published in French in 2015. But I had the feeling that at some point soon I was going to have to do a thorough research job on Katyn because honestly I was still not convinced. I was in greater doubt than ever about the conventional story but I was still not convinced that the Soviets were innocent. It just seemed to me to demand much more attention.
So meanwhile other evidence had begun to come out and this is very important. In 2010 a Russian member of the Duma, which is the Russian parliament, a member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation produced and publicized what seemed to be drafts of the documents from closed packet number one, that is, drafts of the forgery of closed packet number one, a lot of material. And he said that he had been approached by one of the people one of the people in the team of Russian forgers who had been hired to forge these documents to fabricate them in order to blame the Soviets and that this man had, you know, he had second thoughts. He thought this was an unpatriotic saying apparently and so he turned in all this information and he gave it to the representative of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation because the Communist Part of the Russian Federation is, for all intents and purposes, the continuer of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union — there’s no more Soviet Union, but there is a Russian Federation. So he gave it to them and this Russian Duma member Viktor Iliukhin published this material. And one of the interesting things about it is that the mainstream press, with almost no exceptions, in Russia ignored this. This is a huge story, of course, and since the mainstream press in Russia ignored it you know only the left-wing press — and those people who are already questioning and doubting Soviet guilt at Katyn, and paid attention to it, but the Russian mainstream press ignored it and the Western press the press outside Russia completely ignored it.
Now that to me is itself very suspicious. I mean this was a sensational event that threatened to overturn it, certainly challenged a very significant story dealing with the Second World War. So what could possibly be the justifiable explanation for ignoring it? But it was ignored. So that happened.
I also discovered that there had been some more research done by a
Russian scholar for example who believed that the Soviets were not guilty. Then there also been some more materials published by a couple of Russian researchers who are firmly of the opinion that the Soviets were indeed guilty, but they had published some primary documents, and those primary documents deserve to be studied carefully, and hadn’t been, I found — I thought — carefully studied them. But they had published them on the internet. And so that meant that there was this body of materials that had come to light since the Gorbachov – Yeltsin publication of these sensational documents from closed packet number one back in 1991 – 1992, There had been more materials that had come to light that needed to be brought to bear in a serious study of Katyn. And by this time, by 2015 or so, the mainstream version of Katyn was fixed. The main books on it had been written, the journal articles had been published, and the collections of documents had appeared in Polish and Russian. At least the story was basically signed sealed and delivered.
So I realized I would have to go on and start all over. So by 2015 I had been concerned about the Katyn issue for about 15 years, maybe even 20 years, since the publication by Gorbachev and then by Yeltsin – well, by Yeltsin — of these documents from closed back in number one. So for over 20 years, but seriously concerned for about 15 years. And I published this article, and then I published this little book in in French in 2015. And I realized that I couldn’t let it go, okay, I had to — at least for my own satisfaction – get to the bottom of this. And I thought that, because of the new evidence that was out there, that had come to light, that it might be possible to do this. I wasn’t completely sure, but I thought it’s possible that that this mystery can be solved.
Okay so that’s what the first thing I did. I decided to approach this like a detective approaches a mystery. That is, to approach it objectively. Okay, we don’t know who did it. We have to gather all the evidence and study it, and come to the conclusion on the basis of the evidence alone. Now, nobody else had ever done this, as far as I can tell. The official versions that exist all proceeded from the basis of accepting that the documents in closed packet number one were genuine. And yet there was a very good case made that they were not, genuine. So, but at the same time, it in my opinion that it was impossible to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were forgeries too. So there was a claim that they were forgeries, and a claim that they were genuine. There were confessions there were — that is to say recorded statements — of NKVD men who had been questioned by Russian investigators in the Gorbachev period and who had agreed that they knew about the shooting of thousands of Poles. Three of these old NKVD men had been interviewed. None of them were talking about the executions at the Katyn site near Smolensk, but one had been in Ukraine, the other had been in Kalinin, and that material was available, although only in Polish translation for some reason, but it was available, and there were other materials available. But there had also been interviews of local residents by the Germans who claimed that the Soviets were guilty and by the Soviets, and at that time the local residents had claimed, of course, that the Germans were guilty.
So what to do? I decided that the only correct way to do this, to go about this, was to set aside all of the evidence that was questioned, whose genuineness had been questioned. Now, that’s what the defenders of the official version, the version that says the Soviets were guilty, that’s what they’re not willing to do. Ok, but I think that it is not honest to proceed that way. For example in closed packet number one there are those documents, but then there are the dot the materials presented by Duma member Viktor Iliukhin in 2010 that purport to be evidence that the documents of closed packet number one were forgeries. OK, there were the confessions of NKVD men made in 1990 and 1991, which tended to support the view that the Soviets were guilty, but there were the statements made in the Burdenko report to the contrary of that – the claim the Germans were guilty.
So I asked myself: What evidence exists that cannot possibly have been fabricated or faked? And I decided that there were sort of two kinds of evidence that could be identified as being very unlikely — not impossible — that it was faked. Number one was any evidence that tended to contradict the version set forward by those who had published the evidence.
Okay, so evidence set forward by people who thought the Soviets were guilty but that tended upon closer examination to cast doubt on Soviet guilt, and vice versa. if there was any evidence put forward by the Germans that tended to support German guilt — and it turns out that there is such evidence, I’m not going to go through all of it here — but I discovered that that this evidence had never really been scrutinized in great depth. And I decided to do that — to gather it all of the evidence that could not — well all of the evidence, period — and then to find within this mass of evidence, mass of documentation, that evidence that could not have been falsified, because the people who produced it either didn’t recognize what it was, or felt compelled to produce it for one reason or another even though it didn’t seem to support their case. In the end I call this the unimpeachable evidence. It may not be completely unimpeachable, but it has been unimpeached — nobody has challenged it — and to study that evidence. And I did that.
In my book — the book is titled The Mystery of the Katyn Massacre: the Evidence, the Solution — and studying that evidence and that evidence alone, without preconceptions, without trying to prove that the Soviets were guilty or the Soviets were innocent, just looking objectively at it. I was very interested; it’s intellectually challenging! A challenge not only, you know, to my ability to analyze the evidence. It also challenged my own preconceived ideas. Right? Because the purpose of objectivity, the goal of objectivity, is to study a phenomenon and to set aside your own preconceived ideas, to give especial attention to evidence that tends to contradict your own preconceived ideas, and to be sure to doubt, to question sharply, any evidence that tends to support your own preconceived ideas. And that’s the only way to really be objective, to “operationalize” the concept of objectivity, of scientific objectivity.
So I did that and of course it took me a while. But what I found pretty quickly was that the only evidence which cannot possibly have been challenged the only unimpeachable evidence, all of it either points towards Soviet innocence or towards German guilt. None of it supports Soviet guilt or German innocence. And I think that’s decisive. That is, I do not think it is possible that all of the unimpeachable evidence points towards Soviet innocence and therefore German guilt, but at the same time the documents of closed packet number one, or these confessions of these former NKVD men be genuine. You can’t have it both ways. I think that the fact that the unimpeachable evidence shows the Soviets didn’t do it is sufficient evidence that these other accounts, these accounts that claim Soviet guilt, have to be fraudulent, have to be false. There’s no way you can have both of these things, both of these categories of evidence, be true
Now I realized that this of course, would be very agreeable to those people — mainly Russians — and some others no doubt, around the world but mainly in Russia, who insisted the Soviets were innocent. This would be very agreeable to them. And it would be very disagreeable to mainstream Soviet scholarship, which had long ago decided that Soviet guilt at Katyn was so firmly established that it could not legitimately be questioned, that is, that there was something illegitimate simply about looking at it again in an objective manner.
I realized that, and that is in fact the case. The mainstream Soviet scholars, the mass media all refuse to even countenance, even consider, the possibility that the Soviets may not be guilty at Katyn. They refuse even to discuss the issue, even to discuss the evidence. And I understand why that is — although it’s very dishonest of them to do this — I understand why it is. If you start to discuss the evidence, it gives the public the impression that this is an open question. I mean, why would you discuss the evidence, why would you discuss it this issue, if it were not, in some way or other, still undecided? And of course the Polish nationalists and the anticommunists of all stripes, the Russian government, the mass media, want to maintain the fiction that this is a “done deal,” that no honest person can actually question Soviet guilt, and that therefore all of those people who do question Soviet guilt, like myself, are either some kind of quack — you know somebody who believes fantastic tales – or are, you know, biased by their pro-communist or pro-Soviet or some other motive that makes their work unobjective and therefore worthless.
So that’s in fact the case. It is not possible to have a discussion about this question of whether the Soviets are guilty or not, because those people who believe the Soviets are guilty, those authorities who believe the Soviets are guilty, whether political or academic or mass media, simply refuse to have that kind of discussion. They do not want “to upset their own applecart,” so to speak — they do not want to give the impression even for a minute that the question of Katyn is unsettled, is not a done deal, that there might be some question as to Soviet guilt. But of course I am convinced that some of them know very well that their position is very shaky – that, in fact, an objective study cannot possibly conclude that the Soviets were guilty, and there have been one or two reviews of my book in Russian that have come to the same conclusions.
And I believe that that is the case. So that as that’s the way in which I went about doing this research and writing this book, and coming to the conclusion that, beyond any doubt, unless more evidence somehow or other comes to light, certainly at this stage, it’s impossible to honestly conclude that the Soviets were guilty.
We then asked Grover to give an estimation of what the best evidence tells us really did happen:
As you can see — as you recall from my talk — the Katyn massacre is actually alleged to have happened in three places: at Katyn near Smolensk, which is the site that the Germans uncovered in 1943, but also at two other places: in Khar’kov, and in the city of Kalinin, now called Tver’, and then there are supposedly burial sites of these Polish prisoners outside of Khar’kov, at a place called Pyatikhatky, and outside of Tver, formerly Kalinin, at a place called Mednoe. Okay, so that is the official story. And there are actually monuments, Polish monuments with the names of the victims, at all three of those sites. Naturally enough, the thousands of bodies of Polish prisoners that are supposed to be buried at Pyatikhatky, outside of Khar’kov and at Mednoe, outside of Tver’, have never had found. There have been attempts to find them –unsuccessful, okay, but as you would expect if, in fact, they are not there at all.
So what happened at Katyn? Well, certainly lots of people, lots of Polish prisoners, were shot. The Germans were smart enough not to turn up any German shell casings at Katyn that were dated 1941. We’re not sure what the Germans turned up. They — in their report they put photographs of shell casings that can be dated to about ten years before that, and of course then they claimed that the Soviets used German shells to shoot the Poles at Katyn. I think that’s very unlikely it’s very unlikely that these four thousand and more Polish prisoners whose bodies were buried and then unearthed at Katyn were all shot by one batch of ammunition. So I don’t think the German report in this respect or in any other respect should be believed. And there’s good evidence that it was falsified, and if you want to see that evidence, you should read my book.
So the answer is: nobody has looked for the bodies of the Polish prisoners who were killed, except for the four thousand or so at Katyn. There’s a story both by Russians and also by Poles, that there’s another mass grave not far from the mass graves at Katyn and this mass grave also contains the remains of Polish prisoners, but it’s never been excavated, it’s basically ignored, although there was some writing about it some years ago, it’s never been investigated.
The Soviets – I should say the Russians – for reasons of their own probably – possibly — in order to maintain good relations with Poland, have never gone back and re-excavated the graves at Katyn. It’d be interesting to know what kind of shell casings they might find there, but they haven’t done that. Okay, and of course as I mentioned there’s been no DNA analysis. But it’s only four thousand or so bodies at the graves that were excavated first by the Germans and then later by the Soviets at Katyn and that are memorialized in the Polish memorial in Katyn.
What about the other – eighteen thousand, fourteen thousand, depending on how you, which way you look at it — how about all these other bodies where are they? Well nobody’s looking for them. I mentioned that these badges of these two Polish policemen had been uncovered in this German mass murder grave in Volodymyr-Volyns’kiy, now in Ukraine, but of course 1941 it was part of the Soviet Union — there might be many more many more Polish prisoners supposedly shot at Katyn, might be in that mass grave. Certainly the Polish authorities don’t want to know that. The Ukrainian authorities are also very anti Soviet, anticommunist, they don’t want to know that. Nobody wants to know that! The Russian government isn’t pushing the issue either, and of course this mass grave is in Ukraine anyway. Nobody’s looking for these other victims.
The bodies of these other victims in Ukraine and Belorussia and to some extent western Russia are full of mass graves of people who were massacred by the Nazis and by the Ukrainian nationalists who fought on the side of the Nazis. By the way, it’s been established by other researchers that Ukrainian nationalists participated in the mass murders at Volodymyr-Volyns’kiy, shooting, among others, Jews, women and children, as well as men. So it’s very likely that whatever happened to these other thousands of Polish prisoners who never returned to Poland that they were shot by the Germans and probably also with the help of the Ukrainian nationalists somewhere in western Russia and Western Ukraine, and Western Belorussia and are in these hundreds of mass graves which are all over this area. But nobody’s looking, nobody’s searching the archives, nobody’s looking at the documents left behind by the German army, nobody’s looking for them.
But I think two things. Number one, the Polish nationalists have also always proclaimed that none of these men whose names they have as prisoners of the Soviets ever returned to Poland. We don’t know that. We don’t know that. We don’t know how hard they looked. We don’t know if they’re being honest. If we’re going to be objective, there’s no reason to take the word of the Polish government, or any government, you know, as the gospel truth. That has never been verified. In fact, we know that there are a couple of people — at least a couple of men– whose names are on those transit lists, the lists of Polish prisoners shipped out of the camps near Khar’kov, Kalinin, and Smolensk, a couple of those people were not killed at Katyn. We know that they either made it back to Poland or were killed elsewhere. But actually no one is looking, so we don’t know. I mean, but that’s my guess, that they were killed — most of them, at least most of them, I should say almost all of them, were killed by the Germans and probably with the help of Ukrainian nationalists, in various places in the Western Soviet Union but that’s as an unresolved issue because nobody’s looking. Because to look, to go out and search for them, would be to concede that the Soviets did not shoot them all and bury them near Khar’kov, near Kalinin, now called Tver’, or near Katyn, and the anti-communists, the Polish nationalists, the Ukrainian nationalists, Soviet scholarship, Soviet studies generally, which is intensely anti-Soviet, don’t want to concede for a second that the standard, the mainstream, the official view of Katyn, which states that the Soviets shot all these people, they don’t want to cast any doubt on it. They don’t want to have anybody to think that it’s an open issue. As for the Russian government, well I don’t know. I think they’re probably, at least to some extent, torn. On the one hand, Katyn sort of tarnishes the otherwise heroic story of the Soviet Union fighting the Germans, of making a real attempt to form a collective security with the Allies, being frustrated by the Allies, signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as a kind of a last resort and then heroically and at great cost defeating the Nazis is almost single-handedly, really. Katyn somewhat disturbs that stirring account. On the other hand, relations with between Russia and Poland are bad enough as it is. My guess is that the Russian government does not really want to make them any worse. And they certainly would make them worse if they claimed — if the Russian government were to agree — that the Soviets were innocent.
Also, since Gorbachev, the moral standing, if you want to call it, the credibility, the stance of the Russian government in the eyes of the world is to a large extent based upon its demonization of Stalin, and that’s still the case. The Russian government today under Vladimir Putin still denounces Stalin whenever they can. They don’t agree with all the anti Stalin stories, especially those that have something to do with World War Two. But they accept the rest of the narration, the anti-Stalin lies, so there’s a, you know, a seeming unanimity that the Russians, you know, hesitating only a little bit, a unanimity that, you know, the Stalin regime, the communist regime, was evil and these people, these voices, the anti Soviet voices, the anti-Stalin voices, have control over academic scholarship and semi-popular publications and the mass media. And certainly that’s reflected in the official government positions. So nobody’s looking for the actual victims of Katyn. Nobody’s found them. They are clearly not buried where the official version says that they’re buried — that is to say, outside of Khar’kov at Pyatikhatky, outside of Tver’ at Mednoe, and so nobody knows where they are. But nobody’s looking, because nobody wants to disturb the official version. I mentioned already that the Polish archaeologist who investigated the mass graves at Volodymyr-Volyns’kiy has withdrawn her conclusion that these are mass graves of victims of the Nazis, and now states that there’s evidence that these people were shot by the Soviets, although there is no such evidence. So this is a really interesting example of what I call the Anti=Stalin paradigm. That is to say, it is illegitimate to question Stalin’s guilt in any crime of which Stalin has been accused, regardless of the evidence.
Once you’ve accused Stalin of a crime — and this is just one example although it’s an important example of it, Katyn — then it is considered illegitimate to disagree with that or to question it in any way. So it’s a good example of the Anti-Stalin Paradigm, which exercises a controlling
influence over the history of the Soviet Union during the Stalin period and in fact over Soviet history in general and the history of World War 2 – of world history, in a certain respect.
Next we enquired who insists on maintaining the the Nazi version of events, despite all evidence to the contrary:
The groups that are wedded, as you say, to the official history of Katyn, that is, or the false story that the Soviets were guilty there, you know, can basically be summed up as anti-communist forces: the Polish nationalists of course, for whom this is an integral part of their post-socialist constructed, and of course, utterly false national identity. But anti-communist forces around the world, including in Russia, including the Russian government, and including, importantly, academia – the academic field of history generally and of Russian and Soviet history, Eastern European history specifically.
It is fair to say that with no exceptions outside of Russia, and with very few exceptions in Russia, it is impossible for anyone to have a career in the field of teaching, and doing research on, Russian or Soviet history, who does not adopt an anti-Soviet, anti Stalin position. And Katyn has being successfully constructed – helped, if you want — to being a constituent part of false paradigm of Soviet history, and therefore of world history.
Because of course in many respects the 20th century, from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the 20th century was the Soviet century. All important historical events on an international scale certainly but even on a national scale because of the spread of the Communist international, all important historical events were influenced and related in one way or another, often very powerfully, by the presence of the Soviet Union and its activities, and through the Communist International its industrialization and collectivization and social development.
So the history of the 20th century is terribly biased, terribly distorted by this false version of the Soviet history, and particularly of the history of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, during the time that Stalin was in the leadership, from let’s say 1928 or so until his death in 1953. So that’s pretty much everybody.
Now in China and it may possibly be elsewhere as well — I don’t know about Vietnam and North Korea, but certainly in China – there is a space for a positive interpretation of Stalin and the policies associated with Stalin, certainly, and many self-identified communists around the world — but I’m thinking specifically of places like India — in many places around the world, the Soviet Union during the Stalin period is still looked upon as a very important period and with considerable sympathy.
But in the West and in the United States and Great Britain especially, the Trotskyist movement has become influential on the left and the Trotskyists repeat virtually all anti-communist stories invented by the academic experts in Russian and Soviet history. So the Trotskyists are kind of a megaphone on the left, they kind of smuggle into the left-wing movement these views, the views that basically serve the interests of the overt anti-communists. And so that’s the case with Katyn, as well as far as I am aware, all Trotskyist intellectuals and Trotskyist historians buy into the story that the Soviets were guilty of Katyn. They buy into a lot of other falsehoods and myths. And Trotsky-invented falsehoods and myths wholesale, and they buy into those. But this isn’t place to go into Trotsky’s conspiracies and lies and so forth. I’ve written about them but we won’t go into that here and now.
We also asked how this version of the Katyn Massacre is used by the Polish far right as a national myth:
Polish nationalist mythology — we’re talking about the attempt in post-socialist Poland to construct a false history of Poland and its experiences, you know, from its origins after the First World War to the present day, and certainly through the end of the Soviet Union, and
there are many falsehoods that the Polish government and mass media and of course academics, “legitimated” scholars, promote. I can’t enumerate all of them. I probably don’t even know all of them. It starts with the myth that the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1918 or 1919, when it was in fact Poland that invaded Soviet Russia, and goes on from there.
But a few of these myths are, I suppose, more important than others in the Polish nationalist mythology and Katyn is certainly among the most important of those. For whatever reason, the Polish nationalists after World War 2 — of course they weren’t in power but they were a Polish government-in-exile, although not recognized as such, but informally recognized as such by the anti-communist allies — continued to exist in London and they continued to promote the falsehood that that the Soviet Union had shot the Poles.
Now they of course did this during the war. The Polish government-in-exile had sent representatives to Katyn in April, 1943, at the invitation of the Nazis with whom they were theoretically at war, and those representatives had parroted the Nazi line. I think if that had not happened, no one would have paid any attention to the German allegations that the Soviets had killed the the Polish prisoners at Katyn and ultimately elsewhere. So Polish participation, the Polish government’s connivance, collusion with the Germans, was critical to the to the story of Soviet guilt at Katyn’s having any longevity at all, having any “legs,” having any durability, and any credibility among anybody.
And after the Germans’ defeat, it was the Polish nationalists who promoted this view strongest of all. Of course it fell on to fertile ground during the Cold War, when any and every falsehood about the Soviet Union, particularly during Stalin’s time, was avidly repeated, and not only in the mass media and by politicians, but also by supposedly respectable academic.
In Poland Katyn is sacralized, by which I mean that when it is memorialized, the Catholic clergy are very often brought out and the whole ceremony turns into a kind of quasi-religious ceremony. So that in Poland, to question Soviet guilt at Katyn, to disagree with the conventional Polish nationalist view, is virtually sacrilegious — you know, it’s almost like questioning, I don’t know, the Virgin Mary or Jesus Christ something like that. It’s just not done. It’s not tolerated either, it isn’t legal to do it, in some sense.
So it’s critical, and for that reason the Polish historical profession and the Polish government, this Polish government, they’re never going to question that. They’re not interested in evidence, they’re just not interested in evidence. And as for the anti-communist Soviet studies – Soviet history – Russian history profession around the world, Katyn is the best documented “crime of Stalin”. I put “crime of Stalin” under scare quotes here, right? — like quote crime of Stalin end quote — because I have been searching for crimes of Stalin, for real crimes of Stalin, for many years now, close to 20 years. I’ve never found one — not yet, and I’ve looked.
I’ve looked at the evidence for all of the alleged crimes of Stalin and they’re just not there.
More specifically, back in 2013 I published a book called “Blood Lies” about Yale professor Timothy Snyder’s prize-winning book titled “Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin.” Snyder alleges — I didn’t count them, but certainly dozens and dozens of crimes by Stalin and the Soviet leadership during the period of the 1930s. Every single one of them is a falsehood! There is no evidence for any of them. All of the evidence that Snyder cites for them is fraudulent or non-existent.
In 2019, I published a book called “Stalin Waiting for The Truth,” in which I examine Princeton professor Stephen Kotkin’s book “Stalin waiting for Hitler 1929 to 1941,” an enormous volume with over 5000 footnotes. I examined very carefully Kotkin’s evidence for every single alleged crime, or even misdeed — or even unkind act! — by Stalin and the Soviets during that period. Every single one of them is false. Kotkin doesn’t prove a single one. So I have been looking for crimes of Stalin for many years and expecting — at least for the first decade or so of my search — I expected to find something. I mean, whoever heard of a political leader who didn’t commit some crimes? But I have not found any.
And as for the major works on the Stalin period, surely they would have cited some examples of real crimes — as opposed to all of the falsifications and lies that they do cite — they surely would have cited some real crimes and the evidence for them if they had been able to find it. They were not able to find any, so they don’t cite any real crimes.
And I think that’s probably the best evidence we’re ever going to get that Stalin didn’t commit any crimes. Because these super anti-communist anti-Stalin figures would surely have publicized them and the evidence to support them, if they had found it. But in fact they’ve only publicized falsehoods, and the evidence that they cite just doesn’t hold up.
Now, I’m often called a “Stalinist,” as though I’m trying to defend Stalin. But of course I’m not trying to defend Stalin. I’m trying to discover the truth. And this is the truth: that the historical profession, as well as of course the politicians, are lying. Now, it’s not just a question of Poland, but of course it is very important for Poland as well.
Finally we asked about the significance of rejecting the Nazi version of history in favour of what the evidence tells us:
Okay, let me start by repeating this question because I think it’s important. The question is: What is the significance of changing our understanding of what happened to match this best evidence? Well the anti-communists governments, scholars and so forth aren’t going to change their understanding. They’re going to continue to blame the Soviets even though it is possible to prove — and I believe, and others believe that I have proven it — that the Soviets absolutely did not kill the poles in the events known to history as the Katyn massacres.
I think that it shows us that the field of Soviet history, Russian history, and therefore world history, rests upon a foundation of falsehoods. And I think that our whole understanding of 20th century history is seriously flawed by what I call the “Anti-Stalin Paradigm,” by the fiction that Stalin and the Soviets during his time committed terrible crimes. None can be proven. All of the allegations of crimes by Stalin and the Soviets during his time are similar in a broad sense to the falsehood about Katyn, in that they cannot be sustained by the evidence. And that distorts the entire way that world history is understood.
I have alluded to the fact already that the Trotskyist movement on the left maintains itself through continuing the falsehoods about Stalin, falsehoods about Katyn just being a part of them, and falsehoods about Trotsky, of course, who was not at all the person that they thought he was. Trotsky in fact did collaborate with the Germans and Japanese, and conspire through his own followers in Russia and also with German spies and Russian fascists, to sabotage Soviet industry and conspire with his followers in the Soviet Union to try to assassinate some Soviet leaders, knowing that if they were successful Trotsky and those he conspired with would have to basically do whatever the German Nazis told them to do and side with the German Nazis and therefore make the Nazi side, the fascist side in World War 2 much, much stronger than it was.
I don’t want to go into the details of that now. But you can get a kind of general idea about how world history the history of World War 2, of world history itself, would have been very different, if the conspiracies that Trotsky and others were involved in against the Stalin leadership had been successful. So Katyn is a capstone, or at least one stone, in this edifice, one important element of this anti-Stalin paradigm which completely distorts our understanding of world history.
I don’t know exactly how thoroughgoing world history reflects this falsehood in China. I know that there certainly is interest in China in the research that I’ve done. There certainly is in China, as well as on the left in other countries, still a lot of sympathy for Stalin and yet though I think that that worldwide including from what I can tell in China the understanding that history of the of the Soviet Union during the Stalin period has been completely falsified — I think that this is not widespread. So I think that, in general in the world, including on the Left, including on the non-Trotskyist left, the understanding of how thoroughly Soviet history during the Stalin period has been falsified has not been grasped, or perhaps in some quarters is just beginning to be grasped, and its implications understood. And that is a development that I hope to see continue and expand in the future because I don’t think that we can hope to build a better society, a socialist or a communist society, a society that is not based on ruthless exploitation and all the horrors that a company that exploitation that is characteristic of any form of capitalism — I don’t think we can hope to build a better society than capitalism and imperialism without understanding the history of the Soviet Union.
Because, of course, the Soviet Union was not successful in building a communist society. That was the idea of Lenin. It was certainly the idea of Stalin – he talked frequently about that. That ideal was abandoned beginning with Khrushchev and through the rest of the Soviet leadership. And if you abandon he goal of building communism, there’s really nothing left to do but to reimburse at some point capitalism and that’s what Gorbachev did. So it’s easy to correctly criticize Gorbachev for all of his lies and falsifications about Soviet Union about Soviet history under Stalin, about the Soviet economy and his re-embrace of exploitative capitalism. But it’s a logical development of the abandonment of the attempt to build communism. And that that goes back not only to Nikita Khrushchev. But Nikita Khrushchev himself came from somewhere, okay? Khrushchev was a major political leader under Stalin, So one thing we need to do is to examine critically the Stalin route, the Lenin-Stalin route, to building socialism and communism. Because it didn’t work.
I’m of the opinion, at least at this point, from the research that I’ve done, in the studies that I’ve conducted, that Stalin tried very hard and in fact succeeded in following whatever you might call a Leninist blueprint. Lenin didn’t have a detailed blueprint of how to get to socialism, let alone communism, from the state that Russia was in after the Civil War. But he had certain ideas, and that was certainly his ultimate goal and that was Stalin’s goal. And for all of their great achievements – and the Soviet Union had great achievements — they didn’t manage to do it. Something went wrong along the way. And we need to study, we need to figure out, what the Soviets did not only that was right — you know, defeating Nazis, creating a society free of racism and with much less sexism, with a strong bias in favor of the working class, collectivizing agriculture, industrializing a very poor country in a small amount of time and then of course the heroic defeat of the Nazi invasion, spreading the communist movement around the world – and the communist movement did many wonderful, heroic things around the world in the 20th century. So the Soviet Union had great triumphs. But, ultimately, they did not develop in the direction of building communism, but that development was reversed at some point. So we need to study the Stalin period, to learn its lessons positive and also negative, what they did was right, but also what they did that it was incorrect, and that facilitated the reversal of socialism there.
And in order to do that, we need to know the truth and to learn the truth about Soviet history, but particularly during the Stalin period. That is what my goal and my aim is. I don’t think we can build a better world without understanding that the lessons that we must learn from the Soviet experience, from the experience of the communist movement of the 20th century.
And that is what ultimately I would say, animates me, impels me forward in my research. And I think it’s important that other people take up this challenge too. And I’m convinced that others will eventually do that. And I think that we have a great deal to learn from investigating the truth about the Soviet experience. But at this point investigating the alleged crimes and misdeeds of Stalin and the Soviet Union during his time, I think has a certain priority, because the lies about them are spread so widely. And that’s been what I’ve been concentrating on. And I intend to continue to do that for the foreseeable future.
The entire interview as one video is included below:
Grover Furr’s writing on the Katyn Massacre and other events relating to the Soviet Union during this time period can be found on his web page:
https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/
One of Grover Furr’s books that deals with the Katyn Massacre and many other crimes of the USSR alleged by anti communist researchers is called Blood Lies, and is hosted below: