Katyń

Abstract

Using the cover of state secrets in order to suppress and conceal the conclusions of the Katyń investigation is a violation of current Russian law. And yet Russian prosecutors have engaged in a cover-up of the documentation involved in the long-standing international investigation into the Katyń Massacres of 1940. The outcome of the investigation is a far cry from a truthful accounting, instead attesting to the prosecutors’ eagerness to avoid any indictment of the USSR’s former top leadership, and more generally to their attempts to sweep the entire affair under the carpet. First, the Katyń Massacres are characterized not as a war crime but merely as an abuse of power by authorities. Second, the scope of culpability has been deliberately circumscribed: both Stalin and the Politburo members who approved the massacres have been absolved of blame. Third, the inquest shows serious lapses, as no complete list of victims has been made public—an essential step for both completeness of the investigation and for the possibility of the victims’ subsequent rehabilitation. This article explains in detail the political and legal logic behind this treatment of Katyń-related documentation by the Russian political establishment since the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Biopolitical conservatism in Europe and beyond: the cases of identity-making projects in Poland and Russia

“…What was particularly emphasized is the role of the Soviet (and then Russian) people, who was often represented by a generalized figure of the Red Army soldier as a liberator from the universal evil of Nazism. In fact, this Victory Day cult was always a glorifying act of military bravery rather than an act of mourning about millions of victims, including those who lost their lives due to Stalin's repressive policies (Fedor 2017;Petrov 2015). The state's reluctance to take the full responsibility for terror against its own people or, in the words of Alexander Etkind, the 'warped mourning of the undead in the land of the unburied' (Etkind 2013), suppressed necropolitics as an expression of mourning and grief for dead compatriots.…”