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IN MAY 2010, the then president of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev released a document about the massacre of about 22,000 Polish officers and others by the Russian army in 1940. The document was the notorious letter, written on March 5, 1940 by Lavrentiy Beria, head of the Soviet secret police NKVD (precursor to the KGB), to Stalin proposing the execution of the Poles on the grounds that they were all “enemies of the Soviet authorities and full of hate for the Soviet system”. The document, which featured the signatures of Stalin and other members of the Politburo, sent shock-waves across the world, even though the truth was known and nobody had ever believed Stalin’s propaganda which blamed this heinous crime on the Germans. Denials of the authenticity of the document came from three sources - the Communist Party of Greece, the Communist Party of Russia and of course the Communist Party of Cyprus, AKEL. The leadership of these parties claimed the Medvedev document was made up and the signatures had been forged. Writing about this preposterous reaction, on May 30, 2010, I urged AKEL chief Andros Kyprianou to explain why the party leadership had run to the defence of the hideous crimes committed by a ruthless and paranoid dictator 70 years ago. On April 16, the European Court of Human Rights issued its decision on the recourses 55508/07 and 29520/09 (Janowiec and others) filed by 15 relatives of the victims of the Katyn forest massacre, which is how the extermination of the Poles by Stalin’s killers came to be known. The decision vindicated the relatives and put an end to the vile Soviet propaganda that blamed the Germans. It should be noted that despite the fact that the Russian state admitted committing the massacre, the ECHR decision censured Russia for failing to co-operate with the court, as it had refused to supply a copy of the decision by the Russian authorities to terminate the investigation into the matter which had started in 2004 at the instigation of relatives of the victims. The 30-page ECHR decision went into shocking details. The executions took place in April and May 1940 in several locations. Estimates of the number of victims were included in a memo given by Alexander Shelepin, head of the KGB, to Nikita Kruschev on March 3, 1959. It said: “In all, according to the decision of the troika of the NKVD (the special committee in charge of the massacre) a total of 21,857 people were shot, 4,421 in the Katyn forest, 3,820 at the Starobilsk army camp near Kharkiv, 6,311 at the Ostakof army camp and 7,305 at other army camps and prisons in western Ukraine and Belarus.” In the same memo, Shelepin suggested the destruction of the 21,857 files of the people executed. The rest of the documents, such as the memos of Beria and Shelepin as well as the minutes of the Politburo meeting that took the decision were stored in a special file. It was these documents that were posted on the web-site hosting Russian state archives on April 28, 2010. According to the decision of the Soviet Politburo, March 5, 1940 the executions would have been carried out “through special procedure, without summoning the prisoners, without trial, without investigation and findings and without their being charged.” I would like to ask Andros Kyprianou, once again, to tell us if the AKEL leadership, after the damning decision by the ECHR, still maintains that the slaughter of 22,000 Poles in 1940 in Katyn and elsewhere was not ordered by Stalin and Soviet Union’s Communist Party? If Kyprianou believes that the ECHR’s decision was based on forged documents, he has an obligation to publicly say so. The Cypriot people need to know that the ECHR is a pseudo-court which bases its decisions on forged documents and distorts history. |