P R E S S S T A T E M E N T
The Federation of Poles in Great Britain C.I.O, based in London, which has represented Polish organizations in the UK since 1947,has sent a letter this weekend to the Russian Ambassador in London to protest at the removal by Tver city authorities in central Russia of plaques which commemorated the mass execution by the NKVD in April and May of 1940 of 6311 Polish military and civilian officials.
The local prosecutor and mayor in Tver have claimed there is no documentary evidence of the massacre despite all evidence to the contrary and despite acknowledgement of the crime by the Russian government. Prime Minister John Major recognized in 1991 that the British government held the Soviet government responsible for this wartime massacre. The Federation asks the Russian Ambassador to forward the protest both to President Putin and to the local authorities in Tver and urges that the plaques are restored in a public ceremony.
The executions at Tver have been public information in Russia since 1990 and the site of the killings was initially open to the public. The executions at Tver were part of the "Katyn massacres" of more than 22,000 Polish military and civilian personnel who had been captured by the Red Army after the joint invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in September 1939. It was one of the most heinous crimes of the Second World War which the Soviet government had blamed for many decades as being a Nazi crime even though overwhelming evidence showed that the executions were carried out by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, at the express instructions of Joseph Stalin and the Politburo.
"Katyn denial, like Holocaust denial, is a standard feature of the growing radical nationalism in the Russian heartlands, and it is vital, in tthe interests of the survival of democracy in Russia, that the plaques are restored and due respect is paid to the memory of those Polish prisoners of war killed in Tver, Katyn, Kharkov and other places of execution in Russia as well as of all other victims of the Red Terror in the Soviet Union," said Federation spokesman and trustee Wiktor Moszczynski.
Issued by the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, 240 King Street, London W6 0RF
For futrther information please contact Wiktor Moszczynski, tel. 07786471833
His Excellency Mr Andrei Kelin, 16 May 2020
Russian Ambassador,
6/7 Kensington Palace Gardens
London W8 4QP
Your Excellency,
This week we have seen a film showing the illegal removal of plaques commemorating the mass murder of Polish citizens in the former NKVD headquarters in Tver between 4th April and 16th May 1940. This follows reports of a grotesque statement by the local mayor in June last year that there is no documentary evidence for this crime, and a subsequent letter from alocal prosecutor’s office to the Chancellor of Tver State Medical University (current landlordof the former NKVD building) to have the plaques removed.
It has been known since 1942 that 6311 Polish officials had been held in a prisoner of war camp at Ostashkov following the joint invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the USSR in 1939. Since 1990 we also know that they had been brought to the black panelled cellars of the NKVD in Tver to be executed at a rate of 250 every day with a single shot in the back of the
head and then their bodies were dumped in an unfenced site in Miednoye, 30 kilometres from Tver, where they were buried unceremoniously in long trenches. Their bodies had been discovered in 1990 and initially unearthed by Memorial, a local human rights group. The bodies are now reburied in an official commemorative site visited each year by relatives of the victims, Polish consular authorities and local officials. For a short period, the site of the executions was even open to visitors.
As you are aware, in October 1992, at the request of President Boris Yeltsin, Professor Rudolf Pikhoia, Director of the National Archives of the Russian Federation, presented President Lech Wałęsa with original documents showing, first, a motion by Lavrenty Beria, Commissar for Internal Affairs, arguing for the shooting of 25,700 interned Polish officers and, second, a positive response approving the motion at a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee, signed by Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov and others. In the meantime, Russian military prosecutor Colonel Anatoly Yablokov, in charge of the Katyn case, concluded a 3-year investigation in 1993 that named Stalin and members of the Politbureau as guilty of the mass execution of Polish officers. This evidence and these findings were entirely consistent with all the evidence on the case held by the wartime Polish government and by the U.S.House of Representatives Select Committee in 1952. They were further supported by masses of later evidence from NKVD and other Soviet state institutions gathered by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. Soviet guilt for the crime of Katyn is now the common conclusion held by every government and every independent historical institute throughout the world.
At the site of the Katyn massacre in 2010, at the 70th Anniversary, your Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, now President of the Russian Federation, rightfully acknowledged the Soviet authorship of the Katyn crimes when he stressed the common suffering of Russians, Poles and other ethnic groups under Stalin’s rule. He said that “with decades of cynical lies, they tried to blot out the truth about the Katyn shootings.” and appealed that all parties “should come to terms with a common historical truth and realise that we cannot go on living in the past alone”.
We must protest therefore at the removal of the plaques commemorating the 6311 Polish victims of the Tver massacres. We see this act as an insult to the memory of these victims, to the victims’ families and to countless millions of other victims of Stalin’s terror, as well as a rejection by the local authorities in Tver of the “common historical truth” which the Russian government had previously acknowledged. We urge that the plaques be restored immediately in a public ceremony as this would be in the interests of good future Russian-Polish relations and an acknowledgement of international concern at such a blatant attempt to revise the truth about Russia’s past.
We request that you forward our protest both to the President of the Russian Federation and to the local authorities in Tver.
Yours sincerely,
Włodzimierz Mier-Jędrzejowicz
Deputy Chairman, Acting Chairman, Federation of Poles in Great Britain
