MEDNOYE, RUSSIA — There were 6,295 Polish prisoners held captive at the monastery when the order came to "unload" the camp. It took a month and a half to kill all of them.
The prisoners were mostly military officers, police, gendarmes and landlords, rounded up as a dangerous "bourgeois" elite when the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland in the run-up to World War II. The following year, 1940, the Communist Party decided to eliminate them.
Prison directors began to send the men by train, a group at a time, to the provincial town of Tver, then called Kalinin, about 100 miles northwest of Moscow. There, in the basement of intelligence headquarters, the prisoners were executed: a single bullet to the head from a German pistol, historians here say.
The executioners worked through the spring nights, loading bodies into trucks and carting them nearly 20 miles to this pine glade that once encircled a rest house for the NKVD, the feared precursor to the Soviet KGB. They threw them into deep trenches. Even the truck drivers were ordered to take part in the slaughter, to ensure their silence.
"The situation is normal," the prison camp commissar wrote to his superiors in Moscow. "The Polish officers are not guessing anything. They think they're being deported back home. Even those who are sick try to pretend they're healthy so they can go too."
It was a bloody spring. The same fate was unfolding for Poles held in other camps throughout the western flank of the Soviet Union.
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It's an old story among many old stories, pooling at the bottom of Russian memory long before it was articulated officially or publicly. And yet the mass executions of the Polish prisoners remain a potent issue today for Russians as well as Poles.
There was a time, roughly between the collapse of communism and the rise of Vladimir Putin, when the Russian government began to dig into the uglier aspects of Soviet history. Investigators arrived at this sleepy forest and unearthed thousands of corpses, the remains of some of the Polish prisoners systematically killed by Stalin's executioners in the operation now shorthanded as the Katyn massacre. (Katyn forest contains another Polish mass grave.) As many as 22,000 Poles were killed.
Today, lawyers, Polish families and human rights organizations are calling on the Russian government to establish the victims' innocence by "rehabilitating" the Polish prisoners. They are also pushing for the declassification of documents and recent decisions about the probe into the massacre.
The requests are meeting stiff resistance from Moscow. Appeals to the courts have failed and investigations have halted. The government has progressively curtailed access to intelligence archives, where historians believe more evidence may lie.
Some critics say Putin, who has called the Soviet collapse the "geopolitical disaster" of the last century and cut his teeth working for the KGB, is the intellectual product of the same system; that the powerful prime minister who previously served as Russia's president could not be expected to undertake any reexamination of history.
Others say the current government is harking back to a more powerful time, using Soviet nostalgia and allowing a resurgence of Stalin's popularity as a bulwark against dissent and growing economic woes.
Whatever the reason, the Polish case remains shrouded in what Yelena Obraztsova, research director at a memorial site in Mednoye, calls "a syndrome of half-truths and lies."
State newspapers have started to backpedal to Stalin-era propaganda about the Polish prisoners, recycling the claim that it was in fact the Nazis, and not the Soviets, who killed the men and dumped them into mass graves.
In October 2007, Russia's most popular newspaper published, without a dissenting view, a Soviet general's denial of the Soviet Union's hand in the death of the Poles. He termed the mass graves "a German provocation."
"The Germans destroyed them," Valentin Varennikov, who died this month, was quoted as saying. "And then at gunpoint the same Germans forced several Russians to write statements that the Poles were allegedly shot by the NKVD."
This plays out against a backdrop of marked defensiveness over the Soviet role in World War II. The government has recently discussed criminalizing any criticism of Soviet tactics during the conflict, known by Russians as the Great Patriotic War.
Many Russians feel keenly that the millions of deaths their country suffered to squelch the rise of fascism are little remembered, let alone appreciated, by the West.
Holidays such as this month's Victory Day celebrate the bygone glory and moral rectitude of the World War II era. Tanks and warplanes stream along Moscow's main boulevard, leafy parks sway with orchestra music, and young women slip into 1940s frocks to waltz with stooped veterans.
Details such as the mass extermination of Polish prisoners undercut the sense of righteousness, some say.
