Katyn

I have just watched the Polish film span style="font-style: italic;"Katyn/span about the Soviet massacre of members of the Polish intelligentsia who were captured as POWs in 1939. It was a rather chilling film and showed how, from the beginning, the post-war communist Polish regime had to lie about the past.br /br /As a consequence of the Ribbenthrop-Molotov Pact of 1939, the USSR seized eastern Poland while Germany took the west. It was at this time that lots of military officers - and members of the educated elite who had been called up - were captured by the Red Army.br /br /The film rather chillingly shows them being shot and then dumped in a mass grave in 1940. However, the post-war Polish state followed the official Soviet propaganda line that these individuals were killed by the Germans not the Soviets. They thus claimed that it was only after Operation Barbarossa, when the Germans took over Soviet-occupied Poland as they invaded the USSR, that the group was killed (i.e. in 1941). The film presents a fictionalised version of how individual family members of the deceased realised this was a lie and tried to fight against the official verdict of events.br /br /It is only after the fall of the communist regime in Poland and the end of the USSR that the truth of the massacre emerged. The fiction that it was committed in 1941 was wiped away and the truth emerged that it took placed in 1940 at the hands of the dreaded Soviet secret police - the NKVD.div class="blogger-post-footer"img width='1' height='1' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/38622711-3073031748692334164?l=vinospoliticalblog.blogspot.com'//div

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