Down with Big Brother (53 page)

The NKVD executioners were trained to kill with brutal efficiency. Soviet pistols tended to overheat with heavy use, so they used a German-made pistol, the Walther 7.65 mm, considered more reliable. They took aim at the nape of the victim’s skull, so that the bullet passed neatly through his brain, emerging between the nose and the hairline. Perfected in the early days of the revolution, this method caused instant death with minimal consumption of bullets. An assistant usually stood by to reload the eight-shot semiautomatic pistol. The bodies were neatly stacked in layers of twelve. There could be anywhere between two hundred and three thousand bodies per pit.
When the pit was full, it was filled in with heavy sand and landscaped with birch trees.
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The Germans stumbled on what had happened at Katyn after invading the Soviet Union in June 1941. Acting on a tip from a local peasant, they dug up the skeletons of 4,143 Polish officers. The mass graves also contained personal effects such as letters, snapshots, bracelets, and leather cavalry boots. The discovery was a propaganda windfall for the Nazis, who used it to drive a wedge between the Poles and the Soviets. It was also an embarrassment for the Western Allies, who needed to keep on good terms with Stalin in order to win the war.

From the historians’ point of view, the most important find were twenty-two diaries, which make it possible to reconstruct what happened to the officers in the seven months between their arrests and brutal executions. After their capture by the Red Army, the officers were interned in a Russian Orthodox monastery at Kozielsk, 150 miles south of Moscow. All attempts to “reeducate” them or persuade them to remain in the Soviet Union failed. Proud of their national traditions, they defied the Soviet military authorities by holding prayer meetings in their barracks and singing the Polish national anthem. Their proud demeanor, unquenchable optimism, and beautifully cut leather boots astonished their Soviet jailers. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they persisted in believing that their homeland would soon be liberated.

Toward the end of March 1940 the prisoners picked up rumors that the camp was about to be closed. The Soviet Union had never declared war on Poland. The officers hoped to be sent to a neutral country and eventually rejoin the exiled Polish army. The NKVD encouraged such rumors, hinting that they were going “to the West” or “to home.” On April 3 the first group of three hundred or so prisoners left Kozielsk to the exuberant cheers of their countrymen. They were fed a good meal before leaving the camp, leading to speculation that the Soviets wanted to fatten them up prior to releasing them. After a twenty-four-hour ride in windowless wagons, they were pushed off the train at a place called Gniezdovo.

“At [the Gniezdovo] station, we were loaded into prison cars under strict guard,” noted Lieutenant Wacław Kruk in a diary entry dated April 8. “Optimistic as I was before, I’m now coming to the conclusion that this journey does not bode well.”
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One of the Polish officers, Major Adam Skolski, managed to keep writing his diary until a few moments before he died. “From dawn, the day started in a peculiar way. Departure in lorries fitted with cells; terrible.
Taken somewhere into a forest, something like a country house. Very thorough search of our belongings. They took my watch, which showed time as 6:30 (Polish time) 8:30 (Soviet time); asked about a wedding ring. Ruble, belt, and pocket knife taken away.”
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F
OR
G
ORBACHEV
, glasnost had never been an end in itself. It was a means to an end, a way of bringing outside pressure to bear on the apparatchiks who actually made decisions. Historical truth was a powerful political weapon to be used sparingly, in accordance with changing circumstances, and at the most opportune time. This was one area where he enjoyed an advantage over his bureaucratic rivals. As general secretary he was the custodian of the regime’s most terrible secrets.

The secrets were stuffed in large envelopes, tied with string, and sealed with wax. There were around two thousand of these envelopes, all neatly filed away in cupboards in the Kremlin apartment once occupied by Stalin, down the corridor from the general secretary’s office. This was the celebrated
osobaya papka
(special file), containing documents so secret that they were circulated and preserved in one copy only. Anybody who checked the documents out was obliged to sign for them. Many of the envelopes in the
osobaya papka
could be opened only by the general secretary himself or with his personal authorization.
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The contents of the
osobaya papka
were politically and ideologically devastating. Here, in black and white, were documents that laid bare the cynicism and opportunism of Soviet leaders, from Lenin onward. There were orders, signed by Lenin, for the murder of priests and “class enemies” and for a policy of “Red Terror” against the enemies of the revolution. There were documents proving that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions of his countrymen, and not just “thousands,” as Gorbachev himself maintained as late as November 1987. There was the official Russian-language text of the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, providing for the dismemberment of Poland and the Baltic states, a document that Moscow had long denounced as a forgery. There were the squalid details of Kremlin power struggles, including the murder of the secret police chief Lavrenti Beria and the plot against Khrushchev. There were documents outlining preparations for the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. And there were two large envelopes devoted to Katyn.

An item in Envelope No. 1 revealed the shameful truth: The Polish officers
had been killed on Stalin’s direct orders. It was a typewritten memorandum from Beria to the dictator, recommending the “supreme penalty—shooting” for Polish officers and Poles suspected of belonging to “various counter-revolutionary organizations.” Stalin had scrawled his approval across the top of the document, and other Politburo members had also affixed their signatures. Another handwritten report, submitted to Nikita Khrushchev by the head of the KGB, gave a precise figure for the number of Poles executed at Katyn and two other sites: 21,857. It recommended destroying the personnel records of the murdered Poles on the ground that they no longer had any “operational” or “historical” value and were potentially embarrassing.
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Gorbachev had the opportunity to discover the truth about Katyn from the moment he became general secretary. However, he showed little interest in the matter until it became a subject of hot political controversy. In the spring of 1987 he set up a joint Soviet-Polish commission to investigate so-called blank spots in relations between the two countries. Official historians from both sides were instructed to comb the archives to produce an agreed-upon version of history. Despite numerous meetings, the commission failed to make much progress largely because the Soviet representatives were not authorized to question the official line. Polish historians concluded that the purpose of the blank spots campaign was to obfuscate rather than to clarify, postponing the moment when Moscow would finally admit responsibility for Katyn.

Two years later, in the spring of 1989, pressure began to mount from the Polish side for a resolution of the Katyn affair. With contested elections approaching, and in the wake of the Round Table agreement with Solidarity, Jaruzelski was anxious to demonstrate his national credentials. For the Polish Communist Party to continue to deny Soviet guilt—in the face of overwhelming evidence—would be politically suicidal. In March 1989 a Polish spokesman announced that everything pointed to the conclusion that “the crime was committed by the Stalinist NKVD.”
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The Polish about-face put Gorbachev in a difficult spot since he had earlier insisted that there was no conclusive evidence of Soviet guilt. Far from being dead and buried, the Katyn mystery had now become a live political issue. In a memorandum dated March 22, 1989, the top Soviet officials dealing with Poland warned Gorbachev that the Katyn affair could explode in his face and urged him not to procrastinate any further. “In this case, time is not our ally,” the memorandum concluded. “It might be preferable to explain what really happened, and who specifically is responsible for what
happened, and close the issue there. The costs of this course of action would be lower, in the final analysis, than the damage caused by our inaction.”
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Preoccupied with his own domestic problems, Gorbachev effectively shelved this recommendation. But according to his former chief of staff Valery Boldin, he did order his own search of the
osobaya papka
. Boldin later recalled:

He called me in and asked me to show him everything we had on the Katyn affair. Two envelopes were found. I ordered them from the archives, and I brought them to him unopened, exactly the way I received them from the archives. He opened both envelopes himself, read what was inside, and sealed them back with Scotch tape. He did not give the material to me to read. He told me, “This is indeed the material concerning Katyn. It needs to be kept so that it is quite safe.” I put the material in a new envelope and sealed it properly.… All the documents that were kept in the archives on this subject were handed over to him.
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In accordance with the rules of the
osobaya papka
, archivists duly noted that the documents were signed out to Boldin on April 18, 1989, and returned in a new envelope. It was the first time that any Kremlin official had examined the file in more than eight years.

Gorbachev insists he was never shown the documents relating to Katyn or equally damning evidence on the Molotov-Ribbentrop secret protocols.
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He has challenged the veracity of his former chief of staff, pointing out that Boldin played a leading role in the August 1991 coup. He has also posed the rhetorical question, Why should the father of glasnost, the man who did more than any other Soviet leader to publicize the ghastly atrocities of the Stalin era, have any reason to lie about Katyn?
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Boldin’s reliability as a historical witness is certainly open to question. On this occasion, however, he seems more credible than Gorbachev. In April 1989 he was still the perfect apparatchik, faithfully carrying out his master’s wishes. He had no reason to conceal documents from his own boss. On the contrary, he wanted to impress the general secretary with his loyalty and zeal. The idea that he would have kept such explosive material to himself is so improbable that few Russian officials outside Gorbachev’s immediate entourage believe it. Even Yakovlev, the Politburo member directly responsible for historical matters, has accused the former Soviet leader of lying: “There was a huge fuss about this. Gorbachev kept telling me: ‘Find
the documents, keep looking.’ And he told Jaruzelski: ‘Press harder on Yakovlev, let him look for these documents.’ It put me in such a difficult position. During my talks with Jaruzelski, I felt like a fish in a hot frying pan.… I later discovered that he [Gorbachev] had hid the facts about Katyn all along.”
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There is a plausible answer to Gorbachev’s rhetorical question about why he should have concealed the most damning documents about Katyn when he allowed so much else to come to light, and it goes to the heart of his political identity and character. The father of glasnost was a master obfuscater and manipulator. He was in favor of openness, but on his terms. He believed in doling out the truth in small, politically calculated doses. He could have totally destroyed the legitimacy of the Communist system with a series of spectacular revelations, but he had no interest in doing so. He was a reformer, not a revolutionary. In the case of the Katyn archives, he wanted to prevent a wave of anti-Sovietism in Poland. He did not want to antagonize the conservative wing of his own Politburo, at a time when he needed its support to create a powerful presidency. A host of such considerations are likely to have run through his mind as he stuffed the incriminating documents back into the envelope.

In short, the time was not yet ripe.

Later on, when the time was ripe, he had his own historical reputation to consider. The way Boldin tells it, Gorbachev became trapped in his own Byzantine political manipulations. His attempt to control the flood of revelations from the archives had led him to conceal valuable documents from both his own colleagues and the international community. Having lied once, he was obliged to lie again, for reasons of consistency.

When Gorbachev revised his position about Soviet responsibility for Katyn in April 1990, he did so for primarily pragmatic reasons. Independent research in both Poland and the Soviet Union had exploded the longstanding claim of German guilt and Soviet innocence. Jaruzelski was coming to Moscow and wanted to go down in history as the man who had persuaded the Soviets to “tell the truth” about Katyn. From Moscow’s point of view, it was better to concede Soviet guilt to Jaruzelski than to his anti-Communist rivals. According to a secret Kremlin memorandum, it was necessary to find a way “to seal the political problem and at the same time avoid an explosion of emotion.” The challenge facing Soviet leaders was to come up with a version of history that would set the record reasonably straight, at the “lowest [political] cost.”
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