Katyn– the Soviet massacre of over 21, 000 Polish prisoners in 1940 – has come to be remembered as Stalin's emblematic mass murder, an event obscured by one of the most extensive cover-ups in history. Yet paradoxically, a majority of its victims perished far from the forest in western Russia that gives the tragedy its name. Their remains lie buried in killing fields throughout Russia, Ukraine and, most likely, Belarus. Today their ghosts haunt the cultural landscape of Eastern Europe.
This book traces the legacy of Katyn through the interconnected memory cultures of seven countries: Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic States. It explores the meaning of Katyn as site and symbol, event and idea, fact and crypt. It shows how Katyn both incites nationalist sentiments in Eastern Europe and fosters an emerging cosmopolitan memory of Soviet terror. It also examines the strange impact of the 2010 plane crash that claimed the lives of Poland's leaders en route to Katyn.
Drawing on novels and films, debates and controversies, this book makes the case for a transnational study of cultural memory and navigates a contested past in a region that will define Europe's future.
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Yes, you can access Remembering Katyn by Alexander Etkind, Rory Finnin, Uilleam Blacker, Julie Fedor, Simon Lewis, Maria Mälksoo, Matilda Mroz in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Latin American & Caribbean History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
In 2008, the Polish rock-punk-ska group Lao Che released ‘Are You Human?’, a song about the Katyn massacres performed with the stiff, regular cadence of a military march. Its lyrics are a confession of an NKVD agent who recalls leading a Polish victim through the forest to his death. ‘If you’d like, I’ll tell you/ How I once played God’, intones Hubert Dobaczewski, the lead singer of Lao Che. ‘How I leaned [my victim] over the pit/ If you’d like, I’ll tell you/ How in the back of his head I … ’. Consigned to ellipsis, the precise moment of the murder haunts the murderer. The echo of the gunshot rings out in his conscience with mockery; the ‘wise’ eyes of the victim burn in his memory without end. The damned NKVD agent implores the listener, ‘Tell me I am human. Tell me, am I human?’
Lao Che have won acclaim in Poland and beyond for their visceral confrontation of the dark events of the twentieth century.1 With ‘Are You Human?’ – a song that asserts the humanity of the perpetrators of Katyn by having them question their humanity – the group confronts a particular problem related to the Polish memory of Katyn. The problem is, strictly speaking, that there is no memory. There was no survivor to bear voluntary, direct witness to the shootings, no one to recollect and remember them. ‘The survivor’s vocation is to remember; he cannot not remember’ (Agamben 2002, 26). Yet the memory of Stanisław Swianiewicz, a man widely considered a Katyn survivor, ends at Gnezdovo train station outside Katyn forest, where he was pulled aside by Soviet authorities at the last moment. His recollection of seeing his compatriots loaded onto transports at bayonet point, unaware of their fate, is the closest we have to a survivor’s memory of Katyn. As Swianiewicz acknowledges at the beginning of his memoir In the Shadow of Katyn (1976), ‘I am not a Katyn witness … ’ (Swianiewicz 1976, 11).2 Indeed, no one who entered the space designated for his destruction in Katyn, Kalinin and Kharkiv survived. No one who saw the edge of the pits escaped before the trigger was pulled. And no one who saw any of these 21,857 Poles perish would go on voluntarily to bear witness to their fate. As Lao Che suggest, the cursed memory of Katyn lies with the Soviet perpetrator.
Here we can begin to discern what might be called, for Poland, the singularity of Katyn. No one could remember the killings, so everyone should remember them. A loss of individual memory, in other words, mobilized the work of ‘connective memory’, what Jan Assmann calls a ‘unifying semantics that “holds [groups] inwardly together” and [stabilizes] a common identity’ (Assmann 2006, 11). In this sense, remembering Katyn has been a literal re-membering for Poland, a sustained effort to connect and unite the members of a community around an understanding of a traumatic event of the past beset by lies and deceit. To a degree, remembering Katyn has also been a cosmopolitan undertaking, involving various communities in Europe, North America and beyond whose recognition of the massacre promised assurance, security and vindication for Polish memory and mourning.
For decades, this work of memory and mourning was undertaken both in the Soviet satellite state of the People’s Republic of Poland (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, hereafter PRL) and in ‘Polonia’, the Polish émigré community. Poles at home and Poles abroad interacted with one another – sometimes uneasily, often clandestinely – to achieve the same goal, a discovery and disclosure of the facts of the Katyn massacre. Yet the risks attendant to their activities were very different. For Polish émigrés in the United Kingdom, home of the anti-Communist Polish Government-in-Exile, the work of connective memory involved mounting relentless investigations, educating often disinterested or quiescent publics, and lobbying politicians. For Poles in the PRL, such acts could spell punishment, imprisonment or even death. These many obstacles, from the mundane to the perilous, meant that remembering Katyn also involved, implicitly or explicitly, a meditation on the very limits of memory. Indeed, what we observe in this case is a special type of ‘postmemory’, which Marianne Hirsch relates to an ‘inter- and trans-generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience’ through oral narratives and material artifacts (Hirsch 2008, 106; our emphasis). For Poland, this transmission has been more a pursuit. At home or abroad, Poles had to fight to remember Katyn – not only in the face of a state-enforced campaign of forgetting, obfuscation and denial, but also in the face of a stark realization of the literal impossibility of remembering an event for which there was no living and willing witness. Their discourse is symptomatic of what we might call instead metamemory: memory about memory, about its loss and disappearance, failures and lacunae. In a verse by poet and literary critic Jacek Trznadel, it is the haunting of a ‘Polish Hamlet’ by a father executed at Katyn whose ghost cannot speak:
The ghost of his father in his charnel rags
with a hole in the back of his head
wakes him at midnight
but gives no sign
his hands are tied behind him
and from that moment Hamlet constantly hears
that same rap of Nagan pistols in his heart3
drowning out the morning song
of Ophelia and the birds
(Trznadel 1995b, 173–4)
Fighting the Katyn Lie
In 1988 Trznadel wrote that in Poland ‘there has been no end’ to Katyn. Events like the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 had passed into the historical record, but the ‘Katyn Lie’ lingered and persisted, testifying to the ‘falsity of the [Communist] regime, which has tortured the Polish national consciousness’ (Trznadel 1994, 128, 12). Indeed, for the anti-Communist opposition, the official narrative of Katyn as a Nazi crime was ‘the foundational lie of the Polish People’s Republic’ (Wasilewski 2010, 87).4 Exposing the lie would shake the very foundations of Communism in Poland; asserting the truth would provide a ‘trench for the spirit’, protection and security for a beleaguered resistance (Trznadel 1994, 22).5
Asserting the truth in Poland would mean overcoming a policy that went beyond mere censorship: discursive cleansing (Finnin 2011). Discursive cleansing is the process of disciplining speech through coordinated epistemic and physical violence that is both retrospective and prospective in its application. In Communist Poland, it involved silencing and punishing those who dared speak of Katyn; falsifying evidence and fabricating texts related to the massacres; and retroactively effacing references to Katyn in the public sphere, even when such references asserted Nazi responsibility. In tandem with their counterparts in Moscow, authorities in Warsaw were to ensure that Katyn was virtually expunged from public discourse and that its victims were made ‘ungrievable’ (Butler 2009), that is, cast outside the realm of sanctioned mourning. In principle, Katyn was to remain recognized as a Nazi crime, but in practice, after the late 1940s, the event was not to be recognized at all. As Mirosław Golon remarks, ‘For most of the period of the PRL, the Katyn crime simply did not exist in its propaganda, or at least was not meant to exist’ (Golon 2001, 25).
Following in the footsteps of the Soviet NKVD, which had deported thousands of relatives of Katyn victims and imprisoned circumstantial witnesses, the Polish secret service or Słu
ba Bezpiecze
stwa (hereafter, SB) threatened, punished and often displaced those who attempted to establish the fate of the loved ones sent to Kozel’sk, Ostashkov and Starobil’s’k (Gasztold-Se
2010, 132). The SB singled out Poles who brought up Katyn in conversation or passed along information about the crime gleaned from Radio Free Europe and other foreign radio services (Gasztold-Se
2010, 132, 138–9). They also pressured those who had participated in the German exhumations of Katyn in 1943 to recant their testimonies. Writers like Józef Mackiewicz and Ferdynand Goetel, whose reports to the Red Cross and the Polish Government-in-Exile were crucial in establishing an accurate picture of the crime, refused to do so, however. As a result, they were forced to flee to the West, and their names were cleansed from the public sphere.
Even in emigration, Mackiewicz would return, in a sense, to Poland. In 1948 he edited (anonymously) the seminal work The Katyn Crime in the Light of Documents, which circulated widely and repeatedly in the Polish underground. In effect, the volume helped establish a ‘circuit’ of Katyn-related information between Polish émigrés and activists in the PRL. Featuring a foreword by General Władysław Anders, who was invited by the Soviet regime to form a Polish armed force aligned with the Red Army in 1941, The Katyn Crime in the Light of Documents is a collection of documents, photographs, testimonies, interviews and other materials, including diary entries of the victims uncovered during the German exhumations in 1943. These latter, fragmentary texts are both records and representatives of the dead, testifying to the aspirations, fears and experiences of the victims but ending abruptly before the moment of execution (Trznadel 1994, 36). In this way, they speak to Katyn by not speaking of Katyn.
The diaries excerpted and collected in The Katyn Crime in the Light of Documents were transcribed by Dr Jan Zygmunt Robel and his assistants at the former Polish State Institute of Forensic Medicine in Krakow, who were responsible for examining the materials discovered during the 1943 exhumation. Robel and his team risked their lives to reproduce each of the twenty-two diaries and to create a secret catalogue of all the documents they handled. Fifteen diaries were passed on to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London; the others were lost. While Communist authorities confiscated some of Robel’s catalogued material after the war, a cache of documents, including typed copies of the diaries, remained hidden in the Institute of Forensic Medicine until 1991 (Cienciala et al. 2007, 225).
As these texts made their way to Poland via Mackiewicz’s volume, acts of Katyn commemoration proliferated steadily behind cemetery gates and within church wa...
