Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment (Annals of Communism Series) [Hardcover]

Anna M. Cienciala (Editor), Natalia S. Lebedeva (Editor), Wojciech Materski (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0300108516 | ISBN-13: 978-0300108514 | Publication Date: January 28, 2008

The 14,500 Polish army officers, police, gendarmes, and civilians taken prisoner by the Red Army when it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939 were held in three special NKVD camps and executed at three different sites in spring 1940, of which the one in Katyn Forest is the most famous. Another 7,300 prisoners held in NKVD jails in Ukraine and Belarus were also shot at this time, although many others disappeared without trace. The murder of these Poles is among the most monstrous mass murders undertaken by any modern government.

 

Three leading historians of the NKVD massacres of Polish prisoners of war at Katyn, Kharkov, and Tver—now subsumed under “Katyn”—present 122 documents selected from the published Russian and Polish volumes coedited by Natalia S. Lebedeva and Wojciech Materski. The documents, with introductions and notes by Anna M. Cienciala, detail the Soviet killings, the elaborate cover-up, the admission of the truth, and the Katyn question in Soviet/Russian–Polish relations up to the present.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An extremely important book on one of the signature crimes of Stalinism and one of the great efforts of obfuscation of Soviet propaganda."—Timothy Snyder, Yale University

(Timothy Snyder )

“This is not only a story about a cruel crime that remains unpunished. It is also a story about historical truth versus denial, about moral impulses versus political cynicism. A piece of Polish history but also a message of universal importance.”—Janusz Reiter, Ambassador of Poland 

(Janusz Reiter )

About the Author

Anna M. Cienciala, a specialist in twentieth-century Polish diplomatic history and Katyn, is a retired professor of history at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. Natalia S. Lebedeva, the leading Russian historian of Katyn, is a researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, who has edited other documents and published articles on Soviet-Polish relations, the Comintern, and other subjects. Wojciech Materski, the leading Polish historian of Soviet/Russian–Polish relations and Katyn, is director of the Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 624 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (January 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300108516
• ISBN-13: 978-0300108514
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #449,359 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Superb Mini-Encyclopedia on the Katyn Massacre, September 17, 2008

By 

Jan Peczkis "Scholar and Thinker" (Chicago IL, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment (Annals of Communism Series) (Hardcover)

This single volume has everything: History of the events leading up to and including the Massacre, the decades of western silence and Soviet denial, Soviet admission of responsibility, the 1943 and 1990's forensic investigations, and implications for Polish-Russian relationships. In view of the fact that the Russians are once again hardening their attitudes regarding Katyn, this book is more relevant than ever.

Photographs are included, and many documents are printed in their entirety. These include the chilling March 5, 1940 NKVD one that contains the order to shoot the Polish internees. (pp. 118-120). An earlier NKVD document includes a complaint about the Polish prisoners being religious. (p. 86). Obviously, the Katyn Massacre had encompassed religious martyrdom in addition to genocide. Another document (pp. 344-345) contains the decades-belated Soviet admission of guilt. Still another Soviet document mentions a total of 21,857 victims. (pp. 240-241).

This volume includes an examination of "counter-Katyns", wherein Poles are accused of killing Soviet captives in the 1920 Polish-Bolshevik War. These, in actuality, are unintentional deaths of Soviets in captivity and are comparable to frequencies of Polish deaths in Soviet captivity during this war. (p. 263, 510, 533).

I found some parts of this book particularly fascinating. One of these is an account of the battle to hide the mementos of the victims, taken by the Germans in 1943, and to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Soviets and their Polish-Communist stooges. Amazingly, some of them survived the four decades of the Soviet puppet state. (pp. 225-226). There are also the eye-opening interviews with some of the Russian eyewitnesses of the Massacre still alive in the early 1990's. (pp. 124-129, 133-135).

The end of this book includes a biographical glossary of important personages. This contains information beyond Katyn. For instance, we learn that Edward Smygly-Rydz, the Commander in Chief of Poland's unsuccessful 1939 defense against the German-Soviet aggressors, snuck back into German-occupied Poland and lived under an assumed name until his death in 1941 from heart disease. (Other accounts have him shot by the Germans, who supposedly didn't realize his actual identity.). The entry on AK-Commander Stefan Rowecki "Grot" states that, after he fell into the hands of the Germans, he rejected a proposal to form a Polish collaborationist battalion that would fight on Germany's side against the Soviets. If true, this is further refutation of the No-Polish-Quisling-because-the-Germans-never-wanted-one argument.

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An important book, February 2, 2008

By 

Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment (Annals of Communism Series) (Hardcover)

The Polish people suffered dearly in the Second World War. Three Million Jewish Poles were murdered. Millions of other Poles were forced from their lands in West Poland and relocated. When the Poles rose in Rebellion in 1944 in Warsaw they were brutally crushed and 80% of the city was levelled. These stories have been told in the important book Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw. But there is another story that has gone untold. During the Second World War the German army came across the Katyn massacre sites and blamed Stalin for the atrocity in which 14,500 Polish officers and another 7,300 other political prisoners were murdered by the Soviet secret police. However the world beleived the Soviets when it blamed the atrocity on the Nazis. But it turned out it was not the Nazis.

This book is a testament to this famous story and documents relating to the case by leading researchers into the mass murder. A famous incident that has long been forgotten this book finally brings it back to light.

Seth J. Frantzman

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars KATYN, October 22, 2009

By 

Andrzej Jezierski - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment (Annals of Communism Series) (Hardcover)

It is an excellent historical review of that not widely known episode of
Soviet genocide and deceit.