title: Pregabalin

text: In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved pregabalin for adjunctive therapy for adults with partial onset seizures, management of postherpetic neuralgia and neuropathic pain associated with spinal cord injury and diabetic peripheral neuropathy, and the treatment of fibromyalgia. Pregabalin has also been approved in the European Union, the United Kingdom and Russia for treatment of generalized anxiety disorder.


title: Pregabalin

text: Since 2008, Pfizer has engaged in extensive direct-to-consumer advertising campaigns to promote its branded product Lyrica for fibromyalgia and diabetic nerve pain indications. In January 2016, the company spent a record amount, $24.6 million for a single drug on TV ads, reaching global revenues of $14 billion, more than half in the United States.


title: Pregabalin

text: Up until 2009, Pfizer promoted Lyrica for other uses which had not been approved by medical regulators. For Lyrica and three other drugs, Pfizer was fined a record amount of US$2.3 billion by the Department of Justice, after pleading guilty to advertising and branding "with the intent to defraud or mislead." Pfizer illegally promoted the drugs, with doctors "invited to consultant meetings, many in resort locations; attendees expenses were paid; they received a fee just for being there", according to prosecutor Michael Loucks.


title: Pregabalin

text: Professor Richard "Rick" Silverman of Northwestern University developed pregabalin there. The university holds a patent on it, exclusively licensed to Pfizer. That patent, along with others, was challenged by generic manufacturers and was upheld in 2014, giving Pfizer exclusivity for Lyrica in the US until 2018.


title: Pregabalin

text: As of October 2017, pregabalin was marketed under many brand names in other countries: Algerika, Alivax, Alyse, Alzain, Andogablin, Aprion, Averopreg, Axual, Balifibro, Brieka, Clasica, Convugabalin, Dapapalin, Dismedox, Dolgenal, Dolica, Dragonor, Ecubalin, Epica, Epiron, Gaba-P, Gabanext, Gabarol, Gabica, Gablin, Gablovac, Gabrika, Gavin, Gialtyn, Glonervya, Helimon, Hexgabalin, Irenypathic, Kabian, Kemirica, Kineptia, Lecaent, Lingabat, Linprel, Lyribastad, Lyric, Lyrica, Lyrineur, Lyrolin, Lyzalon, Martesia, Maxgalin, Mystika, Neuragabalin, Neugaba, Neurega, Neurica, Neuristan, Neurolin, Neurovan, Neurum, Newrica, Nuramed, Paden, Pagadin, Pagamax, Painica, Pevesca, PG, Plenica, Pragiola, Prebalin, Prebanal, Prebel, Prebictal, Prebien, Prefaxil, Pregaba, Pregabalin, Pregabalina, Pregabaline, Prégabaline, Pregabalinum, Pregabateg, Pregaben, Pregabid, Pregabin, Pregacent, Pregadel, Pregagamma, Pregalex, Pregalin, Pregalodos, Pregamid, Pregan, Preganerve, Pregastar, Pregatrend, Pregavalex, Pregdin Apex, Pregeb, Pregobin, Prejunate, Prelin, Preludyo, Prelyx, Premilin, Preneurolin, Prestat, Pretor, Priga, Provelyn, Regapen, Resenz, Rewisca, Serigabtin, Symra, Vronogabic, Xablin, and Xil.


title: Pregabalin

text: It was also marketed in several countries as a combination drug with mecobalamin under the brand names Agemax-P, Alphamix-PG, Freenerve-P, Gaben, Macraberin-P, Mecoblend-P, Mecozen-PG, Meex-PG, Methylnuron-P, Nervolin, Nervopreg, Neurica-M, Neuroprime-PG, Neutron-OD, Nuroday-P, Nurodon-PG, Nuwin-P, Pecomin-PG, Prebel-M, Predic-GM, Pregacent-M, Pregamet, Preganerv-M, Pregeb-M OD, Pregmic, Prejunate Plus, Preneurolin Plus, Pretek-GM, Rejusite, Renerve-P, Safyvit-PR, and Vitcobin-P, Voltanerv with Methylcobalamin and ALA by Cogentrix Pharma.


title: Pregabalin

text: Pfizer's main patent for Lyrica, for seizure disorders, in the UK expired in 2013. In November 2018, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruled that Pfizer's second patent on the drug, for treatment of pain, was invalid because there was a lack of evidence for the conditions it covered – central and peripheral neuropathic pain. From October 2015, GPs were forced to change people from generic pregabalin to branded until the second patent ran out in July 2017. This cost the NHS £502 million.


title: Gina Gershon

text: Gina L. Gershon (born June 10, 1962) is an American actress. She has had roles in the films "Cocktail" (1988), "Red Heat" (1988), "Showgirls" (1995), "Bound" (1996), "Face/Off" (1997), "The Insider" (1999), "Demonlover" (2002), "P.S. I Love You" (2007), "Five Minarets in New York" (2010), "Killer Joe" (2011) and "House of Versace" (2013). She has also had supporting roles in FX's "Rescue Me" and HBO's "How to Make It in America". She portrayed Gladys Jones on The CW teen drama series "Riverdale".


title: Gina Gershon

text: Gershon was born in Los Angeles, to Mickey Gershon (née Koppel), an interior decorator, and Stan Gershon, who worked in the import-export business and sales. She was raised in a Jewish family in Los Angeles's San Fernando Valley. She has an older brother and an older sister.


title: Gina Gershon

text: Gershon went to Collier Street Elementary School and Woodland Hills Academy (formerly Parkman Junior High). She attended Beverly Hills High School and started acting at the age of 14. After graduating from high school in 1980, she moved to Boston to attend Emerson College. She transferred to New York University, and graduated with a BFA in drama and psychology/philosophy in 1983.


title: Gina Gershon

text: Gershon attended the Circle in the Square Professional Theater School in New York, working first with David Mamet and later with Harold Guskin and Sandra Seacat, whom she has described in interviews as "a huge influence." Her first professional acting was in stage productions of "Camille" and "The Substance of Fire".


title: Gina Gershon

text: She has appeared on Broadway three times: as Sally Bowles in the revival of "Cabaret"; in the revival of the sex farce "Boeing-Boeing"; and as Rosie Alvarez in the 2010 revival of "Bye Bye Birdie" at the Roundabout Theatre Company.


title: Gina Gershon

text: Her break came with a bit part in "Pretty in Pink" (1986), which led to more substantial roles in "Sweet Revenge" with Nancy Allen, "Cocktail" with Tom Cruise and Elisabeth Shue, and John Sayles' urban drama "City of Hope" (1991). Also in 1991, she appeared in the action film Out for Justice opposite Steven Seagal, where she played Patti Madano, sister of the film's villain, Richie Madano (William Forsythe). Gershon also worked in television, with a recurring role on "Melrose Place" playing a prostitute working for a Heidi Fleiss-esque Hollywood madam.


title: Gina Gershon

text: In 1996 she played Corky, an ex-con who gets mixed up in an affair with Violet (played by Jennifer Tilly) in the mobster flick "Bound". In 1997 she co-starred with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in "Face/Off".


title: Gina Gershon

text: Gershon is regarded as a gay icon for her roles in movies such as "Bound" (in which she played a butch lesbian), "Prey for Rock & Roll", and "Showgirls" (in which she played a bisexual showgirl, and which is regarded as a camp classic). She was ranked #51 on the "Maxim" Hot 100 Women of 2004.


title: Gina Gershon

text: In 2011, Gershon appeared alongside Matthew McConaughey in "Killer Joe", a dark comedy/thriller featuring director William Friedkin.


title: Gina Gershon

text: In 2017, Gershon starred in "Bad Kids of Crestview Academy" directed by Ben Browder, "Lost Cat Corona" directed by Anthony Tarsitano, the romantic comedy-drama "Permission" opposite Dan Stevens and Rebecca Hall directed by Brian Crano, Gershon co-starred alongside Nicolas Cage in the thriller "Inconceivable", thriller film directed by Jonathan Baker, That same year, she starred in "9/11" directed by Martin Guigui revolving around the September 11 attacks opposite Whoopi Goldberg, Luis Guzmán and Charlie Sheen. The film was panned by critics and faced controversy for Sheen's history with the 911 Truth movement, a conspiracy theory. Gershon stated she was unaware of Sheen's comments during production of the film and would have spoken with Sheen and Guigui before agreeing to star.


title: Gina Gershon

text: In 2018, Gershon starred in the adventure drama "American Dresser" directed by Carmine Cangialosi, which was critically panned. Gershon then starred in the drama film "After Everything" directed by Hannah Marks and Joey Power, opposite Maika Monroe and Jeremy Allen White. The film had its world premiere at South by Southwest in March 2018, and was released in October 2018, to critical acclaim. She also had a small role in comedy "Blockers" directed by Kay Cannon, which was released on April 6, 2018, to critical and commercial success.


title: Gina Gershon

text: In 2020, Gershon starred in the sports film "" directed by Jesse Quinones. Gershon next starred in "Rifkin's Festival" directed by Woody Allen. Following backlash for starring in the film, Gershon defended her decision to star in the film stating: "I don't believe that to be true. You should really do all of the research and read all of the articles before believing that. It's really important to make up your own mind and not go by what the masses claim. I've done extensive research and I can say with very clear conscience that I'm so happy to be working with him. This man is not a sexual predator." Gershon also called working on the film "a dream come true". Gershon will also star in "With/In" an anthology film set during the COVID-19 pandemic directing from a screenplay she wrote.


title: Gina Gershon

text: She portrayed Nancy Barbato, Frank Sinatra's 1st wife in the made-for-TV biopic "Sinatra", in 1992. Gershon next had a recurring role on "Melrose Place" playing a prostitute working for a Heidi Fleiss-esque Hollywood madam. Gershon made a guest appearance as herself on "The Larry Sanders Show". Gershon next starred in the lead role of Glenn Hall in ABC's detective series "Snoops" created by David E. Kelley, which was cancelled after one season.


title: Gina Gershon

text: Gershon has made numerous guest and recurring appearances on various shows including HBO's comedy series "Curb Your Enthusiasm", FX's comedy-drama "Rescue Me", ABC's "Ugly Betty", USA Network's "Psych", A recurring role on HBO's "How to Make It in America".


title: Gina Gershon

text: Gershon voiced the role of Six in the adult animation series "Tripping the Rift". Gershon also voiced the role of Catwoman in the 2007 animated series "The Batman". From 2017 to 2018, Gershon voiced the role of Langwidere in "Lost in Oz".


title: Gina Gershon

text: In 2013, Gershon starred in the television film "House of Versace" as Donatella Versace, which premiered on Lifetime. Gershon's performance earned praise from fashion critic Cathy Horyn. That same year, Gershon began starring in the Crackle action series "Cleaners".


title: Gina Gershon

text: In 2015, Gershon made a guest appearance on "Glee" in the sixth and final season as Blaine's mother. From 2015 to 2017, Gershon had a recurring role on Amazon Prime Video's "Red Oaks". She also appeared in two episodes of "Elementary". That same year, Gershon had a recurring role on "Z Nation". In 2016, Gershon guest starred on "Empire". In 2017, Gershon guest starred on the HBO comedy series "Crashing". That same year, Gershon had a recurring role in "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" as the villainous Lt. Melanie Hawkins. Gershon was cast in the E! dark comedy pilot "#Fashionvictim" opposite Willa Fitzgerald, which was not picked up to series. Since 2018, Gershon has had a recurring role on The CW drama "Riverdale" portraying the role of Jughead Jones's mother, Gladys. That same year, Gershon made a guest appearance on "Younger".


title: Gina Gershon

text: Gershon has appeared in two videos on FunnyorDie.com parodying former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, titled "Gina Gershon Strips Down Sarah Palin", and "Gina Gershon Does Sarah Palin 2". In 2016, Gershon parodied Melania Trump in a Funny or Die video "A Message from Melania Trump". Gershon additionally has played Trump on an episode of "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon", An Off-Broadway play, "The 1st Annual Trump Family Special". and in an episode of CBS All Access's "The Good Fight".


title: Gina Gershon

text: Gershon played Jaw harp on "I Can't Decide", a song on the Scissor Sisters 2006 release "Ta-Dah". She also played Jaw harp on the song "I Do It For Your Love", Paul Simon's collaboration with Herbie Hancock on his album "Possibilities", in a duo with bassist Christian McBride on the song "Chitlins and Gefiltefish", on McBride's 2011 album "Conversations with Christian", and on "Maria" from her album "In Search of Cleo".


title: Gina Gershon

text: She had a cameo role in The Cars 1984 music video "Hello Again" alongside Andy Warhol, and appeared in Lenny Kravitz's music video "Again".


title: Gina Gershon

text: Gershon's first book written for adults, "In Search of Cleo: How I Found My Pussy and Lost My Mind", is the true story of the hunt for her runaway cat and was released on October 11, 2012.


title: Gina Gershon

text: From 2015 to 2018, Gershon was in a relationship with Belgian entrepreneur and former footballer, Robert Dekeyser.


title: Escape Room (2019 film)

text: Escape Room is a 2019 American psychological horror film directed by Adam Robitel and written by Bragi F. Schut and Maria Melnik. The film stars Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Deborah Ann Woll, Tyler Labine, Nik Dodani, Jay Ellis, and Yorick van Wageningen, and follows a group of people who are sent to navigate a series of deadly escape rooms.


title: Escape Room (2019 film)

text: Development of the film began in August 2017, then under the title "The Maze", and the casting process commenced. Filming took place in South Africa in late 2017 through January 2018.


title: Escape Room (2019 film)

text: "Escape Room" was released in the United States on January 4, 2019, by Sony Pictures Entertainment, and grossed over $155million worldwide. The film received mixed reviews from critics, who praised the atmosphere and cast, but criticized the familiar plot and its failure to take full advantage of its premise. A sequel, "", was released on July 16, 2021.


title: Escape Room (2019 film)

text: Six people from varied backgrounds are presented with a puzzle cube: Zoey, a physics student; Jason, a wealthy daytrader; Ben, a stockboy; Mike, a truck driver; Amanda, an Iraq War veteran; and Danny, an escape room enthusiast. When they solve the puzzle, they are invited to take part in an escape room with a $10,000 prize. The participants arrive at an office block with no greeting, and when Ben tries to leave, the door handle falls off, revealing that the challenge has begun. They escape the first two rooms, a giant heating oven and a winter cabin. After finding the key, however, the rooms become fatal. Danny falls through the ice in an icy room and drowns; Amanda plummets to her death in an upside-down billiards bar where parts of the floor periodically fall into a deep shaft below; Jason shocks Mike to death to solve a puzzle in a hospital room filling up with poisonous gas; and in a room with optical illusions and strobe lights, Ben kills Jason over an antidote required to escape.


title: Escape Room (2019 film)

text: Some rooms, through songs playing, coats, and hospital beds, remind the players of them being sole survivors of various disasters; Mike escaped a mine cave-in, Zoey survived a plane crash, Danny survived when his family died of carbon monoxide poisoning, Amanda survived an IED blast, Jason survived a shipwreck in frigid weather, and Ben survived a car accident where his friends died. Zoey realizes that the purpose of the game is to determine which player is the luckiest. Ben, after escaping the last room where a wall moves inwards to crush him, meets the Gamemaster, who controls the game that the Puzzle Maker designed. The Gamemaster explains that each year they lure in players with something in common – college athletes, savants, etc. – and wealthy viewers bet on the result, with the current game luring in sole survivors of previous disasters. The Gamemaster tries to kill Ben, but Zoey intervenes, and together they kill the Gamemaster.


title: Escape Room (2019 film)

text: As Ben recovers, Zoey returns to the building with a detective. The police do not believe Zoey, as all evidence of the game has disappeared. They do not believe Ben either, as he was found to have drugs in his system. While looking at the graffiti on the wall, Zoey notices the words "Wootan Yu" and realizes they are an anagram for "No Way Out", suggesting the game is not over. Six months later, Zoey meets up with Ben and shows him newspaper articles that passed off the other players' deaths as everyday accidents. When Ben suggests Zoey should move on, she refuses. She reveals clues to Ben that point to an unlisted building in Manhattan. Ben agrees to go with her. However, the Puzzle Maker is already preparing to make their flight a new deadly game of survival.


title: Escape Room (2019 film)

text: Additionally, Cornelius Geaney Jr. appears as Zoey's professor while Jessica Sutton portrays her roommate, Allison. Russell Crous portrays Charlie, Jason's assistant; Bart Fouche portrays Gary, Ben's boss; Kenneth Fok portrays Detective Li; and Jamie-Lee Money portrays Rosa, a fake flight attendant who works for Minos.


title: Escape Room (2019 film)

text: On August 9, 2017, it was announced that the film, then titled "The Maze", had commenced casting, based on an original story created by screenwriter Bragi F. Schut. It was set to shoot in South Africa in late 2017. In January 2018, director Robitel told Syfy that production had wrapped and that the film would be released in September 2018, before the film was delayed multiple times to an eventual early 2019 release.


title: Escape Room (2019 film)

text: Brian Tyler and John Carey composed the score for the film. The soundtrack was released by Sony Music Entertainment, and includes the full score and a remix of the film's main theme by Madsonik and Kill the Noise, used in the closing credits.


title: Escape Room (2019 film)

text: Robitel originally planned the film to end with one of the survivors returning home but decided to change the ending to make the antagonists appear more menacing in anticipation of .


title: Escape Room (2019 film)

text: In May 2018, it was announced that the film was originally going to be released on November 30, 2018. A month later, the film was pushed back two months from its original release date of November 30, 2018, to February 1, 2019, and later was moved up from February 1, 2019, to January 4, 2019.


title: Escape Room (2019 film)

text: In Poland, United International Pictures announced that the film's release in the country would be delayed out of respect for the five teenagers who had died in the Koszalin escape room fire, which actually occurred on the day of the film's U.S. release.


title: Escape Room (2019 film)

text: "Escape Room" grossed $57million in the United States and Canada, and $98.7million in other territories, for a total worldwide gross of $155.7million, against a production budget of $9million. "Deadline Hollywood" calculated the net profit of the film to be $46.6million, when factoring together all expenses and revenues.


title: Escape Room (2019 film)

text: In the United States and Canada, the film was projected to gross $10–14million from 2,717 theaters in its opening weekend. It made $7.7million on its first day, including $2.3million from Thursday night previews. It went on to debut to $18.2million, surpassing expectations and finishing second, behind "Aquaman". The film made $8.9million in its second weekend, dropping 51% and finishing fifth.


title: Escape Room (2019 film)

text: On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of based on reviews, and an average rating of . The website's critical consensus reads, ""Escape Room" fails to unlock much of the potential in its premise, but what's left is still tense and thrilling enough to offer a passing diversion for suspense fans." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 48 out of 100, based on 26 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film a grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Escape Room (2019 film)

text: Sandy Schaelfer from "Screen Rant" gave the film 2.5 out of 5 stars, writing that ""Escape Room" is an entertainingly cheesy and surprisingly innovative B-movie, but suffers when it turns its attention to setting up future sequels."


title: Escape Room (2019 film)

text: In February 2019, a sequel, "", was announced as being in active development, with Robitel set to return to direct along with screenwriter Schut and producer Moritz. In October 2019, Collider reported that original cast members Russell and Miller would reprise their roles in the sequel. It was released on July 16, 2021.


title: Katyn massacre

text: The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD ("People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs", the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn Forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by German forces.


title: Katyn massacre

text: The massacre was initiated in NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria's proposal to Joseph Stalin to execute all captive members of the Polish officer corps, which was secretly approved by the Soviet Politburo led by Stalin. Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, and the remaining 8,000 were Polish intelligentsia the Soviets deemed to be "intelligence agents and gendarmes, spies and saboteurs, former landowners, factory owners and officials". The Polish Army officer class was representative of the multi-ethnic Polish state; the murdered included ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Jews including the chief Rabbi of the Polish Army, Baruch Steinberg.


title: Katyn massacre

text: The government of Nazi Germany announced the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest in April 1943. Stalin severed diplomatic relations with the London-based Polish government-in-exile when it asked for an investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross. After the Vistula–Oder offensive where the mass graves fell into Soviet control, the Soviet Union claimed the Nazis had killed the victims, and it continued to deny responsibility for the massacres until 1990, when it officially acknowledged and condemned the killings by the NKVD, as well as the subsequent cover-up by the Soviet government.


title: Katyn massacre

text: An investigation conducted by the office of the prosecutors general of the Soviet Union (1990–1991) and the Russian Federation (1991–2004) confirmed Soviet responsibility for the massacres, but refused to classify this action as a war crime or as an act of mass murder. The investigation was closed on the grounds that the perpetrators were dead, and since the Russian government would not classify the dead as victims of the Great Purge, formal posthumous rehabilitation was deemed inapplicable. In November 2010, the Russian State Duma approved a declaration blaming Stalin and other Soviet officials for ordering the massacre.


title: Katyn massacre

text: The falsified Soviet version of the events has become known as the "Katyn lie", a term coined in reference to the "Auschwitz lie".


title: Katyn massacre

text: On 1 September 1939, the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany began. Consequently, Britain and France, fulfilling the Anglo-Polish and Franco-Polish treaties of alliance, declared war on Germany. Despite these declarations of war, the two nations undertook minimal military activity during what became known as the Phoney War.


title: Katyn massacre

text: The Soviet invasion of Poland began on 17 September, in accordance with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The Red Army advanced quickly and met little resistance, as Polish forces facing them were under orders not to engage the Soviets. About 250,000 to 454,700 Polish soldiers and policemen were captured and interned by the Soviet authorities. Most were freed or escaped quickly, but 125,000 were imprisoned in camps run by the NKVD. Of these, 42,400 soldiers, mostly of Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnicity serving in the Polish Army, who lived in the territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union, were released in October. The 43,000 soldiers born in western Poland, then under Nazi control, were transferred to the Germans; in turn, the Soviets received 13,575 Polish prisoners from the Germans.


title: Katyn massacre

text: Soviet repressions of Polish citizens occurred as well over this period. Since Poland's conscription system required every nonexempt university graduate to become a military reserve officer, the NKVD was able to round up a significant portion of the Polish educated class as prisoners of war. According to estimates by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), roughly 320,000 Polish citizens were deported to the Soviet Union (this figure is questioned by some other historians, who hold to older estimates of about 700,000–1,000,000). IPN estimates the number of Polish citizens who died under Soviet rule during World War II at 150,000 (a revision of older estimates of up to 500,000). Of the group of 12,000 Poles sent to Dalstroy camp (near Kolyma) in 1940–1941, mostly POWs, only 583 men survived; they were released in 1942 to join the Polish Armed Forces in the East. According to Tadeusz Piotrowski, "during the war and after 1944, 570,387 Polish citizens had been subjected to some form of Soviet political repression". As early as 19 September, the head of the NKVD, Lavrentiy Beria, ordered the secret police to create the Main Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees to manage Polish prisoners. The NKVD took custody of Polish prisoners from the Red Army, and proceeded to organise a network of reception centres and transit camps, and to arrange rail transport to prisoner-of-war camps in the western USSR. The largest camps were at Kozelsk (Optina Monastery), Ostashkov (Stolobny Island on Lake Seliger near Ostashkov), and Starobelsk. Other camps were at Jukhnovo (rail station "Babynino"), Yuzhe (Talitsy), rail station "Tyotkino" ( from Putyvl), Kozelshchyna, Oranki, Vologda (rail station "Zaonikeevo"), and Gryazovets.


title: Katyn massacre

text: Kozelsk and Starobelsk were used mainly for military officers, while Ostashkov was used mainly for Polish Scouting, gendarmes, police officers, and prison officers. Some prisoners were members of other groups of Polish intelligentsia, such as priests, landowners, and law personnel. The approximate distribution of men throughout the camps was as follows: Kozelsk, 5000; Ostashkov, 6570; and Starobelsk, 4000. They totalled 15,570 men.


title: Katyn massacre

text: According to a report from 19 November 1939, the NKVD had about 40,000 Polish POWs: 8,000–8,500 officers and warrant officers, 6,000–6,500 officers of police, and 25,000 soldiers and non-commissioned officers who were still being held as POWs. In December, a wave of arrests resulted in the imprisonment of additional Polish officers. Ivan Serov reported to Lavrentiy Beria on 3 December that "in all, 1,057 former officers of the Polish Army had been arrested". The 25,000 soldiers and non-commissioned officers were assigned to forced labor (road construction, heavy metallurgy).


title: Katyn massacre

text: Once at the camps, from October 1939 to February 1940, the Poles were subjected to lengthy interrogations and constant political agitation by NKVD officers, such as Vasily Zarubin. The prisoners assumed they would be released soon, but the interviews were in effect a selection process to determine who would live and who would die. According to NKVD reports, if a prisoner could not be induced to adopt a pro-Soviet attitude, he was declared a "hardened and uncompromising enemy of Soviet authority".


title: Katyn massacre

text: On 5 March 1940, pursuant to a note to Joseph Stalin from Beria, six members of the Soviet Politburo — Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Mikhail Kalinin — signed an order to execute 25,700 Polish "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries" kept at camps and prisons in occupied western Ukraine and Belarus. The reason for the massacre, according to the historian Gerhard Weinberg, was that Stalin wanted to deprive a potential future Polish military of a large portion of its talent. The Soviet leadership, and Stalin in particular, viewed the Polish prisoners as a "problem" as they might resist being under Soviet rule. Therefore, they decided the prisoners inside the "special camps" were to be shot as "avowed enemies of Soviet authority".


title: Katyn massacre

text: The number of victims is estimated at 22,000, with a lower limit of confirmed dead of 21,768. According to Soviet documents declassified in 1990, 21,857 Polish internees and prisoners were executed after 3 April 1940: 14,552 prisoners of war (most or all of them from the three camps) and 7,305 prisoners in western parts of the Byelorussian and Ukrainian SSRs. Of them 4,421 were from Kozelsk, 3,820 from Starobelsk, 6,311 from Ostashkov, and 7,305 from Byelorussian and Ukrainian prisons. The head of the NKVD Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees, , was involved in "selections" of Polish officers to be executed at Katyn and elsewhere.


title: Katyn massacre

text: Those who died at Katyn included soldiers (an admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 85 privates, 3,420 non-commissioned officers, and seven chaplains), 200 pilots, government representatives and royalty (a prince, 43 officials), and civilians (three landowners, 131 refugees, 20 university professors, 300 physicians; several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers; and more than 100 writers and journalists). In all, the NKVD executed almost half the Polish officer corps. Altogether, during the massacre, the NKVD executed 14 Polish generals: Leon Billewicz (ret.), Bronisław Bohatyrewicz (ret.), Xawery Czernicki (admiral), Stanisław Haller (ret.), , Henryk Minkiewicz (ret.), Kazimierz Orlik-Łukoski, Konstanty Plisowski (ret.), Rudolf Prich (killed in Lviv), Franciszek Sikorski (ret.), Leonard Skierski (ret.), Piotr Skuratowicz, Mieczysław Smorawiński, and Alojzy Wir-Konas (promoted posthumously). Not all of the executed were ethnic Poles, because the Second Polish Republic was a multiethnic state, and its officer corps included Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Jews. It is estimated about 8% of the Katyn massacre victims were Polish Jews. 395 prisoners were spared from the slaughter, among them Stanisław Swianiewicz and Józef Czapski. They were taken to the Yukhnov camp or Pavlishtchev Bor and then to Gryazovets. Up to 99% of the remaining prisoners were killed. People from the Kozelsk camp were executed in Katyn Forest; people from the Starobelsk camp were killed in the inner NKVD prison of Kharkiv and the bodies were buried near the village of Piatykhatky; and police officers from the Ostashkov camp were killed in the internal NKVD prison of Kalinin (Tver) and buried in Mednoye. All three burial sites had already been secret cemeteries of the victims of the Great Purge of 1937–1938. Later, recreational areas of NKVD/KGB were established there.


title: Katyn massacre

text: Detailed information on the executions in the Kalinin NKVD prison was provided during a hearing by Dmitry Tokarev, former head of the Board of the District NKVD in Kalinin. According to Tokarev, the shooting started in the evening and ended at dawn. The first transport, on 4 April 1940, carried 390 people, and the executioners had difficulty killing so many people in one night. The following transports held no more than 250 people. The executions were usually performed with German-made .25 ACP Walther Model 2 pistols supplied by Moscow, but Soviet-made 7.62×38mmR Nagant M1895 revolvers were also used. The executioners used German weapons rather than the standard Soviet revolvers, as the latter were said to offer too much recoil, which made shooting painful after the first dozen executions. Vasily Mikhailovich Blokhin, chief executioner for the NKVD, is reported to have personally shot and killed 7,000 of the condemned, some as young as 18, from the Ostashkov camp at Kalinin prison, over 28 days in April 1940.


title: Katyn massacre

text: After the condemned individual's personal information was checked and approved, he was handcuffed and led to a cell insulated with stacks of sandbags along the walls, and a heavy, felt-lined door. The victim was told to kneel in the middle of the cell and was then approached from behind by the executioner and immediately shot in the back of the head or neck. The body was carried out through the opposite door and laid in one of the five or six waiting trucks, whereupon the next condemned was taken inside and subjected to the same treatment. In addition to muffling by the rough insulation in the execution cell, the pistol gunshots were masked by the operation of loud machines (perhaps fans) throughout the night. Some post-1991 revelations suggest prisoners were also executed in the same manner at the NKVD headquarters in Smolensk, though judging by the way the corpses were stacked, some captives may have been shot while standing on the edge of the mass graves. This procedure went on every night, except for the public May Day holiday.


title: Katyn massacre

text: Some 3,000 to 4,000 Polish inmates of Ukrainian prisons and those from Belarus prisons were probably buried in Bykivnia and in Kurapaty respectively, about 50 women including two sisters, Klara Auerbach-Margules and Stella Menkes, among them. Lieutenant Janina Lewandowska, daughter of Gen. Józef Dowbor-Muśnicki, was the only woman POW executed during the massacre at Katyn.


title: Katyn massacre

text: The question about the fate of the Polish prisoners was raised soon after Operation Barbarossa began in June 1941. The Polish government-in-exile and the Soviet government signed the Sikorski–Mayski agreement, which announced the willingness of both to fight together against Nazi Germany and for a Polish army to be formed on Soviet territory. The Polish general Władysław Anders began organizing this army, and soon he requested information about the missing Polish officers. During a personal meeting, Stalin assured him and Władysław Sikorski, the Polish Prime Minister, all the Poles were freed, and not all could be accounted because the Soviets "lost track" of them in Manchuria. Józef Czapski investigated the fate of Polish officers between 1941 and 1942. In 1942, with the territory around Smolensk under German occupation, captive Polish railroad workers heard from the locals about a mass grave of Polish soldiers at Kozelsk near Katyn; finding one of the graves, they reported it to the Polish Underground State. The discovery was not seen as important, as nobody thought the discovered grave could contain so many victims.


title: Katyn massacre

text: In early 1943, Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff, a German officer serving as the intelligence liaison between the Wehrmacht's Army Group Centre and Abwehr, received reports about mass graves of Polish military officers. These reports stated the graves were in the forest of Goat Hill near Katyn. He passed the reports to his superiors (sources vary on when exactly the Germans became aware of the graves—from "late 1942" to January–February 1943, and when the German top decision makers in Berlin received those reports [as early as 1 March or as late as 4 April]).


title: Katyn massacre

text: Joseph Goebbels saw this discovery as an excellent tool to drive a wedge between Poland, the Western Allies, and the Soviet Union, and reinforcement for the Nazi propaganda line about the horrors of Bolshevism, and American and British subservience to it. After extensive preparation, on 13 April, Reichssender Berlin broadcast to the world that German military forces in the Katyn forest near Smolensk had uncovered The broadcast went on to charge the Soviets with carrying out the massacre in 1940.


title: Katyn massacre

text: The Germans brought in a European Red Cross committee called the Katyn Commission, comprising 12 forensic experts and their staff, from Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, Switzerland, and Bohemia & Moravia. The Germans were so intent on proving the Soviets were behind the massacre they even included some Allied prisoners of war, among them writer Ferdynand Goetel, the Polish Home Army prisoner from Pawiak. After the war, Goetel escaped with a fake passport due to an arrest warrant issued against him. Jan Emil Skiwski was a collaborator. Józef Mackiewicz has published several texts about the crime. Two of the 12, the Bulgarian Marko Markov and the Czech , with their countries becoming satellite states of the Soviet Union, were forced to recant their evidence, defending the Soviets and blaming the Germans. The Croatian pathologist Eduard Miloslavić managed to escape to the US.


title: Katyn massacre

text: The Katyn massacre was beneficial to Nazi Germany, which used it to discredit the Soviet Union. On 14 April 1943, Goebbels wrote in his diary:


title: Katyn massacre

text: When Joseph Goebbels was informed in September 1943 that the German Army had to withdraw from the Katyn area, he wrote a prediction in his diary. His entry for 29 September 1943 reads:


title: Katyn massacre

text: The Polish government-in-exile led by Sikorski insisted on bringing the matter to the negotiation table with the Soviets and on opening an investigation by the International Red Cross. On 17 April 1943 the Polish government issued a statement on this issue, asking for a Red Cross investigation, which was rejected by Stalin, who used the fact that Germans also requested such an investigation as a "proof" of Polish-German conspiracy, and which led to a deterioration of Polish-Soviet relations.


title: Katyn massacre

text: According to the Polish diplomat Edward Bernard Raczyński, Raczyński and General Sikorski met privately with Churchill and Alexander Cadogan on 15 April 1943, and told them the Poles had proof the Soviets were responsible for the massacre. Churchill reportedly stated According to Raczyński Sikorski himself died in the 1943 Gibraltar B-24 crash —an event convenient for the Allied leaders.


title: Katyn massacre

text: The Soviet government immediately denied the German charges. They claimed the Polish prisoners of war had been engaged in construction work west of Smolensk, and consequently were captured and executed by invading German units in August 1941. The Soviet response on 15 April to the initial German broadcast of 13 April, prepared by the Soviet Information Bureau, stated


title: Katyn massacre

text: In response to Polish demands, Stalin accused the Polish government of collaborating with Nazi Germany and broke off diplomatic relations with it. The Soviet Union also started a campaign to get the Western Allies to recognize the pro-Soviet government-in-exile of the Union of Polish Patriots led by Wanda Wasilewska.


title: Katyn massacre

text: Having retaken the Katyn area almost immediately after the Red Army had recaptured Smolensk, around September–October 1943, NKVD forces began a cover-up operation. They destroyed a cemetery the Germans had permitted the Polish Red Cross to build and removed other evidence. Witnesses were "interviewed" and threatened with arrest for collaborating with the Nazis if their testimonies disagreed with the official line. As none of the documents found on the dead had dates later than April 1940, the Soviet secret police planted false evidence to place the apparent time of the massacre in mid-1941, when the German military had controlled the area. NKVD operatives Vsevolod Merkulov and Sergei Kruglov issued a preliminary report, dated 10–11 January 1944, that concluded the Polish officers were shot by German soldiers.


title: Katyn massacre

text: In January 1944, the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission for ascertaining and investigating crimes perpetrated by the German-Fascist invaders set up another commission, the (Специальная комиссия по установлению и расследованию обстоятельств расстрела немецко-фашистскими захватчиками в Катынском лесу (близ Смоленска) военнопленных польских офицеров). The commission's name implied a predestined conclusion. It was headed by Nikolai Burdenko, the president of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, hence the commission is often known as the "Burdenko Commission", who was appointed by Moscow to investigate the incident. Its members included prominent Soviet figures such as the writer Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy, but no foreign personnel were allowed to join the commission. The Burdenko Commission exhumed the bodies, rejected the 1943 German findings the Poles were shot by the Soviet army, assigned the guilt to the Nazis, and concluded all the shootings were done by German occupation forces in late 1941. It is uncertain how many members of the commission were misled by the falsified reports and evidence, and how many actually suspected the truth. Cienciala and Materski note the commission had no choice but to issue findings in line with the Merkulov-Kruglov report, and Burdenko was likely aware of the cover-up. He reportedly admitted something like that to friends and family shortly before his death in 1946. The Burdenko Commission's conclusions would be consistently cited by Soviet sources until the official admission of guilt by the Soviet government on 13 April 1990.


title: Katyn massacre

text: In January 1944, the Soviets also invited a group of more than a dozen mostly American and British journalists, accompanied by Kathleen Harriman, the daughter of the new American Ambassador W. Averell Harriman, and John F. Melby, third secretary at the American embassy in Moscow, to Katyn. Some regarded the inclusion of Melby and Harriman as a Soviet attempt to lend official weight to their propaganda. Melby's report noted the deficiencies in the Soviet case: problematic witnesses; attempts to discourage questioning of the witnesses; statements of the witnesses obviously being given as a result of rote memorization; and that "the show was put on for the benefit of the correspondents." Nevertheless, Melby, at the time, felt on balance the Soviet case was convincing. Harriman's report reached the same conclusion and after the war both were asked to explain why their conclusions seemed to be at odds with their findings, with the suspicion the conclusions were what the State Department wanted to hear. The journalists were less impressed and not convinced by the staged Soviet demonstration.


title: Katyn massacre

text: An example of Soviet propaganda spread by some Western Communists is Alter Brody's monograph "Behind the Polish-Soviet Break" (with an introduction by Corliss Lamont).


title: Katyn massacre

text: The growing Polish-Soviet tension was beginning to strain Western-Soviet relations at a time when the Poles' importance to the Allies, significant in the first years of the war, was beginning to fade, due to the entry into the conflict of the military and industrial giants, the Soviet Union and the United States. In retrospective review of records, both British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt were increasingly torn between their commitments to their Polish ally and the demands by Stalin and his diplomats.


title: Katyn massacre

text: On 24 April 1943, the British government successfully pressured the Poles to withdraw the request for a Red Cross investigation, and Churchill assured Stalin's regime: Unofficial or classified UK documents concluded Soviet guilt was a "near certainty", but the alliance with the Soviets was deemed to be more important than moral issues; thus the official version supported the Soviets, up to censoring any contradictory accounts. Churchill asked Owen O'Malley to investigate the issue, but in a note to the Foreign Secretary he noted: O'Malley pointed out several inconsistencies and near impossibilities in the Soviet version. Later, Churchill sent a copy of the report to Roosevelt on 13 August 1943. The report deconstructed the Soviet account of the massacre and alluded to the political consequences within a strongly moral framework but recognized there was no viable alternative to the existing policy. No comment by Roosevelt on the O'Malley report has been found. Churchill's own post-war account of the Katyn affair gives little further insight. In his memoirs, he refers to the 1944 Soviet inquiry into the massacre, which found the Germans responsible, and adds,


title: Katyn massacre

text: At the beginning of 1944, Ron Jeffery, an agent of British and Polish intelligence in occupied Poland, eluded the Abwehr and travelled to London with a report from Poland to the British government. His efforts were at first highly regarded, but subsequently ignored, which a disillusioned Jeffery later attributed to the actions of Kim Philby and other high-ranking communist agents entrenched in the British government. Jeffery tried to inform the British government about the Katyn massacre but was as a result released from the Army.


title: Katyn massacre

text: In the United States a similar line was taken, notwithstanding two official intelligence reports into the Katyn massacre that contradicted the official position. In 1944, Roosevelt assigned his special emissary to the Balkans, Navy Lieutenant Commander George Earle, to produce a report on Katyn. Earle concluded the massacre was committed by the Soviet Union. Having consulted with Elmer Davis, director of the United States Office of War Information, Roosevelt rejected the conclusion (officially), declared he was convinced of Nazi Germany's responsibility, and ordered that Earle's report be suppressed. When Earle requested permission to publish his findings, the President issued a written order to desist. Earle was reassigned and spent the rest of the war in American Samoa.


title: Katyn massacre

text: A further report in 1945, supporting the same conclusion, was produced and stifled. In 1943, the Germans took two U.S. POWs—Capt. Donald B. Stewart and Col. —to Katyn for an international news conference. Documents released by the National Archives and Records Administration in September 2012 revealed Stewart and Van Vliet sent coded messages to their American superiors indicating they saw proof that implicated the Soviets. Three lines of evidence were cited. Firstly, the Polish corpses were in such an advanced state of decay that the Nazis could not have killed them, as they had only taken over the area in 1941. Secondly, none of the numerous Polish artifacts, such as letters, diaries, photographs and identification tags pulled from the graves, were dated later than the spring of 1940. Most incriminating was the relatively good state of the men's uniforms and boots, which showed they had not lived long after being captured. Later, in 1945, Van Vliet submitted a report concluding the Soviets were responsible for the massacre. His superior, Major General Clayton Lawrence Bissell, General George Marshall's assistant chief of staff for intelligence, destroyed the report. Washington kept the information secret, presumably to appease Stalin and not distract from the war against the Nazis. During the 1951–52 Congressional investigation into Katyn, Bissell defended his action before the United States Congress, arguing it was not in the U.S. interest to antagonize an ally (the USSR) whose assistance the nation needed against the Empire of Japan. In 1950, Van Vliet recreated his wartime report. In 2014, a copy of a report Van Vliet made in France during 1945 was discovered.


title: Katyn massacre

text: From 28 December 1945 to 4 January 1946, a Soviet military court in Leningrad tried seven Wehrmacht servicemen. One of them, Arno Dürre, who was charged with murdering numerous civilians using machine-guns in Soviet villages, confessed to having taken part in the burial (though not the execution) of 15,000 to 20,000 Polish POWs in Katyn. For this he was spared execution and was given 15 years of hard labor. His confession was full of absurdities, and thus he was not used as a Soviet prosecution witness during the Nuremberg trials. He later recanted his confession, claiming the investigators forced him to confess through torture.


title: Katyn massacre

text: At the London conference that drew up the indictments of German war crimes before the Nuremberg trials, the Soviet negotiators put forward the allegation, "In September 1941, 925 Polish officers who were prisoners of war were killed in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk". The U.S. negotiators agreed to include it but were "embarrassed" by the inclusion (noting the allegation had been debated extensively in the press) and concluded it would be up to the Soviets to sustain it. At the trials in 1946, Soviet General Roman Rudenko raised the indictment, stating "one of the most important criminal acts for which the major war criminals are responsible was the mass execution of Polish prisoners of war shot in the Katyn forest near Smolensk by the German fascist invaders", but failed to make the case and the U.S. and British judges dismissed the charges. Only 70 years later did it become known that former OSS chief William Donovan had succeeded in getting the American delegation in Nuremberg to block the Katyn indictment. A German officer, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, who was stationed in Smolensk during the war, had convinced Donovan that not the Germans but the Soviets were the perpetrators. It was not the purpose of the court to determine whether Germany or the Soviet Union was responsible for the crime, but rather to attribute the crime to at least one of the defendants, which the court was unable to do.


title: Katyn massacre

text: In 1951 and 1952, with the Korean War as a background, a congressional investigation chaired by Rep. Ray Madden and known as the Madden Committee investigated the Katyn massacre. According to the Committee conclusion: "the Katyn massacre involved some 4,243 of the 15,400 Polish Army officers and intellectual leaders who were captured by the Soviets when Russia invaded Poland in September 1939." The committee concluded that these 4,243 Poles had been killed by the NKVD and that a case should be brought to the International Court of Justice. However, the question of responsibility remained controversial in the West as well as behind the Iron Curtain. In the United Kingdom in the late 1970s, plans for a memorial to the victims bearing the date 1940 (rather than 1941) were condemned as provocative in the political climate of the Cold War. It has also been alleged that the choice made in 1969 for the location of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic war memorial at the former Belarusian village named Khatyn, the site of the 1943 Khatyn massacre, was made to cause confusion with Katyn. The two names are similar or identical in many languages, and were often confused.


title: Katyn massacre

text: In Poland, the pro-Soviet authorities following the Soviet occupation after the war covered up the matter in accordance with the official Soviet propaganda line, deliberately censoring any sources that might provide information about the crime. Katyn was a forbidden topic in post-war Poland. Censorship in the Polish People's Republic was a massive undertaking and Katyn was specifically mentioned in the "Black Book of Censorship" used by the authorities to control the media and academia. Not only did government censorship suppress all references to it, but even mentioning the atrocity was dangerous. In the late 1970s, democracy groups like the Workers' Defence Committee and the Flying University defied the censorship and discussed the massacre, in the face of arrests, beatings, detentions, and ostracism. In 1981, Polish trade union Solidarity erected a memorial with the simple inscription "Katyn, 1940". It was confiscated by the police and replaced with an official monument with the inscription: "To the Polish soldiers—victims of Hitlerite fascism—reposing in the soil of Katyn". Nevertheless, every year on the day of Zaduszki, similar memorial crosses were erected at Powązki Cemetery and numerous other places in Poland, only to be dismantled by the police. Katyn remained a political taboo in the Polish People's Republic until the fall of the Eastern Bloc in 1989.


title: Katyn massacre

text: In the Soviet Union during the 1950s, the head of KGB, Alexander Shelepin, proposed and carried out the destruction of many documents related to the Katyn massacre to minimize the chance the truth would be revealed. His 3 March 1959 note to Nikita Khrushchev, with information about the execution of 21,857 Poles and with the proposal to destroy their personal files, became one of the documents that was preserved and eventually made public.


title: Katyn massacre

text: During the 1980s, there was increasing pressure on both the Polish and Soviet governments to release documents related to the massacre. Polish academics tried to include Katyn in the agenda of the 1987 joint Polish-Soviet commission to investigate censored episodes of Polish-Russian history. In 1989, Soviet scholars revealed Joseph Stalin had indeed ordered the massacre, and in 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev admitted the NKVD had executed the Poles and confirmed two other burial sites similar to the site at Katyn: Mednoye and Piatykhatky.


title: Katyn massacre

text: On 30 October 1989, Gorbachev allowed a delegation of several hundred Poles, organized by the Polish association "Families of Katyń Victims", to visit the Katyn memorial. This group included former U.S. national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. A mass was held and banners hailing the Solidarity movement were laid. One mourner affixed a sign reading "NKVD" on the memorial, covering the word "Nazis" in the inscription such that it read "In memory of Polish officers killed by the NKVD in 1941." Several visitors scaled the fence of a nearby KGB compound and left burning candles on the grounds. Brzezinski commented:


title: Katyn massacre

text: It isn't a personal pain which has brought me here, as is the case in the majority of these people, but rather recognition of the symbolic nature of Katyń. Russians and Poles, tortured to death, lie here together. It seems very important to me that the truth should be spoken about what took place, for only with the truth can the new Soviet leadership distance itself from the crimes of Stalin and the NKVD. Only the truth can serve as the basis of true friendship between the Soviet and the Polish peoples. The truth will make a path for itself. I am convinced of this by the very fact that I was able to travel here.


title: Katyn massacre

text: His remarks were given extensive coverage on Soviet television. On 13 April 1990, the forty-seventh anniversary of the discovery of the mass graves, the USSR formally expressed "profound regret" and admitted Soviet secret police responsibility. The day was declared a worldwide Katyn Memorial Day ().


title: Katyn massacre

text: In 1990, future Russian President Boris Yeltsin released the top-secret documents from the sealed "Package №1." and transferred them to the new Polish president Lech Wałęsa. Among the documents was a proposal by Lavrentiy Beria, dated 5 March 1940, to execute 25,700 Poles from Kozelsk, Ostashkov and Starobelsk camps, and from certain prisons of Western Ukraine and Belarus, signed by Stalin (among others). Another document transferred to the Poles was Aleksandr Shelepin's 3 March 1959 note to Nikita Khrushchev, with information about the execution of 21,857 Poles, as well as a proposal to destroy their personal files to reduce the possibility documents related to the massacre would be uncovered later. The revelations were also publicized in the Russian press, where they were interpreted as being one outcome of an ongoing power struggle between Yeltsin and Gorbachev.


title: Katyn massacre

text: In 1991, the Chief Military Prosecutor for the Soviet Union began proceedings against Pyotr Karpovich Soprunenko (b. 1908) for his role in the Katyn killings, but eventually declined to prosecute because Soprunenko was 83, almost blind, and recovering from a cancer operation. During his April 1991 interrogation, Soprunenko defended himself by denying his own signature. Soprunenko, who died in June 1992, was an NKVD captain in early 1940 and was the organization's Head of Directorate for Prisoners of War Affairs & Internees, from September 1939 to February 1943. In this capacity, he was reportedly involved in the planning and operational control of the executions, in following with Beria's and Merkulov's orders.


title: Katyn massacre

text: Further testimonies emerged in October 1991 via a report made by Nicholas Bethell, a British historian and Conservative member of the European Parliament, who obtained videotaped copies of the interrogations to surviving participants, statements, and met with military prosecutors in Moscow. His report mentioned Soprunenko and another participant, Vladimir Tokaryev, who was 89 but still recalled how 250 Poles were murdered every night in Kalinin. Bethell's report, which was published in "The Observer", also quoted Tokaryev as saying that he learned of the massacre's plan in March 1940; he was called to a meeting in Moscow with Bogdan Kobulov, Beria's NKVD deputy, and claimed that Soprunenko was present in said meeting, in which the latter explained details of the operation. Moreover, Bethell's spoke of Soprunenko telling that he received an order from the Politburo to carry out the executions, signed by Stalin. Bethell also characterized Soprunenko as ″evasive and shifty″ in his deposition, showing little regret for his role.


title: Katyn massacre

text: During Kwaśniewski's visit to Russia in September 2004, Russian officials announced they were willing to transfer all the information on the Katyn massacre to the Polish authorities as soon as it became declassified. In March 2005 the Prosecutor-General's Office of the Russian Federation concluded a decade-long investigation of the massacre and announced that the investigation was able to confirm the deaths of 1,803 out of 14,542 Polish citizens who had been sentenced to death while in three Soviet camps. He did not address the fate of about 7,000 victims who had not been in POW camps, but in prisons. Savenkov declared the massacre was not a genocide, that Soviet officials who had been found guilty of the crime were dead and that, consequently, "there is absolutely no basis to talk about this in judicial terms". Of the 183 volumes of files gathered during the Russian investigation, 116 were declared to contain state secrets and were classified.


title: Katyn massacre

text: On 22 March 2005, the Polish Sejm unanimously passed an act requesting the Russian archives to be declassified. The Sejm also requested Russia to classify the Katyn massacre as a crime of genocide. The resolution stressed that the authorities of Russia "seek to diminish the burden of this crime by refusing to acknowledge it was genocide and refuse to give access to the records of the investigation into the issue, making it difficult to determine the whole truth about the killing and its perpetrators."


title: Katyn massacre

text: In 2007, a case (Janowiec and Others v. Russia) was brought in front of the European Court of Human Rights, with the families of several victimes claiming that Russia violated the European Convention on Human Rights by withholding documents from the public. The declared admissible two complaints from relatives of the massacre victims against Russia regarding adequacy of the official investigation. In a ruling on 16 April 2012, the court found Russia had violated the rights of victims' relatives by not providing them with sufficient information about the investigation and described the massacre as a "war crime". But it also refused to judge the effectiveness of the Soviet Russian investigation because the related events took place before Russia ratified the Human Rights Convention in 1998. The plaintiffs filed an appeal but a 21 October 2013 ruling essentially reaffirmed the prior one, claiming that the matter is outside the court's competence, and only rebuking the Russian side for its failure to substantiate adequately why some critical information remained classified.


title: Katyn massacre

text: In late 2007 and early 2008, several Russian newspapers, including "Rossiyskaya Gazeta", "Komsomolskaya Pravda", and "Nezavisimaya Gazeta", printed stories that implicated the Nazis in the crime, spurring concern this was done with the tacit approval of the Kremlin. As a result, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance decided to open its own investigation.


title: Katyn massacre

text: In 2008, the Polish Foreign Ministry asked the government of Russia about alleged footage of the massacre filmed by the NKVD during the killings, something the Russians have denied exists. Polish officials believe this footage, as well as further documents showing cooperation of Soviets with the Gestapo during the operations, are the reason for Russia's decision to classify most of the documents about the massacre.


title: Katyn massacre

text: In the following years, 81 volumes of the case were declassified and transferred to the Polish government. , 35 out of 183 volumes of files remain classified.


title: Katyn massacre

text: In June 2008, Russian courts consented to hear a case about the declassification of documents about Katyn and the judicial rehabilitation of the victims. In an interview with a Polish newspaper, Vladimir Putin called Katyn a "political crime".


title: Katyn massacre

text: In September 2009, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, Stalin's grandson, sued Russian newspaper "Novaya Gazeta" after it published an article claiming his grandfather personally signed execution orders against civilians. Dzhugashvili centered his case on the veracity of a document showing Stalin ordered the Katyn massacre. On 13 October 2009, the Russian court rejected the suit.


title: Katyn massacre

text: On 21 April 2010, the Russian Supreme Court ordered the Moscow City Court to hear an appeal in an ongoing Katyn legal case. A civil rights group, Memorial, said the ruling could lead to a court decision to open up secret documents providing details about the killings of thousands of Polish officers. Russia handed over to Poland copies of 137 of the 183 volumes of unclassified material of Russian investigation of the Katyn criminal case. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev handed one of the volumes to the acting Polish president, Bronislaw Komorowski. Medvedev and Komorowski agreed the two states should continue to try to reveal the truth about the tragedy. The Russian president reiterated Russia would continue to declassify documents on the Katyn massacre and ordered to release the documents proving the guilt of Stalin and his secret police chief Beria. The acting Polish president said Russia's move might lay a good foundation for improving bilateral relations. In November 2010, the Russian State Duma issued an official declaration that condemned Joseph Stalin for Katyn massacres.


title: Katyn massacre

text: Archive searches are continuing in the Belarus state archives for the "Belarusian Katyn List" expected to contain the names of 3,870 officers whose identities and exact place of execution (presumably Bykivnia and Kuropaty, as mentioned above) were not yet established.


title: Katyn massacre

text: Russia and Poland remained divided on the legal description of the Katyn crime. The Poles considered it a case of genocide and demanded further investigations, as well as complete disclosure of Soviet documents.


title: Katyn massacre

text: In June 1998, Boris Yeltsin and Aleksander Kwaśniewski agreed to construct memorial complexes at Katyn and Mednoye, the two NKVD execution sites on Russian soil. In September of that year, the Russians also raised the issue of Soviet prisoner of war deaths in the camps for Russian prisoners and internees in Poland (1919–24). About 16,000 to 20,000 POWs died in those camps due to communicable diseases. Some Russian officials argued it was "a genocide comparable to Katyn". A similar claim was raised in 1994; such attempts are seen by some, particularly in Poland, as a highly provocative Russian attempt to create an "anti-Katyn" and "balance the historical equation". The fate of Polish prisoners and internees in Soviet Russia remains poorly researched.


title: Katyn massacre

text: On 4 February 2010, the Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin, invited his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, to attend a Katyn memorial service in April. The visit took place on 7 April 2010, when Tusk and Putin together commemorated the 70th anniversary of the massacre. Before the visit, the 2007 film "Katyń" was shown on Russian state television for the first time. "The Moscow Times" commented that the film's premiere in Russia was likely a result of Putin's intervention.


title: Katyn massacre

text: On 10 April 2010, an aircraft carrying Polish President Lech Kaczyński with his wife and 87 other politicians and high-ranking army officers crashed in Smolensk, killing all 96 aboard the aircraft. The passengers were to attend a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre. The Polish nation was stunned; Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who was not on the plane, referred to the crash as ""the most tragic Polish event since the war."" In the aftermath, a number of conspiracy theories began to circulate. The catastrophe has also had major echoes in the international and particularly the Russian press, prompting a rebroadcast of "Katyń" on Russian television. The Polish President was to deliver a speech at the formal commemorations. The speech was to honour the victims, highlight the significance of the massacres in the context of post-war communist political history, as well as stress the need for Polish–Russian relations to focus on reconciliation. Although the speech was never delivered, it has been published with a narration in the original Polish and a translation has also been made available in English.


title: Katyn massacre

text: In November 2010, the State Duma (lower house of the Russian parliament) passed a resolution declaring long-classified documents "showed that the Katyn crime was carried out on direct orders of Stalin and other Soviet officials". The declaration also called for the massacre to be investigated further to confirm the list of victims. Members of the Duma from the Communist Party denied the Soviet Union had been to blame for the Katyn massacre and voted against the declaration. On 6 December 2010, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev expressed commitment to uncovering the whole truth about the massacre, stating "Russia has recently taken a number of unprecedented steps towards clearing up the legacy of the past. We will continue in this direction".


title: Katyn massacre

text: On 10 April 2022, in response to Polish authorities attempts to demolish or remove "post-Soviet occupation monuments", pro-government activists in support of the invasion parked heavy machinery with flags of the Russian Federation and letters Z outside the Katyn Memorial Cemetery, which was interpreted as an act of intimidation. This was denied by the organizers, who stated they wished to draw attention to the "Russophobic Polish authorities". A number of Russian politicians advocated to demolish Polish part of the memorial complex. Among them State Duma deputies Anatoly Wasserman and Alexey Chepa. On 28 June 2022 Leningradsky Court of Kaliningrad forbade distribution of the book "Katyn. On the trail of a crime". According to the court the book "rehabilitated Nazism" and "violated the law on glorifying Soviet Victory in the Great Patriotic War".


title: Katyn massacre

text: The Communist Party of the Russian Federation and a number of other pro-Soviet Russian politicians and commentators claim that the story of Soviet guilt is a conspiracy and that the documents released in 1990 were forgeries. They insist that the original version of events, assigning guilt to the Nazis, is the correct version, and they call on the Russian government to start a new investigation that would revise the findings of 2004.


title: Katyn massacre

text: A number of Russian historians and organizations such as Memorial openly admit Soviet responsibility. In particular, they point to inconsistencies in this alternative version, namely the details of another contemporary mass execution site at Mednoye in the Tver Region. That part of Central Russia, they stress, was never under German occupation and yet it contained the remains of victims originating from the same camps as those killed in Katyn; the victims at Mednoye were also killed in April–May 1940. Mednoye was only examined in the 1990s and was found to contain well-preserved Polish uniforms, documents, souvenirs, and Soviet newspapers dating back to 1940.


title: Katyn massacre

text: In 2021, however, the Russian Ministry of Culture downgraded the memorial complex at Katyn on its Register of Sites of Cultural Heritage from a place of federal to one of only regional importance. Such decisions, says the preface to the site, are made in consultation with the regional authorities, i.e. the Smolensk Region administration. More importantly, the Ministry altered the descriptive text to say, once more, that the "Polish officers were shot by the Hitlerites in 1941".


title: Katyn massacre

text: In June 2022, Russia removed the Polish flag from the memorial complex, amidst a rise in Russia–Poland political tension due to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.


title: David Benioff

text: David Friedman (; born September 25, 1970), known professionally as David Benioff (), is an American writer, director and producer. Along with his collaborator D. B. Weiss, he is best known as co-creator and showrunner of "Game of Thrones" (2011–2019), the HBO adaptation of George R. R. Martin's series of books "A Song of Ice and Fire". He also wrote "25th Hour" (2002), "Troy" (2004), "City of Thieves" (2008) and co-wrote "" (2009).


title: David Benioff

text: Benioff was born David Friedman in New York City, the youngest of three children in a Jewish family with ancestral roots in Austria, Romania, Germany, Poland and Russia. He is the son of Barbara (née Benioff) and Stephen Friedman, a former head of Goldman Sachs. He has two older sisters, Suzy and Caroline, and grew up in Manhattan, first in Peter Cooper Village, then on 86th Street where he spent most of his childhood, before eventually moving near the U.N. headquarters when he was 16.


title: David Benioff

text: Benioff is an alumnus of Collegiate School and Dartmouth College. At Dartmouth he was a member of Phi Delta Alpha Fraternity and the Sphinx Senior Society. After graduating in 1992, he had a number of jobs: for a time as a club bouncer in San Francisco, and as a high school English teacher at Poly Prep in Brooklyn for two years, where he served as the school's wrestling coach.


title: David Benioff

text: Benioff became interested in an academic career and went to Trinity College Dublin in 1995, for a one-year program to study Irish literature. In Dublin he met D. B. Weiss, who later became his collaborator. Benioff wrote a thesis on Samuel Beckett at Trinity College, but decided against a career in academia. He worked as a radio DJ in Moose, Wyoming, for a year—mostly as a side job that he accepted mainly to spend a year in the countryside at a writer's retreat. He then applied to join the University of California, Irvine's creative writing program after reading "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" by Michael Chabon (an alumnus there), and received a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing there in 1999.


title: David Benioff

text: As an adult, he began using the pen name Jacqueline Benioff when his first novel was published in 2001. Benioff is his mother's maiden name. He explained that he did this to avoid confusion with other writers named David. For legal purposes, his copyright filings from the 2010s onward list him as "David Benioff Friedman".


title: David Benioff

text: Benioff spent two years writing his first published novel, "The 25th Hour", originally titled "Fireman Down", and completed the book as his thesis for his master's degree at Irvine. He was asked to adapt the book into a screenplay after Tobey Maguire read a preliminary trade copy and became interested in making a film of the book. The film adaptation, "25th Hour", starring Edward Norton, was directed by Spike Lee. In 2004 Benioff published a collection of short stories, "When the Nines Roll Over (And Other Stories)".


title: David Benioff

text: He drafted a screenplay of the mythological epic "Troy" (2004), for which Warner Bros. pictures paid him $2.5 million. He also wrote the script for the psychological thriller "Stay" (2005), directed by Marc Forster and starring Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts. His screenplay for "The Kite Runner" (2007), adapted from the novel of the same name, marked his second collaboration with Forster.


title: David Benioff

text: Benioff was hired in 2004 to write the screenplay for the "X-Men" spin-off "" (2009). He based his script on Barry Windsor-Smith's "Weapon X" story, Chris Claremont and Frank Miller's 1982 limited series on the character, as well as the 2001 limited series "Origin". Hugh Jackman collaborated on the script, which he wanted to be more of a character piece than the previous "X-Men" films. Fox later hired Skip Woods to revise and rewrite Benioff's script. Benioff had aimed for a "darker and a bit more brutal" story, writing it with an R rating in mind, but acknowledged the film's final tone would rest with the producers and director.


title: David Benioff

text: In 2006, Benioff became interested in adapting George R.R. Martin's novel series "A Song of Ice and Fire", and began working with Weiss on a proposed television series, "Game of Thrones". The pilot, "Winter Is Coming", was put into development by HBO in 2007 and the series greenlit in 2010. Benioff and Weiss acted as the show's executive producers, showrunners, and writers. It began airing on HBO in 2011. Benioff and Weiss had previously worked together on a script for a horror film titled "The Headmaster", but it was never made.


title: David Benioff

text: In October 2007, Universal Pictures hired Benioff to write an adapted screenplay of the Charles R. Cross biography of Kurt Cobain, but the screenplay was not used.


title: David Benioff

text: On April 10, 2014, Benioff announced he and Weiss had taken on their first feature film project to write, produce, and direct "Dirty White Boys", based on a novel by Stephen Hunter. 21st Century Fox greenlit pre-production on the movie even though at the time, both producers had significant contractual obligations for other projects. Though it was assumed development on "Dirty White Boys" would proceed slowly, promotion for the film not only began slow but stopped altogether. According to Kasey Moore, it has been years since anyone once known to be involved with "Dirty White Boys", has given an update on the project's status.


title: David Benioff

text: On July 19, 2017, Benioff announced that he and Weiss would produce another HBO series, "Confederate", after the final season of "Game of Thrones". Benioff and Weiss said, "We have discussed "Confederate" for years, originally as a concept for a feature film, but our experience on "Thrones" has convinced us that no one provides a bigger, better storytelling canvas than HBO." The announcement of "Confederate" met with public animosity and as of August 2019 (when Benioff's and Weiss's deal with Netflix was announced) is not moving forward.


title: David Benioff

text: On February 6, 2018, Disney announced that Benioff and Weiss would write and produce a new series of "Star Wars" films after the final season of "Game of Thrones" ended in 2019.


title: David Benioff

text: Towards the end of the final season of "Game of Thrones", a petition to HBO was started on Change.org. It called Benioff and Weiss "woefully incompetent writers" and demanded "competent writers" to remake the eighth season of "Game of Thrones" in a manner "that makes sense". The petition eventually amassed over 1.5 million signatures. In the "Chicago Sun Times", Richard Roeper, wrote that the backlash to the eighth season was so great that he doubted he had "ever seen the level of fan (and to a lesser degree, critical) vitriol leveled at" "Game of Thrones".


title: David Benioff

text: In early August 2019, Benioff and Weiss negotiated an exclusive multi-year film and television deal with Netflix worth $200 million. Due to their commitments to Netflix, Benioff and Weiss exited their contract to produce Star Wars films for Disney and Lucasfilm.


title: David Benioff

text: In September 2020, it was announced that Benioff, Weiss and Alexander Woo will write and executive produce a Netflix series based on "The Three-Body Problem" trilogy.


title: David Benioff

text: Benioff and Weiss together directed two episodes of "Game of Thrones", flipping a coin to decide who would get the credit on the show. Benioff was given the credit for season 3 episode 3, "Walk of Punishment", while Weiss was credited with season 4 episode 1, "Two Swords". Benioff and Weiss co-directed the series finale.


title: David Benioff

text: Benioff's and Weiss's first project on Netflix was to direct the stand-up comedy special "Leslie Jones: Time Machine".


title: David Benioff

text: On September 30, 2006, Benioff married actress Amanda Peet in a traditional Jewish ceremony in New York City. They have three children. The family divides their time between homes in Manhattan and Beverly Hills. He is the cousin of software entrepreneur Marc Benioff.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: Scottish Gaelic ( ), also known as Scots Gaelic and Gaelic, is a Goidelic language (in the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family) native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a Goidelic language, Scottish Gaelic, as well as both Irish and Manx, developed out of Old Irish. It became a distinct spoken language sometime in the 13th century in the Middle Irish period, although a common literary language was shared by the Gaels of both Ireland and Scotland until well into the 17th century. Most of modern Scotland was once Gaelic-speaking, as evidenced especially by Gaelic-language place names.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: In the 2011 census of Scotland, 57,375 people (1.1% of the Scottish population aged over 3 years old) reported being able to speak Gaelic, 1,275 fewer than in 2001. The highest percentages of Gaelic speakers were in the Outer Hebrides. Nevertheless, there is a language revival, and the number of speakers of the language under age 20 did not decrease between the 2001 and 2011 censuses. Outside Scotland, a dialect known as Canadian Gaelic has been spoken in eastern Canada and Glengarry County, Ontario since the 18th century. In the 2016 national census, nearly 4,000 Canadian residents claimed knowledge of Scottish Gaelic, with a particular concentration in Nova Scotia.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: Scottish Gaelic is not an official language of the United Kingdom. However, it is classed as an indigenous language under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which the UK Government has ratified, and the Gaelic Language (Scotland) Act 2005 established a language-development body, .


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: Aside from "Scottish Gaelic", the language may also be referred to simply as "Gaelic", pronounced in English. However, "Gaelic" also refers to the Irish language () and the Manx language ().


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: Scottish Gaelic is distinct from Scots, the Middle English-derived language which had come to be spoken in most of the Lowlands of Scotland by the early modern era. Prior to the 15th century, this language was known as ('English') by its own speakers, with Gaelic being called ('Scottish'). Beginning in the late 15th century, it became increasingly common for such speakers to refer to Scottish Gaelic as ('Irish') and the Lowland vernacular as . Today, Scottish Gaelic is recognised as a separate language from Irish, so the word in reference to Scottish Gaelic is no longer used.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: Based on medieval traditional accounts and the apparent evidence from linguistic geography, Gaelic has been commonly believed to have been brought to Scotland, in the 4th–5th centuries CE, by settlers from Ireland who founded the Gaelic kingdom of on Scotland's west coast in present-day Argyll. An alternative view has been voiced by archaeologist Dr Ewan Campbell, who has argued that the putative migration or takeover is not reflected in archaeological or placename data (as pointed out earlier by Leslie Alcock). Campbell has also questioned the age and reliability of the medieval historical sources speaking of a conquest. Instead, he has inferred that Argyll formed part of a common Q-Celtic-speaking area with Ireland, connected rather than divided by the sea, since the Iron Age. These arguments have been opposed by some scholars defending the early dating of the traditional accounts and arguing for other interpretations of the archaeological evidence.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: Regardless of how it came to be spoken in the region, Gaelic in Scotland was mostly confined to until the eighth century, when it began expanding into Pictish areas north of the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde. During the reign of (Constantine II, 900–943), outsiders began to refer to the region as the kingdom of Alba rather than as the kingdom of the Picts. However, though the Pictish language did not disappear suddenly, a process of Gaelicisation (which may have begun generations earlier) was clearly under way during the reigns of and his successors. By a certain point, probably during the 11th century, all the inhabitants of Alba had become fully Gaelicised Scots, and Pictish identity was forgotten. Bilingualism in Pictish and Gaelic, prior to the former's extinction, led to the presence of Pictish loanwords in Gaelic and syntactic influence which could be considered to constitute a Pictish substrate.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: In 1018, after the conquest of Lothian by the Kingdom of Scotland, Gaelic reached its social, cultural, political, and geographic zenith. Colloquial speech in Scotland had been developing independently of that in Ireland since the eighth century. For the first time, the entire region of modern-day Scotland was called in Latin, and Gaelic was the . In southern Scotland, Gaelic was strong in Galloway, adjoining areas to the north and west, West Lothian, and parts of western Midlothian. It was spoken to a lesser degree in north Ayrshire, Renfrewshire, the Clyde Valley and eastern Dumfriesshire. In south-eastern Scotland, there is no evidence that Gaelic was ever widely spoken.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: Many historians mark the reign of King Malcolm Canmore (Malcolm III) between 1058 and 1093 as the beginning of Gaelic's eclipse in Scotland. His wife Margaret of Wessex spoke no Gaelic, gave her children Anglo-Saxon rather than Gaelic names, and brought many English bishops, priests, and monastics to Scotland. When Malcolm and Margaret died in 1093, the Gaelic aristocracy rejected their anglicised sons and instead backed Malcolm's brother Donald Bàn (Donald III). Donald had spent 17 years in Gaelic Ireland and his power base was in the thoroughly Gaelic west of Scotland. He was the last Scottish monarch to be buried on Iona, the traditional burial place of the Gaelic Kings of and the Kingdom of Alba. However, during the reigns of Malcolm Canmore's sons, Edgar, Alexander I and David I (their successive reigns lasting 1097–1153), Anglo-Norman names and practices spread throughout Scotland south of the Forth–Clyde line and along the northeastern coastal plain as far north as Moray. Norman French completely displaced Gaelic at court. The establishment of royal burghs throughout the same area, particularly under David I, attracted large numbers of foreigners speaking Old English. This was the beginning of Gaelic's status as a predominantly rural language in Scotland.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: Clan chiefs in the northern and western parts of Scotland continued to support Gaelic bards who remained a central feature of court life there. The semi-independent Lordship of the Isles in the Hebrides and western coastal mainland remained thoroughly Gaelic since the language's recovery there in the 12th century, providing a political foundation for cultural prestige down to the end of the 15th century.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: By the mid-14th century what eventually came to be called Scots (at that time termed Inglis) emerged as the official language of government and law. Scotland's emergent nationalism in the era following the conclusion of the Wars of Scottish Independence was organized using Scots as well. For example, the nation's great patriotic literature including John Barbour's "The Brus" (1375) and Blind Harry's "The Wallace" (before 1488) was written in Scots, not Gaelic. By the end of the 15th century, English/Scots speakers referred to Gaelic instead as 'Yrisch' or 'Erse', i.e. Irish and their own language as 'Scottis'.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: A steady shift away from Scottish Gaelic continued into and through the modern era. Some of this was driven by policy decisions by government or other organisations, some originated from social changes. In the last quarter of the 20th century, efforts began to encourage use of the language.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: The Statutes of Iona, enacted by James VI in 1609, was one piece of legislation that addressed, among other things, the Gaelic language. It compelled the heirs of clan chiefs to be educated in lowland, Protestant, English-speaking schools. James VI took several such measures to impose his rule on the Highland and Island region. In 1616 the Privy Council proclaimed that schools teaching in English should be established. Gaelic was seen, at this time, as one of the causes of the instability of the region. It was also associated with Catholicism.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: The Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) was founded in 1709. They met in 1716, immediately after the failed Jacobite rebellion of 1715, to consider the reform and civilisation of the Highlands, which they sought to achieve by teaching English and the Protestant religion. Initially their teaching was entirely in English, but soon the impracticality of educating Gaelic-speaking children in this way gave rise to a modest concession: in 1723 teachers were allowed to translate English words in the Bible into Gaelic to aid comprehension, but there was no further permitted use. Other less prominent schools worked in the Highlands at the same time, also teaching in English. This process of anglicisation paused when evangelical preachers arrived in the Highlands, convinced that people should be able to read religious texts in their own language. The first well-known translation of the Bible into Scottish Gaelic was made in 1767 when Dr James Stuart of Killin and Dugald Buchanan of Rannoch produced a translation of the New Testament. In 1798 4 tracts in Gaelic were published by the Society for Propagating the Gospel at Home. 5,000 copies of each were printed. Other publications followed, with a full Gaelic Bible in 1801. The influential and effective Gaelic Schools Society was founded in 1811. Their purpose was to teach Gaels to read the Bible in their own language. In the first quarter of the 19th century, the SSPCK (despite their anti-Gaelic attitude in prior years) and the British and Foreign Bible Society distributed 60,000 Gaelic Bibles and 80,000 New Testaments. It is estimated that this overall schooling and publishing effort gave some 300,000 people in the Highlands some basic literacy. Very few European languages have made the transition to a modern literary language without an early modern translation of the Bible; the lack of a well-known translation may have contributed to the decline of Scottish Gaelic.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: Counterintuitively, access to schooling in Gaelic increased knowledge of English. In 1829 the Gaelic Schools Society reported that parents were unconcerned about their children learning Gaelic, but were anxious to have them taught English. The SSPCK also found Highlanders to have significant prejudice against Gaelic. T. M. Devine attributes this to an association between English and the prosperity of employment: the Highland economy relied greatly on seasonal migrant workers travelling outside the . In 1863, an observer sympathetic to Gaelic stated that "knowledge of English is indispensable to any poor islander who wishes to learn a trade or to earn his bread beyond the limits of his native Isle". Generally, rather than Gaelic speakers, it was Celtic societies in the cities and professors of Celtic from universities who sought to preserve the language.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: The Education (Scotland) Act 1872 provided universal education in Scotland, but completely ignored Gaelic in its plans. The mechanism for supporting Gaelic through the Education Codes issued by the Scottish Education Department were steadily used to overcome this omission, with many concessions in place by 1918. However, the members of Highland school boards tended to have anti-Gaelic attitudes and served as an obstacle to Gaelic education in the late 19th and early 20th century.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: Loss of life due to World War I and the 1919 sinking of the HMY combined with emigration to mean the 1910s saw unprecedented damage to the use of Scottish Gaelic, with a 46% fall in monolingual speakers and a 19% fall in bilingual speakers between the 1911 and 1921 Censuses. Michelle MacLeod of Aberdeen University, has said there was no other period with such a high fall in the number of monolingual Gaelic speakers: "Gaelic speakers became increasingly the exception from that point forward with bilingualism replacing monolingualism as the norm for Gaelic speakers."


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: The Linguistic Survey of Scotland (1949–1997) surveyed both the dialect of the Scottish Gaelic language, and also mixed use of English and Gaelic across the Highlands and Islands.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: Dialects of Lowland Gaelic have been defunct since the 18th century. Gaelic in the Eastern and Southern Scottish Highlands, although alive until the mid-20th century, is now largely defunct. Although modern Scottish Gaelic is dominated by the dialects of the Outer Hebrides and Isle of Skye, there remain some speakers of the Inner Hebridean dialects of Tiree and Islay, and even a few native speakers from Western Highland areas including Wester Ross, northwest Sutherland, Lochaber and Argyll. Dialects on both sides of the Straits of Moyle (the North Channel) linking Scottish Gaelic with Irish are now extinct, though native speakers were still to be found on the Mull of Kintyre, on Rathlin and in North East Ireland as late as the mid-20th century. Records of their speech show that Irish and Scottish Gaelic existed in a dialect chain with no clear language boundary. Some features of moribund dialects have been preserved in Nova Scotia, including the pronunciation of the broad or velarised l () as , as in the Lochaber dialect.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: The Endangered Languages Project lists Gaelic's status as "threatened", with "20,000 to 30,000 active users". UNESCO classifies Gaelic as "definitely endangered".


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: The 1755–2001 figures are census data quoted by MacAulay. The 2011 Gaelic speakers figures come from table KS206SC of the 2011 Census. The 2011 total population figure comes from table KS101SC. Note that the numbers of Gaelic speakers relate to the numbers aged 3 and over, and the percentages are calculated using those and the number of the total population aged 3 and over.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: The 2011 UK Census showed a total of 57,375 Gaelic speakers in Scotland (1.1% of population over three years old), of whom only 32,400 could also read and write the language. Compared with the 2001 Census, there has been a diminution of about 1300 people. This is the smallest drop between censuses since the Gaelic-language question was first asked in 1881. The Scottish government's language minister and took this as evidence that Gaelic's long decline has slowed.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: The main stronghold of the language continues to be the Outer Hebrides (), where the overall proportion of speakers is 52.2%. Important pockets of the language also exist in the Highlands (5.4%) and in Argyll and Bute (4.0%) and Inverness (4.9%). The locality with the largest absolute number is Glasgow with 5,878 such persons, who make up over 10% of all of Scotland's Gaelic speakers.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: Gaelic continues to decline in its traditional heartland. Between 2001 and 2011, the absolute number of Gaelic speakers fell sharply in the Western Isles (−1,745), Argyll & Bute (−694), and Highland (−634). The drop in Stornoway, the largest parish in the Western Isles by population, was especially acute, from 57.5% of the population in 1991 to 43.4% in 2011. The only parish outside the Western Isles over 40% Gaelic-speaking is Kilmuir in Northern Skye at 46%. The islands in the Inner Hebrides with significant percentages of Gaelic speakers are Tiree (38.3%), Raasay (30.4%), Skye (29.4%), Lismore (26.9%), Colonsay (20.2%), and Islay (19.0%).


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: Today, no civil parish in Scotland has a proportion of Gaelic speakers greater than 65% (the highest value is in Barvas, Lewis, with 64.1%). In addition, no civil parish on mainland Scotland has a proportion of Gaelic speakers greater than 20% (the highest is in Ardnamurchan, Highland, with 19.3%). Out of a total of 871 civil parishes in Scotland, the proportion of Gaelic speakers exceeds 50% in seven parishes, 25% in 14 parishes, and 10% in 35 parishes.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: Decline in traditional areas has recently been balanced by growth in the Scottish Lowlands. Between the 2001 and 2011 censuses, the number of Gaelic speakers rose in nineteen of the country's 32 council areas. The largest absolute gains were in Aberdeenshire (+526), North Lanarkshire (+305), Aberdeen City (+216), and East Ayrshire (+208). The largest relative gains were in Aberdeenshire (+0.19%), East Ayrshire (+0.18%), Moray (+0.16%), and Orkney (+0.13%).


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: In 2018, the census of pupils in Scotland showed 520 students in publicly funded schools had Gaelic as the main language at home, an increase of 5% from 497 in 2014. During the same period, Gaelic medium education in Scotland has grown, with 4,343 pupils (6.3 per 1000) being educated in a Gaelic-immersion environment in 2018, up from 3,583 pupils (5.3 per 1000) in 2014. Data collected in 2007–2008 indicated that even among pupils enrolled in Gaelic medium schools, 81% of primary students and 74% of secondary students report using English more often than Gaelic when speaking with their mothers at home. The effect on this of the significant increase in pupils in Gaelic-medium education since that time is unknown.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: Gaelic Medium Education is one of the primary ways that the Scottish Government is addressing Gaelic language shift. Along with the Bòrd na Gàidhlig policies, preschool and daycare environments are also being used to create more opportunities for intergenerational language transmission in the Outer Hebrides.  However, revitalization efforts are not unified within Scotland or Nova Scotia, Canada. One can attend Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, a national centre for Gaelic Language and Culture, based in Sleat, on the Isle of Skye. This institution is the only source for higher education which is conducted entirely in Scottish Gaelic. They offer courses for Gaelic learners from beginners into fluency. They also offer regular bachelors and graduate programs delivered entirely in Gaelic. Concerns have been raised around the fluency achieved by learners within these language programs because they are disconnected from vernacular speech communities. In regard to language revitalization planning efforts, many feel that the initiatives must come from within Gaelic speaking communities, be led by Gaelic speakers, and be designed to serve and increase fluency within the vernacular communities as the first and most viable resistance to total language shift from Gaelic to English. Currently, language policies are focused on creating new language speakers through education, instead of focused on how to strengthen intergenerational transmission within existing Gaelic speaking communities.


title: Scottish Gaelic

text: In the Outer Hebrides, accommodation ethics exist amongst native or local Gaelic speakers when engaging with new learners or non-locals. Accommodation ethics, or ethics of accommodation, is a social practice where local or native speakers of Gaelic shift to speaking English when in the presence of non-Gaelic speakers out of a sense of courtesy or politeness. This accommodation ethic persists even in situations where new learners attempt to speak Gaelic with native speakers. This creates a situation where new learners struggle to find opportunities to speak Gaelic with fluent speakers. Affect is the way people feel about something, or the emotional response to a particular situation or experience. For Gaelic speakers, there is a conditioned and socialized negative affect through a long history of negative Scottish media portrayal and public disrespect, state mandated restrictions on Gaelic usage, and highland clearances. This negative affect towards speaking openly with non-native Gaelic speakers has led to a language ideology at odds with revitalization efforts on behalf of new speakers, state policies (such as the Gaelic Language Act), and family members reclaiming their lost mother tongue. New learners of Gaelic often have a positive affective stance to their language learning, and connect this learning journey towards Gaelic language revitalization. The mismatch of these language ideologies, and differences in affective stance, has led to fewer speaking opportunities for adult language learners and therefore a challenge to revitalization efforts which occur outside the home. Positive engagements between language learners and native speakers of Gaelic through mentorship has proven to be productive in socializing new learners into fluency.