• By
  • Marcin Sobczyk

The Soviet massacre of Polish prisoners of war during World War II was a war crime and Russia, which assumed the Soviet Union’s rights and obligations in 1991, demonstrated “an attitude lacking in humanity” toward families of the victims and violated an international treaty, the European Court of Human Rights said in a ruling Monday.

The court said it had been unable to examine the merits of the case because it had not received vital documents from Moscow, but ruled that Russia had failed to treat the victims’ families “in a humane and compassionate way.”

A group of Polish claimants, unable to get access to classified Russian documents on the Katyn massacre, took the country to the European Court of Human Rights, asking for recognition that Russia hadn’t carried out an effective investigation, and that it “displayed a dismissive attitude to all their requests for information about the dead people’s fate.”


In 1940, the Soviet Union’s secret police, the NKVD, on Joseph Stalin’s orders killed more than 20,000 Polish soldiers in a forest in the village of Katyn, near Smolensk in western Russia. The Soviet Union denied this for nearly all of its existence and the matter was also censored in Soviet-controlled Poland before 1989.

Soviet authorities initially insisted German Nazi soldiers had perpetrated the crime. In the 1990s, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet president, and Boris Yeltsin, then Russia’s president, admitted Soviet guilt. Some officials and historians in Russia have continued to deny Stalin’s guilt, while Russia has refused to call the massacre genocide.

“The Court was struck by the apparent reluctance of the Russian authorities to recognize the reality of the Katyn massacre,” the court said in a judgment released Monday. “The approach chosen by the Russian military courts to maintain, to the applicants’ face and contrary to the established historic facts, that their relatives had somehow vanished in the Soviet camps, demonstrated a callous disregard for the applicants’ concerns and deliberate obfuscation of the circumstances of the Katyn massacre.”

Russia had the obligation to account for the fate of the missing people, the court also said.

The victims’ families “had been left to bear the burden to uncover how their relatives had died, while the Russian authorities had not provided them with any official information about the circumstances surrounding the deaths, nor made any serious attempts to locate the burial sites of the relatives,” the court said, referring to the Katyn massacre as a war crime.

Russia also violated the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights by failing to cooperate with the court and refusing to produce a copy of a 2004 decision to discontinue the investigation into the Katyn massacre, the court said. The ruling may be challenged by the parties before the Grand Chamber of the Court.

Poland and Russia have for decades been in dispute over the Katyn massacre. In a move signaling more openness, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin appeared at a ceremony in Katyn on April 7, 2010, to commemorate the victims with his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski was planning a conciliatory speech three days later, but died when the government’s airplane crashed near Smolensk as the president and his delegation of 95 people traveled to Katyn.

What initially looked like a chance for permanent reconciliation amid deep mourning for the victims of the crash in both countries appears to be lost. Russia’s handling of the investigation into the plane crash has irked Polish officials, and the country relapsed partially in its attitude toward the Katyn massacre.

Prime Minister Tusk said in February that his country’s relations with Russia were worse than before the crash.