Artfldgr says:
During the war and the German occupation of Poland, something like 20% of the entire country's population perished; something the Soviets never even remotely came close to during their rule which lasted up to 1989.
While your history is better than pretty much most of everyone elses, its still not fully honest.
Especially in your assertion that Hitler was worse than Stalin. Care to ask the women that threw their babies onto trains in hopes they will be found and fed rather than starve to death?
Poland signed a worthless non aggression pact with germany and the soviet union. Both those then conspired to carve up the world. Stalin held back so that he could blame Hitler, and it nearly backfired on him when Hitler decided to remove his friend too.
September 1939 both countries rolled in and took what was not theirs from their ‘friends’. Germany as a state was more connected with the world than russia was, and so the facts about germany became more prevalent than similar facts about russia.
Just do be clear, remember the words of Edward Rydz-Smigly? No I doubt you do, and I am sure the others don’t either.
"With the Germans we run the risk of losing our liberty. With the Russians we will lose our soul"
The Russians lost Poland to the germans, and so didn’t have the time nor the cover of war to do to them what they did to the Latvians, Estonians, and others.
Whats interesting is your pick of the 20%.
From wiki
These territories were repopulated with Poles expelled from the eastern regions by the Soviet Union and other territories. The new Poland emerged 20% smaller by 77,500 square kilometres (29,900 sq mi).
Stalin was determined that Poland's new government should be Communist, and therefore ultimately under his control. He had severed relations with the Polish government-in-exile in London in 1943 in the aftermath of the Katyn Massacre, but to appease Roosevelt and Churchill he agreed at Yalta that a coalition government would be formed. The Prime Minister of the Polish government in exile, Stanisław Mikołajczyk, resigned his post and, with several other Polish exile leaders, went to Lublin in eastern Poland, where the Communist-controlled provisional government had been established. This government was headed by a Socialist, Edward Osóbka-Morawski, but the Communists held a majority of key posts. It was recognized by the Western Allies in July 1945. Stalin also agreed that Poland would receive a $US10 billion reparation payment from Germany.
The attitude of the Polish population towards Soviet entry was generally hostile, while some cases existed of welcoming them, they soon turned into hatred and despise as Red Army soldiers engaged in plunder, rape, banditry, while NKVD implemented a reign of political terror. In the eyes of Polish society which wasn't yet under the Soviet occupation in 1939-1941 the Soviets became a new occupiers, and soon protests and demands of their withdrawal have spread among the country. A popular belief was that Western Allies will soon defeat Soviets using atomic weapons and free Poland.[10]
The Germans mostly killed, Russians used them up.
As recent as a few months ago, Katyn facts have been updated with new information. At least your educated enough to not try to make the massacre the work of the Germans when it was the work of Russians attempting to make a frame up.
Here is what YOU said as to Katyn.
Katyn happened in 1940 after the Soviets and Germans both invaded Poland, not after the Soviets "liberated" it from the Nazis several years later. Katyn was a massacre of an officer corps that Stalin regarded as potential subversives in the part of Poland he had bargained with Hitler to control. Your "analysis" makes it sound like the Soviets did this after the war was over which is, of course, false.
Lets compare them with the CURRENT knowledge of Katyn.
You get one point for the date. The event happened during april may of 1940. You lose your point as to who was killed.
The victims were Polish officers, soldiers, and civilians captured by the Red Army after it invaded eastern Poland in September 1939. Strictly speaking, even the Polish servicemen were not POWs. The USSR had not declared war, and the Polish commander in chief had ordered his troops not to engage Soviet forces. But there was little the Poles could do. On 28 September, the USSR and Nazi Germany, allied since August, partitioned and then dissolved the Polish state. They then began implementing parallel policies of suppressing all resistance and destroying the Polish elite in their respective areas. The NKVD and the Gestapo coordinated their actions on many issues, including prisoner exchanges. At Brest Litovsk, Soviet and German commanders held a joint victory parade before German forces withdrew westward behind a new demarcation line.
That description above is a world of difference from yours… care to check the facts? Let me know what fact is wrong. hint: none.
Official records, opened in 1990 when glasnost was still in vogue, show that Stalin had every intention of treating the Poles as political prisoners. Just two days after the invasion began on 17 September, the NKVD created a Directorate of Prisoners of War. 2 It took custody of Polish prisoners from the Army and began organizing a network of reception centers and transfer camps and arranging rail transport to the western USSR. Once there, the Poles were placed in "special" (concentration) camps, where, from October to February, they were subjected to lengthy interrogations and constant political agitation. The camps were at Kozelsk, Starobelsk, and Ostashkov, all three located on the grounds of former Orthodox monasteries converted into prisons. The NKVD dispatched one of its rising stars, Maj. Vassili Zarubin, to Kozelsk, where most of the officers were kept, to conduct interviews. Zarubin presented himself to the Poles as a charming, sympathetic, and cultured Soviet official, which led many prisoners into sharing confidences that would cost them their lives.
During April-May 1940, the Polish prisoners were moved from their internment camps and taken to three execution sites. The place most identified with the Soviet atrocity is Katyn Forest, located 12 miles west of Smolensk, Russia. For years historians assumed that the grounds of an NKVD rest and recreation facility were both an execution and burial site for nearly a fifth of the unfortunate Poles who found themselves in Soviet captivity. Post-Cold War revelations, however, suggest that the victims were shot in the basement of the NKVD headquarters in Smolensk and at an abattoir in the same city, although some may have been executed at a site in the forest itself. In any event, the Katyn Forest is--and will probably long remain--the main symbol of the atrocity, even if it was not the actual killing field.
If you want, you can go online and you can read the leter from beria to stalin proposing the executions.
The Katyn Forest massacre was a criminal act of historic proportions and enduring political implications. When Nazi occupation forces in April 1943 announced the discovery of several mass graves, propaganda minister Josef Goebbels hoped that international revulsion over the Soviet atrocity would drive a wedge into the Big Three coalition and buy Germany a breathing space, if not a victory, in its war against Russia. (A headline in the May 1943 Newsweek read: "Poles vs. Reds: Allied Unity Put to Test Over Officer Dead.") But Goebbels miscalculated. Despite overwhelming evidence of Soviet responsibility, Moscow blamed the Germans, and for the rest of the war Washington and London officially accepted the Soviet countercharge. When the Polish government-in-exile in London demanded an international inquiry, Stalin used this as a pretext to break relations. The Western allies objected but eventually acquiesced. Soon thereafter, the Soviet dictator assembled a group of Polish Communists that returned to Poland with the Red Army in 1944 and formed the nucleus of the postwar government. Stalin's experience with the Katyn affair may have convinced him that the West, grateful for the Red Army's contribution to the Allied military effort, would find it hard to confront him over Poland after the war.
Did you know that someone survived?
Professor Stanislaw Swianiewicz was the sole survivor of Katyn. He was waiting to board a bus to the forest area when an NKVD colonel arrived and pulled him out of line. Swianiewicz was an internationally recognized expert on forced labor in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, who had been born in Poland when it was still part of the Russian empire, and had studied in Moscow. He ended up in Siberia, and after the war emigrated to the United States, where he taught economics at the University of Notre Dame. At least one CIA analyst remembers the professor from his days in South Bend.
Those who died at Katyn included an admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 3,420 NCOs, seven chaplains, three landowners, a prince, 43 officials, 85 privates, and 131 refugees. Also among the dead were 20 university professors; 300 physicians; several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers; and more than 100 writers and journalists as well as about 200 pilots. 7 It was their social status that landed them in front of NKVD execution squads. Most of the victims were reservists who had been mobilized when Germany invaded. In all, the NKVD eliminated almost half the Polish officer corps--part of Stalin's long-range effort to prevent the resurgence of an independent Poland.
Recent historical research shows that 700-900 of the victims were Polish Jews. 8 Ironically, the Germans knew this, and it complicated Goebbels' effort to portray the atrocity as a "Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy"--a mainstay of the Nazi regime's anti-Semitic propaganda.
We have the lists of who were killed. Its possible to get them and determine who and what they are. and your explanation does not fit the facts. If one knows ALL the facts one cant discount this as the execution of a bunch of subversives.
Even more telling. It also shows that you’re of the mental twist that says its ok to execute people for no thinking the way the state wants them to.
By telling us how Stalin thought, you are implying that his thinking was correct, and that the outcome was necessary. Its end justifies the means thinking, aka pragmatism.
Here is a bit on the coverup by russia… of course if the actions were such a goodness, why then cover them up so much? because they weren’t such, but very bad, and exposed the true nature of soviet rule!!!
It shows that the point your trying to make as to when it happened was not clouded by the analysis above, but was actually clouded by soviet operations to hide, obfuscate, and change the reality, and so the perceived outcome.
For 50 years, the Soviet Union concealed the truth. The coverup began in April 1943, almost immediately after the Red Army had recaptured Smolensk. The NKVD destroyed a cemetery the Germans had permitted the Polish Red Cross to build and removed other evidence. In January 1944, Moscow appointed its own investigative body, known as the Burdenko Commission after the prominent surgeon who chaired it. Predictably, it concluded that the Polish prisoners had been murdered in 1941, during the German occupation, not in 1940.
So much of the mix up is because of Stalinists (revisionists) screwing around with history, and in general, injecting tons of crap into modern literature and histories poisoning the wealth of knowledge. [by the way, this is why they keep the records, the old idea was that after everything was over, and they had total control, then the histories could be opened and the real information exposed and those who were once vilified would be seen to be heroes, and visa versa]
In early 1989, three top Soviet officials sent Gorbachev a memorandum warning him that the issue was becoming "more acute" and that "time is not our ally." 15 Some form of official admission, even a partial one, would have to be made. At a Kremlin ceremony on 13 October 1990, Gorbachev handed Jaruzelski a folder of documents that left no doubt about Soviet guilt. He did not, however, make a full and complete disclosure. Missing from the folder was the March 1940 NKVD execution order. Gorbachev laid all blame on Stalin's secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria, and his deputy. (This was a safe move, because Beria and his deputy had been branded criminals and summarily shot by Stalin's successors.) Gorbachev also failed to mention that the actual number of victims was 21,857--more than the usually cited figure of 15,000. By shaving the truth, Gorbachev had shielded the Soviet Government and the Communist Party, making Katyn look like a rogue secret police action rather than an official act of mass murder.
Meanwhile Russians can talk about American atrocities. They come no where near the INTENDED and PLANNED actions of the Russians against everyone including their own people.
However with the letter from beria, and more and more information from the actual sites and archives, more and more information came out.
we now know that katyn was just one in an extremely long line of brutal Russian actions outside of all morals. That in the recorded history of man there are few examples of such brutality and malice of forethought, and no example of a nation state totally run that way in perpetuity
The next major discovery turned up in an unexpected place--the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. While conducting research on Katyn at the Archives in spring 1990, a Polish-American art and antiques expert named Waclaw Godziemba-Maliszewski was given a copy of an article entitled "The Katyn Enigma: New Evidence in a 40-Year Riddle" that had appeared in the Spring 1981 issue of Studies in Intelligence. It was written by CIA officer and NPIC analyst Robert G. Poirier, who used imagery from Luftwaffe aerial photoreconnaissance during World War II to uncover evidence of the original crime and a Soviet coverup during 1943-1944. 16 The imagery, selected from 17 sorties flown between 1941 and 1944 and spanning a period before, during, and after the German occupation of the Smolensk area, was important evidence. Among other things, it showed that the area where the mass graves were located had not been altered during the German occupation and that the same area displayed physical changes that predated the Germans' arrival. It also captured the NKVD on film bulldozing some of the Polish graves and removing bodies. Poirier speculated that the corpses had been removed and reburied at another site.
Stalin always operated (as do leftists in the US) as if he would win and that no one was looking so no one would know. (US feminists did the same thing siding with Margret Sanger). Putin is doing the same thing, after all, it works well till later, and later, its too late to bother!
The person above went and located the aerial photos (us Americans don’t trust our CIA, and we are allowed not to, and so we are also allowed access to information. the fact that such information led to lots of sites and many countries confirming it means that the information was not false or contrived). He then re-did the analysis. More and more information came out. MORE than just the mass grave of military people that at the time colored the history (and yoru mind) that it was combatants, or such.
In 1992, Moscow suddenly "discovered" the original 1940 execution ordered signed by Stalin and five other Politburo members-- in Gorbachev's private archive. 17 Gorbachev almost certainly had read it in 1989, if not earlier. 18 In October 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin presented a copy of the order along with 41 other documents to the new Polish president, former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa.
And so you can see… more than 50 years of never telling the truth. that the only way to get the truth is not to leave any chance of a lie working.
Russian politics is like dealing with the habitual liar character, except that the character is backed with the deadly force of the state. yeah yeah, that’s the ticket.
Stalin's secret police had committed crimes against some 11,000 Poles living in western Ukraine and western Belorussia after the USSR had incorporated those regions, and murdered more than 3,000 Polish prisoners in panic killings when Germany attacked
in June 1941
Yeltsin told his audience that "totalitarian terror affected not only Polish citizens but, in the first place, the citizens of the former Soviet Union." 22 He added that 10,000 bodies of the "most varied nationalities" had been found there. (The NKVD had used the forest as a killing ground in the 1930s.)
Some Poles undoubtedly took offense at Yeltsin's effort to commemorate Katyn as a common Russian and Polish tragedy and blame it on "totalitarianism." Moreover, the Russian president refused to apologize and did not follow up on his pledge to punish still-living culprits and pay reparations.
So as usual. All lipservice. Smooth out relations but don’t punish the perpetrators as they are HEROES not villains. Lugovoy comes to mind too (and more than 100 other examples I remember from history).
Now its MY turn to teach YOU some history and get SMUG off your face!
It gets REALLY weird, as there was new information showing even more bad about russia, and so they decided to try to turn it all around and make up something (again, figuring that the information to expose them was in the dustbin of time).
the story stood until fall 1998, when Moscow made a bizarre move. In September, Procurator General Yuri Chayka sent a letter to Poland's minister of justice demanding an official inquiry into the deaths of Russian soldiers captured during the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1921. The letter asserted that 83,500 internees had died "in Polish concentration camps as a result of cruel and inhuman conditions."
Then, in July 1998, the Moscow paper Nezavisimaya Gazeta [Independent Newspaper] ran a front-page article claiming that tens of thousands of prisoners had died as a result of shootings, starvation, and exposure. This article formed the basis of Chayka's demarche. 26 It went beyond previous assertions that Russians and Poles both were victims of Stalinism: "The present position of Warsaw resembles the former position of the USSR, which failed to confess the Katyn crime for a long time . . . . It would be good if Poland followed in Russia's footsteps and pleaded guilty to the savagery [against Red Army soldiers]." The case for moral equivalence had been replaced by a claim to moral superiority.
What a beautiful piece of dissimulation.
Care to go through the line?
First make friends with the poles.
Then betray them with the germans
Then betray the germans by being slow to fulfill their part (as usual)
Then the germans betray the Russians
[secret: The Russians between all this get a hold of lots of poles, and then exterminate them]
They then pawn it off on the germans
The germans pawn it off to them
Years of dissimulation and such till more information is found that exposes russia as the sole operator
Pretend to come to terms and apologize, but never apologize, only claim to share victimhood status
Keep dissimulating, hiding, and denying – keep lying by omission
Let bits out, and when more is to come out, then dissimulate and now the poles and Russians are no longer equal in victimhood, but the poles are bad because they didn’t admit that they did bad too (of which there is no evidence as it was the socialists that had such camps!).
Now at the end, its turned around and russia can pretend to have the superior moral high ground for being a victim of itself!!! kind of like me becoming a saint by shooting myself with arrows.
Right after that game, even MORE information started flooding out about Katyn!!!!
So what it was was a preemptice propaganda practice to cloud the issues and again, actually avoid apology, and other points.
AND here is the proof sir that your assertions as to the Russians and Germans with the Germans being worse is way off base.
in 1998, a Russian-Polish research team issued a series of previously classified secret police reports with the title Eyes Only for J.V. Stalin: NKVD Reports from Poland, 1944-1946. The reports detailed a second wave of terror unleashed during the postwar occupation, showing that the crimes committed during 1939-1941 were not an aberration but part of a single imperial design. Soon thereafter, a group of Polish members of parliament spent 10 days in Russia, trying unsuccessfully to obtain an official acknowledgment that the Soviet Government had engaged in genocide. In the meantime, more graves filled with Polish corpses were found near Tavda and Tomsk, east of the Urals.
That Katyn wasn’t the end, but the beginning, and the games were to hide how big the horrors were and are!!!
You are very wrong sir..
Russians cannot look at Katyn without seeing themselves in the mirror of their own history. Thus official Moscow resists using the "g" word (genocide) to describe the atrocity. When Gorbachev's advisers warned him in 1989 that Poland's demand for the truth contained a "subtext . . . . that the Soviet Union is no better--and perhaps even worse--than Nazi Germany" and that the Soviet Union was "no less responsible" for the outbreak of World War II and the 1939 defeat of the Polish Army, they were also thinking of undercurrents in their own country. 28 Russian intellectuals were already beginning to equate Communism with fascism and Stalin with Hitler. Reports of vandalized war memorials and looted battlefield cemeteries underscored growing popular disillusionment with the cult of triumphalism built around Stalin and the USSR's victory over Nazi Germany. 29 Now some Russian revisionists go so far as to claim that Hitler's invasion launched a preventive war aimed at forestalling Stalin's plan to strike Germany first--a view that even Western historians reject.
The Russians the Russians claimed were killed by poles were killed by Russians. And you can see where and why the information your giving out with smugness is intended to push someone to think HITLER is worse than STALIN.
But there is actually no way to show that! you can EASILY show that stalin was worse than Hitler though… from practices, to volume, to sadistic extremes, experimentation, and never stopping any of it during their whole existence! Their creating the concept of perpetual war gave us perpetual spy orgs!! Just like when a woman strips all other women who want to compete with her have to strip to. It’s a race to the bottom, and it was Lenin that said, we will get to the bottom first! And win. But he said it more eloquently by justifying using the criminally insane sociopaths for state appointments.
Don’t berate people for not knowing history, when you don’t know it either.
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