"Stalin was an efficient leader, not a murderer. The killing of Polish officers in Katyn was a well-deserved revenge," will be the new official historical theory taught in Russian schools.
Before the opening of the new school year, the Russian Academy of Qualification Improvement and Professional Retraining of Education Employees has released guidelines for teachers regarding the history syllabus in schools.
From now on, Russian pupils will be informed that some 22,000 Polish officers were indeed killed by the NKVD in Katyn in 1940, but the act was fully justified and "politically suitable", reports a Moscow-based liberal, but pro-government daily newspaper Vremya Novostei.
Russian teachers will also explain to their school children that the Katyn massacre was carried out "in response to the killing of thousands of Red Army soldiers in Polish captivity after the war of 1920 [between Poland and the Soviet Union], initiated by Poland, not the USSR".
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Purges and acts of ethnic cleansing, killing millions, carried out on Stalin's orders were simply "efficient endeavors" of the leader getting the country ready for the forthcoming war.
The Katyn massacre has been a running sore between Warsaw and Moscow. On March 5, 1940, Joseph Stalin signed a decree to murder Polish Army officers taken captive after the Red Army invasion of Poland in 1939. The officers, made up of Poland's intellectual elite, were systematically shot from April till May 1940 in Katyn, Charkov and Tarnow.
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The information about mass graves in Katyn was made public by the Germans on April 13, 1943. Two days later, the Soviets blamed the massacre on the Nazis. After an investigation of over a decade in length, Moscow refused to name the massacre as a war crime nor, as the Polish side alleges, was it genocide. No prosecutions have ever been made against the NKVD officers involved in the slaughter. |