Have the Katyn files opened Pandoras Box?
The facts may be known to many but it will still shock Russians to see the actual documents showing how casually Joseph Stalin and the Soviet leadership dispatched 22,000 Polish prisoners to their deaths at Katyn. President Medvedev’s order to publish the file comes at a sensitive moment for Russia, just days before it celebrates the 65th anniversary on May 9 of the Soviet defeat of Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War, as the Second Wolrd War is known here. The Kremlin has painstakingly constructed a sense of Russian national pride on the foundations of the war victory, seeing it as one of the few historical achievements to survive the collapse of the Soviet Union. Anything that calls into question the heroism of Russians in that period has been fiercely challenged. Yet here are documents showing how the NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB secret police, proposed the cold-blooded extermination of Polish prisoners to Stalin, the man still held in awe by many older Russians as the great
