The Gallery of Katyn Executioners
The killing of Polish prisoners of war, officers and civilians in 1940 was the bloodiest crime since the end of the Great Terror.
Nikita Petrov, a Russian historian and human rights activist, has drawn a collective portrait of the Katyn executioners especially for Polish readers, starting with the Politburo members whose signatures appear under Beria’s note of 5 March, and ending with the “staff operating the death machine.”
The author searches for regularities in the fates of NKVD officers, trying to identify their motivations and the fates that made those people involved in the Katyn Massacre. He also tries to answer the question as to whether involvement in this crime and in the “covert circle” of secrecy for many years could have left any trace in their minds and emotions. By exploring these biographies, we can learn about the mechanisms of the security apparatus and the entire Soviet system of oppression.
Moreover, Nikita Petrov does not avoid the bitter truth about the course of the Katyn investigation and the lack of readiness among the Russian authorities and the society to honestly settle accounts with the totalitarian Soviet past.
The publication comes with an annex containing more than 120 detailed biographies of officers at various levels of the Soviet security apparatus involved in the Katyn Massacre, most of them with photographs.