Poland protests Russian plan to “devastate” cemetery of Polish victims of Soviet massacres

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Poland’s state Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) has criticised plans by Russia to remove Polish symbols from the Katyn cemetery that houses the remains of thousands of Poles murdered by the Soviet Union during World War Two.

In a statement, the IPN pointed to Russian media reports that the regional authorities in Smolensk have ordered the removal of Polish military symbols from the cemetery after local prosecutors deemed that they violate regulations on cultural heritage and commemorating the Soviet victory in the war.

“The Institute of National Remembrance strongly protests against these plans…to devastate the cemetery,” wrote the IPN. “Any country wishing to call itself civilised ought to treat burial sites as sacred and inviolable.”

The Russian plans include removing the Virtuti Militari – which symbolises Polish military successes against Russia in 1792 – and the September Campaign Cross, which commemorates Poland’s defence against the joint invasions by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939.

In May, the same symbols were removed from another cemetery in nearby Mednoye also dedicated to Polish victims of Soviet massacres. That incident prompted protests from Poland, with the foreign minister saying that it was part of Moscow’s attempts to promote “historical lies” about the war.

In 2022, Poland similarly lodged a protest against the removal of Polish flags from the Katyn and Mednoye cemeteries. Last year, Poland’s foreign ministry published a statement correcting a number of false and revisionist claims that Putin has regularly made about World War Two history.

Around 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia – captured by the Soviets after their invasion of Poland – were killed in the Katyn massacres. However, the Soviet Union denied responsibility for decades, and in recent years there have been renewed efforts in Russia to obscure the crime.

More broadly, Russia’s official historical narrative is that it did not enter the war until 1941, when the Soviet Union was invaded by Nazi Germany. That whitewashes over the fact that Moscow had previously been allied with Berlin, and that the two had invaded Poland in league with one another in 1939.

In its statement this week, the IPN noted that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany “became the direct cause of the outbreak of World War Two” and led to “Germany and Soviet Russia jointly attacking Poland in September 1939”.

The Polish institution also denied claims by the regional authorities in Smolensk that Poland has undertaken the “mass destruction of graves and monuments of Soviet liberating soldiers” on its territory.

While the IPN noted that those “soldiers cannot be called liberators”, given that they brought Poland under Soviet control, it pointed out that Poland has not destroyed Soviet graves, and in fact works to protect and restore them.

Poland has, however, in recent years demolished dozens of Soviet monuments as part of a “decommunisation campaign” launched by the former government and implemented by the IPN.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Polska w Rosji (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.