How it was №1656 31.10.2000 (2000)

Katyn massacre, 1940 year.

For decades, the theme of the Katyn tragedy remained in our country under the ban, or rather, it simply did not exist.

But historians, political and state figures did not leave any attempts to learn about what really happened in that far 1940 near Smolensk.

In September 1939 in the hands of the NKVD was about 120 thousand Polish soldiers.

In May 1940, news of the Poles in the Soviet camps stopped coming to their homeland.

In 1943 the world flew around the message of the German command that under Smolensk there were found the burials of Polish prisoners of war who were shot by the NKVD in 1940.

Documents, facts and eyewitness accounts indicate that over 20,000 officers were shot on orders from the USSR's top leadership.

The program is attended by the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Poland to the Russian Federation Andrzej Zalutski and the leading researcher of the Institute of World History RAS, Doctor of Historical Sciences of Poland Natalia Lebedeva, for a long time engaged in the investigation of the details of the death of Polish officers near Katyn.

Fragments of the interview with Sergo Beria and a member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, Alexander Yakovlev, were added on how the decision was taken on the shooting and on the documents on the Katyn massacre transmitted to Poland in the early 1990s.

Personnel chronicles of different years: a joint Soviet-German parade in Brest, a meeting of the German command, an emergency commission at the scene of the crime, an excerpt of the documentary film "The Katyn case" (1991).