Putin mourns Stalin-era massacre of Polish forces in unprecedented gesture to Poland

more images

more images

Putin mourns Stalin-era massacre of Polish forces

MOSCOW — Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin attended a memorial ceremony on Wednesday for 22,000 Polish prisoners who were killed by Soviet secret police during World War II in an unprecedented gesture of good will and reconciliation to Poland.

Putin — accompanied by his Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk — became the first Russian leader to ever commemorate the Katyn massacres with a Polish leader, and said the two nations’ “fates had been inexorably joined” by the atrocities.

The 22,000 Polish officers, prisoners and intellectuals were massacred by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s secret police in 1940 in Katyn, a village near Russia’s border with Belarus.

In what appeared to be his harshest condemnation of Stalin’s rule to date, Putin said: “In our country there has been a clear political, legal and moral judgment made of the evil acts of this totalitarian regime, and this judgment cannot be revised.”

But his speech stopped short of offering any apology to the Polish nation or calling the massacres a war crime, as some commentators in Poland had expected.

Also, while giving the go-ahead to a joint historic commission on the matter, Putin gave no concrete pledge that all Soviet archives documenting it would finally be unsealed.

Tusk used his emotional speech about the Polish victims to push Putin on this point.

“Prime minister, they are here. They are in this soil. The eye sockets of their bullet-pierced sculls are looking and waiting to see whether we are able to transform violence and lies into reconciliation,” Tusk said.

For half a century, Soviet officials claimed that the mass executions had been carried out by Nazi occupiers during the Second World War. But the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule admitted in 1990 that the crimes had been committed by Stalin’s NKVD secret police, a precursor to the KGB.

The disclosure opened the floodgates of historical consciousness across the Soviet Union, speeding its demise as nations across the Eastern bloc awoke to the horrors of the Soviet regime and sought independence.

As recently as December, Putin resisted a broad denunciation of Stalin’s reign. He told a call-in show with the Russian public that it was “impossible to make an overall judgment” against Stalin because he had industrialized the nation and played a key role in defeating the Nazis.

Russia also has clashed with its neighbors in Eastern Europe over what it has perceived as offenses to the legacy of Stalin and the Red Army. The relocation of a Soviet war memorial in Estonia in 2007 was met with a bristling reaction from Moscow, as was a resolution made by European lawmakers in 2009 equating Stalinism and Fascism.

Putin’s meeting with Tusk seems to be part of a broader Kremlin effort to avoid similar confrontations and improve ties with Europe.

President Dmitry Medvedev wrapped up a two-day visit to Slovakia on Tuesday, and said in the capital, Bratislava, that the EU-member state was a “very convenient and open door for Russia to the European Union.”

“We are ready to actively go through this door,” Medvedev said during a televised news conference with his Slovak counterpart, Ivan Gasparovic.

During the visit — marking the 65th anniversary of the Slovak capital’s liberation from Nazi rule — Medvedev gave Slovak officials World War II documents from Russia’s state archives.

Associated Press writer Monika Scislowska in Warsaw contributed to this report.