Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 14, 1990 TAG: 9004140279
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WARSAW, POLAND LENGTH: Medium
"The fact that they admitted this is an important thing, but in what form the final admission and statement will be made is also very important," said Cezary Chlebowski, a professor of history at Warsaw University and member of a Polish commission investigating the massacre.
"If this will just end with this statement, this is not the way to do it," he said. "We expect there should be activities of the prosecutor to find the perpetrators of this crime."
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev on Friday gave Poland's President Wojciech Jaruzelski cartons of documents the Soviet leader said "indirectly but convincingly" proved the Soviet secret police killed thousands of Polish officers in Katyn Forest in the spring of 1940.
"It is not easy to speak of this tragedy, but it is necessary," said Gorbachev, as the Soviet government for the first time officially and publicly accepted responsibility for this long-denied crime of the Stalinist regime in the thick pine and birch forests.
The truth of what happened in the forests of Katyn has been, as Gorbachev said Friday, one of the "historical knots" that has complicated Soviet-Polish relations, particularly this last year, as Eastern European countries have emerged from their longtime domination by the Soviet Union.
Bronislaw Geremek, leader of Solidarity's political arm in Parliament and a close adviser to the government, said, "This acceptance of guilt is important for Polish-Soviet relations. The words were pronounced that murder was committed and those who did it were named.
"These were words that we waited for for a long time. It can be said that now, just now, the possibility is open that relations between Poland and the Soviet Union can be put on the right track."
Katyn has long been one of the most bitterly resented symbols of Soviet domination in Poland.
Under the Communists, Poles were not permitted to speak or write of the event, even though the Soviet role in the killings of 15,000 Polish army prisoners, most of them officers, was widely known and had been confirmed in detail by historians.
After making the Soviet announcement the lead item on the news Friday night, the Polish television broadcast a recent documentary on Katyn that included interviews with dozens of relatives of the men who were killed.
Solidarity leader Lech Walesa issued a statement that praised the admission but focused on what he called "unsettled questions."
Those issues, the statement said, were the "punishment of those responsible for the crime of genocide" and "free access to places within the territory of the Soviet Union that are important to Poles' emotions."
Janeusz Zawodny, a Polish expatriate whose book "Death in the Forest" is the most detailed history of the massacre, said the Soviet statement did not address the fates of 12,500 Polish officers and others who were killed at places other than Katyn in the same period.
"If the Soviet Union follows up," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Washington state, "this could be the beginning of a new relationship between Poland and the Soviet Union. If it stops with this statement, it would be abysmal arrogance."
Even before the Communists gave up most political power last year, the Polish government publicly broke with Moscow on the issue.
Jerzy Urban, the spokesman for the last Communist government, declared in March 1989 the Soviets were to blame for the massacre.
Until last year, the Warsaw monument to the victims carried an inscription that blamed the Germans for the killings.
It has since been rewritten to read simply: Katyn 1940.
by CNB