Polish diplomats in Belarus are right to demand that the prosecutors there launch an inquiry into the corpses of Poles found in the cellar of an Orthodox cathedral in Hlybokaye in Vitebsk region in northern Belarus. There are all indications to believe that the victims were murdered by the Soviet NKVD in 1940. It was a time when, on orders from Stalin and the Politburo members from spring 1940, Polish intellectuals, administration officials, army and police officers in Poland's eastern territories seized by the Soviet Union in September 1939 were being liquidated by special NKVD squads. It was on the basis of those orders that the NKVD murdered some 20,000 Poles - the prisoners of Katyn, Ostashkov, Starobelsk and other places of execution in what are now Belarus and Ukraine.
At the same time, Belarus is the only ex-Soviet state that hasn't yet provided Poland with any help in determining whether persons from the so called Katyn list were murdered in its territory. Russia admitted at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s that the crime had been committed by the NKVD and declassified a lot of documents on the matter. An exhumation was also carried out and the Russian military prosecutor's office launched a long-term inquiry. Despite tighter political relations - following Vladimir Putin's coming to power - a cemetery of Polish officers was opened in Katyn, and before that, in Tver.
A similar cemetery is located near Kharkov in Ukraine. Polish and Ukrainian historians have cooperated closely to determine how many persons from the Katyn list were murdered in Ukraine and where. It is known that some of them were executed in Bykovnia near Kyiv, and there is a hypothesis about graves in Kherson in the west of the country.
In Belarus, one of the possible places were Poles executed by the NKVD are buried is the Kurapaty forest on the outskirts of Minsk, but since Alexander Lukashenko became president 15 years ago, the Belarussian administration has done nothing to verify this or at least give Polish historians access to the archives.
The reason for this is not necessarily any particular dislike of Poles on part of Mr Lukashenko as the ideology of his regime, which young Belarussians have to study at school. This ideology is based on an unconditional glorification of the Soviet era. There is no place for the NKVD doing anything bad in this version of history. Absurd as it may sound, at the beginning of the 21st century official Belarus remains profoundly Stalinist in terms of its historical consciousness. It is not by accident that the country's secret police remains called KBG to this day and its patron is Felix Dzerzhinsky.
Fortunately, even in the authoritarian Belarus there exists something like the web and work independent historians such as Igar Kuznyatsou from the Belarussian branch of the Memorial association, who has no doubts that the remnants recently discovered in Hlybokaye are of Poles murdered before the arrival of the Germans. Mr Kuznyatsou teaches at Belarussian State University, which shows that there are gaps in the system created by Mr Lukashenka. And that is what we need to stick to, basing on people for whom historical truth is more important than conformism or political cynicism.
The Belarussian authorities, in turn, need to be pressed delicately to permit, even unofficially, an examination of the graves in Hlybokaye and other in places where Polish victims of the NKVD may be buried.
I have no illusions that Mr Lukashenko will suddenly abandon the Soviet vision of history. But he may at least turn a blind eye to historians doing research.
This research should be joint, Polish-Belarussian, to help the Belarussians document the fate of their own victims of Stalinism. The record of the other NKVD execution sites in the former Soviet Union - Katyn, Kharkov, Bykovnia - proves that besides Poles, the NKVD for years murdered there members of other ethnicities as well - Belarussians, Ukrainians, Russians, Jews. Showing sensitivity to the suffering of others will help us win the Belarussians' sympathy for the Polish efforts to fill the blank pages of history. What is uplifting in the whole story is that the Orthodox parish priest who has notified the press about the grisly find wants the truth about the Hlybokaye corpses to be found out.
This capital of sympathy for Poland is worth protecting. Our diplomats should therefore demonstrate firmness, but also tact, discreetness and calmness. Then there is a chance that Mr Lukashenko will decide to treat the Hlybokaye case as an opportunity to make a gesture towards the West.
translated by Marcin Wawrzyńczak
Źródło: Gazeta Wyborcza
