As reported by Giczan on social media, Russian officials in Smolensk started a petition to solve the "Katyn issue" once and for all.
Local activists brought heavy equipment to the Katyn cemetery and threatened to destroy the graves of Polish soldiers if Poles decided to demolish Soviet monuments.
The Russians referred to the appeal of the Institute of National Remembrance regarding the dismantling of the monuments, but not cemeteries, to the Red Army. On March 23, in Chrzowice, a monument praising communist criminals and occupiers of the Polish state was demolished.
- There is no place in the public space of free, independent, and democratic Poland for monuments with a red star. Behind this symbol are the crimes of the communist system - said the President of the Institute of National Remembrance, Dr. Tadeusz Nawrocki.
He then appealed to local governments to remove from the public space all names and symbols still commemorating persons, organizations, events or dates symbolizing communism.
In the spring of 1940, the Russian NKVD murdered 22,000 Poles. Among them were 14,500 prisoners of war - officers and policemen - from the Kozielsk, Starobielsk, and Ostashkov camps and 7,300 prisoners arrested in the Soviet-occupied eastern part of Poland. On April 11, 1943, the Germans published an official announcement about discovering mass graves of Polish Army officers in the USSR.
The Soviet Union admitted the crime only 50 years after the murder, on April 13, 1990, when Mikhail Gorbachev handed over to Wojciech Jaruzelski NKVD waybills from the camps in Kozelsk and Ostashkov and a list of prisoners of the Starobelsk camp.
However, since the collapse of the USSR, Moscow refused to disclose the secret archives of the NKVD, including the 'Belarusian list', of Poles murdered in Belarus.
Smolensk officials and local activists have brought heavy machinery to the Polish military cemetery in Katyn and threatened to destroy it in response to the "demolition of Soviet monuments in Poland". They've also started a petition to resolve the "Katyn issue" once and for all. pic.twitter.com/oCXnPsO4ZL
— Tadeusz Giczan 🇺🇦 (@TadeuszGiczan) April 15, 2022