Today, sixty years after the tragedy was perpetrated, the 'Katyn Affair' is gathering more and more attention in the West. However, the sad truth is that the thousands of murdered Polish officers that were discovered by the Germans in 1943 represent just the tip of the iceberg with regard to Soviet war crimes against the Poles.
This week, a previously unknown mass grave was uncovered in the village of Bykovina near the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. At present 3435 bodies have been counted. Names have not been clarified yet, but the victims are soldiers, police officers and members of Poland's elite who fell into Russian hands following Stalin's invasion of Poland in September 1939.
Stalin's policy was halted in June 1941 when his former ally Adolf Hitler stabbed him in the back and ploughed into Soviet-held territory. Yet by that stage, hundreds of thousands had been either deported to Siberia, imprisoned, and in the case of a sizable minority, shot. Russia final admitted to the executions in 1990, when Gorbachev ushered in the new age. However, two thirds of the files have yet to be handed over to the Polish authorities, and Russian law courts made the controversial decree that the 'Katyn Crime' was not 'genocide'.
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