Overview
Revisiting the events of the 1940 Katyn Massacre, in which some 25,000 Polish prisoners of was were shot by the Soviet secret police on Stalin's orders, Victor Zaslavsky explores a paradigmatic and terrifying example of the policy of class cleansing practiced in the Soviet Union and its occupied territories during World War II. By blaming the Katyn Massacre on the Nazis, the Soviets constructed one of the greatest historiographical falsifications of the twentieth century. Based on secret documents of the Soviet regime that became available only after its collapse, Zaslavsky unearths the methods used to create and maintain the Soviet "official version" of what happened at Katyn, a process involving the complicity of Western governments and left-leaning historians, which resulted in the upholding of this falsification until the fall of the Soviet Union.