Relatives of Polish soldiers executed by Joseph Stalin's secret police in one of the Second World War's most infamous massacres will finally have their case heard. The Moscow City Court on Tuesday has ordered the reconsideration of the Katyn massacres case. Surviving families want the Russian court to recognise that they were victims of Soviet repression and not of ordinary criminals.

The Moscow City Court has reconsidered an earlier decision by a district court and re-opened for consideration a complaint by the families of the victims of the 1940 Katyn massacre. The relatives of the Polish officers are fighting for an official rehabilitation before the Russian authorities.

Legal procedure
The Court's decision raises hopes that the massacre will be recognised as a crime of repression by the Soviet Union. Russia has until now refused to prosecute surviving suspects or even reveal their names. It is keeping two-thirds of the files on the subject classified, and has classed the murders as an ordinary crime whose statute of limitations has expired.

Relatives of victims say that the killings amounted to genocide and that Russia has a moral obligation to open its archive on them. In 2006 seventy relatives of Polish soldiers killed in Katyn attempted to bring Russia to the European Court of Human Rights in a bid to get the Kremlin to disclose the full truth about the murders. Some wanted surviving suspects to be prosecuted, while others wanted the killings to be classed as genocide and for Russia to be forced to disclose everything it knows about the atrocity.

The earlier decision by the lower court ruled that rehabilitation was not possible because the relevant documents were destroyed and that only those whose rights had been violated could file complaints and not their representatives who were acting as third persons.

Katyn massacres
In the Katyn atrocities, personally ordered by Stalin in March 1940, the KGB's forerunner, the NKVD killed 21,587 Polish intelligentsia for opposing the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland. Among the dead were officers, chaplains, writers, professors, journalists, engineers, lawyers, aristocrats and teachers.

The executions took place at different locations but the massacre took its name from just one, the Katyn Forest in western Russia. Some 15,000 victims' bodies were tossed into mass graves and the rest are thought to be still buried in secret mass graves.
 

Nazi Germany announced in 1943 the discovery of mass graves in the Katyn Forest. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels saw this discovery as an excellent tool to drive a wedge between Poland, Western Allies, and the Soviet Union and blamed the Soviets for the atrocities. The Soviet government immediately denied the German charges and claimed that the Polish prisoners of war were captured and executed by invading German units in August 1941. An international commission of inquiry in 1943 found that it was the Soviets who were responsible for the killings.

Soviet denial and Polish national Memory
The Katyn legacy has troubled Russia's relations with Poland for six decades, with Warsaw accusing the Kremlin of deception, a lack of remorse and indifference. It was only in 1989 that Mikhail Gorbachev recognised that Stalin's secret police killed the Poles. Before that the USSR blamed the atrocities on the Nazis, even reburying bodies and bulldozing evidence in an elaborate attempt to deflect blame.

Gorbachev's recognition of the mass murder has not satisfied Poland yet. Despite the construction of memorial complexes at Katyn in 1998 and Russian promises to transfer all archives to the Polish authorities, the Russian authorities ended a decade-long investigation with no one charged in 2005. The Kremlin declared that the massacre was not genocide, a war crime nor a crime against humanity, but a military crime and that there is absolutely no basis to talk about this in court.

The Katyn tragedy is a scar on national Polish memory. The Poles keep seeking acknowledgement of the crimes and rehabilitation of the victims. The late Moscow Court decision to re-consider the case might lead to new truths about the murders and its perpetrators. One has to bear in mind, however, that sixty years of controversy might not come to a sudden conclusion.