The secret pact of Ribbentrop-Molotov singed a month earlier made Hitler and Stalin best pals for about 21 months. Yes, the same Molotov that forged out plans to invade Finland. And yes, the same guy after whom Finns named the gasoline bombs - Molotov cocktails - used to fight the Russians aggressors.
Hitler's crimes against humanity are well known and publicized but Stalin's crimes seem to slip through the cracks of history. Or, the definition of it.
So, for starters, let's get the naming convention straight. Nazis = Germans. Soviets = Russians. Years of watering down the naming to make the mysterious Nazis and Soviets responsible for murdering millions of people worked very well. Ask some American teenagers about who the Nazis were and they won't be able to pinpoint the nationality of those cruel Nazis you speak of. Yes, I've ended the sentence with the preposition of the phrase. Yes, the Soviet Union was a patch of different countries but the Russians were the leading force behind Lenin's bloody revolution and Stalin's mass murders. Interestingly, Stalin himself was Georgian and his real name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. He combined "stal", a Russian word for steel, with parts of Lenin to create his new name: Stalin. Since cars were in short supply those days, he had to compensate in some other way.
Right after Russians took over the Eastern part of Poland, with the 13 millions inhabitants, the killings of Polish intelligentsia, Polish police, land owners, and Polish officers began. Before Hitler's attack in 1941, the historians estimate that Stalin killed between 90-100,000 Poles and 1 million were either sent to slave work camps, factories, or concentration camps of Siberia.
The most hideous Russian murder is the Katyn Forest massacre. In the spring of 1940, the Russian NKVD systematically killed 22,000 Poles with a single shot in the head.
Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers taken prisoner during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, with the rest being Polish intelligentsia arrested for allegedly being "intelligence agents, gendarmes, landowners, saboteurs, factory owners, lawyers, officials and priests".
The 2007 Andrzej Wajda's film "Katyń", tells the horrible story about the massacre. To this day, Russians are refusing to open the secret Stalin's archives to finally reveal the whole truth about those killings. Many suspect that most of the high ranking former NKVD officers involved, held many leadership positions in the former Soviet Union. If any of those monsters are still alive, they must be tried for war crimes.
Why am I so passionate about the WWII history? Before she passed away, my Polish grandmother told me all kinds of stories from that time. She lived as a teenager in the Eastern Poland known as "Kresy". She and her family were finally expelled by the communists to the west part of new Poland after the war ended. That war touched my family in many ways. Totalitarian regimes will fail. People want a true freedom and no government will keep everyone blindfolded forever.
