One crime, many places
Speaking about the Katyn Massacre, we usually focus on the forest near Smolensk, close to the small village of Katyn. This is a perfectly natural association. There the Soviets murdered and buried Polish prisoners of war from the Kozelsk camp. After all, the entire criminal operation took its name from Katyn. However, the prisoners from Kozielsk were not the only victims of this crime, and the forest near Smolensk is just one of many execution sites.
Geography of crime
After 17 September 1939, the Soviets took hundreds of thousands of Polish prisoners of war: soldiers, police officers, border guards, members of the Border Protection Corps, and many others from various Polish services and units. Moscow had very different fates in store for them. Around 15,000 of them were sent to three special camps under the administration of the NKVD in Kozelsk (Kozelsk District, Smolensk Oblast), Starobilsk (Starobilsk District, Voroshilovgrad Oblast) and Ostashkov (Ostashkov District, Kalinin Oblast).
On 5 March 1940, the Political Bureau of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), headed by Joseph Stalin, made the decision to murder the prisoners of war from the three camps and those held in occupied Poland. The executions began a month later…
The last station
The camp at Ostashkov (or, more precisely, 10 km from the town) was the largest of the three special camps run by the NKVD. There Soviets detained mainly officers of the State Police and Border Guard, as well as soldiers of the Border Protection Corps. Of the 6,364 people who were in the Ostashkov camp in April 1940, the vast majority were rank and file officers and soldiers, rather than officers, as is commonly believed. This was one of the ways in which Ostashkov differed from the other two camps. However, a common feature with Kozelsk, Starobilsk and Ostashkov was that the Soviets had located the camp in former monastic buildings (Stolobny Island), which they had taken over for their own use years earlier.
In April 1940, the NKVD began the ‘evacuation’ of the Ostashkov camp. The first transport of prisoners, unaware of their fate, left the camp on 4 April.
First of all, the prisoners had to reach the mainland, as the camp was located on Stolobny Island. Initially, they made their way to the other side on foot, across the frozen surface of Lake Seliger. In the days and weeks that followed, as the weather grew warmer and the Russian winter began to give way to spring, they were transported by boat. The guards then led them to the railway station and locked them in prison carriages. The final stop was Kalinin (now Tver), where lorries sent from the NKVD Regional Administration in that city were waiting for them. After being transported to the headquarters of the Soviet security services, the prisoners were locked in basement cells, where they spent from a few hours even to several days. In the evenings and at night, NKVD officers would lead them out of their cells one by one and take them to other basement rooms. In one room, they would check the prisoner’s personal details and tie his hands, then lead him into another room, where a waiting executioner would shoot him in the back of the head.
In the early hours of the morning, the Soviets transported the bodies by lorry to a forest near the village of Mednoye, where they buried them in mass graves.
Years of uncertainty: then and now
For many decades, the relatives of the prisoners from Ostashkov did not know where their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons were buried… The Germans’ disclosure of the crimes in the spring of 1943 concerned only Katyn. The truth about Kalinin and Mednoye was not revealed for another half-century. In 1990, the Kalinin KGB admitted that there were graves of Polish prisoners of war in the vicinity of Mednoye. This was confirmed by archaeological excavations carried out in 1991 and between 1994 and 1995.
Today, after many years, an atmosphere of falsehood is once again beginning to hang over Mednoye. A monument erected on the grounds of the local Polish War Cemetery, commemorating the Polish prisoners of war buried there, was vandalised by so-called unknown perpetrators in May 2025. Even earlier, however, not far from this site, the local authorities had unveiled monuments… of Soviet leaders. Among them was Joseph Stalin, the man directly responsible for the murder of Polish prisoners of war.
Piotr Bosko
Translated from Polish: Agnieszka Glińska (Sybir Memorial Museum)