Word: smolensk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...black marble monument stands in a grove in the Katyn Forest outside Smolensk, a memorial to the more than 4,000 Polish officers massacred at that spot during World War II. But the dedication etched in the marble tells a lie that mocks the very lives it memorializes: "To the victims of Fascism -- the Polish officers shot by the Hitlerites...
...fate of the rest is well-known. Invading German armies found 4443 corpses in a mass grave in the Katyn forest, near Smolensk, USSR. Each victim had a bullet hole in the base of his skull. Each still wore his uniform, and each lay face-down over his fellow officers. Trees had been planted over the bodies...
...spoke, German artillery had already started firing, and tanks were rolling eastward. For a time, everything went as Hitler planned. The Red Army was caught by surprise, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers fell prisoner. Within three weeks the German line had moved forward some 400 miles, to Smolensk and almost to Leningrad. But with the central army group in striking distance of Moscow, Hitler delayed its advance to concentrate on capturing the industrial and agricultural resources of the Ukraine, and it was not until October that he began a new drive on the capital. And the Soviets proved tougher...
Ever since the bodies of more than 4,000 Polish officers were found in 1943 in the Katyn forest, near the Soviet city of Smolensk, their fate has been a disturbing blank spot in Polish history. Moscow has maintained that the cold- blooded killings were carried out by the Nazis after they invaded the U.S.S.R. in 1941. But Poles have long suspected that the officers were executed and buried in mass graves by Soviet forces...
...principal address to the Polish Sejm (parliament), Gorbachev profoundly disappointed even many conservative listeners by failing to deal forthrightly with the bitterest chapter in Soviet-Polish relations: the World War II massacre of 15,000 Polish army officers in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk. The Soviets have long maintained that those murders were carried out by invading Nazi forces, but most Polish and many other historians believe they were ordered by Moscow. A joint Soviet-Polish historical commission was formed last year and given access to previously closed Soviet archives dealing with the matter. Many Poles had hoped that Gorbachev...