your_not_aleksandr posted:Stalin: To jest niemożliwe, oni uciekli.
Stalin: That is impossible, they fled.
interesting the use of the word "escaped" in the congress hearing version, and Zawodny (1962) rather than "fled" in ur translation, subtle but it changes the meaning/tone somewhat
i may have confused u too, the feigned extreme suprise was an embelishment by Roman Brackman (a shit) in his book The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life (shit) which i just quoted as an example of how things get exagerated and embellished with each retelling
see as 1 of my favorite examples:
https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/gf_marxmem2016.html posted:On page 114 Zimmerman states that Kleimenov, an accused prisoner, was “tortured severely,” citing an article by Asif Siddiqi. Siddiqi claims that Kleimenov was “beaten severely” and confessed to “trumped-up charges,” footnoting a Russian-language article by Anisimov and Oppokov.1 But that article states clearly: “It is not hard to presume the following version of events” – that Kleimenov and others “were subjected to physical and moral pressure.”2
edit: the other line i would be v internested in your translation of is:
Stalin. They have certainly been freed, but have not yet arrived.
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wrt "uciekli" and not tog et into slavic linguistics, uciekli is the past plural perfective, possible translations are fled, run away, escape, abscond.
to make it even more literal, "they" have made good their escape, and for purposes of the conversation, are gone.
i honestly can't tell whether this is stalin being tight-lipped or laconic because his sentences are typically shorter in russian (and in polish) than they are in english.
Stalin: Certainly they have been released, only <they> have not arrived yet.
there are a couple of other books that would be great to see if anyone knows/ can find them:
that book i want posted:I hope that following will clarify my reasons for writing this book. When, in 1950, I found myself in Soviet labour camps, amongst German prisoners of war, Polish underground army members, some of Vlasov's men and Bandera's men, where the crime of Katyn was frequently and hotly discussed. I developed, quite when I know not, a deeper interest in the subject and, with the passage of time and influenced by material I had gathered, I began to see that the version of the Katyn crime given in 1943 by Polish exile groups in London had no real foundation.
During my seven-year stay in the camps, I met many German officers who, in 1941, were occupying the territories of Smolensk and saw, with their own eyes camps with Polish officers. I also met in the camps several residents of Smolensk whose statements finally confirmed my conviction that some Polish exile groups in London, /Sanacja/ took advantage of the discovery by Germans of the mass graves of Polish officers in order to use it as a political weapon against General Sikorski, whose policy towards the Soviet Union, as, indeed, his very person, was to them, total anathema.
And:
Katyn. Documents of Genocide". Documents and Materials from Soviet archives turned over to Poland on October 14, W. Materski ed., 1992.
im supprised i cant find more about the documents turned over to poland in 1991-2 and later in 2010 exept their tonnage, height, thickness,
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Horselord posted:is there any other topic of history where this sort of creative "reinterpretation" of sources is tolerated as much as it is when the topic is communism? because this shit is shameful. like "oh the source didn't say it but he was totally pretending, we all know that's what he'd do rite???" man fuck off w/that. what other history is bullshit
obviously totally unrelated in every possibly way and entirely isolated but western reflections on yugoslavia give an awful lot of weight to personal anecdotes.
edit: the story of ante pavelić having a bucket of human eyes is one of these, where it may actually have happened but there's no substantial evidence and it shows up on a lot of serbian nationalist websites, but it gets repeated as a way to justify not having to learn about yugoslav history cuz they're basically regarded as all savages.
Edited by your_not_aleksandr ()
Horselord posted:is there any other topic of history where this sort of creative "reinterpretation" of sources is tolerated as much as it is when the topic is communism? because this shit is shameful. like "oh the source didn't say it but he was totally pretending, we all know that's what he'd do rite???" man fuck off w/that. what other history is bullshit
the source did say that stalin said the executed polish officers went to manchuria though
it's pretty incongruous with the post-discovery story about them being captured by germans
Romuald Świątek-Horyń, The Katyn Forest. London. Panda Press, 1988, p99-102 posted:During my stay at Vorkuta I met in camp number 10 a German major who in 1941 was engaged in the occupation of Smolensk, and from him I know that the Germans did in fact take over several camps of the Polish prisoners of war in the area. Once during a conversation with him I asked his opinion about Katyn. He unreservedly told me that it was the Germans, because it had been in their interest to do this. He was in fact surprised by the outcry created by the Poles. The major was of the opinion that a good soldier and more so an officer should die if his homeland dies. He said that when taken into Soviet hands he was well aware of the fact that he may die and if this situation arose he would accept it with the dignity of the German officer. I also heard from him that the Germans knew about the attempts made by the General Sikorski in Moscow to free the Polish officers and soldiers which would lead to a Polish-Russian agreement. The major did not in the least see the killing of those Polish officers as a crime. He considered that, in the wake of what happened, those Polish officers were a grave threat to Germany. I heard this opinion repeated many times by other German prisoners of war.
In camp number 11 at Vorkuta I met Wlodzimierz Mandryk who until the war and during the occupation worked in the main post office at Smolensk. Mr.Mandryk with all certainity claims that from 1940 there had been camps with Polish prisoners of war in them near Smolensk. He was even prepared to state when they were liquidated by the Germans. According to his story it happened between August and October 1941, as at that time the post office stopped receiving letters written in the camps, and any correspondence addressed to the camps, on German instruction, was destroyed. Mr.Mandryk remembered also that it was about this time that the Germans let it be known that Polish prisoners of war had been sent back to Poland.
In the autumn of 1952 I was transfered to Norylsk and there in camp number 4 met Captain Wladyslaw Zak who in September 1939 was taken into Soviet captivity. We lived in the same barrack for nearly a year and I was a witness to many discussions and arguments on the subject of Katyn amongst the Poles, but Captain Zak always used to be in charge during these discussions and he claimed that he had no doubt whatsoever that Katyn was a German affair and that he would have shared the fate of his murdered comrades had fate not decreed otherwise. For two weeks before the German invasion of the Soviet Union he was taken from the camp near Smolensk and transported to a prison in Moscow where he was accused of spying and sabotage, and was sentenced to ten years. To the camp near Smolensk, Captain Zak was transported with a group of Polish officers towards the end of April 1940. All the other Poles that I met at Norylsk were prepared to believe that the Polish officers had died from the hand of the Russians, these were mostly from the Polish underground army and simply repeated, without thought, what had been put forward by Nazi propaganda and reactionary Polish groups in London.
In my opinion Captain Zak was an important witness in the Katyn case because his story in the greater part corresponded with stories of other Polish officers who in 1942 left with the Polish army for the Middle East.
From the memoirs I have read about Katyn amongst others was a book by Stanislaw Swianiewicz called "In the Shadow of Katyn", also a book by Juzef Czapski called "On an Inhuman Land". I learned that Polish prisoners of war in Soviet captivity were not too badly off and were in fact treated quite well. For instance Juzef Czapski writes in his book about a camp for officers in which in 1940 the Russian authorities kept three Polish generals: H.Minkiewicz, M.Smorowinski and B.Bohaterewicz, and on the day that they were to leave, the camp authorities organised a farewell dinner. For someone who does not know the Soviet Union this gesture would not have any deeper meaning. However for me and others like me who spent quite a few years in the Soviet Union it clearly indicates that the camp authorities in this way showed their respect for those high ranking officers. For me, even the mention of the fact that the officers leaving the camp at Kozielsk received herrings not wrapped traditionally in newspaper but in brand new gray paper also indicates that those leaving the camp were returning to Poland and the Russians wished to show off in front of the Germans that they were also a civilised country. Only people who have spent many years in Russia would understand the meaning of such small gestures. I am sure that the authorities of the camp from which the Polish officers were leaving had no other way of creating a good impression. To those who, without thought, accuse the Russians of murdering the Polish officers I suggest that they should concern themselves more with the small details of every day life for the Poles in Russia because those small details led to the signing of a Polish-Russian Treaty in 1941 and led to the release of many thousand Polish prisoners from labour camps and the formation of the Polish army in the USSR.
In July 1953 I was sent with a group of invalids to Irkutsk district, to camp number 233 which was near Nova Czunka. In that camp I met Father Kozera who was very interested in the case of Katyn. During his stay in many camps over a period of eight years, Father Kozera had collected many interesting materials which led him to the final conclusion that the murder at Katyn had been committed by the Germans. However, of all the people that I have met, the most convincing evidence was held by the Russian major, who before the war worked in the Smolensk Forestry Commission, and after the entry of Germans took up work on the railways and in the resistance. That major told me that his interest in the murdered officers happened by pure chance, when one of his men informed him that the Germans had surrounded the area of Kosogory with the barbed wire and erected notices that the entry to the area was forbidden.
"I thought", says the major, "that the Germans were building there some secret army installations or an ammunition damp, so I ordered my men to check. However when I was informed that the local people had seen German transport lorries full of Polish prisoners of war entering the area I decided that the Germans must have built a camp to hold the Poles there. At the beginning of 1943 I was transported to Germany as a part of a labour force, and when I heard that the Germans had discovered in Katyn woods the graves of murdered Polish officers and hung the blame on the Soviet Union, it was then that I became aware of the whole perfidy of Nazi propaganda".
That major from Smolensk was a person met only by chance and that is why his declaration convinces me that only the Germans are responsible for the death of those Polish officers at Katyn.
In all I spent nine years in the Soviet Union, two as a deportee and seven in labour camps. During that time I went through a lot, saw many things, and met thousands of interesting people, and I am of the opinion that, if the Soviet authorities had wanted to rid themselves of those Polish officers they would turned to their well tried methods of sending them to Nova Zemlya, Kolyma or Norylsk, as they had already done with millions of Russians and Ukrainians political opponents and there at least half would die within the year of cold, hanger and illness.
As an ex political prisoner sentenced by the Soviet Military Tribunal in Lvov to twenty five years in a labour camp, I am far from trying to exonorate the Soviet system. I was myself an innocent victim and it is only due to the death of a tyrant that I was saved. I also got to know the whole of the criminal history of the Stalin times, and know that many hundreds of thousands were shot and many millions were sent to Siberian labour camps from which only small numbers returned. And if I stand in their defence it is only to correct false opinions in the case of Katyn as I know that the information spread was done so in bad faith and by irresponsible people.
I have to admit that despite its unfairness and its atrocities the communist system differs from that of the Nazi one as it always tried to keep up appearance of low and order. Soviet courts, right from the beginning of their existence, sentenced people to death by shooting. However, those sentences were carried out in prisons and only after confirmation by the Soviet Supreme Courts or the Supreme Soviet.
By this I wish to say that during the time of Stalin the communist system existed in a very degenerate way but its jurisdiction never allowed for the mass killing of people without trial as happened in the Katyn wood. This kind of killing only happened in Russia during the revolution. So therefore the findings of the International Commission gathered from countries under German occupation cannot be taken into account as they had to work under supervision of the Gestapo. Professor Buhtz who was from the University of Wroclaw and helped in the process of exhumation may have known the truth but he was later shot by the Germans. On the basis of the materials that I have gathered I have all the proofs necessary to say that the accusations of the Polish Government in London had wholly political motives. I have to say the same of General Anders who, on hearing the news about the Katyn Massacre, started to display unhealthy psychic symptoms - ordering to form at the headquarters of the Polish Army in Russia an Office of Documentation and searching party for the missing Polish officers. He also ordered Captain J.Czapski to gather slanderous material against the Soviet Union from which after he left Russia Captain J.Czapski wrote and published a book entitled "On an Inhumane Land" with the intention to poison Polish-Russian relations. Here I must add that the appointment of General Anders as commander in chief of the Polish Army in Russia was one of the greater mistakes and incapability of picking the right person for the right job shown by General Sikorski. Had General Boruta-Spiechowicz been appointed commander in chief, I am sure that he would not have been afraid to fight on the Eastern front. He would not have bothered by Russian rye bread or sleeping on the straw matrass. He would have known how to look to the future, and would have been at the head of the Polish Army entering a free Warsaw. We know that General Anders could not forget the humiliating times he spent in prison, and breathed hatred and contempt for Russia and Russian people and right from the start did everything in his power to create the worst possible relations between the Russian and Polish commands. With every step he showed great reluctance bordering on fear whenever the question of the Polish Army fighting on Soviet front come to a head.
Right from the beginning he maneuvered so as to take the Polish Army out of Russia to the Middle East. Together with Polish Ambassador Kot they failed to realise that they held office of great importance in an unique system, and acted very selfishly as if they were in their own yard, and created by their own behaviour great harm to Poles and Poland.
https://web.archive.org/web/20091207062841/http://katyntruth.hotmail.ru/swiatekkatynforest.htm#004
I have to admit that despite its unfairness and its atrocities the communist system differs from that of the Nazi one as it always tried to keep up appearance of low and order. Soviet courts, right from the beginning of their existence, sentenced people to death by shooting. However, those sentences were carried out in prisons and only after confirmation by the Soviet Supreme Courts or the Supreme Soviet.
we know that stalin devolved extraordinary powers of capital punishment to chekist troikas during the anti-kulak operations so this is obviously wrong
glomper_stomper posted:your_not_aleksandr posted:
Horselord posted:
is there any other topic of history where this sort of creative "reinterpretation" of sources is tolerated as much as it is when the topic is communism? because this shit is shameful. like "oh the source didn't say it but he was totally pretending, we all know that's what he'd do rite???" man fuck off w/that. what other history is bullshit
obviously totally unrelated in every possibly way and entirely isolated but western reflections on yugoslavia give an awful lot of weight to personal anecdotes.
edit: the story of ante pavelić having a bucket of human eyes is one of these, where it may actually have happened but there's no substantial evidence and it shows up on a lot of serbian nationalist websites, but it gets repeated as a way to justify not having to learn about yugoslav history cuz they're basically regarded as all savages.
most western historiography about the chinese communists up until deng xiaoping is based on bad faith translations/interpretations of translations, distortions of eyewitness accounts, and memoirs by random expats.
like to the point that a physician who treated mao zedong for two weeks in the early 70's is probably the foremost historical source on his personal life
my favourite one is when he allegedly said he was fine with killing half the country if he had to, and the literal translation of what he said was "shut down half the country's steel mills"
Horselord posted:Horselord posted: my favourite one is when he allegedly said he was fine with killing half the country if he had to, and the literal translation of what he said was "shut down half the country's steel mills"
this sounds like a great party trick but i'd like a source just in case someone asks me to back it up.
your_not_aleksandr posted:Horselord posted:
Horselord posted: my favourite one is when he allegedly said he was fine with killing half the country if he had to, and the literal translation of what he said was "shut down half the country's steel mills"
this sounds like a great party trick but i'd like a source just in case someone asks me to back it up.
I got that from something a chinese peasant wrote about growing up in the great leap forward for one of the indian parties' paper. i'll see if i still have it
E: i slightly misremembered (it's been a few years)
http://www.maoists.org/dikottermisinterpretation.htm
mao was worried the steel targets were too high and trying to furfill them would cause deaths, so he wanted them cut in half. dickbro asshole "historian" translates that to mean he wanted half the country killed
i originally found it as a cite on the indian paper's article
http://www.rupe-india.org/59/introduction.html
Edited by Horselord ()
Horselord posted:your_not_aleksandr posted:
Horselord posted:
Horselord posted: my favourite one is when he allegedly said he was fine with killing half the country if he had to, and the literal translation of what he said was "shut down half the country's steel mills"
this sounds like a great party trick but i'd like a source just in case someone asks me to back it up.
I got that from something a chinese peasant wrote about growing up in the great leap forward for one of the indian parties' paper. i'll see if i still have it
E: i slightly misremembered (it's been a few years)
http://www.maoists.org/dikottermisinterpretation.htm
mao was worried the steel targets were too high and trying to furfill them would cause deaths, so he wanted them cut in half. dickbro asshole "historian" translates that to mean he wanted half the country killed
i originally found it as a cite on the indian paper's article
http://www.rupe-india.org/59/introduction.html
tyvm
Panopticon posted:the source did say that stalin said the executed polish officers went to manchuria though
this is incorrect, the minutes say:
Stalin. That is impossible. They escaped.
General Anders. Where could they have escaped to?
Stalin. Well, to Manchuria.
(my italics)
stalin didnt say that they "went to manchuria", he said, when asked where they could have gone "Well, to Manchuria".
its exactly these sorts of interprative micro-revisions to primary source material that Furr spends so much time pointing out
Is that a fair assessment of polish nationalists beliefs?
(what do storm front people say about this, I might check)
Meanwhile the soviets cant be trusted on katyn because they do things like katyn (which we know about thanks to the nazis)
The animosity of Poland towards Russia is not really something I understand... Eg I'm from Ireland which was oppressed by Britain (properly oppressed not what they weep about the soviets doing) and there is not the kind of blind hatred at all
Katyn: Lazar Kaganovich’s testimony
The well known Russian military historian, doctor in history of science, A. N. Kolesnik has to the editorial staff of “The truth about Katyn” forwarded extracts of stenograph from his personal conversations with the former member of the Politburo of the Communist Party, L. M. Kaganovich.
Altogether A.N. Kolesnik conducted six conversations with L. M. Kaganovich between 1985 and 1991 around different historical subjects. Out of censorship reasons it is not possible to release the stenographs from these conversations without considerable cuts and edits, not even in small parts, since the direct speech from Kaganovich is full of ugly words and swearing which characterizes his attitude to the leadership of Hitlerite Germany, to the leading circles of bourgeois Poland and to the leaders of the “Gorbachovite” perestroika, and in particular in person to A. N. Yakovlev.
The dates for A. N. Kolesniks conversations with L. M. Kaganovich and their duration are documented by the employees of the KGB who guarded the stairwell where L. M. Kaganovich were living. If necessary the dates and the duration of the conversations can be established more thoroughly with the help of archival information, since the guards were obligated to register all the visitors in a special logbook. Apart from that all the visitors were photographed with a special camera which automatically fixed the date and the time for the film shooting.
The conversation about the Katyn issue, during which L. M. Kaganovich for the first time announced the information of the exact amount of citizens from former Poland that had really been executed on Soviet territory between November 1939 and July 1941, took place on November 6, 1985 in Moscow in L. M. Kaganovich’s apartment which was located at Frunzenskaya naberezhnaya, house 50 and lasted for 2 hours and 40 minutes, from 6.40 pm to 9.20 pm. Present at this conversation was also Lazar Moiseyevich’s daughter Maya Lazarevna, who stenographed everything that was said.
Later it turned out that the conversation also had been recorded with the help of special technical equipment by the employees of the KGB who in silence conducted reconnaissance of L. M. Kaganovich. That became obvious, when A. N. Kolesnik was called by the operative KGB employee Captain Ryazanov, who in a categorical form demanded that the content of the completed conversation could not be made public.
During the conversation on November 6, 1985, L. M. Kaganovich said that during the spring of 1940 the Soviet leadership was forced to make a very difficult decision to execute 3 196 criminals among those who were citizens of former Poland, but L. M. Kaganovich said that it was absolutely necessary in the then prevailing political situation. According to Kaganovich’s testimony, they had essentially sentenced to execution Polish criminals who had been involved in the mass extermination of captured Russian Red Guards 1920-1921, and employees of Polish punishment bodies who had compromised themselves with crimes committed against the USSR and the Polish working class during the 1920s and 1930s. Apart from them they had also executed criminals among the Polish POWs who had committed serious general crimes on Soviet territory after their internment in September-October 1939 – gang rapes, criminal assaults, murders and so on (L. M. Kaganovich said literally: “ …the fuckers, the bandits and the murderers …”).
Apart from Kaganovich, the former chairman of the Peoples Council of Commissars V. M. Molotov in a telephone conversation in 1986 estimated that the amount of executed citizens of former Poland 1939-1941 amounted to “about 3 000 people”.
The exact figure “3 196” Polish citizens who had been executed in the USSR in 1939-1941 was also decidedly confirmed by the former Soviet People’s Commissar for the Construction Industry, S. Z. Ginzburg, in a private conversation with A. N. Kolesnik.
S. Z. Ginzburg told A. N. Kolesnik little-known details of the Soviet excavation works in the Katyn forest. According to him the excavations of the graves with the Polish citizens were conducted in 1944 not only in Kozi Gory but also in at least two other places west of Smolensk. The excavations and the exhumations were conducted with the help of special construction- and assembly units, so-called OSMCh (in Russian osobye stroitelno-montazhnye chasti), which were under S. Z. Ginzburg’s operational management. Because of the period of time that had elapsed S. Z. Ginzburg could not remember the exact number of this OSMCh unit, but said that the unit in question had been formed shortly after the beginning of the war on the basis of one of the civilian building boards and that their staff in 1944 amounted to about 200 people. After the exhumation works they distributed to all the conscripts of the unit – at S. Z. Ginzburg’s request – one kilogram of chocolate as some kind of bonus.
A. N. Yakovlev, member of the Politburo of the Central Committee, started to earnestly interest himself in the contents of the conversations between A. N. Kolesnik and L. M. Kaganovich, and also showed great concern regarding a possible publication of Kaganovich’s testimony about the Katyn issue. At the end of 1989, right before his appearance in front of the 2nd Congress of People’s Deputies, A. N. Yakovlev turned, through A. N. Kolesnik, over a list of tendentiously selected questions about the Katyn issue with the suggestion of recording his answers at a tape recorder. The idea was to prepare Kaganovich’s answers in a proper way and confirm the version of the Soviet guilt in the Katyn massacre by his authoritative testimony. (Kaganovich said literally: “Tell this son of a bitch that I have had them spinning around my dick! I am from the family of a common meat pundit, but have been a member of the Central Committee and a minister, while they want us to fall back to 1914. The thing they have invented about Katyn – that will bounce back at them with bloody tears. They want us again to end up in a conflict with Europe. Because during the last war we indeed not only fought Hitler but with most other European countries!”
The perspective of a publication of the exact amount of Polish citizens that were executed in 1939-41 (3 196 people) and the true reasons for the executions, induced an extreme nervousness of Yakovlev and his surroundings. In exchange that A. N. Kolesnik should keep quiet about the information around the Katyn issue that he had received from L. M. Kaganovich, A. N. Yakovlev suggested that he could choose between six different senior posts.
When A. N. Kolesnik declined that offer, they arranged on directives from A. N. Yakovlev and D. A. Volkogonov a meeting between him and a representative for “competent bodies” who conducted a “preventive talk” with him in V. M. Falin’s (the head of the news agency APN) office. During the conversation threats were made to “bring him in on a long time”, if A. N. Kolesnik would go public on the facts about the Katyn issue that L. M. Kaganovich had told him.
When it became apparent that this measure had no effect, they brought prosecution on A. N. Kolesnik which ended with him being dismissed from the Military History Institute in 1993.
Source: http://www.katyn.ru/index.php?go=Pages&in=view&id=936
translation from http://katynmassakern.blogspot.com/2010/07/katyn-lazar-kaganovichs-testimony.html
edit: forgot to mention, this is the source which Furr refers to in chapter 10 here:
Furr, Blood Lies, Chapter 10 posted:A few researchers tend toward a more nuanced position something like the following. First the Soviets shot some of the Polish POWs, perhaps because they were found guilty of anti-Soviet or anticommunist crimes. This is the version that Lazar' Kaganovich, a former Politburo member very close to Stalin, reportedly told military historian A.N. Kolesnik in November 1985. See Sergei Styrgin, "L.M. Kaganovich o Katynskom dele" (L.M. Kaganovich on the Katyn affair), "Pravda o Katyne" site. Then the Germans shot the rest of the Poles, obviously for very different reasons. Then in 1943 the Germans staged a "discovery" of bodies - really a propaganda stunt - unearthing corpses of Polish officers they had shot elsewhere (and so the location of which they knew) and bringing them for reburial and "discovery" to "Katyn" (in reality the small area called Koz'i Gory).
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General A.: Dokądże mogli uciec?
Stalin: No, do Mandżurii.
Stalin: That is impossible, they fled.
General A.: To where have they fled, then?
Stalin: Well, to Manchuria.
Dokądże is an emphatic form of "wherever". In Russian it's куда же. No is a particle when you have a pause. Ну in Russian. It just means "well" or "uh".
A translation that is more correct to the tone, rather than the content, is:
Stalin: That's impossible, they've fled.
General A.: Where could they possibly have fled to?
Stalin: Well, they might have gone to Manchuria.
It is very much a theoretical location for their escape, versus a definitive one.
if he gave a joke answer, might that be because he didn't think the poles would find out he had them all executed?
why didn't he say the germans captured them? the story after the mass graves were found was that the camps were overrun, that's not something you can suddenly discover later.
Panopticon posted:so either stalin lied thru his teeth or he gave a joke answer because he didn't care
if he gave a joke answer, might that be because he didn't think the poles would find out he had them all executed?
why didn't he say the germans captured them? the story after the mass graves were found was that the camps were overrun, that's not something you can suddenly discover later.
Stalin's greatest concern in the 3 December 1941 discussion was determining whether the Polish government would be more willing to supply troops to the British over the Soviets, and keeping the officers in question in "Manchuria" was essential to this, because he could return them (the pro-Soviet ones at least).
It's not a lie and it's not a joke. It's a non-answer that's incredibly politically astute because giving a definitive location and status is how you get trapped.
that is definitive and a lie
either stalin knew they were executed, knew they were captured by germans, or had no idea and made that up on the spot
it really doesn't help his "case"
Panopticon posted:he said "they have certainly been freed"
that is definitive and a lie
either stalin knew they were executed, knew they were captured by germans, or had no idea and made that up on the spot
it really doesn't help his "case"
"they must have been freed" as in "we don't know where they are after we let them go, they could be anywhere." it's not very definitive because it means "they are not here" or even "i signed the order saying they were free but it got lost in the mail / the NKVD have the real instructions."
Stalin isn't lying here, he's politicking. Which sounds like incredible nitpicking, but it's important to understand that, from Stalin's position, he's working towards a greater goal. Purging the officer corps and essentially splitting the Polish military in two is part of a greater goal to align Poland with the Soviet Union, and British involvement would disrupt this. So he needs to ascertain the Polish GIE's position, and keeping the officer corps in "Manchuria" is an important piece of that.
Panopticon posted:shooting all the officers to stop them creating an anti-soviet movement in the annexed areas would also be a way of achieving a greater goal
yes, i said that. "Purging the officer corps and essentially splitting the Polish military in two is part of a greater goal to align Poland with the Soviet Union"
- cared little for the fate of 3000 antisemitic rapists while ending the nazi holocaust of 20,000,000+ people
-
Panopticon posted:i expect he could have ended the holocaust a lot sooner if he invaded germany while the panzers were in france
Yeah or if he had thought to invade the USA during the confusion of the revolutionary war of the 1770s
ie the dimension swampman resides in
Panopticon posted:the parallel dimension where stalin sticks to his principles during the purges and has to be tricked into agreeing to mass executions by the traitor ezhov, but understands the nuance of realpolitik when it comes to executing thousands of captured polish prisoners
ie the dimension swampman resides in
Once again, there is just no evidence to support your interpretation of events. In this example specifically, what "your (sic) not aleksandr" offers is also an interpretation without truly hard evidence behind it. Another interpretation, which I had privately assumed while reading the transcripts posted above, is that Stalin is just done with the line of questioning since they have nothing useful to offer on the subject. But the historiographical point is that we can't assume your narrative is true over these others, especially when the actual translation suggests that Stalin isn't speaking with a particularly cold or cruel overtone. The "evidence" presented by the "experts" who agree with your interpretation is repeatedly shown to be flawed - in this case with the repeated modification of Stalin's words and convenient caricature of his past, unknowable emotional state. What you are presenting is not a solid foundation for your overall portrait of Stalin as malicious, deceptive, and manipulative. This is not because the foundation has cracks and gaps that can be filled in, but because overall, it's made of a material that can't withstand the weight of evidence 
the evidence to support my interpretation of events includes documents from the soviet archives and testimony of people who weren't in soviet prison camps at the time they gave it, so it's much more believable. i also don't need to bend over backwards to invent reasonable excuses for stalin lying through his teeth.
tears posted:Romuald Świątek-Horyń, The Katyn Forest. London. Panda Press, 1988, p99-102 posted:https://web.archive.org/web/20091207062841/http://katyntruth.hotmail.ru/swiatekkatynforest.htm#004
This wasn't "testimony given", this came from personal recollections of Roman Świątkiewicz, a Pole, of conversations he had with a number of other prisoners while he was also in prison. The reason I went to the effort to track it down is specifically because Świątkiewicz was (e: or is) both polish and anti-communist which makes his writings on Katyn somewhat unique and worth a look imo
Edited by tears ()