President Komorowski; photo - east news

President Bronislaw Komorowski has decorated a group of 30 scholars and activists with high state distinction for combating historical revisionism of the 1940 Katyn massacres, which for years the Soviets, and Polish communist authorities, claimed was a crime perpetrated by the Nazis.

Bronislaw Komorowski, a former Solidarity activist, thanked all those who struggled, especially for many decades under communist rule, to include the truth of the Katyn massacre in Polish historiography.

President Komorowski said Monday that revealing the truth about the murder of around 22,000 Polish army officers and intellectuals by the Soviet NKVD in 1940 - under Stalin’s direct orders, documents revealed by Russia last year confirmed - has helped “change Poland and the world”.

President Komorowski voiced hope that thanks to the widespread awareness of what happened at Katyn, “the Stalinist system will be condemned once and for all in people’s hearts and minds.”  

“It can also serve to improve Polish-Russian relations,” he stressed, however, during the ceremony at the Presidential Palace in Warsaw.

The ceremony comes after the anniversary of the first transportations of Polish officers to the Katyn forests on 3 April, 1940 and days before the 10 April Smolensk disaster anniversary.

The Polish head of state said he was pleased to note that the remaining documents relating the crime 71 years ago would soon be made public by the Kremlin. (ss/pg)