The Katyn massacre , also known as the '' zbrodnia katyńska '' ( ' Katyń crime ' ) , was a mass execution of Polish POW officers and citizens ordered by the Soviet authorities in 1940 . The most widely accepted estimate of the number of dead is about 22,000 . The victims were murdered in the Katyn forest , Kalinin ( Tver ) and Kharkiv prisons , and elsewhere . About 8,000 were officers taken prisoner during the Soviet 1939 invasion of Poland , the rest being Poles arrested for allegedly being " intelligence agents , gendarmes , spies , saboteurs , landowners , factory owners , lawyers , priests , and officials . " During the German occupation of Poland , the Germans used the massacre for propaganda purposes against the Soviets . However , after the war , when Poland fell under Soviet influence , the truth about the event was suppressed by the Soviet authorities , who maintained an official line throughout the Eastern Bloc that the massacre was committed by the Germans . With the fall of communism in Poland in 1989 , the first non-communist Polish government immediately acknowledged that the crime was committed by the Soviets . In 1990 , Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged Soviet responsibility for the Katyn massacre for the first time . In 1991 , Boris Yeltsin made public the documents which had authorised the massacre
Katyn massacre
Katyn massacre
Katyń (film)