NARRATIVE – In the context of an instrumentalization of ever more active history, the official recognition by Russia of Soviet responsibility in the execution of some 22,000 Polish officers in 1940 is gradually called into question.
The immobility responsible for places of memory. Monticles that draw tormented land. A forest frozen in the frosts of a spring untraceable. The Katyn site is 25 kilometers from Smolensk, not far from the Belarusian border. A seventeen hectare memorials was inaugurated in 2000, where more than 8,000 Soviet citizens victims of red terror are buried from the 1920s to 1938, and more than 4,000 Polish, shot in 1940 on the orders of Moscow.
Once a red portal has passed, the sanctuary is divided into three parts. On the left, in the Russian part, common pits, surmounted by the Orthodox cross, are delimited by small fences. They have not been exhumed. It is the “death valley”. Pasters have been built so as not to trample anonymous burials. At the entrance to the site is nevertheless a commemorative stele comprising the names of 8,000 people shot in the Smolensk region. Almost all have been rehabilitated.
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