As a gesture of goodwill following the Smolensk crash which claimed the life of President Lech Kaczynski and scores of other influential Polish leaders, the Russian government decided this week to declassify some historical archives relating to the role of Josef Stalin and the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn in 1940.  The documents are being published online for all to see, and there is talk of going even further and opening up more documents from the era.  (See the scans of the original documents here, although the page is overwhelmingly clogged with traffic right now).

The documents, which clearly show Stalin’s personal signature on the orders for the execution of some 22,000 Poles, were first provided in part to the Polish government by President Boris Yeltsin in 1992, but this is the first time the documents have been made available to the public.  Clearly this decision to finally get transparent about the war crimes from 70 years ago faced a lot of opposition within the Russian government, but it seems that President Dmitry Medvedev finally gathered enough muscle to push it through.  “Let people see it, let them know who made the decision to kill the Polish officers,” the president commented during his visit to Copenhagen, the first Russian state visit to Denmark in 45 years. “It’s all there in the documents. All signatures are there, all the faces are known.“