The Mednoye Polish War Cemetery was built in 1999-2000 at the initiative of the government of the Republic of Poland. It has a total area of 1.7 ha and holds 25 mass graves with the bodies of more than 6,300 Polish PoWs who were secretly and against all international regulations by officers of the Soviet People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs or NKVD in in April and May 1940 in the basement of the NKVD Regional Directorate in Kalinin (nowadays: Tver). They victims were officers of the State Police and the Police of the Silesian Voivodeship, the Border Guard and the Prison Guard, soldiers and officers of the Border Protection Corps and other military formations, and employees of the state administration of the Second Polish Republic.

Next to the Mednoye Polish War Cemetery there is an area commemorating over 5,000 Soviet citizens who were executed and buried by the NKVD in 1937-38. Both sites form a larger memorial complex and are administered by one institution.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The top secret order for the holocaust of the Poles was signed by: J. Stalin, Soviet military officer K. Voroshilov, Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs V. Molotov, and Soviet statesman A. Mikoyan at the suggestion of the chief of the NKVD, Lavrentiy Beria. The 6,300 Poles had been arrested by the NKVD following the attack of the Soviet Union on the 2 Polish Republic on 17 September 1939, just 17 days after Poland had been attacked by Hitler's Nazi Germany, the then political ally of the Soviet Union. In total, the Soviet Union had arrested up to 26 thousand Polish officers, policemen and officers of the reserve, 21,768 of whom were murdered by the NKVD, with the massacre in Kalinin being only one of several similar Soviet crimes known collectively as the Katyń Massacre,

THE SECRET BURIAL SITE

In July 1990, as a result of actions taken by Polish and Russian journalists and activists from the Memorial human rights organisation (awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022) who were searching for the bodies of Poles taken captive by the Soviet Union after its attack on Poland in September 1939, the KGB authorities in Kalinin officially confirmed that such burial places indeed existened between the villages of Yamak and Mednoye at Twertsa River. The times in the Soviet Union were favorable, this was the time of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika. Preliminary research was conducted in situ by a Polish team a year later, between 15 and 30 of August 1991. The team headed by the then prosecutor general of the Polish Republic included: prosecutors, court doctors, an anthropologist, an archaeologist, police experts, a priest and a Polish documentary film director.

The area around Kalinin was not occupied by the Germans during World War II. It was continuously under Soviet rule. Thus, the exhumations in Mednoye had special evidentiary value from the point of view of the investigation, because the Soviet Union had been denying having committed the crime ever since the Polish government-in-exile began asking the Soviet authorities in 1941 and 1942 about the fate of all those PoWs who had simply disappeard and since Nazi Germany discovered the secred mass
graves in Katyń in 1943. This policy of denial lasted all the time until the
perestroika and glasnost' times of Gorbachev.

Archaeological research and exhumations in Mednoye began only in 1994. They were carried out between 7 and 22 September 1994 and again between 7 June and 31 August 31 1995. The team members included: an anthropologist, archaeologists, court doctors, phalerists; representatives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, of the Polish Red Cross and documentarians, photographers, auditors and technical workers.

25 mass graves were located over an area of 1.7 ha with the remains of more than 6,300 Poles imprisoned in 1939 in the NKVD special camp in Ostashkov and murdered in Kalinin in April and May 1940. After the murder, the bodies were loaded on trucks, taken to a nearby forest owned by the NKVD and dumped into secret pits that had been dug beforehand. In addition to the human remains, thousands of items belonging to the victims were recovered from the graves in Mednoye and taken back to the Poland. They include badges of the State Police, the Silesian Voivodeship Police and the Border Guard, police eagles, uniforms, shoes, military books, policemen's ID cards and notebooks, records, letters, photographs of relatives, notes and chronicle entries, as well as lists of fellow prisoners. After conservation, these items were handed over to the Katyń Museum
in Warsaw.

BUILDING THE MEDNOYE POLISH WAR CEMETERY

The Polish authorities succeeded in signing a document with the Russian side in Smoleńsk on 25 March 1995, which granted them permission to build the Polish
War Cemetery in Katyń and the Polish War Cemeteries in Mednoye (the other
two locations of the Katyń Massacre are in present-day Ukraine). The foundation act was ceremonially laid on 11 June 1995. After almost two years of efforts, the Polish side received the Russian approval for the design of the future cemetery and the right to use the land, and a permit to build a cemetery.

Construction started in the spring of 1999 and lasted approximately 12 months.

THE OPENING CEREMONY

The Polish War Cemetery in Mednoye was officially opened on 2 September 2000. The ceremony was attended by:

- the official state delegation headed by Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland

- representatives of two organisation of the relatives of the murdered, the Katyń Families and Police Families

- the Chief of the General Staff of the Polish Army

- the Chief of Police

- the Commander-in-Chief of the Border Guard

- the representative company of the Polish Army, the Polish Army and politicians.

THE LAYOUT OF THE CEMETERY

Cast iron columns with the Polish coat of arms, an eagle each, flank the gate of the cemetery and in front of the columns, on the ground, an inscription in Polish reads: "POLSKI CMENTARZ WOJENNY MIEDNOYE" or "Polish War Cemetery Mednoye". Just like in the two other main locations of the so-called Katyń Massacre, in Katyń and in Kharkov (present-day Ukraine, formerly part of the Soviet Union) an altar forms the central part of the cemetery. It is an open chapel with a wall bearing the names of the murdered policemen, a central cross and an underground bell in front of the main entrance. Behind the altar, large vertical crosses mark the site of the 25 mass graves. Nearby, there are smaller birch tree crosses with the Polish flag and plaques with the names of the murdered Poles. Some more information on them is provided on cast iron plaques which line an alley that surrounds the cemetery area. The cemetery is fenced.

On August 28, 2000, the management of the cemetery was handed over to the Russian State Memorial Complex "Mednoye".

A two-volume book on the Mednoye Polish War Cemetery entitled "Miednoje. Księga cmentarna Polskiego Cmentarza Wojennego" (Mednoye. The Cemetery Book of the Polish War Cemetery) was published in Warsaw in 2005. It contains a list of the victims of the Katyn massacre buried there and their biographies (6,288 names in total), some very short, some a bit longer, depending on the information the research team was able to find.

LINKS

https://katyn.ipn.gov.pl/kat/miejsca-pamie/cmentarz/12240,Polski-Cmentarz-Wojenny-w-Miednoje.html

(in Polish)

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polski_Cmentarz_Wojenny_w_Miednoje

(in Polish)

for a list of the Poles murdered in Kalinin and dumped in the mass graves by the Soviets see:

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ofiary_zbrodni_katy%C5%84skiej_%E2%80%93_zamordowani_w_Kalininie

(in Polish)

for a list of the Poles murdered by the Soviets in the Katyń massacre see:

http://ksiegicmentarne.muzeumkatynskie.pl/

(in Polish)

for the two volume book on the victims buried here see:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160404093800/http://www.radaopwim.gov.pl/media/pliki/Ksiega_Cmentarna_Miednoje_Tom1.pdf)

(Vol. 1)

and

https://web.archive.org/web/20160331185620/http://www.radaopwim.gov.pl/media/pliki/Ksiega_Cmentarna_Miednoje_Tom2.pdf

(Vol. 2)

Written by Ivonna Nowicka, 2023