KATYN MEMORIAL, Smolensk Region — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, paid tribute Wednesday to the thousands of Poles massacred here 70 years ago by Soviet secret police, the first joint ceremony ever held at the mass grave.
The two walked solemnly through the pine forest to a towering memorial inscribed with the names of Polish officers executed in the spring of 1940, an atrocity that the Soviet Union blamed on the Nazis for decades.
Putin went down on one knee to lay a wreath to the Polish dead, while clergy from four confessions offered prayers.
The executions of Polish prisoners of war, captured in 1939 as Germany and the Soviet Union were dividing up Poland, have remained the darkest spot in Moscow’s ties with Warsaw — even after authorities stopped hushing up the killings in the waning years of perestroika.
In his speech after visiting the graves, Putin sought to end the chilliness by showing that Russians regret the killings, just as they feel sorry for their countrymen who fell victim to Stalin’s totalitarian rule.
The Katyn forest was the site of many secret police executions, including ones during the political purges of the 1930s.
“It is common memories and grief that brought us here,” Putin told a small crowd of relatives of the Russian and Polish victims, clergy and officials from both countries, and ethnic Poles living in Russia. “Our people, perhaps like no other people, understand what Katyn means.”
Putin criticized the Soviet-era coverup but also warned that it would be similarly misleading to “blame these crimes on the Russian people.”
Echoing comments that he has made about other countries, Putin said Russia and Poland must move beyond their grievances, while still remembering the victims.
Many Russians still harbor hard feelings about cruelties by Polish troops who fought against the Bolsheviks during the civil war that broke out in Russia toward the end of World War I.
Putin won applause for his emphatic speech condemning terror by the state, despite avoiding the steps that many Poles would have liked to see, including recognizing the massacre as a war crime.
Poland wants Russia to resume a 14-year investigation into the executions, which prosecutors dropped in 2004 on the grounds that the suspects were dead. Russia, Poles say, must officially vindicate the victims, declassify the investigation’s files and make public the archives of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD.
“For us, any evidence is important,” Tusk said in his speech in commemoration of the victims.
The idea of sharing the files on the Stalinist crimes against the Poles has backers in Russia as well. Human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin, a member of the government delegation here, said there could not be any secrets about murders committed on orders of a “notorious criminal figure and serial killer, Dzhugashvili.”
Josef Dzhugashvili was Stalin’s given name.
Accompanying Tusk on Wednesday were several notable Polish leaders, including former President Lech Walesa, who helped bring about the fall of communism, and filmmaker Andrzej Wajda whose 2007 film “Katyn” premiered Friday on Russian state television.
Galina Subotowicz-Romanova, chairwoman of the Poles in Russia Congress, a group of 5,000 ethnic Poles with Russian citizenship, said members would be heartened by the measure. The organization has been asking the Kremlin to issue a vindication statement for the slain Polish officers.
Moscow has twice officially acknowledged the responsibility of Stalin’s regime for the grisly mass murders.
First, the official Soviet newspaper Izvestia carried a TASS statement in 1990 before a meeting between Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Poland’s leader Wojciech Jaruzelski, which accused secret police chief Lavrenty Beria and his sidekicks of ordering the massacres.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed a joint Russian-Polish statement in 1992 that blamed Stalin’s rule for causing great suffering to Poland. The same year, Yeltsin ordered that Poland be given a copy of Beria’s proposal to Stalin to apply the death penalty to the Polish prisoners because they were “inveterate and incorrigible enemies of the Soviet power.”
Katyn, a village near Smolensk, is one of a handful of sites across Russia where the NKVD officers executed Polish prisoners of war. The Katyn graves, discovered by Nazi invaders in 1943, hold 4,000 bodies out of what Poland says is a total of at least 21,768 victims.
The prime ministers also laid a cornerstone to a cathedral that will be built in honor of the victims at Katyn, some 350 kilometers southwest of Moscow, near the border with Belarus.
In a news conference after the ceremonies, Putin and Tusk took additional questions on the Katyn massacres, as well as bilateral ties.
Putin suggested that Stalin ordered the killings in revenge for “his personal responsibility for the tragedy” of Soviet-Polish military conflict from 1919 to 1921. He said he had learned from Russian academics that Stalin had personally overseen the campaign, in which some 32,000 soldiers died from hunger and illness in Polish captivity.
“Stalin may have felt guilty,” Putin said. “He may have committed these murders in retaliation.”
He went on to call the joint ceremony and reiteration of Stalin’s responsibility a turnaround. “We showed everybody that this unbiased, genuine truth must help us move on,” Putin said, drawing applause from Polish reporters.
Tusk appeared to concede that the visit might have failed expectations at home to get more out of the meeting.
“Our task is to step down a certain path,” he said. “The full truth requires patience.”
Putin said Russia was not hiding any gruesome facts about the killings from the public by keeping the rest of the investigation’s files under the wraps.
“Nothing that could conceal the truth about the crime is being kept behind seven seals,” he said, suggesting that relatives and descendents of those named in the documents could suffer unjustly.
Investigators collected 4 million documents in the course of their work, sharing a quarter of them with Polish counterparts, Putin said.
He made a point of noting that Britain recently decided to extend the time for the files on the pre-World War II murder of the Polish prime minister to be classified for another 20 years, implying that Russia’s refusal to open access to all of the files on Katyn might have the same security reasons that other governments apply.
Putin said he had invited Tusk to commemorate the victims together as a way to stress that there were no taboo issues in Russia. The murders will hopefully no longer remain a topic for diplomats, instead becoming a matter for historians, Putin said.
Tusk said Putin’s show of sorrow was impressive.
“When we saw the Russian prime minister lower his head to the Katyn victims and kneel to light the candles, many might have thought it was something usual to do,” Tusk said at a news conference. “But at the time when we just began talking about the issue, this wouldn’t seem usual.”
He described the talks as frank and warm.
“We spoke as friends, as neighbors who want to understand each other completely,” Tusk said. “Perhaps, this day will go down in history as one of the best days in our relations.”
The prime ministers agreed to boost and extend sales of Russian gas to Poland, Putin said. He did not specify the new amounts but said the supply contract would be signed soon and run through 2037. A new transit contract would cover the time through 2045, Putin said.
A new accord between Gazprom and Polish gas monopoly PGNiG has been delayed repeatedly, leading to fears that Poland may face a gas shortage this year.