Update   I now also have a piece over at Commentator which elaborates on the material below.

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The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has pronounced on a case brought against Russia by a number of Polish relatives of victims of the Katyn Massacres.

Even though on some issues Russia was not found to have been in breach of its international law obligations, the judgement is bleak reading for Moscow. Some highlights (my emphasis):

The Court is not convinced that a public and transparent investigation into the crimes of the previous totalitarian regime could have compromised the national security interests of the contemporary democratic Russian Federation, especially taking into account that the responsibility of the Soviet authorities for that crime has been acknowledged at the highest political level. Moreover, the decision to classify the document appears to have been at variance with the requirements of the Russian law, in that section 7 of the State Secrets Act expressly precluded any information about violations of human rights by State officials from being classified. In sum, the Court finds likewise no substantive grounds which could have justified the Russian Government’s refusal to produce a copy of the requested decision.

In the light of the above considerations, the Court concludes that the Russian Government breached their obligations under Article 38 of the Convention on account of their failure to submit a copy of the requested document.

… The Court accepts that the mass murder of Polish prisoners by the Soviet secret police had the features of a war crime. Both the Hague Convention IV of 1907 and the Geneva Convention of 1929 prohibited acts of violence and cruelty against war prisoners and the murder of prisoners of war constituted a “war crime” within the meaning of Article 6 (b) of the Nuremberg Charter of 1945. Although the USSR was not a party to the Hague or Geneva Conventions, the obligation to treat prisoners humanely and abstain from killing them clearly formed part of the international customary law which it had a duty to respect.

 … The applicants’ expectations and hopes of having the circumstances of the Katyn massacre elucidated had been further dashed by the Russian courts’ decisions declaring that it had not been established what had happened to their relatives after they had been placed “at the disposal” of the NKVD. Those findings represented a sheer denial of the basic historical facts and were tantamount to informing a group of relatives of Holocaust victims that the victims must be considered unaccounted for as their fate could only be traced to the dead-end track of a concentration camp because the documents had been destroyed by the Nazi authorities

 … The Court is struck by the apparent reluctance of the Russian authorities to recognise the reality of the Katyn massacre, to which the applicants’ relatives had fallen victims

 … The Court considers that the approach chosen by the Russian military courts which consisted in maintaining, to the applicants’ face and contrary to the established historic facts, that the applicants’ relatives had somehow vanished in the Soviet camps, demonstrated a callous disregard for the applicants’ concerns and deliberate obfuscation of the circumstances of the Katyn massacre.

 … On 26 November 2010 the Russian Duma adopted a statement on the Katyn tragedy and its victims, in which it recognised that the Polish prisoners-of-war had been shot dead and that their death on the USSR territory had been “an arbitrary act by the totalitarian State”. It also considered necessary “to continue studying the archives, verifying the lists of victims, restoring the good names of those who perished in Katyn and other places, and uncovering the circumstances of the tragedy”. However, the declaration did not lead to a re-opening of the investigation, declassification of its materials, including the decision on its discontinuation, or any attempts on the part of the Russian authorities to establish direct contacts with the victims of the Katyn massacre and involve them into the elucidation of its circumstances. Being a mere political declaration without any visible follow-up, it did little to alleviate the feeling of frustration, since the previously made allegations that the applicants’ relatives might have been criminally responsible, were not explicitly dismissed. The Court is struck by the Russian authorities’ continued complacency in the face of the applicants’ anguish and distress, especially as they are becoming more and more fragile by virtue of their age.

By acknowledging that the applicants’ relatives had been held prisoners in the Soviet camps but declaring that their subsequent fate could not be elucidated, the Russian courts denied the reality of summary executions that had been carried out in the Katyn forest and at other mass murder sites. The Court considers that such approach chosen by the Russian authorities has been contrary to the fundamental values of the Convention and must have exacerbated the applicants’ suffering.

… In sum, the Court finds that the applicants were left to bear the brunt of the efforts to uncover any facts relating to the manner in which their relatives died, whereas the Russian authorities demonstrated a flagrant, continuous and callous disregard for their concerns and anxieties. The Court therefore considers that the manner in which the applicants’ enquiries have been dealt with by the Russian authorities has attained the minimum level of severity to be considered inhuman treatment within the meaning of Article 3 of the Convention.

Read the whole judgement here.

The problem for the Russian state is simple. It insists that it can not be held responsible for the crimes of the Stalin period. In part because it wants to show that there has been substantive discontinuity between the USSR and the New Russia. In part because it fears unending law suits over Katyn and other WW2 war crimes. Indeed, the Russian state has never even accepted that Katyn was a ‘war crime’. And is there evidence out there that the Soviet Union collaborated with the Nazis in effecting this horror? That would be hugely embarrassing for Moscow.

You might think that the fact of insisting that Russia is not responsible for USSR war crimes might make it easier to throw open the whole ghastly story. You’d be wrong. By keeping secret extensive Soviet archives on Katyn and, as the Court convincingly argues, by behaving in an odious way in response to many requests form relatives of the victims for further information, the Russian state takes firm moral and legal ownership of it.

Just in case you’ve forgotten, let’s remember that Katyn was a process, not an event. It is not easy to murder over 20,000 people. So they wheeled out Vasili Blokhin, the most prolific murderer in human history:

Blokhin initially decided on an ambitious quota of 300 executions per night, and engineered an efficient system in which the prisoners were individually led to a small antechamber—which had been painted red and was known as the "Leninist room"—for a brief and cursory positive identification, before being handcuffed and led into the execution room next door. The room was specially designed with padded walls for soundproofing, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose, and a log wall for the prisoners to stand against.

Blokhin—outfitted in a leather butcher’s apron, cap, and shoulder-length gloves to protect his uniform, then pushed the prisoner against the log wall and shot him once in the base of the skull with a German Walther Model 2.25 ACP pistol…

His count of 7,000 shot in 28 days remains one of the most organized and protracted mass murders by a single individual on record.

As I previously have put it:

Nazism’s collectivist death cult was, if you like, essentially irrational if not mad, but with manic method in the madness. All that raving about blood and Jews and maggots, combined with Germanic efficiency in rounding up so many Jews and Romas and Poles and others and then destroying them.

Stalinism’s collectivist death cult by contrast was ultra rational. It was based on the idea that the end (Scientific Socialism) justified any means and in any case was inevitable as the communist Wheel of History rotated. Bourgeois and other opponents simply ‘had’ to be eliminated.

Surely an intelligent deliberate murderer is more morally guilty than a crazy one?

Put it this way. Imagine that Hitler and Stalin had been captured at the end of WW2 and put on trial for their crimes.

Hitler’s lawyers might have been able to mount some sort of defence argument based on Insanity – that he was so crazed by that in any sense that mattered he should not be regarded as legally responsible for his actions. (See also Norway’s Anders Breivik: sane or not? Or in some category far beyond either?)

Stalin surely could not claim that. The record of his iniquity and his countless justifications of it and the documentation describing it would all show that he knew exactly what he was doing and meant to do it.

In short any normal person has to ‘equate’ Nazism and Communism and find nothing of any true significance to distinguish them. If anything the very nihilistic ‘rationality’ of Communism makes it even worse.

The ECHR got this one right. The continuing refusal of Moscow in general (and Vladimir Putin in particular) to come to terms with the supreme example of Soviet wickedness, the Katyn Massacre, is one of the great moral calamities of our times.