The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by German Nazi forces.
Mass grave of Polish officers in Katyn Forest, exhumed by Germany in 1943
Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov signs the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Behind him: Ribbentrop and Stalin.
Polish POWs captured by the Red Army during the Soviet invasion of Poland
Memo from Beria to Stalin which proposed the execution of Polish officers, policemen, etc.
The intelligentsia is a status class composed of the university-educated people of a society who engage in the complex mental labours by which they critique, shape, and lead in the politics, policies, and culture of their society; as such, the intelligentsia consists of scholars, academics, teachers, journalists, and literary writers.
In Russia, the writer Pyotr Boborykin defined the intelligentsia as both the managers of a society, and as the creators of society's high culture.
The surgeon Ludwik Rydygier and his assistants. (Leon Wyczółkowski)
Vissarion Belinsky
"Evening Party" by Vladimir Makovsky (1897). Three generations of Russian intelligentsia discuss current issues.
