21-11-2009, 01:38 PM
Jan Klimkowski Wrote:Helen - I have a great uncle who was most probably executed by the NKVD at Katyn, along with around 22,000 other Poles. Of course, for decades, the USSR blamed this on the Nazis, and British governments from Churchill's to Thatcher's, played along with this Soviet propaganda.
Yes, Jan. I hope this isn't presumptious, but I figured you knew about all the the permutations and possibilites a la Katyn, based solely on your Polish name.
Quote:However, this was Ukrainian reporting through Pravda in 2002, so the control mechanisms of the NKVD and KGB and the Soviet Communist Party are less of a factor than previously.
Sure, but there's retribution by locals as a possibility too, I know some very bloody revenge was taken on Nazis in the Ukraine.
Quote:If the bodies are from the WW2 era, they are almost certain to be slavs or Germans, not Jews. They could be partisans butchered - by either side, with evidence left to blame the other.
This is the only part I didn't get: why couldn't they be Jewish? Not all Jews were murdered at Babi Yar, and there were plenty of Jewish partisans.
I'm not sure one way or the other, of course, but I'm sure curious what it was really about. Pravda isn't infallible either, I've seen a lot of sensational stuff in Pravda and other Russian newspapers. Very interesting it was next to the kurgan or kurgans. Marija Gimbutas the Lithuanian anthropologist at UCLA I think, made a lot of noise about kurgans being Scythian and proto-Indo-European, but a lot of her work is purely speculative and sometimes even simple circular reasoning based on very little physical evidence. There is another school of thought that thinks the Steppe was Kipchak long before it was Sarmatian, Cimmerian, Scythian, Roxani or Slavic. The Kipchak turks gave rise to the kingdom of Khazaria in Ukraine, but originally hailed from somewhere east of the Caspian (ancient geographers give us multiple Khazarias, just as there were three Indias, ranged roughly west to east).
