Citation

Weber C. J. Genocide Res. 2009; 11(2): 285-306.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/14623520903118987

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The article focuses on the interdependencies between Stalin's imperial expansion and his politics of terror after 1939. The first part demonstrates how the NKVD, as the main perpetrator of the Great Terror, became an influential actor in foreign politics. With the so-called Katyn forest massacre, the article describes one of the first massive Soviet war crimes that resulted directly from this crucial alliance between foreign politics and the culture of Stalinist terror. It argues that the history of the mass execution of about 14,700 Polish prisoners of war serves as a haunting example of the extent to which established institutions and the logic of Stalinist terror became driving forces of Soviet imperial expansion.

The second part discusses problems and long-term consequences of this unquestioned “export of terror” for postwar international politics and Soviet representation. In doing so, it again relies on the Katyn mass executions and, more specifically, on the history of its treatment at the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-46. Here, I argue that the transfer of Stalinist terror coincided with Stalin's misperceptions and exaggerated expectations regarding his international political power after the Soviet Union emerged as one of the victors of World War II. Because these misperceptions apparently tempted Stalin to include Katyn in the Soviet indictment, they provoked a far-reaching conflict with the former Western allies; a conflict that was reinforced by the beginning of the Cold War. In 1946, Stalin failed to establish Katyn as a German war crime. This failure contributed to a decade long history of taboo and denial as well as to the mystification of the Katyn crime. Katyn became an “unquiet ghost” not only for Stalin but even more so for his successors, because the Soviet dictator had underestimated the fact that he could not control international trials and politics the way he was used to controlling them at home.