This week's episode is crammed with enough villains to last several lifetimes, but Vasily Blokhin gets the title spot, because he still reigns as the current Guinness World Record holder for most prolific executioner/mass murderer, with more than 7000 killings to his name. And that's only for the Katyn Massacre. As Joseph Stalin's chief executioner, Blokhin's total death count likely ranks in the tens of thousands.
Learn how the early days of the Soviet Union and the dueling pressure cookers of two world wars allowed a monster like Blokhin to grow and thrive. You'll also hear how Soviet allies in the west (including the United States) helped cover up his horrific deeds for nearly half a century, and how the tragedy of nearly 25,000 murdered Polish citizens continues to fuel political unrest between Russia and Poland to this very day.
RESOURCE LINKS:
https://allthatsinteresting.com/vasily-blokhin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror
Credits:
Main Theme Music -- Ken Dickson
Main Graphics -- Nathaniel Dickson
This week's episode is crammed with enough villains to last several lifetimes, but Vasily Blokhin gets the title spot, because he still reigns as the current Guinness World Record holder for most prolific executioner/mass murderer, with more than 7000 killings to his name. And that's only for the Katyn Massacre. As Joseph Stalin's chief executioner, Blokhin's total death count likely ranks in the tens of thousands.
Learn how the early days of the Soviet Union and the dueling pressure cookers of two world wars allowed a monster like Blokhin to grow and thrive. You'll also hear how Soviet allies in the west (including the United States) helped cover up his horrific deeds for nearly half a century, and how the tragedy of nearly 25,000 murdered Polish citizens continues to fuel political unrest between Russia and Poland to this very day.
RESOURCE LINKS:
https://allthatsinteresting.com/vasily-blokhin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror
Credits:
Main Theme Music -- Ken Dickson
Main Graphics -- Nathaniel Dickson
For this week's episode. I took my time machine to 1940 and I found a bad guy. Hop aboard as we head over to Soviet Russia, where we'll meet a Guinness World Record holder for most prolific executioner. Yeah, I didn't know. They awarded for that either. We're talking Vasily Blokin on this week's episode of Vintage Villains.
Speaker 1:At a glance, the year 1940 shows the world at large on the brink of an abyss. Although the United States would not enter World War II until December of the following year, adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin had already invaded Poland and set up various ghettos and other camps. They were also waging battles elsewhere in Europe, particularly in Finland and Norway, with British and other Allied forces trying to hold back the tide and suffering a lot of casualties. Already well aware of what it was up against, great Britain would begin their war rationing program that January. In March of that year, italian dictator Benito Mussolini would meet with Hitler and agree to join their war effort. He would declare war on the Allies by June. In May, winston Churchill would succeed Neville Chamberlain as British Prime Minister, soon after which the Nazi Blitzkrieg would begin tearing through France. That same month would also see the miraculous evacuation of British and Allied soldiers from Dunkirk. Back here in the States, rear Admiral Joseph Tossig would testify before the Senate in April that war with Japan was inevitable, and of course he was right. The Germans would also open the Auschwitz concentration camp as well as begin forbidding train travel by Jewish citizens.
Speaker 1:1940 was also the year President Franklin Delano Roosevelt would be nominated for a historic third presidential term. Fm radio would make its debut at the start of the year, bringing listeners a clear, static-free signal, all the better for broadcasting news of the war effort. Additionally, television broadcasting would take a big leap forward when NBC began using general electric antennas to beam a show from New York City to nearby Schenectady and other cultural milestones. Gone with the Wind was the big winner at the Oscars that year, with eight total wins, which included Hattie McDaniel being the first black woman to score a statue for her role as Mami, and she would be the last black woman to win for another 50 years, exactly when Whippy Goldberg took home a trophy for Ghost in 1990. Author John Steinbeck would nab the Pulitzer Prize for his defining 1939 book on the Great Depression, the Grapes of Wrath. The film adaptation, directed by John Ford, also hit theaters in January of 1940, reminding Americans that while they were fresh from the fires of one hell, the Great Depression, there was another, bigger inferno waiting just around the bend.
Speaker 1:On April 16th of 1940, major League Baseball would see its only opening day no Hitter, pitched by Bob Feller of the Cleveland Indians. The Cincinnati Reds would also win the World Series that year. So it was a pretty great year for Ohio baseball and as an Ohio girl, I'm going to acknowledge those rare moments in history every chance I get. In science technology, the very first electron microscope would be demonstrated by RCA and in avoidable American tragedies, 198 people would be killed in a horrific dance hall fire in Natchez, mississippi. Oh, and bringing it back to Ohio, the first synthetic rubber tire, which would soon revolutionize road travel, would debut in Akron from the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, just a couple states over in Joylett, illinois. We would also open the first Dairy Queen restaurant, because there isn't something that can't be made a little better by the addition of delicious soft serve.
Speaker 1:In the Batman comic books, we would see the first appearance of the circus high wire team known as the Flying Grayson's, whose youngest member, dick, would be made an orphan and later become Robin. Billboard published its first ever record singles chart and Frank Sinatra topped it with his Tommy Dorsey pen hit I'll Never Smile Again. In November of that year, walt Disney would begin reporting to the FBI regarding the activities of any Hollywood subversives. He'd also release his film Fantasia, which fun fact, I have never been able to watch all the way through without falling asleep. And that's just a short summary of the many events of 1940, a year filled with triumphs and horrors that would only multiply exponentially in the coming years. A perfect time in history for someone like today's vintage villain to spawn and thrive and kill at least 7,000 people all by himself, and with that. There's no time like the present to dive into the past. So let's get going, shall we?
Speaker 1:In order to understand how someone like Vasily Blokin can even exist in the first place, we should break down a little bit of the history of early Soviet Russia, which is about as bloody as that elevator scene from the Shining about a million times over. In particular, I want to focus on the NKVD, which stands for pardon my pronunciations here Narodny Komisaryat Vnatruneh Del, otherwise known as the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. There's a lot to it, but think of it as the backbone of a brand new Russian government, and I say brand new, because in February of 1917, a brutal revolution called the February Revolution appropriately enough took place that toppled the centuries-long reign of Russian Tsars. That's their monarchy. And for those of you who watched that Anastasia movie as a kid, it's those Tsars I'm talking about, although highly fictionalized versions of them. And yes, the murders of the Romanov family will definitely be covered in a future episode, because it is one hell of a story.
Speaker 1:In the immediate aftermath, a provisional government was formed that seemed bent in the direction of the sort of liberal democracy we understand over here in the States Constitution, freedom of speech, elections, etc. Etc. A natural enough goal after a long streak of monarchical rule. But it wasn't to be. Thanks largely to their participation in World War I, which put a huge strain on the country's already tight resources, that provisional government, led by Alexander Kerensky, would very quickly be toppled by the Communist Bolsheviks and Vladimir Lenin only a few months later and what became known as the October Revolution, rendering that dream of liberal democracy to blood-soaked ash.
Speaker 1:Now I could get into the weeds really quickly, trying to explain the rapid and constant evolution of the Russian government and the wake of the Bolshevik takeover. The alphabet soup of a dozen different divisions, ministries and other government organizations dissolving into one another had my eyes glazing over during the research, and you're fine to go look it up if you want to. But I feel like you, the listener, having to sit here listening to all of the acronyms. You might fall asleep and you could be driving. So I'm just looking out for you guys. But I'll sum it up like this when an entire country, especially one the size of Russia, has been beheaded not once but twice in the same year, it's going to take a whole lot of people to bring things into some semblance of order a red army if you will. And when the overthrows are as violent as these were, the order will be swift and hard.
Speaker 1:And that's the thing few people seem to grasp when they talk about these events in history where the people rise up against their kings, queens and dictators and otherwise incompetent imbeciles in power. There's this totalitarian truth lying at the foundation of nearly every violent revolution, and history constantly bears this out, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, to Central America, hell, even here in the United States. The response is to stop the bleeding by any means necessary. Stop it with a heavy iron fist, and moving that iron fist often takes another rebellion. Anyway, back to Russia.
Speaker 1:The NKVD set up a series of people's militias to quell various uprisings across the country that were all vying for power or trying to get back power that they'd recently lost, like the bourgeoisie and the monarchists. And the monarchies, as we know, aren't exactly bastions of freedom and human rights. It's why people tend to rise up and overthrow them after a while. But the Bolsheviks, well, they weren't too interested in a free and vibrant populace either, and while they called themselves communists. It's very important to remember that a lot of these strongman-type governments love to throw buzzwords around purely for the branding. Despite the fact that Russia, china and Cuba are all known as communist countries, there has been no successful demonstration of an actual Marxist, communism-style government anywhere. It's just been a label that aspiring populist authoritarians like to slap on things in order to entice the peasants to go along and not revolt. Then, once all the goons are in place, it's just more lies, oppression and death. You can split a lot of hairs trying to decide where on the political compass these people lie, but after a certain point and after enough people have been murdered, one asshole is completely indistinguishable from the next.
Speaker 1:A lot of the citizens saw what was happening, and they weren't fans. That's not including those who were still beholden to the monarchy. The NKVD knew it had to control these wayward groups before another war broke out. And these people's militias, who were mostly comprised of ordinary workers who hadn't done any real policing before, were not adequate to the task. So the government created a new elite police force with a very specific goal to stifle any and all rebellion, as well as protect shipments of food and supplies and run the prison system, because boy did they lock a lot of people up. You've heard of the Russian gulags, yes, well, they started here, and these police would need to be able to do their jobs without the pesky interference of a judicial system. You know secret police, because nothing bad ever happened when those two words were jammed together. Enter the All-Russia Extraordinary Commission, colloquially known as the Cheka. They were the first of what would become a very long succession of secret police forces Russia created to infiltrate, watch and swiftly act on all perceived threats against the Soviet Union. We here in the United States probably can think of one right off hand the KGB. Well, they came a little bit later, but they all started here, and with full carte blanche from the NKVD. They would be responsible for the imprisonment, torture, interrogations and executions of millions. They did this through a campaign known as the Red Terror, which raged across Russia, ukraine and other territories like Latvia, estonia, lithuania and Finland.
Speaker 1:Our vintage villain, vasily Blokin, was a member of the Cheka and he was their golden boy. Born in 1895, blokin began life as a countryside peasant, eventually moving to Moscow to work as a bricklayer. By June of 1915, he would be enlisted with the Imperial Army to fight in World War I, quickly rising up the ranks to become a non-commissioned officer In 1918,. He would return home wounded and watch to see how the government's situation sorted itself out. When it became clear the Communists were going to retain power, he joined the party and, by 1921, was climbing up the ranks of the Cheka. Joseph Stalin would gain control of the Communist Party in 1928, which followed a long fight to fill the power vacuum opened by Vladimir Lenin's death in 1924.
Speaker 1:Blokin quickly gained his notice due to his skill and what the Russians termed wetwork, and that referred to assassinations, executions and torture the spilling of blood. In other words, there isn't a ton out there about Blokin's personal or early life. A lot of these records have been either concealed or purged. More on those purges later and you're going to be hearing that word a lot Nothing that would inform anyone as to why Blokin was so into this wetwork. If anything, he was described as a cheerful man which, given his propensity for dealing death by the thousands, only makes him sound more monstrous. But history is no stranger to serial killers and mass murderers, who had the rare distinction of being able to fulfill their homicidal fantasies while wearing an official uniform. I would also venture to say that the years of combat in the Poison Choked Horror Scape of World War I galvanized these desires as well, or at the very least desensitized him to a point few ever make it.
Speaker 1:Within six years of joining the Cheka, blokin was in charge of a special unit created specifically for the handling of wetwork, which reported directly to Stalin himself. Blokin was also personally responsible for the high-profile assassinations of many of his former bosses, because while there were always plenty of threats for the NKVD to suppress outside its walls, it also purged itself a lot. Prior to 1933, that simply meant a purging of the roles, where older members simply left to be replaced by the new ones. However, by the mid-1930s, under the direction of Stalin. Few of the old guard left without either being imprisoned or murdered, but Blokin managed to escape being purged himself due to positive word of mouth from people close to Stalin. Stalin must have seen a bit of himself in the guy, or he understood that when you find someone who's willing to deal death to your enemies with a big smile on his face, you don't let him go.
Speaker 1:It should be noted that between 1937 and 1938 in particular, stalin rounded up, imprisoned, tortured and murdered over 700,000 people whom he saw as threats to his consolidation of power. Just think of that Three quarters of a million people in one year. Many of these were also members of the Communist Party, but they followed his rivals like Communist leader Leon Trotsky and older Bolsheviks who no longer believed the dictator-style government originally deployed to bring order to the chaos after the revolution was necessary. Stalin, of course, disagreed. This period became known as the Great Terror, and it wasn't just political enemies he was after here. He also saw fit to eliminate writers, philosophers and ethnic minorities and other people that Stalin saw as quote-unquote non-desirables.
Speaker 1:Between all this and the ensuing civil wars and famines, even when you don't count the strain of two world wars being fought, stalin murdered millions of Russians between the 1920s and the 1940s, simply because he wanted to stay in power by 1940,. However, with the eyes of the world really fixed on him, he would publicly condemn these purges and would see to the trial an execution of all those he originally put in charge of them. What a guy, huh. The full extent of the killings under Stalin would not become known to the world until after his fall. In fact, mass graves from these purges are still being uncovered today. One is late as 2021 in Odessa, ukraine, containing between 5 and 8 thousand skeletons.
Speaker 1:Even with all this discussion of death and mayhem, we still haven't spent a lot of time on Vasiliy Blokin. But it's important to understand the murderous culture at work here with the Soviets, how it must have seemed almost banal to the people directly involved, him most of all. It's especially important to keep that in mind later on when we get to how much the Soviets attempted to cover up, just how much murdering they did and how we let them get away with it for a very long time, because we needed Stalin's help getting rid of the threat of Germany and Japan at the time. But I'm getting ahead of myself In the late 1930s, as World War II was really beginning to heat up in Europe, few countries were getting stomped on more than Poland. The Nazis wanted it every bit as much as the Soviets did, and that's perhaps why, despite thinking Hitler was a great guy, stalin wasn't much interested in working with him. They both had eyes on the same prize and they weren't interested in sharing much. They even formed treaties over which portions of the country the other was allowed to have upon their invasions. How nice for Poland. Right In September of 1939, germany invaded, followed by Russia a couple weeks later.
Speaker 1:Estimates vary, but between 300,000 and 700,000 Polish prisoners of war were rounded up by the Soviets. These POWs consisted largely of Poland's educated class, because their conscription system required every non-exempt college graduate to register with the military reserves. Most of these people were eventually released or they escaped, but by November of that year the NKVD had in its possession some 40,000 Polish prisoners. And here's how some of those numbers break down. We have 8,000 to 8,500 officers and warrant officers, 6,000 to 6,500 police officers and 25,000 soldiers and non-commissioned officers who were still being held as POWs. The 25,000 soldiers and non-commissioned officers were assigned to forced labor camps, and Stalin wanted them interrogated to see if they could be converted and become useful for the Soviet Union. If it became clear that a prisoner would not adopt a pro-Soviet mentality, however, he would be declared an enemy of the state and added to the death list. On March 5, 1940, the highest levels of the Russian government signed an order to execute 25,700 Polish nationalists and counter-revolutionaries. Stalin figured if they weren't going to be useful to the Soviets, then he would deprive the Polish military of their best talent.
Speaker 1:This sounds a whole lot like a genocide, if you ask me, and that word will be debated quite hotly, and in fact still is to this day, when it comes to this particular incident. This, my friends, though, is how one man, our vintage villain, vasiliy Blokin, becomes a Guinness World Record holder for murder. Because of the near 22,000 prisoners who were executed and what would become known as the Katcian Massacre, blokin was personally responsible for 7,000 of them by his own hand. And how does one person kill 7,000 people? And note 7,000 of these people? Because, before this, blokin, being the chief executioner, had killed thousands more during the Great Terror, including several of his fellow executioners who'd fallen under suspicion by this point, he's probably responsible for tens of thousands of deaths by himself, but we're just focusing on this one particular job.
Speaker 1:So you have to have a plan right. So they set a quota to kill 300 per night and they built a soundproofed hut that was outfitted with a sloping concrete floor and a drain that could be quickly rinsed, because well, if you're going to be shooting 300 people a night in the head and you're going to do that every night for the next month or so, it's going to get messy very quickly. Anyway, victims would be led to an anti-chamber of the hut that had been painted red and dubbed the Linen Room for identification. The man would then stand in the main room waiting behind the door. He wore a leather butcher's apron, a leather hat and shoulder-length leather gloves, not wanting to have his real uniform touched with even a single drop of the blood he gleefully spilled once every three minutes over those ghoulish 28 nights, without further word from either the guards or Blokin himself. Each prisoner would be brought into the main room, would be restrained by the guards against the wall, while Blokin shot them once at the base of the skull with a German-Walter Model 2 25-caliber ACP pistol. He had brought a briefcase filled with his own Walther pistols, since he didn't trust the reliability of the standard-issue Soviet TT-30,. But the use of the German pistol had another purpose, and that was to provide plausible deniability of the executions if the bodies were discovered later. And boy, we will get to that. An estimated 30 NKVD agents were assigned as guards and drivers and escorts for the prisoners to the basement, where they would then confirm the identification and remove the bodies after their deaths, and then they would hose down the room after each execution before sending another one in.
Speaker 1:And although some of the executions were carried out by senior lieutenant of state security, andrei Rubinov, blokin was the primary executioner and apparently, according to his reputation, liked to work continuously and rapidly, without interruption. Like I said, every three minutes they were shooting someone, and he would work for up to 10 hours a night doing this. And because of the secrecy of the operation, these executions were all conducted at night. They would start at dusk and continue until dawn, and they would load the bodies onto flatbed trucks through a back door in the execution chamber and they would haul those trucks twice a night to a nearby village of Mednoy. Blokin apparently had a bulldozer on hand. They would dig 24-25 trenches measuring 8-10 meters long, 26-33 feet, and each trench would be covered over before dawn. He would then provide vodka to all his men, but Blokin himself would have none. At that time he was a strict tea totaler, which was in major contrast to his fellow executioners. These guys were ardent drunks, no doubt because of the trauma of not only the murders they participated in, but because they also knew they were one foot out of line from receiving their own bullet or worse. On April 27th of 1940, blokin secretly received the Order of the Red Banner and a little bit of a pay bump from Stalin for his quote skill and organization in the effective carrying out of special tasks.
Speaker 1:His tally of 7,000 people shot in 28 days remains the most organized and protracted mass murdered by a single individual on record and caused him being named the Guinness World Record holder for most prolific executioner in 2010. And I want to break down really quick the types of people that were murdered at Kachyan In Admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 85 privates and 3,420 non-commissioned officers, oh, and seven chaplains. There were also 200 pilots, government representatives and royalty that included a prince and 43 officials. There were also civilians three landowners, 131 refugees, 20 university professors, 300 physicians, several hundred lawyers, engineers and teachers and more than 100 writers and journalists. In all, the NKVD executed almost half of the Polish officer corps All together. During the massacre, the NKVD executed 14 Polish generals.
Speaker 1:This is all according to Wikipedia, and here's where you can start folding in a whole lot of sick irony to go along with the gut churn You're already undoubtedly feeling and hearing all of this. You know how I mentioned earlier, and you very likely already knew anyway, about how that dude Hitler was causing a lot of problems for Poland, europe and the entire world at large, and same goes for Japan. Not long after this grisly discovery, americans would enter the war following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. So we were in the thick of the whole. Enemy of my enemy is my friend thing, and those enemies all just happened to be some of the worst human beings ever spawned. So our choices and friends were less than stellar. But that's also nothing new. If you were young and find yourself aghast at American involvement with world leaders who are doing very bad things to people, it usually goes back to that same enemy of my enemy, credo.
Speaker 1:Well, you can imagine how awkward the discussions between Poland and Russia became in June of 1941 when the two countries agreed to work together to fight Germany, and the Polish generals were all like, hey, could we have some of our soldiers and officers back to help aid in this fight that we're going to do together? Russia and Stalin was like, oh, those guys, yeah, they were freed, see. And then we lost track of them and all the chaos, see, but they're totally out there. Totally Okay, death cell. Even when captive Polish railroad workers reported to the underground state of rumors of mass graves of Polish soldiers in the German occupied forests near Katcien, no one listened. Mostly, it was just hard for anyone to believe that there could even be graves filled with that many bodies.
Speaker 1:Then, in early 1943, german officers took more notice of the reports of these graves in the forests of Goat Hill near Katcien. And that's when Joseph Gerbils, you know Hitler's favorite propaganda guy he decided to use the discovery as a way to create a divide between Poland, the Western allies and the Soviet Union. And I mean, of course they'd do that. First of all, remember how those bodies were all riddled with German bullets. He had to throw the focus off of that, but imagine the awkwardness this created. On the one hand, stalin's work did Germany a huge favor by nixing all these important Polish people for them. But Stalin wasn't working for them, didn't want to. Hell. Imagine if he had wanted to. Would we even be having this discussion right now if Hitler and Stalin had gotten along and worked together? I shudder to think.
Speaker 1:Anyway, gerbils made a huge announcement about the discovery of the bodies. A quote a ditch 28 meters long and 16 meters wide, in which the bodies of 3000 Polish officers were piled up in 12 layers, and they claimed that it demonstrated the horrors of Bolshevism and how the Americans and the British were right on board with it. Remember, this is prior to the world learning about the Holocaust and all those mass graves. So Germany could still kind of get away with some of these theatrics. And Germany took it a step further. You know they were going all out, trying to be like hey guys, look at Russia is doing over here, russia working with the Americans and the British. Look at this guy, look what he's doing, look how evil he is. They brought in a European Red Cross committee called the Catching Commission, comprised of 12 forensic experts and their staff, and these people were from all over Europe Belgium, bulgaria, croatia, denmark, finland, france, hungary, italy, romania, switzerland. I mean there were people from all over and the Germans were so bent on proving the Soviets were behind this massacre that they even included some Allied POWs among them, and they brought in all these people to examine these graves so that they could see hey, this wasn't us right.
Speaker 1:And you know, Goebbels was just riding that train hard. In fact, he wrote in his diary we are now using the discovery of 12,000 Polish officers killed by the GPU for anti-Bolshevik propaganda on a grand style. We sent neutral journalists and Polish intellectuals to the spot where they were found. The reports now reaching us from ahead are gruesome. The Fuhrer has also given permission for us to hand out a drastic news item to the German press. I gave instructions to make the widest possible use of the propaganda material. We shall be able to live on it for a couple of weeks Now a couple weeks.
Speaker 1:So even Goebbels knew that they weren't going to be able to get away with this forever. But if anything, it shows how forward thinking the man was. And I don't mean that as a form of praise, I just mean that it kind of sucks when you know super evil people have super smart people on their staff. And Goebbels was not an idiot and in fact he already kind of understood the ephemeral nature of human communication. Right, the news cycle. Oh, we're only going to be able to ride this for a bit, but we're going to ride it while we can.
Speaker 1:And so when he was informed in September of 1943 that the German army had to withdraw from the Kacchan area, he wrote a prediction in his diary, and that reads Unfortunately we have had to give up Kacchan. The Bolsheviks undoubtedly will soon find quote that we shot 12,000 Polish officers. That episode is one that is going to cause us quite a little trouble in the future. The Soviets are undoubtedly going to make it their business to discover as many mass graves as possible and then blame it on us, which is exactly what happened. Anyway, the Polish government or the government in exile, because, remember, they're still an occupied country at the time, they're still an occupied country at this point Insisted on bringing the matter to the negotiation table with Soviets and opening an investigation by the International Red Cross. In April of 1943, they issued a statement on the issue, asking for the Red Cross to investigate, which was then rejected by Stalin, who then used the fact that the Germans also requested such an investigation as quote proof of Polish German conspiracy, which then led to further deterioration of the Polish-Soviet relations. So here's Stalin sitting here, knowing damn well what he did, that he had these tens of thousands of Polish officers and other intelligentsia murdered and buried in mass graves, blamed it on the Germans and then, when the Polish people are asking for a proper investigation, he's trying to be like you guys are working together to make us look bad. It is the ultimate form of gaslighting on a global international scale. But Stalin wasn't the only one trying to cover stuff up. Okay, unfortunately, we were kind of in on it with him. Oh, I don't mean kind of, we were really in on it with him.
Speaker 1:The Polish government ultimately met with Winston Churchill on April of 1943 and told them that the Poles had proof that the Soviets were responsible for the Kaczyn massacre. And Churchill himself stated the Bolsheviks can be very cruel. And then, according to those diplomats, churchill, without committing himself, showed by his manner that he had no doubt of it. But he didn't actually say it out loud, see, because you don't want to anger the venomous pit bull that you have acquired as part of your Allied force to defeat your enemies, right? So the Soviet government was immediately and vehemently denying the German charges. They claimed that the Polish POWs had been doing construction work and were captured and executed by invading Germans in August of 1941.
Speaker 1:And because the Soviets were able to successfully recapture the Kachin area from the Germans in fall of 1943, they were able to more effectively begin their cover-up operation. They destroyed the cemetery that the Germans had permitted the Polish Red Cross to build and they removed other evidence. Witnesses were quote, interviewed and threatened with arrest for collaborating with the Nazis if their testimonies agreed with the official line. And because none of the documents found on the dead bodies had dates later than April of 1940, the Soviet secret police planted false evidence to place the apparent time of the massacre in mid-1941, when the German military were controlling the area. And in January 1944, the Soviets began setting up a lot of fake commissions to look into these quote unquote crimes that the Germans had committed against the Polish.
Speaker 1:And here are the names of these commissions. They're very long, so trust me, it's the whole thing. The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission for Acertaining and Investigating Crimes Perpetrated by the German Fascist Invaders was the name of one commission, and there is another called the Special Commission for Determination and Investigation of the Shooting of Polish Prisoners of War by German Fascist Invaders in the Katzian Forest. So the name of the commission set to investigate this massacre by its own name pretty much tells you what they're going to conclude. It's a little bit like the Warren Commission that was set up to investigate the assassination of JFK just being called the Commission for Determining that Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK all by himself and no one else was involved, we swear.
Speaker 1:Anyway, these commissions all exhumed the bodies and of course, rejected all of the 1943 German findings that the Poles were shot by the Soviet Army and they assigned the guilt to the Nazis, which you know it's. It's funny. Ordinarily I would be like fine, blame it on the Nazis. The Nazis did it. But the thing is, and that we here in the West have trouble understanding, is that Stalin was really no better than Hitler at all, but we were working with him to take out Hitler. And sometimes, in that philosophy of using bad guys to take out other bad guys, you end up looking like you're totally okay with the other stuff your bad guy friend is doing. But anyway, these commissions conclusions would be consistently used by Soviet sources until they officially admitted guilt in 1990 under Mikhail Gorbachev. But of course the Soviets then also brought over a lot of American and British journalists who would come over and look at all this information, thinking that having Americans involved would lend weight to the official Soviet claim that the Germans had done this. And although the American reports noted deficiencies in the Soviets claims there were problematic witnesses, attempts to discourage questioning of the witnesses, statements of the witnesses being coached, they still, at the end of the day, claimed that they believed the Soviet story. So we were lending credence to the Soviet lies this whole time because we had to provide cover for ourselves.
Speaker 1:And meanwhile the Polish and Soviet tension was continuing to grow. Because the polls knew what Russia had done, the Soviets did not want to admit it and meanwhile the polls importance to the allies, which was really significant in the first year of the war, was beginning to fade. So when it came to Churchill and Roosevelt, they were constantly torn on whether they even stay committed to the Polish people in the first place, despite them being our allies and the demands of Stalin and his people. We had ended up putting ourselves in the middle of some very, very nasty fighting and we were continuing to give power to the Soviets despite knowing what the truth was because we didn't want to anger Stalin.
Speaker 1:On April 24 of 1943, the British government successfully pressured the polls to withdraw the request for a Red Cross investigation and Churchill assured Stalin's regime that he would vigorously oppose any investigation by the International Red Cross or any other body in any territory under German authority. Such an investigation would be a fraud and its conclusions reached by terrorism. So Churchill was all and on the cover up, because unofficial and classified UK documents concluded that Soviet guilt was a quote near certainty. But the alliance with the Soviets was deemed to be more important than moral issues, and so the official version supported by the Soviets up to censoring any contradictory accounts. I mean, people probably got locked up or killed for trying to tell the truth on this. But Churchill, when he asked someone to investigate the issue, noted all this is to merely ascertain the facts, because we should none of us ever speak a word about it. And you know, the investigations done later on would easily bring out the inconsistencies and the impossibilities in the Soviet version of events.
Speaker 1:Winston Churchill sent a copy of these reports to Roosevelt on the 13th of August 1943, that deconstructed the Soviet account of the massacre and showed the political consequences within a strongly moral framework but recognized that there was no viable alternative to the existing policy. No comment by Roosevelt on those reports has ever been found. And Churchill, in his own post war accountings of the Cotchian incident, he gives no further insight. In his own memoirs he refers to the 1944 Soviet inquiry into the massacre, which found the Germans responsible. He adds belief seems an act of faith. But then what did we do here in the States? Well, in 1944, franklin Roosevelt assigned his special emissary to the Balkans, who was Navy Lieutenant Commander George Earl, to produce a report on Cotchian. And Earl concluded that the massacre was committed by the Soviet Union. But after consulting with the United States Office of War Information, roosevelt rejected that conclusion on the official record and declared he was convinced of Nazi Germany's responsibility and ordered that all the other reports be suppressed. So we here in the United States we're pretty good at playing those Soviet games too when it suits us. In fact, when George Earl requested permission to publish his findings, the president issued a written order to desist. He was reassigned and spent the rest of the year in American Samoa.
Speaker 1:But what was released in those documents? Because we were able to get a look at all this later. Obviously I'm finding this stuff all over the internet, so it's mostly been declassified now, so we can really look at all this stuff and see what information was in these documents that made it so clear that the Soviets had committed the atrocity. Because obviously, you know, you would think a bunch of bodies in the ground with German bullets would be easy enough to just say, fine, we're just going to let this go right. Well, first, evidence is thus the Polish corpses were in such a state of decay that the Nazis could not have killed them because they simply weren't there yet. It was very obvious that these people were killed well prior to the German occupation in 1941. And second, none of the Polish artifacts, such as the letters, diaries, photographs and identification tags pulled from the graves, were dated later than the spring of 1940. But most incriminating was that the relatively decent state of the men's uniforms and boots showed that they hadn't lived long after being captured. And despite all that very clear evidence, all of these reports were either destroyed or kept hidden, presumably to appease Stalin and not distract from the war against the Nazis.
Speaker 1:But then what happens in the 1950s? And interestingly enough there was a lot of talk about this in our own newspapers there are quite a bit talking about our own acquiescence and role in covering up this massacre as early as the 1950s. In 1951, a congressional investigation into Katzchen, where a lot of the people that were part of the cover up would defend their actions in doing so, saying that it was not in the US interest to antagonize our allies, in this case the USSR, whose assistance the nation needed against the Empire of Japan. And then things just continued on. I mean this back and forth tug of war through, you know, the 70s. It went on through the 80s, all these attempts between the Polish government to have their victims recognized as having been killed by the Soviets and the Soviets, attempts to cover up and deny that. There was increasing pressure on both the Polish and the Soviet governments to release their documents related to the massacre.
Speaker 1:In the 80s and 1989, soviet scholars revealed Stalin had indeed ordered the massacre. And in 1990, mikhail Gorbachev admitted the NKVD had executed the polls and confirmed two other burial sites similar to the site at Katzchen, and Mednoy and Piat Kikati. I hope I pronounced that right. On October 30th of 1989, gorbachev also allowed a delegation of 700 polls organized by the Polish Association of the Families of Katzchen Victims to visit the Katzchen Memorial, and in fact they held a big mass there and had banners that declared solidarity, and one mourner was able to cover up a sign that said it was Nazis with NKVD. Several visitors scaled the fence of a nearby KGB compound and left burning candles on the grounds, so A lot of people who had lived during all this were still alive back then too. So this was a huge moment of recognition after decades of cover-up and censorship. And in fact in April of 1990, the USSR formally expressed profound regret and admitted the Soviet secret police were responsible, and the day was declared a worldwide catch-and-memorial day. However, that was not meant to last.
Speaker 1:Russia and Poland remained divided on how to describe the catch-and-massacre legally. The Poles considered it a case of genocide and they wanted even more investigations as well as a full disclosure of the Soviet documents. In 1998, russian President Boris Yeltsin agreed to construct a memorial complex at Kachin, as well as in Mednoy and the two NKVD execution sites on Russian soil, and in September of that same year the Russians also raised the issue of Soviet prisoner of war deaths in the camps for Russian prisoners and internees in Poland. So now we have Russians saying to Poland. Hey, you might be mad at us for killing all those Polish soldiers, but what about all our POWs that died in your camps due to various diseases and whatnot? And there were Russian officials then arguing that it was also a genocide. That was the same thing as Kachin, and this started to gain speed throughout Russia. This attempt to create an anti-Kachin and balance the historical equation, quote unquote. But meanwhile the fate of those prisoners kept in those POW camps in Poland, we're still not exactly sure the extent to how true a lot of that is. But then enter Vladimir Putin, because this just continues to evolve and if you think that things have been smoothed over in the years since, you would be, unfortunately, wrong.
Speaker 1:On February 4th of 2010, prime Minister of Russia Vladimir Putin invited Prime Minister of Poland Donald Tusk to attend a Kachin memorial service in April and they commemorated together the 70th anniversary of the massacre. But then, on April 10th of 2010, an aircraft carrying Polish President Lecz Kaczynski and his wife and 87 other politicians and high-raking army officers crashed in Smolensk, killing all 96 aboard. The passengers on that plane were supposed to attend a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Kachin massacre, and the Polish nation was completely stunned. Prime Minister Donald Tusk wasn't on the plane, but referred to the crash as the most tragic Polish event since the war. And of course, this caused an untold number of conspiracy theories to begin circulating, because at that event, the Polish president was supposed to deliver a formal speech to honor the victims of the Kachin massacre and to highlight the significance of the massacres in the context of the post-war communist political history and to stress the need for Polish-Russian relations to focus on reconciliation. That speech was never delivered, but it is out there. You can actually see that they released it posthumously.
Speaker 1:And then, and later that year of November 2010, the Russian parliament passed a resolution declaring long-classified documents that showed the Kachin crime was carried out on direct orders of Stalin and other Soviet officials. But then other members of the party would then deny the Soviet Union had been to blame for the Kachin massacre and voted against that declaration. And unfortunately, that seems to be where things are continuing to deteriorate. I mean really up into this day. You have the Russian invasion of Ukraine. That's further upsetting things between Russia and Poland, and Putin has made it his goal essentially to try to suppress again any admission of guilt in the carrying out of the Kachin massacre and we're seeing that propaganda machine starting up all over again. In June of 2022, russia removed the Polish flag from the memorial complex amid a rise in Russia-Poland political tension due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and in April of 2023, russia ordered all Polish flags to be removed from the site before the commemoration on April 20th. Then, in April of 2023, russian state-owned domestic news agency reported that the FSB Department for St Petersburg and the Leningrad region handed over quote unique archival documents on Kachin to the Central State Archive of St Petersburg, which includes testimony of a German soldier claiming that he took part in the Kachin massacre burials in early September of 41. However, that testimony has long been proven to be false. So the deeds of Soviet Russia and and all around the Kachin forest remain a source of political tension between Poland and Russia to this very day.
Speaker 1:And while Vladimir Putin massages the propaganda machine to his personal benefit, we at least have the names of key operatives like Vesely Blokin, whose monstrous acts we must not forget, because, although names like Stalin, hitler, mussolini, putin, etc. Are forever branded on the historical record of evildoers, it's their happily subservient lap dogs doing their bidding that make such bloodbaths possible. But what happened to Vesely Blokin. After all this, you're probably wondering, right? I mean, after all this, after learning that this whole affair has never completely been settled, is in fact still a political football being kicked back and forth? I can at least give you a happy ending when it comes to our happy executioner.
Speaker 1:So, following the death of Stalin in March of 1953, blokin's life pretty much fell apart. He was forcibly retired from the NKVD. The official record stated it was due to poor health. But a lot of Stalinist figures were removed from power by the new leadership of Nikita Khrushchev and although his service record was publicly noted by the leaders of the time, all of his ranks were stripped away from him and Khrushchev deemed him unworthy of carrying the rank of a general due to his involvement in mass executions. Blokin, by that point, had given up his whole life of teetotaling I guess the stress finally did get to him and apparently died of suicide on February 3, 1955 at the age of 60. The official cause of death is listed as suicide, though his personnel files recorded that he died due to a heart attack. So we can't even get a straight answer on this. But when it comes to Soviet Russia, expecting straight answers is a losing proposition. Well, the train has pulled back into the station, I'm afraid, and I will soon be headed off to another year and another villain.
Speaker 1:In the meantime, why not head over to Apple or Spotify and leave a rating or review if you like today's episode? If there's a villain you want me to feature, pre-1980 is preferred, send me a message at vintagevillainspodcom or come on over to the Vintage Villains Soiree. That's the Facebook group where you can interact with me and other listeners. And if you really want to go the extra mile to support the show, there's a Patreon page. $3 a month gets you exclusive access to live recordings with guests and more. There is also a merch store where you can get yourself some beautiful shirts, mugs, hats and totes, both for this show and my other one, ding Dong Darkness Time. You will find links for all of that in the show notes. That's it for now. Vintage Viewers, I will see you soon, in another century.