A Moscow court dismissed on Tuesday a libel suit filed by Stalin’s grandson Yevgeny Dzhugashvili against the State Duma, which approved a declaration blaming the Soviet leader for the 1940 Katyn massacre, a RIA Novosti correspondent reported.
More than 20,000 Polish officers, police and civilians taken prisoner during the 1939 partition of Poland by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were executed by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in Katyn, near the western Russian city of Smolensk.
Dzhugashvili said he would appeal against Tuesday’s court ruling. He is demanding refutation of the phrase: “The Katyn crime was carried out on the direct instruction of Stalin and other Soviet leaders.”
Dzhugashvili’s previous lawsuit seeking 100 million rubles ($3.3 mln at current rates) in damages from Duma deputies has been dismissed by the court.
The Soviet Union always blamed the Katyn massacre on the Nazis, saying the killings took place in 1941, when the territory was in German hands. However, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev formally admitted in 1990 that the executions took place around 1940 and were carried out by the NKVD.
In the 1990s, Russia handed over copies of documents from top-secret File No.1 to Poland, which placed the blame squarely on the Soviet Union. The lower house of Russia's parliament approved the declaration recognizing the Katyn massacre as a crime committed by Joseph Stalin's regime in November last year.
In October 2011, Dzhugashvili filed a defamation lawsuit against Channel One television host Vladimir Pozner, who maintains that Stalin authorized the killing of thousands of the Polish POWs in Katyn. Dzhugashvili has lost several similar lawsuits filed against other Russian media outlets.
