"Shoot all Polish officers in the camps at Kozelsk, Starobelsk and Ostashkov." This was the decision made at a meeting of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee on March 5, 1940. Historians from the Memorial Association's Scientific Information Center got onto the trail of this document after penetrating what were, until recently, top-secret Soviet party and state archives.

It is yet more proof of the crimes committed at Katyń, where 13,000-15,000 Polish officers were massacred after the Soviet invasion of Poland on Sept. 17, 1939. Until recently the authorities in Moscow denied that these documents ever existed.