Politburo approves NKVD execution of Polish prisoners, later named Katyn

NARA’s Katyn collection, the 5 March 1940 document as published after 1990, Britannica, and the 2010 Duma statement independently converge on Soviet responsibility. Body counts are archival ranges, not a Factrail original census.

Where later commissions publish death or deportee estimates, those estimates are attributed to the commission, not invented as a Factrail original count.

Established: a 5 March 1940 Politburo decision authorized the killings later named Katyn. Not established: every secondary burial site’s exact headcount as a Factrail original number.

The documentary limit is the same for every Stalin instrument in this dossier. Central files can show that an order was issued; they cannot, by themselves, reconstruct every raion’s implementation. Memoir and literary evidence (Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, Grossman) is used here only as independent texture, never as the sole causal source. Soviet published statistics of the 1930s are treated as official claims with known incentives to over-report industrial output and under-report famine. Post-1956 party revelations, the 1991–92 archival openings, the 2010 Russian State Duma statement on Katyn, Ukrainian Holodomor statutes, and USHMM/Wilson Center document publications are later independent or successor-state records. They do not cancel the original instrument. Readers who want the welfare path should open the named driver, then the indicator that driver already reaches, rather than treating the portrait as the mechanism.