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This is the kind of thing that troubles me about anything that Furr writes. In his "The “Official” Version of the Katyn Massacre Disproven?", the article that is focused on debunking the notion that Polish prisoners at Volodymyr Volyns’kiy were executed, he also has something to say about the Smolensk killings that, as I pointed out, produced 22 times more corpses than those found in the Ukraine mass grave.
He claims that a former NKVD agent named Tokarev was forced into testifying against Stalin in an investigation that was held in tandem with the release of the Katyn papers in 1990 even though he wasn't "at the Katyn Forest, the place where 4000+ bodies of Polish POWs were unearthed by the Germans in 1943, and none of them has anything to say about this, the most famous of the execution/burial sites subsumed under the rubric 'the Katyn Massacre.'"
He may have not been in the forest but he was an eyewitness to the executions in NKVD headquarters, from which the bodies were later transported to the forest. This is from "Katyn: a crime without punishment", edited by Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, Wojciech Materski:
NKVD documents do not show how the Ostashkov prisoners were killed, but an eyewitness was found half a century after the event who deposed testimony on this particular mass murder. In March 1991 the aged Tokarev (b. 1902) gave many details on the fate of the Ostashkov prisoners during his interrogation by Lieutenant Colonel Anatoly Yablokov, a military prosecutor in the Soviet Main Military Prosecutor’s Office, who was in charge of the Soviet Katyn investigation from 1991 to 1994. Tokarev claimed that he was not personally involved in the killing because a special group of NKVD men came from Moscow to do the “work.” He stated that those in charge of the operation were GB Major V. M. Blokhin, head of the Komendatura [Command] of the AKhU [Administrative-Housekeeping Board of the NKVD]; Kom-brig [Brigade Commander] M. S. Krivenko, head of NKVD Convoy Troops; and Senior GB Major N. I. Sinegubov, head of Intelligence for the NKVD Main Transport Administration and its deputy chief.
According to Tokarev, about thirty NKVD men, mostly drivers and some prison guards, took part in shooting the prisoners, always at night, after which they would retire to their special quarters and drink a lot of vodka. Blokhin was the chief executioner. His special uniform consisted of a leather cap, an apron, and gloves reaching above the elbows.
According to Furr, Tokarev was coerced into making this testimony, a funny thing to hear from someone who defended the integrity of the Moscow Trials.
In his article, he would lead the reader into believing that Tokarev didn't see bodies being dumped into mass graves. If he wasn't so dodgy, he could have instead tried to debunk his testimony about what he *did* see rather than dismiss him for being an expert witness to events he did not claim to see.
Typical Furr. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
