Talk:Roman Świątkiewicz

Katyn massacre

The Massacre of Katyn is one of the rare occassions where the Germans were not responsible. This article gives the impression as if there are doubts about that.--Tresckow (talk) 23:38, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Swiatek was a POW who spent many years in Russian Gulag, exactly as it says in the article. What article describes is Swiatek's own experiences from that period, i.e. the testimonys of German POW, Russion Gulag prisoners, his meeting with a Polish officer. Swiatek spent lots of time in Brittish archives and found material that indicated that Brittish and US governements were convinced that Russians didn't do it.

We cannot write an article about Swiatek and his work and do not mention his own findings (it is neutral to describe facts). He wrote two books (ISBN numbers and titles are there) in which he question the now "official" party line that NKVD was responsible for Katyn.

Also, though the Katyn massacre has been "investagated" there are lot of unclear moment in the whole affair. Several documents has been pointed out as possibly false, German bullets were found in the Katyn graves, the prisoners' hand were tied with German ropes, massgraves were located at the place where Russian pioneers had their summer camps until 1941, and so on.

But this article is not about THAT investigation. This article is about Swiatek and his own testimony/experience. Vectorhector (talk) 08:54, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Your claims are nonsense as Mikhail Gorbachev admitted soviet responsability. The article is misleading and you should include the info that his findings were actually wrong. if you dont its pretty much revisionist propaganda.--Tresckow (talk) 11:13, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Irrespective of who was actually responsible for the crime in Katyn I have to say that the Gorbachev admission of 1990 is a weak argument because 1) it was made in the time of politically motivated loans from the West (mostly from Germany) and 2) his admission was virtually baseless. The TASS communiqué[1]:

The question of clarifying the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Polish officers, interned in September 1939, has been raised over a long period of time in meetings between representatives of the Polish and Soviet Governments and more widely in public. Historians from the two countries have been engaged in the thorough research of the Katyn tragedy, including a search for documents. Very recently Soviet archivists and historians have discovered documents concerning Polish soldiers, who were held in the Kozelski, Starobelski and Ostashkovski camps by the Soviet NKVD. It emerges from these documents that in April-May 1940, out of about 15,000 Polish officers, held in these three camps, 394 were transferred to the Gryazovetski [Griazovietz] camp. The remainder were "handed over" to the NKVD responsible for the Smolensk, Voroshilovograd and Kalinin regions and were never mentioned in NKVD records again.

The archive material as a whole leads to the conclusion that responsibility for the crimes of Katyn belonged to Beria, Merkulov and their assistants. The Soviet side expresses deep regret over the Katyn tragedy and declares that it is one of the most serious crimes of Stalinism. Copies of the discovered documents will be handed over to the Polish side. The search for the archive material will continue.

You can see from the TASS communiqué that they drew conclusion from an indirect evidence - never mentioned in NKVD records again. So at that time it could be that they just didn't find the records.

Documents of Politbureau on Katyn were released by Yeltsin in 1992 during the trial on the CPSU case in the Russian constitutional court. And today some authors in Russian media point on numerous signs of forgery in those documents.

PS: By the way - a funny article from Economist.com In denial [2] --Nekto (talk) 12:03, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Fringe theories of this person (I am not sure if he is even notable) are certainly no grounds for Katyn denial (I wonder if we need to create this article; the situation bears some resemblance to the Holodomor denial). All reliable scholars agree (and Russian government itself admited) that SU was responsible for the massacre. End of story.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 23:47, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Article name

I reverted page move by User:Piotrus as undiscussed and based on improper considerations. We do not have a "full-name" rule; we follow WP:UCN. We don't have the same titles for our articles as Polish Wikipedia.

And most of all, Piotrus, what in the world were you thinking of with your page move to a different spelling while leaving Romuald Świątek as a redlink? Assuming the longer version is correct in some sense, even if it isn't the proper name for the article title, then certainly this shorter vresion should at least have a redirect if it is not the article name, should it not? Gene Nygaard (talk) 15:23, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

Year of birth

In his book on the last page there is a "repatriation document of author" in Polish. [3] There is a date - "20 maja(?) 1928 r". Is it his birthday? --Nekto (talk) 16:31, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

It's not clear. Possible, though.--_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 05:29, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

I am 100 % sure that the date that we see in the document is "20 marca 1928 roku". It looks like there is 5 letter in the word for month. And if it was "May" then we should see "20 maja" in Polish. The letter "j" would stick out below the row of the other letters. So, it's March the 20th. Roman Świątkiewicz also seems to have been born in the Polesie vojvodship. Vectorhector (talk) 00:33, 12 February 2008 (UTC)