Russia publishes Katyn massacre archives

From The BBC - "Russia has published previously secret documents on the 1940 Katyn massacre, in which some 22,000 Polish officers were killed by Soviet forces. The state archive said the "Packet No. 1" documents had until now only been available to specialist researchers. The Soviet Union denied its role in the massacre for decades. Relations between Russia and Poland have warmed since the Polish president and others were killed in a plane crash on their way to a Katyn commemoration. The documents that the state archive published were declassified in the 1990s though only specialist researchers had access to them, reports said. They were published online on the orders of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Poland has repeatedly demanded that Russia open all its files on Katyn. Earlier this month, the Russian and Polish prime ministers marked the massacre together for the first time. Days later, Polish President Lech Kaczynski and more than 90 others were killed when their plane crashed as it was trying to land in western Russia ahead of a separate event to mark the killings. The April 1940 killings were carried out by the NKVD Soviet secret police on the orders of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. They shot members of the Polish elite - officers, politicians and artists - in the back of the head and dumped their bodies in mass graves"