The State Security Committee of the USSR's Council of Ministers has kept since 1940 an archive of records and other materials relating to the prisoners of war shot during that year as well as to the interned officers, gendarmes, policemen, settlers, land owners and similar persons from the former bourgeois Poland. All in all, on the basis of decisions of the Soviet NKVD's special troika 21,857 persons were shot, of whom 4,421 in the Katyn Forest (Smolensk district), 3,820 in the Starobelsk camp near Kharkov, 6,311 in the Ostashkov camp (Kalininskiy district), and 7,305 in other camps and prisons in Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia. [...]
From the point of view of Soviet institutions all these files have neither operational nor historical value. It is unlikely that they could have a real value for our Polish friends. To the contrary, any unexpected indiscretion could expose the conducted operation, with all the undesirable consequences for our state. The more so as there functions an official version relating to persons shot in the Katyn Forest, [...] according to which, all the Poles liquidated there were found to be killed by the German occupiers. [...]
In connection with the facts stated above it seems purposeful to destroy all the files relating to persons shot in 1940 during the earlier described operation.
Moscow, March 3, 1959
Katyń. Dokumenty ludobójstwa. Dokumenty i materiały archiwalne przekazane Polsce 14 października 1992 r. (Katyn. Documents of Genocide. Documents and Archival Materials Conveyed to Poland on October 14, 1992), translated by W. Majerski, Warsaw 1992