This cross commemorates the Katyn Massacre of 1940, in which Soviet security forces executed tens of thousands of Polish military officers and civilians in an effort to eviscerate the Polish intelligentsia. The Soviets denied that they had committed the massacre, blaming it on German troops instead. In 1990, 50 years after the massacre (and only a year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union), the Soviet government finally admitted that their security forces were responsible for the mass executions.