[2] Wajda’s Katyń is the first screen portrayal of the long-suppressed and “highly controversial historical event.”[3] Six months before the massacres at Katyn, on August 23, 1939, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin authorized the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression agreement with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany with a secret protocol to partition and annex Eastern Europe.

[4] In early 1940, the head of the Russian secret police (NKVD), Lavrentiy Beria, was authorized by Stalin to liquidate selected prisoners.

Most of the victims were murdered in the Katyn forest near Smolensk, Russia, at Kalinin (Tver), and at Kharkov prison, where Wajda’s father, a Polish cavalry officer, was executed.

Stalin’s rationale for the extermination of Polish executive and military staff was that it eliminated social and political elements that may have organized opposition to his policies.

His wife Anna (Maja Ostaszewska) and daughter Weronika, nicknamed "Nika" (Wiktoria Gąsiewska), find him shortly before he is deported to the USSR.

Capitalizing on the Soviet war crime, Nazi propaganda publishes lists with the names of the victims exhumed in mass graves behind the advancing German troops.

A candlelit vigil was also held at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw, where the names of the Polish officers murdered at Katyń were read out…Students and army recruits were then ordered to see the film and the Kaczynski brothers sought to exploit the latter during their ultra-nationalist campaign in the Polish parliamentary elections.”[9]Wajda acknowledged in his production notes that President Kaczynski had provided “honorary patronage” during the film’s production.

[10] Though Wajda reassured Berlin journalists that Katyń was not conceived as anti-Russian propaganda, conservative German chancellor, Angela Merkel attended its premiere.

The website's critical consensus states, "Masterfully crafted by an experienced directorial hand, Katyn is a powerful, personal depiction of wartime tragedy".

Dorota Niemtz writes: For decades, any discussion of the slaughter carried out in Katyń was forbidden in postwar Stalinist Poland, while in the Soviet Union itself, blame for the atrocity was laid on German troops following the breach of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact by Hitler.”[17][18]Not until 1989, with the fall of Communism in Poland in 1989, did the first non-communist Polish government acknowledge that the crime was committed under the direction of Joseph Stalin.

[19][20] On September 18, 2007, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the official newspaper of the Russian government, published an article by Alexander Sabov claiming that the widely accepted version of the tragedy is based on a single dubious copy of a document related to the massacre, and hence the evidence for the Soviet responsibility would be unreliable.

As a retort, the next day, Gazeta Wyborcza emphasized the formal admission by the Soviet Union of NKVD responsibility and republished documents to that effect.