This week the National Archives released new material about a massacre that took place during World War II and that still exerts a powerful gravitational pull on memory: At Katyn, some 22,000 unarmed Polish prisoners were massacred Stalin’s secret police.

Scholar Rory Finnin, a lecturer in Ukrainian studies at Cambridge, has co-authored a forthcoming book on the tragedy, Remembering Katyn. More succinctly, in a recent blog post he shares an excellent summary of the Katyn tragedy in all its complexity and buried threads (one key point: “Katyn…is not simply Katyn”) and introduction with a recent post here. It’s more than a mass grave, which is horrific enough in its own right; it was actually a series of massacres in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia.

Before Finnin turned toward scholarship of language, literature, and history in Ukraine, Finnin taught at a school near Cherkasy as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer. That’s where I first met him, when I was teaching at Volyn University and then directing the Fulbright program in Kyiv. Finnin now chairs the Cambridge Committee for Russian and East European Studies.