The memorial complex is located 20 kilometres from the centre of Smolensk in a wooded area where citizens of two countries, the USSR and Poland were executed. Burials of Soviet citizens shot in Smolensk were made there, it is assumed, from the late 1920s onwards. In spring 1940 more than 4,000 Polish prisoners of war were shot and buried in the woods of Katyn. They were captured in September 1939 when the Soviet Union occupied the eastern territories of Poland and confined to the camp in Kozelsk. The remains of the Polish officers were first exhumed in 1943 when the forces of the Third Reich occupied that part of the USSR. After the end of the Second World War the Katyn woods were closed to outside visitors.

In 1988 the USSR Council of ministers adopted a resolution, “On the building in Katyn, Smolensk Region, of a memorial complex on the burial place of Polish officers and also a monument to Soviet POWs who died during the Great Patriotic War”. In 1990 Russia (the RSFSR) admitted that the Polish officers had been shot by the NKVD. Exhumation of their remains took place in 1990 and again in 1994-1995. A list was compiled of 4,413 Polish POWs who were buried in the Katyn woods. The burials of Soviet citizens were selectively studied in 1995 and 1998; as of 2015 a full investigation of the entire territory had not been conducted. Authoritative evidence of the number of Soviet citizens interred in the woods has not been found: documents refer to “more than 6,000 victims of Stalinist repression”.

Work on the memorial began after an agreement between the Russian and Polish governments was signed in Krakow on 22 February 1994 about burials and memorial sites of the victims of war and repression [in Russia]. The RF Ministry of Culture and the Polish Council were joint organisers and investors in the construction. Work on the memorial began in 1999 and it was opened on 28 July 2000. It combines a Polish military cemetery and the burials of Soviet victims of political repression. A complex of ritual and architectural structures has been created on the site. Further work on the Russian part of the memorial was halted and there was discussion of the development of still unstudied mass burials of Soviet citizens in the Katyn woods. The complex also includes an exhibition centre (opened in 2008) and a reconstruction of “the Gulag on wheels” (opened in 2007).

See also the Mednoe memorial complex [69-04] in the Tver Region.

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As of December 2021 the Katyn Memorial Complex was downgraded on the RF Ministry of Culture’s Unified Register of Sites of Cultural Heritage from a monument of federal importance to one of regional significance; as in the years before 1988 it was again described as the place where the “Hitlerites” murdered thousands of Polish army officers.