2 Zlotys Katyń, Miednoje, Charków 1940 Massacres

Issued fifty-five years after Soviet NKVD units executed approximately 22,000 Polish military officers, police, and intellectuals across three sites in spring 1940, this coin appeared just six years after the USSR formally acknowledged responsibility — an admission extracted only under Gorbachev in 1990, after decades of Moscow blaming the killings on Nazi Germany. Poland had been pressing the question since 1943, when German forces discovered the Katyń mass graves and the Soviet denial became official policy for half a century.