In 1940 the NKVD executed roughly 22,000 Polish officers, intellectuals, and prisoners of war, dumping many of the bodies in mass graves in the Katyn Forest. This History Hit film traces how that atrocity grew out of the machinery Stalin built to run the Soviet terror state, following the careers of NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria and his chief executioner Vasily Blokhin, a man credibly linked to tens of thousands of killings carried out personally with a pistol. Historians walk through the purges, the show trials, and the culture of denunciation that let the NKVD operate with total impunity, then narrow in on the Katyn decision itself: the paperwork trail, the killing sites, and the decades in which the Soviet Union blamed the Nazis for a crime its own secret police had committed. Archival photographs, documents, and location footage from Poland and Russia anchor the account, and the film closes with the postwar cover-up and the slow, politically fraught process by which Katyn's true authorship became undeniable.