WARSAW, September 11 - RAPSI. The grandson of Joseph Stalin, Evgeny Dzhugashvili, requested that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) include him in the Katyn trial so that he could defend his grandfather, but his application was turned down, Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza reported on Tuesday.

More than 20,000 Polish officers, police and civilians imprisoned during the 1939 partition of Poland by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were executed in Katyn, near the western Russian city of Smolensk.

The relatives of the Katyn massacre victims filed an appeal with the ECHR Grand Chamber against the April court ruling with regard to the investigation of the Katyn case in Russia. When accepting the appeal, the ECHR agreed that Russia did not properly investigate the circumstances behind the executions and that it did not provide a due response to the applicants.

Stalin's grandson wanted to take part in the trial in order to prove that his grandfather was not involved in the deaths of the Polish citizens.

Evgeny Dzhugashvili previously requested the Russian Main Military Prosecutor's Office to resume the proceedings under the Katyn case, which was pending with the office from 1990 to 2004. In a statement issued in April, Dzhugashvili stated that the ECHR "established that his grandfather Joseph Stalin was guilty of the Katyn crime" in its April ruling on the case of "Janowiec and Others v. Russia" based on documents Russia handed over to Poland.

The Soviet authorities placed the blame for the Katyn massacre on the Nazis, saying the crime took place in 1941 when the territory was occupied by German troops. However, Mikhail Gorbachev formally admitted in 1990 that the executions were carried out by the Commissariat for Internal Affairs in 1940.

In the 1990s, Russia handed over copies of documents to Poland from top-secret File No. 1, which squarely placed the blame on the Soviet Union. Last November, the Duma approved a resolution recognizing the massacre as a crime committed by Stalin's regime.