MOSCOW, April 12 (UPI) -- A Moscow court Thursday tossed a libel lawsuit by Joseph Stalin's grandson over a general's claim Stalin was responsible for the 1940 Katyn massacre of Poles.
The former Soviet dictator's grandson, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, filed the suit against a Federal Security Service officer, Lt.-Gen. Vasiliy Khristoforov, RIA Novosti reported.
Khristoforov, the head of the Security Service's archive documents department, said during a scientific conference in November Stalin had ordered the Katyn massacre, in which more than 20,000 Polish army officers, police officers and civilians were killed by Soviet secret police, the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev admitted in 1990 the executions in Russia's Katyn Forest occurred about 1940 and were carried out by the secret police.
In the 1990s, Russia turned over documents to Poland that put the blame for the massacre on the Soviet Union, and the lower house of Russia's Parliament, the State Duma, last year approved a declaration recognizing the Katyn massacre as a crime committed by Stalin's regime.
