People cannot be beheaded twice. But a nation can. Twice in less than a century, Poland’s elite — political, military, ministerial — came to a terrible death in the woods around Smolensk. Ordinary Poles with history in their bones can’t be blamed for fearing, on that fateful weekend, that the beheading ax was swung by the same hands.
But it was an accident. The fact that Polish president Lech Kaczynski and his retinue had flown to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, only a few kilometers away, was one of those malign coincidences that haunt Polish history. And it happened at a moment when Russia and Poland were trying, with some success, to put their long and dreadful past behind them. The spontaneous, great-hearted grief of ordinary Russian people in the days after the air crash amazed and then moved the Poles.
Maybe the old icons of hate and suspicion were losing their power at last. Even Katyn.
To understand why Katyn has been the unhealed wound between Poland and Russia, two stories need telling. One is what really happened in 1940 in that forest — and what it was part of. The other is the 60-year cover-up, the big Soviet and Russian lie which the UK and US governments at first endorsed. Grief for the dead lasts all of a life. But thirst for the truth, the pain of being lied to, burns on for generations.
Since the middle ages, when the mighty Polish Commonwealth tried to dominate the infant Russian state, Russia had regarded Poland not as a rival but as a deadly enemy. Then Poland grew weaker, between the two aggressive military tyrannies of Prussia and Russia. At the end of the 18th century, Poland was invaded and partitioned. In “Russian Poland,” in spite of desperate and unsuccessful rebellions, the Polish language, the Catholic religion and the very notion of Polish identity were persecuted. In 1918, Poland regained its independence, only to be briefly invaded by Bolshevik Russia in 1920. Stalin and Hitler looked on the revival of Poland as a criminal “abortion,” and the secret clauses of the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939 agreed on a new partition to wipe Poland off the map for ever.
Hitler invaded Poland on Sep. 1, 1939. On Sep. 17, without warning, the Soviet armies entered Poland from the east, taking the retreating Polish forces by surprise. Last year, the late president Kaczynski called this, accurately, “a stab in the back.” Thousands were taken prisoner, and eastern Poland was annexed into the Soviet Union.
Now comes a blank, a missing piece in the story. We do not know whether the Nazis and the Soviets agreed in detail on how to crush the Poles, but officers from the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB) and the Gestapo had regular meetings at Zakopane in Poland, between late 1939 and early 1940. Soon, the Germans were to launch their own “beheading” program in their part of Poland, starting with the execution of the academic staff of Krakow University and going on to target the priesthood and intellectuals.
Stalin had a double problem. In the annexed territories, the men of active age were now almost all either prisoners of war or had escaped into Romania or Hungary. That left a large civilian population composed mostly of women, children and the old. It was decided to deport the Polish civilians en masse, leaving the region to its Ukrainian and Belorussian inhabitants. The Polish families were herded into cattle trucks and sent to the labor camps of the Arctic or the barren steppes of Kazakhstan where, it was assumed, they would either die out or mature into loyal Soviet citizens. The figures aren’t certain, but the deportees seem to have numbered about 1.25 million. Two years later, only about 800,000 were still alive.
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