Probably apocryphal is the story that Warsaw tram-conductors used to sing out: “Katyn forest!” as the tram stopped by the Palace of Culture, Stalin’s monstrous “gift to the Polish people.” But awareness of this great lie remained the regime’s Achilles heel. I never met a communist official in Poland whose eyes did not flinch when I mentioned Katyn.
During the Cold War, the West changed its mind and enthusiastically added Katyn to its stock of anti-communist ammunition. But even as the Cold War came to an end, Mikhail Gorbachev was remarkably reluctant to come clean, admitting Soviet responsibility but implying that the NKVD chief Beria had acted on his own, without state authority. It was his successor Boris Yeltsin, knowing that Gorbachev had taken secret files with him when he left the Kremlin, who forced him to surrender the key document: Stalin’s unambiguous order to shoot the Poles.
In 1992 Yeltsin went to Warsaw and handed the document to then Polish president Lech Walesa. He knelt to kiss the wreath at the Katyn Memorial, and then promised to pay reparations and punish the surviving murderers. Neither promise has been kept.
But Russian-Polish relations have warmed in the past couple of years. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has said that he wants freedom “from the ghosts of the past.” The Smolensk air crash, like a terrible human sacrifice to end an ancient clan feud, has released a passion for reconciliation between the two peoples.
Will it last? The sources of suspicion remain: Russia’s scheming with Germany “behind Poland’s back,” Poland’s interest in drawing Ukraine westwards, Russian paranoia about Poland’s role in NATO and its taste for US missiles. Russian nationalists, who don’t do apologies, will go on denying Katyn. Yet the Polish and Russian governments now have a chance to exploit the new mood, confess to those suspicions and launch a program to defuse them. Then the second blood sacrifice at Katyn will not have been in vain.
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