DANIEL McLAUGHLINvisits Katyn and Smolensk, a year after the accident that killed Lech Kaczynski
THE SNOW is melting into the soft earth and the breeze fills the forest with the scent of spring.
It stirs the tall pine trees, tugs at the black cassocks of the two priests, Catholic and Orthodox, and lifts the Polish and Russian flags flying together at Katyn.
Relations between the countries are stained by centuries of blood and bile, but one of the deepest wounds was inflicted here, and was reopened by a tragic twist of history on April 10th last year.
The Russian and Polish teenagers carrying flags and flowers through the forest are on a memorial march for more than 20,000 Poles killed by the Soviet secret police in 1940, most of them in this remote clearing 20km from the city of Smolensk. But they are also here to remember President Lech Kaczynski, his wife and 94 other Poles, whose plane plunged into fog-bound woods near Smolensk airport last April 10th, killing them all as they travelled to Katyn to mark 70 years since the massacre of Polish officers and intelligentsia.
Bitter disagreement over who was to blame for the crash – which killed a swathe of Poland’s current elite – has dashed hopes that the accident could help reconcile Poles and Russians, and threatens to make it yet another cause for mistrust and resentment between the Slavic neighbours.
For decades Moscow blamed German troops for what happened at Katyn, and though since the Soviet collapse it has periodically released files on the massacre and its leaders have expressed sympathy for Poland’s loss, Russia still refuses to fully investigate the atrocity or throw open its archives.
Russia’s tendency towards secrecy and reluctance to admit past crimes feeds Polish suspicion, and conspiracy theories have flourished around last year’s plane crash, with Kaczynski’s twin brother, Jaroslaw, and his allies among the quickest to blame Moscow for the disaster.
That this latest national tragedy happened near Katyn makes it even harder for Poles to bear. And their pain is compounded by Russia’s insistence that the crash was caused by the error of pilots who felt pressured to land in terrible conditions, and that no blame rests with air traffic controllers at Smolensk.
“We travelled by bus for two days to be here,” said Bartek, one of dozens of young Poles walking with Russians teenagers past pits where murdered Polish prisoners-of-war were buried.
“It is important for us to be here, especially after what happened last year. Hopefully, after all the problems between our countries, relations between the young generations can be better.” The sentiment was echoed by Smolensk teachers Tatiana Konyakova and Elena Bortakovskaya, whose pupils were due to meet Kaczynski on the day he was killed.
“We need to understand that this is our shared history and, though we may not agree about everything, we should sort things out peacefully,” she said.
“We just couldn’t believe the plane had crashed. But we did not think about countries or politics but about helping ordinary people. We waited for the victims’ relatives and sent a fax of condolence to Warsaw. We heard that they were amazed that such a message had come from Smolensk.”
For Poles this place is now doubly cursed by tragedy. Katyn is where Josef Stalin’s NKVD exterminated many of Poland’s best military officers, political officials, priests, doctors, lawyers, engineers and writers. By killing its elite, Stalin hoped to hobble resistance to his occupation of Poland and its permanent incorporation into the Kremlin’s empire.
The Poles fell into Soviet hands in 1939, when Stalin and Adolf Hitler pledged not to attack each other and agreed to divide Poland and the Baltic region between themselves.
In March the next year, NKVD chief Lavrenty Beria sought permission to execute 25,700 Poles as “nationalists and counter-revolutionaries . . . implacable enemies of Soviet power and full of hatred for the Soviet system . . . waiting to be freed so they can have the opportunity to actively join the fight against Soviet power”. Stalin approved his request and the executions began in early April.
More than 14,000 Poles were shot in the Katyn forest and buried layer upon layer in pits dug into the forest floor. About 7,000 of their compatriots suffered the same fate at other locations.
Katyn is only a half-hour drive from the bleak airstrip on the outskirts of Smolensk where Kaczynski’s plane came down last year. The tower at Severny airfield warned the pilots of fog but, perhaps fearing the wrath of Kaczynski, they tried to bring the jet down but missed the runway.
“The fog was really thick, you couldn’t see anything. I heard the engines as if the plane was landing, and then silence,” said Vyacheslav, an ambulance man who was on duty that day at the airport.“Nothing could be done for anyone on that plane,” he added.
Polish flags, candles and flowers surround a memorial stone to Kaczynski and the other crash victims, and a wooden cross has been erected alongside.
One message left here reads: “To the Polish patriots – victims of the plane crash on April 10th 2010, whose death overcame the historical lie told to the world about the tragedy of the Poles brutally murdered at Katyn”.
Two national tragedies, separated by 70 years and 20 kilometres. They will be forever linked for many Poles and Russians, fuelling the angry suspicion of one and the bristling defensiveness of the other.
“There is still a lack of trust between us, but perhaps the younger generation can put that right,” Smolensk official Sergei Kudryavtsev mused hopefully, as the teenagers trooped away from Katyn, Russians talking to Russians, Poles to Poles.
“If we could finally stop looking at each other as enemies,” he said, “that would be the best memorial to the victims of Katyn and that plane crash.”