An accident of history

The Smolensk plane crash wiped out much of Poland's political and military elite and brought the
Soviet massacre at Katyn back into focus. Can this new tragedy heal old wounds?

A human being 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, last weekend, that the
beheading axe was swung by the same hands.

But it was an accident. The fact that President Lech Kaczynski and his retinue had flown to
commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, only a few miles 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 British and American 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 1 September 1939. On 17 September, 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" programme in their part of Poland,
starting with the execution of the academic staff of Kraków 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 labour 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 around 1.25 million.
Two years later, only about 800,000 were still alive.

This left the question of the 14,700 prisoners of war, and of the 11,000 Poles held in prisons
because they were judges, intellectuals, landowners or police officers. Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria,
head of the NKVD, were quite right to see that their very existence ensured that somewhere, some
day, a free and anti-Soviet Poland would resurrect itself. Stalin decided to kill them all,
immediately.

Astonishingly, the order itself has survived. It is a four-page document, signed in pencil by Stalin,
with the signatures of Voroshilov, Molotov, Mikoyan, Kalinin and Kaganovich underneath.

It reads in part: "In the NKVD camps for war prisoners and in prisons … is currently detained a
large number of ex-officers of the Polish army, ex-members of the Polish police and intelligence
services, members of Polish nationalist and counter-revolutionary parties, members of organisations
exposed as counter-revolutionary and insurrectionist, fugitives and others. All are persistent
enemies of Soviet power, and full of hatred for the Soviet outlook … To be treated in the special
mode with the application in their case of the ultimate measure of punishment – shooting."

The order is dated 5 March 1940. In April, the executioners began their work, and Beria went on to
kill many thousands of other Poles in other parts of the Soviet Union. The main killings were done
in three different locations. The prisoners of war from the Kozielsk camp were killed at Smolensk
or in Katyn forest and buried there. Those from Ostashkino were shot at Tver (buried at Mednoye);
those from Starobielsk in Kharkov (buried at Piatykhatky). Decades later, this mass grave was
found by children playing with dozens of Polish army buttons.

The NKVD killers handcuffed their victims or tied their hands behind their backs with wire, then
shot them in the back of the head. At Katyn, the dying Poles fell into a huge trench dug by
bulldozers in the forest. In Tver, they were pushed one by one into a soundproof room and shot,
their bodies shoved through a hatch into the back of a truck outside. The NKVD men found it hard
work because of the sheer numbers. The department's champion executioner, Vassily Mikhailovich
Blokhin, said he killed 6,000 men in 28 days.

Was it genocide? Of course. It was not the extermination of an entire ethnic group, on the scale of
the Jewish Holocaust or Rwanda. But it was the selective, deliberate murder of a nation's elite, with
the intention of castrating its political and creative energy for the future.

Measured in numbers, other horrors of the time outscale Katyn. In German-occupied Poland, some
5.4 million people died in camps or mass executions, 3 million of them Jews. Nazi policy towards
the main Polish population at first resembled the "beheading" tactic favoured by Stalin, but later
widened into indiscriminate slaughter. Again, the Polish death toll caused by the NKVD's civilian
deportations in 1940-41 was perhaps 10 times that of Katyn. And yet the crime of Katyn retains a
special foulness all its own. It was a true atrocity, in every shade of the word's meaning.

Why is this so? In the first place, because of its black treachery, beginning with the secret clauses of
the Nazi-Soviet pact and ending in the betrayal of helpless men who assumed they had the
protection granted to prisoners of war. But the second reason for Katyn's lasting infamy, for the way
its pain refuses to be anaesthetised by time, is the lie under which it was buried.
The lying began almost at once. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, the Poles
imprisoned and enslaved there were "amnestied" (as if they had committed a crime) and allowed to
form the nucleus of an army. Soon it became clear that thousands of prisoners of war, mostly
officers, were missing. Stalin affected surprise when General Sikorski, the Polish exile leader, told
him so. "That's impossible. They have fled … To Manchuria, for instance."

In July 1941, the advancing Germans reached Smolensk. It was not until 1943 that a Russian
peasant led them to the nearby Katyn woods, where they found mass graves containing the bodies
of more than 4,000 Polish officers. Their uniform pockets still contained letters and papers whose
final dates were in April 1940. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, grabbed his
opportunity. The continent's media and an "international forensic commission" were summoned to
witness the exhumations. Nazi propaganda trumpeted the evidence of a "bestial Bolshevik crime".

The impact was devastating and, as Goebbels had intended, shook the whole anti-Hitler alliance.
Sikorski's government in London demanded an International Red Cross inquiry. Moscow retorted
furiously that Katyn was a German atrocity, and in July broke off relations with the Polish
government. The Allied reaction was mixed. The British public, admiring the Russians as "our
gallant ally", were inclined to believe them. The British government, including Churchill, privately
assumed that the USSR was guilty, but moved harshly to suppress anybody who said so in public.
When the eccentric poet Count Potocki de Montalk sold his own Katyn Manifesto around London,
he was immediately arrested and imprisoned. In the US, where President Roosevelt genuinely
believed Katyn was a German crime, reports demonstrating Soviet guilt were being suppressed as
late as 1945.

The Poles, however, knew the truth and made themselves unpopular by trying to tell it. Even Polish
Communists were secretly disgusted by the 1944 Soviet "Burdenko commission", which used
planted evidence and dummy witnesses to "prove" Nazi responsibility. In 1948, Soviet prosecutors
shamelessly added Katyn to the indictment against Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg tribunal.

The leaders of the postwar Polish Communist regime, like all their unwilling subjects, knew
perfectly well what had happened. But they criminalised all mention of Katyn except as a Nazi war
crime. This did not stop Polish people from erecting "Katyn crosses" in the cemeteries on All Souls'
Day, or prevent teachers whispering to their pupils that they shouldn't believe the official version of
who had murdered the flower of Poland's officers. 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 Beria had acted on
his own, without state authority. It was his successor Boris Yeltsin, knowing 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 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. Vladimir Putin has said 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 American 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 programme to defuse them. Then the second blood
sacrifice at Katyn will not have been in vain.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/17/smolensk-crash-katyn-accident-of-history