Remembering Katyn
Last week was a remarkable week in Polish politics, not because of any resolution to the "will-he, won't-he run" saga of Marian Krzaklewski's presidential bid, but because of something rather more important: President Aleksander Kwasniewski's decision to publicly apologize for the decades-long cover-up on the part of communist authorities concerning the truth about the murder of 21,000 Polish officers at Katyn during World War II.
Casual visitors to Poland are probably unaware of the tremendous significance the Katyn massacre holds for Poles. Those murdered were officers and justice and administration personnel captured by the Soviet Union when it invaded Poland in 1939 two weeks after Hitler's assault from the west. The captured men were the flower of pre-war Polish intelligentsia and aristocracy, and represented a threat to Stalin in the event that Poland was ever liberated from the Germans and Soviet rule was imposed on the country. In the spring of 1940, on Stalin's orders, these men were taken by former Soviet security police troops (NKVD) from their POW camps in the forests near Smolensk and shot one by one in the back of the head. Their bodies lie in graves in three areas: Katyn itself; Russia; and Miednoje and Kharkiv, both now in Ukraine.
When the Germans, by that time already retreating from Soviet troops, came across the graves in 1943, they announced their discovery of the atrocity to the world. At the time, and for the subsequent 50 years, the Soviet Union deliberately lied to the Poles and the outside world, denying all responsibility and pinning the blame on the Germans. Yet the forensic and historical evidence was clear. The Katyn massacre was a communist crime, by no means the worst committed in the 70 years of that ideology's rule, but perhaps one of the most perfidious.
The Soviets were aided and abetted in their "Katyn denial" by the Polish communist authorities after 1945, who also spun the story that the Germans were to blame. For almost 45 years, any public discussion of Katyn was taboo, and those who sought to publish the truth in underground publications, or samizdat, were hounded and arrested. Also party to the conspiracy of lies were many Western governments concerned about putting detente and relations with the Soviet Union first. The behavior of the British government was particularly shameful in this regard; its ministers continued to make statements in the House of Commons parroting the Soviet line right up to the 1970s. Only when Margaret Thatcher came to power did the official line change.
Although it took the Soviets until 1990 to acknowledge responsibility, and although there were half-hearted attempts during the 1980s to broach the subject in the official Polish media, Polish communists never saw fit to take responsibility for their participation in the crime of forgetting the truth about Katyn. Kwasniewski's statements last week go further than ever before in accepting that responsibility, although some political opponents were wondering why the acknowledgement came 10 full years after it became politically possible to do so, even for communists. It would be churlish to suggest, as his opponents did last week, that the president's sudden conversion to historical truth has anything to do with his presidential election campaign later this year. Together with his upcoming visit to the Pope in two weeks' time, Kwasniewski is skillfully disarming those political opponents who will want to paint him as a communist cynic in the campaign battle.
But the memory of Katyn, as well as the experience of half a century of cover-ups on both sides of the Iron Curtain does give pause for wider reflection. It is proof if any more needed be produced of the fact that communism, like Nazism, was an ideology rooted in the theory of progress through extermination, in this case of class rather than race opponents. It also begs the question as to why it has not been possible to establish that lying about the responsibility of communism for millions of deaths is on par with denying the Holocaust. Western politics, especially in France, is riddled with politicians who routinely deny past communist crimes, and besmirch those who seek to write about them, without any public or official reaction.
Above all, even the words of Aleksander Kwasniewski last week cannot hide the sad fact that it is only words that have been spoken, if at all, about Katyn. No former British minister or official of a Western government has apologized for participating in a Soviet-led cover-up. No former Polish communist censor or propagandist has personally come forward to atone for his part in the lie. And no Soviet NKVD officer or communist has ever been brought to trial for the massacre in the new "democratic" Russia. While former Nazis and Holocaust deniers are still rightly being brought to book, Poles continue to wait for justice over Katyn.
Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director@cec.com.pl
