Poland has suffered more than is any country’s right. Its story is one of repeated occupations, partitions and tyrannies. Seventy years ago, almost to the day, 21,768 Polish army officers, intellectuals and senior civil servants were murdered by the Soviet NKVD in the forest near Katyn: an attempt by Stalin to decapitate Poland by liquidating its elite. For years, the crime went unacknowledged: Western governments, reluctant to face up to the reality of the regime to which they had allied themselves, went along with the pretence that the massacre had been carried out by the Nazis.
This morning, a few miles from Katyn, another decapitation occurred. A Russian plane crashed near Smolensk, carrying the President of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, his wife Maria, and dozens of senior Polish officials. They were on their way to a memorial ceremony at the site of the Katyn atrocity, for which Russia finally admitted responsibility in 1990.
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