One of the worst days for Poland is rapidly becoming one of its greatest.
The country's president, its armed forces' chiefs of staff, and its National Bank President, along with many more high state officials--the core members of Poland's governing elite--lost their lives on Saturday morning. Much of the media attention has been on the destination of the presidential visit: the commemoration of the Katyn massacre in 1940. On Stalin’s orders the Soviet NKVD executed nearly 20,000 Polish Army officers (who were also key members of the educational, professional, and administrative elite). The Soviets long denied their responsibility for the massacres, and the issue had long been a major obstacle in Polish-Russian relations. And just as these relations were experiencing a period of warming and mutual concessions, Katyn has claimed more Polish losses. In an obscene irony, family members of Katyn victims were among those killed Saturday, as was Anna Walentynowicz, the crane operator whose firing led to the mobilization of Solidarity in 1980, and the eventual collapse of the communist regime in Poland in 1989. This has led to rampant speculation as to the effect of the crash on Polish-Russian relations (see here, here, and here).
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