I have written extensively on this site about what the Katyn Massaces represents for Poland, for Russia, for Europe – and for civilisation. Type Katyn into the site’s Search function and get the links.

See for example this extract from my final FCO telegram, sent to London from Warsaw as I drove towards the border for the last time as Ambassador:

The days trickle into months and years. It all gets … difficult. Complicated. Memories fade.

Thus people who slyly presided over or benefited from the communist system are feted as modern European social democrats. Jewish, Polish and other victims of communism who had their property stolen or heroically refused to cooperate appeal to European institutions for justice, and often leave empty-handed. We prosecute elderly Nazis for their crimes. Elderly Communists go free…

… Do Al Qaeda and Hamas look at how Stalin got away with mass murder at Katyn, and think that by being viciously determined enough they can do the same? Do they expect the sheer intensity of their hatred of our pluralism to overwhelm our readiness to defend it? That they too can bring us to Submit?

How might we measure if they are succeeding?

The sheer scale of the Katyn murders ordered personally by Stalin with the endorsement of the top Soviet leadership – and carried out single-mindedly by world champion killer Vasili Blokhin – is hard to grasp.

Look at the numbers.

Some 22,000 Polish prisoners were murdered at Katyn and other sites in 1940. Assume (conservatively) that each Pole had a friends and family circle of (say) 100 people. That means that 2,200,000 Poles knew someone killed at Katyn, which in turn means that almost every Polish family either lost a friend or relative at Katyn or knew someone who did.

This latest tragedy is on a far smaller scale. But given the public roles and seniority of so many people involved, the numbers rise fast here too.

If (conservatively) each crash victim knew professionally or privately 500 people, 45,000 people will feel directly touched by the disaster. Again, most Poles either will know someone killed in the crash, or know someone who knows someone who knows someone who died.

Hence Poland’s national grief, all the more intense since it evokes all those appalling memories of Katyn itself.

Returning to Katyn.

Let’s do our best and try to have some sympathy for today’s Russian leaders. They preside over a huge, rich country, run into the ground by seventy years of stupid collectivist brutality. Most Russians feel pride in the titanic sacrifices made by their parents and grandparents in the Second World War.

How to put Katyn in some sort of modern honest context without calling into question so many other aspects of Stalin’s rule and perhaps risking calling into question the sprawling Russian state itself?

A key issue is opening the archives once and for all, if only to reveal the precise chains of command and ascertain which Soviet officials and secret police personnel actually did the killings.

President Yeltsin made big strides in that direction. See this fascinating article by a Russian historian and Katyn expert Natalia Lebedeva on the work done in Russia to explain it all.

Poland of course insists that there are many issues still left unclear, and more papers to be published.

Part of Russia’s official defensiveness on this question has centred on categorising the massacre. It obviously was a war crime, if not the war crime. Natalia Lebedeva:

One of these later books was “The Katyn Syndrome” (“The Katyn Syndrome in Soviet-Polish and Russian-Polish Relations” in Russian), co-authored by Anatoly Yablokov, the prosecutor in charge of the Soviet, and then Russian, Katyn investigation from August 1990 to June 1994.

His group classified the Katyn execution as a crime against peace, a war crime and a crime against humanity, in accordance with Clauses A, B and C of Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal for the Nuremberg Trials.

However, the Military Prosecutor’s Office later reversed the ruling, calling the tragedy an “abuse of power that resulted in grave consequences,” if we are to believe the press. I consider this definition inadequate and have openly expressed my disagreement, including in my book, “Katyn: A Crime Against Humanity.”

Should that be conceded by Moscow? Would that open the way to legal action, claims for reparations, clamour about other Soviet WW2 excesses, and so on?

In recent years Russian leader Putin has played hardball on Katyn and Russian/Polish relations, partly in response to unrelenting (and unsubtle) public pressure on the question by President Kaczynski.

Probably the culmination of this approach was Putin’s ‘Letter to Poles’ sent last year on the eve of the commemorations in Gdansk of the start of World War Two, which I analysed here:

The people of Russia, whose destiny was crippled by the totalitarian regime, fully understand the sensitiveness of Poles about Katyn where thousands of Polish servicemen lie. Together we must keep alive the memory of the victims of this crime.

Message:  be very grateful, sensitive Poland, for our liberating you, even though we murdered and imprisoned thousands of Poles to do so. And let’s remember the victims of the Katyn crime. But let’s not talk about the criminals who committed it.

Katyn and Mednoye memorials, just as the tragic fate of the Russian soldiers taken prisoners in Poland during the 1920 war, should become symbols of common grief and mutual pardon.

Message:  you have your massacre victims, Poland – we have ours. No double standards. OK?

Yet in recent weeks, perhaps because Putin saw Lech Kaczynski’s poor ratings and wanted to send a signal to his less strident Polish political rivals in Poland’s Presidential election year, the Moscow tone had softened. Putin and Polish PM Donald Tusk together stood at a commemorative event only last week.

Now the scale and horror of the Smolensk plane crash has pushed Russia’s relations with Poland in a quite new direction.

While Internet conspiracy theorists on all sides are raving away, most Poles seem impressed by and grateful for the way the Russians have been managing the disaster, not least in extending great generosity to Polish families travelling to Russia for the grim task of identifying bodies.

President Medvedev has sent a powerful message of condolence to the people of Poland promising the closest cooperation with the Polish authorities in establishing the cause of the crash.

And the human sympathy and solidarity shown by Putin himself when he and PM Tusk laid wreaths at the crash site has made a powerful impression in Poland: 

Perhaps most remarkably, Russian TV has now shown the harrowing film Katyn by Andrzej Wajda twice, bringing home to millions of Russians for the first time the scale of this Stalinist villainy and violence.

Is all this disinterested sympathy by the Russian elite?

Of course not. The Russian side have perhaps been just a bit too quick (even insensitive?) publicly to put all blame for the crash on the Polish pilots, as if to stake out up front an immoveable position that neither the ageing Soviet-era Presidential aircraft nor any Russian factors on the ground played any contributory part.

Plus, more generally, the moving images of tough Russian Putin comforting a distressed Polish Tusk suit the Russians’ view of themselves as the Father of All Slavs. They send out strong signals of pan-Slavic solidarity which (in effect) offer an important rival vision to European integration on the EU’s terms (led by Germany) alone.

So be it.

Huge historic ‘open’ themes in Polish/Russian relations go back centuries. They need such symbolic gestures of public and personal solidarity and reconciliation if they are to be shifted in a less confrontational direction.

Moscow looks to doing a magnificent job – both the countries concerned and Europe as a whole will benefit if that is carried through into a joint and uncontested official assessment of the cause of the crash, which in turn could open the way to a Big New Start.

Or something gets contested about the crash, bitter disagreements and recriminations break out – and it all spirals the other way.

I’ll be optimistic this time. Lech Kaczynski would have wanted that upward path, as long as it was done properly and respectfully.