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The world has witnessed this past week pictures of thousands of Poles congregating in the streets of their cities, heaping flowers and candles on impromptu monuments and weeping uncharacteristically openly in public. The news indeed has been grim, but was President Lech Kaczynski some sort of Jack Kennedy to warrant this nationwide outpouring of grief? Would a similar tragedy involving the Joint Chiefs of Staff bring teary-eyed Americans into the streets?
President Kaczynski was actually a controversial figure in Poland and abroad. Indeed, plans for his entombment in Wawel fortress chapel in Cracow, the historic seat of medieval Poland's royalty, has provoked an outcry from some of his political opponents. So what is behind the huge national reaction to this plane crash?
Most news sources have mentioned the reason for the trip: ceremonies being held at the site of a World War II-era massacre of some 22,000 Polish POWs by their Soviet captors near the modern western Russian city of Smolensk. That earlier tragedy, which took place in 1939-1941 when Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were allies and accomplices in the 1939 destruction of Poland, is still today an unresolved source of friction between Poland and Russia. Indeed, it played a role in this week's tragedy; Polish prime minister Donald Tusk had agreed to attend a ceremony with Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin last Wednesday, but Polish president Kaczynski had refused to attend that ceremony as the Kremlin still refuses to fully open its archives on the 1940 Katyn massacre to historians. President Kaczynski was on his way to separate commemorative ceremonies at Katyn this past weekend (not attended by Russian officials) when the plane crashed.
But there is much more to this tragedy still. The very ground on which the president's plane crashed is soaked with the blood of Poles and Russians who, in the 16th and 17th centuries, fought one another in countless savage battles for control of Smolensk. But the memories of medieval struggles did not bring Poles into the streets this week; it is the national sense of loss, of having lost again. Medieval Poland enjoyed its successes but modern Poland's history has been somewhat less prosaic, and in 19th century Poland, Russian and German occupiers repeatedly imprisoned, exiled or executed the country's political and cultural elites in a bid to decapitate any resistance and indeed when the country was reborn in 1918, it desperately lacked trained and educated leaders to organize the country. Poland's ruler at the beginning of World War II, Jozef Beck, died in a Romanian internment camp in 1944 after escaping the joint Nazi-Soviet onslaught. The Polish prime minister for the government-in-exile in London during World War II, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, died -- along with his daughter, his chief of staff and several government members -- in a mysterious plane crash off Gibraltar in 1943 at a time when he was strongly opposing Soviet territorial demands, to the open chagrin of both London and Washington. Conspiracy theories about Sikorski's death abound among Poles, and by coincidence, a popular Polish TV network had showed a conspiracy-laden film about Sikorski over the Easter weekend. Sikorski's successor, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, tried to return to Soviet-occupied Poland after the war to participate in elections but after widespread fraud by the communists and threats from the Soviet NKVD (the 1940s-era KGB), Mikolajczyk had to flee for his life. During the years of Soviet-imposed communist rule in Poland, the government-in-exile continued in London. The last president of the Polish government-in-exile, Ryszard Kaczorowski, resigned his office in December, 1990 after turning over the pre-war seals of office to Lech Walesa, the first freely-elected president of the country since the 1920s. Kaczorowski was among the 96 victims on the plane with President Kaczynski this past weekend.
So while Poles may differ on how they evaluate Kaczynski as a politician, and though all indications at this point are that this was just a tragic accident, his death this weekend has opened old wounds, old wounds in a country all too familiar with tragedy.
