Poles know their neighbor well, and Kaczyński had no illusions about Vladimir Putin’s thuggish regime. Covered up by the Kremlin until after the Cold War (with help from the incurious West), Katyń lingers as an unhealed wound in the Polish psyche the sudden death of so much of the country’s leadership on the way to that site of national martyrdom was too much for some Poles to bear.įrom the outset, right-wing allies of the fallen president smelled a rat-a Russian rat, that is. To make matters even more painful, President Kaczyński and his entourage died en route to a commemoration at Katyń, the forest in western Russia where, in the spring of 1940, Stalin’s secret police murdered 22,000 Polish military officers captured by the Soviets when they carved up Poland with Adolf Hitler the previous September. Among the dead were President Lech Kaczyński and his wife, much of the president’s staff, 18 parliamentarians, 10 generals and admirals representing Poland’s top military leadership, and many other political notables. Although other crashes have claimed more victims-the death toll at Smolensk came to 96, all those aboard the doomed ship plus seven crew-those lost were the elite of Poland’s government. The crash of a Polish Air Force Tu-154 airliner near the Russian city of Smolensk on Apstands as the most momentous air disaster in modern times. Soldiers carry the coffin of late Polish President Lech Kazcynski at a memorial service on Apin Krakow, Poland.
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