IN AMONG the birch and pine trees of the Katyn forests of Smolensk lie the bodies of thousands of dead, anonymous victims of Stalin’s brutality. Specifically honouring the 20,000 Polish offiicers massacred there 70 years ago, Vladimir Putin on Wednesday became the first Russian prime minister to admit the role of his predecessor’s secret police in the killings. In doing so he took a significant step, as Polish prime minsiter Donald Tusk acknowledged at the joint ceremony, towards patching up the tense relationship between the two countries.
But in also drawing attention to the many Russian casualties of the purges who also lie there Putin carefully sidestepped the necessity for what many Poles believe is overdue, an official apology. “In this ground lay Soviet citizens burnt in the fire of the Stalinist repression of the 1930s; Polish officers shot on secret orders; soldiers of the Red Army executed by the Nazis,” he argued.
Mr Putin, who has yet to sanction full access to the files to Polish historians, condemned the “cynical lies that have blurred the truth about the Katyn shootings” – notably, of course, Russian insistance for half a century on Nazi responsibility. But he insisted that “it would also be a lie and a manipulation to place the blame for these crimes on the Russian people.”
That the Russian government should not want to shoulder responsibility for the crimes of the Stalinist era is understandable, but Mr Putin’s words will strike many Poles as deeply disingenuous. His own political power base rests on his articulation of a strong Russian nationalism that is busy reclaiming the country’s “glorious” history from the “foreign” naysayers. In the process it has played on deeply ambivalent attitudes to Stalin’s role among many citizens.
His government has sponsored history textbooks describing Stalin as “the most successful Soviet leader ever” and an “efficient manager”, and Mr Putin, told history teachers in 2007 that “all sorts of things happen in the history of every state. And we cannot allow ourselves to be saddled with guilt . . .” He has brought Soviet flags and songs back into public life. And although he has often expressed sorrow over Stalin’s victims Mr Putin has also described the destruction of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
As the Russian historian Mikhail Gefter once wrote, it is no good blaming everything on Stalin, when the real power and legacy of his reign of terror was “in the Stalinism that entered into all of us.” Mr Putin, included.