Abstract
Taking theoretical cues from the respective works of Jan and Aleida Assmann and Dan Diner, this article has two fundamentally linked goals: to historicize Polish cultural memory of Katyń, emplotting it within a narrative arc encompassing the seven decades separating 1943 from 2015; and to identify individual and collective agency within the history of Polish memory of Katyń. Certainly, the word “Katyń” exists variously as toponym, as metonym, as rallying cry. Yet the historical narratives anchored in that word are the outcomes of actions taken by concrete actors—individuals, states, social movements, international institutions. Although this article takes seriously the many theoretical frameworks undergirding the academic study of collective memory, its principal focus is the balance of historical contingency and structure that has constituted discrete, identifiable episodes of both commemorating and forgetting.
Memory of Katyń should be present in our public debates, our culture, our consciences, and our hearts. This memory is our responsibility. The heroic behavior of the Polish officers who paid the highest price for being Polish is an integral part of our national identity that determines our historical sensibilities. Of crucial importance are initiatives that recover memory of the victims.
The process of converting crimes by a regime into crimes against an ethnic collective becomes strikingly clear in the case of Poland. On the basis of a geopolitical location between Germany and Russia and an associated—tragic—history, two types of suffering have fused in Polish memory: a suffering caused by regimes perceived as totalitarian; and a suffering that stems from the oppression of the Poles as a nation. Consequently, with national interpretation of the Katyn massacre drowning out its significance as a state crime committed by Stalin, its recollection has remained vivid to the present day, keeping Poland ever vigilant toward Russia.
To what does the word “Katyń” refer? 3 Traditionally, historians have taken it to carry several different meanings at once: a forest near the Russian city of Smolensk where officers of the Soviet Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) massacred with shots to the back of the head more than 4,400 Polish officers in the spring of 1940; 4 the sum-total of such massacres of Polish prisoners committed by the NKVD in the spring of 1940 pursuant to two orders by NKVD chief Lavrentii Beria, issued respectively on 5 and 22 March 1940, with the total number of victims estimated at 21,857; 5 and, finally, the example par excellence of collective traumas experienced by the Polish nation—not only in the twentieth century but also before, throughout the long history of Poland’s imperial domination by Russia and other neighboring empires. 6
Since 10 April 2010, the word “Katyń”—despite the vehement objections of many of the descendants of victims of the 1940 massacres—has become associated also with the tragic plane crash outside Smolensk that claimed the lives of all ninety-six members of the Polish presidential delegation traveling to Katyń to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the massacres. These included President Lech Kaczyński, his wife Maria, Polish parliamentary and military leaders, and the principal activists of the movement devoted to commemorating Katyń.
Aleida Assmann has suggested that the past century has marked the culmination of a transformation in human culture by which living memory “gives way to a cultural memory that is underpinned by media—by material carriers such as memorials, monuments, museums, and archives.” As a result, “new forms of memory are reconstructed within a transgenerational framework, and on an institutional level, within a deliberate policy of remembering or forgetting. There is no self-organization and self-regulation of cultural memory—it always depends on personal decisions and selections, on institutions and media.” 7 In exploring the trajectory of the Katyń Massacres in Poland’s historical imaginary from mere communication—the everyday acts of individuals passing along stories—to culture, this article embraces the idea of “cultural memory” as knowledge “that obtains through generations in repeated societal practice and initiation.” 8
Since the discovery of the Katyń Forest Massacre site in 1943, a distinctive Polish memory of Katyń has developed through a feedback process whereby simple acts of communication have combined and assumed a more durable form as narratives of martyrdom and heroism, of criminality and mendacity, and of seventy years’ worth of efforts by individuals and groups alike to institutionalize commemorative practices. The result is a complex narrative tapestry informed by ideology, politics, psychology, and sociology, at the very heart of problems of national identity that have plagued Poland and Poles since the Second World War. 9
From its inception, the scholarly historiography, too, has faced the dilemma of how to examine Katyń on its own terms while acknowledging the massacres’ entanglement in a Polish cultural memory of two totalitarianisms and the resultant struggle against the effacement of national identity. 10 The heart of the historiography of Katyń has embraced these tropes, taking as a given the evils of communism and the heroism of the self-understood Polish nation. 11 Meanwhile, the most recent works on memory of Katyń tend to treat it as a figure of purely anthropological or discursive analysis, without a discrete narrative of that memory’s construction since the moment when knowledge of the massacres—however fragmentary—first reached Poles.
This article has two fundamentally linked goals: to historicize Polish cultural memory of Katyń, tracing its narrative arc over the seven decades separating 1943 from 2015, and to identify individual and collective agency within the history of Polish memory of Katyń. Certainly, the word “Katyń” exists variously as toponym, 12 as metonym, as rallying cry. Yet the historical narratives anchored in that word are the outcomes of actions taken by concrete actors—individuals, states, social movements, international institutions. Although this article takes seriously the many theoretical frameworks undergirding the academic study of collective memory, its principal focus is the balance of historical contingency and structure that has constituted discrete, identifiable episodes of both commemorating and forgetting. Preliminary attempts have been made at understanding Katyń as a transnational discourse punctuated by “memory events”—a category at the crossroads of anthropology and discourse analysis. Yet this article is the first scholarly study to attempt a comprehensive review of the history of Polish memory of Katyń, beginning with the massacres themselves and ending five years into the fallout from 2010’s so-called Katyń #2. 13
In a May 2010 Polish survey, 71 percent of respondents suggested that “the chances of a definitive explanation of the conditions of the Katyń Crime of 1940” had increased since the crash—one month earlier—of the Polish president’s plane just outside of Smolensk. 14 Five years after the crash, “Katyń” remains a rallying cry within mainstream Polish politics, though it more frequently stands in for the 2010 crash than for the massacres of Polish officers seven decades earlier. However, it is subject to the same exigencies as before the 2010 crash: education of society through ongoing research that minimizes national prejudices and ideological and political aspects alike in favor of a perspective better informed by scholarly knowledge and ethical understanding.
The Katyń Massacres
When the Red Army invaded Poland on 17 September 1939, pursuant to the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939, it took into custody as prisoners of war nearly 240,000 Poles, including soldiers, border guards, and state functionaries. 15 These Poles had received orders from their respective superiors to submit to the Soviet authorities without resistance. Non-officers—aside from those accused of “political crimes”—were soon released. Thereafter, there remained 21,857 prisoners in three POW camps (Kozelsk, Starobelsk, and Ostashkov) and multiple prisons scattered across the newly acquired western territories of the Soviet Ukrainian and Belorussian Republics. These prisoners were either military officers, border guards, or so-called “political” prisoners.
Between September 1939 and March 1940, the NKVD based in these territories focused its attention on these prisoners, interrogating them systematically. On 5 March 1940, NKVD chief Lavrentii Beria ordered NKVD officers to kill those prisoners from the three camps who had been deemed “counter-revolutionary” by their interrogators. On 22 March, Beria gave a similar order for the prisons of Kiev, Kharkiv, Kherson, and Minsk. As a result, approximately 14,500 camp prisoners and 7,300 prison inmates were executed. 16 A total of 395 individuals—according to the most credible data 17 —were chosen from among the 22,000 and, as J. K. Zawodny put it, “marked to live.” 18 In other words, they were not branded as “sworn enemies of Soviet power, filled with hatred . . . just waiting to be released in order to be able to enter actively into the battle against Soviet power.” 19 According to Beria’s logic, there was therefore no need to eliminate these people—some of whom were chosen by virtue of their social background, others for skills and training that promised to be of use if the USSR were to end up at war with Nazi Germany—which it did, one year later. The dead were at once “class” and “national” enemies, not only in view of the bourgeois social status attributed to them but also by the very fact of their Polish national self-identification. 20
One of the three camps, at Kozelsk, was liquidated in such a manner that the killing field also became the burial site. The prisoners of Kozelsk were transported in waves to the Katyń Forest between 3 April and 19 May 1940. On arrival, they were immediately executed with shots to the back of the head, then buried in mass graves.
In June 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and in April 1943 German forces uncovered and organized a public exhumation of the forest burial site, assembling an International Commission that included a dozen forensic experts from different countries. The Germans’ goal was to maximize the anti-Soviet propaganda value of their discovery, but this does not detract from the documentary value of the copious forensic records produced. 21 An international array of experts, public figures (including former Polish prime minister Leon Kozłowski), and POWs (including the Americans Lt. Col. John Van Vliet, Jr., and Capt. Donald B. Stewart) were brought to the forest as witnesses. 22 German propaganda incorrectly put the number of uncovered victims at 10,000, as only 4,143 bodies were exhumed. 23 Thus was born public knowledge—and, with it, memory—of Katyń.
Histories of Memory
Polish memory of Katyń can be separated into three distinct realms: first, that of Polish émigrés remaining outside Poland’s borders after the Second World War; “People’s” Poland; and finally Poland after its negotiated exit from communism in 1989. The first two existed in parallel in different geographical spaces, while the third has inherited the legacies of both of its predecessors. Attempts at a history of Katyń by émigrés who could not return to postwar Poland—as well as by dissidents on Polish soil publishing clandestinely in the 1970s and 1980s—became the foundation of the subsequent academic historiography of Katyń. 24 Cultural memory and scholarly knowledge on the topic of Katyń thus have been and remain intimately intertwined.
The Émigrés
From the time of the mass graves’ uncovering in April 1943, through the famous February 1956 “secret speech” of Nikita Khrushchev that heralded the de-Stalinization of the Eastern Bloc, the Polish government-in-exile in London—holding itself to be the continuation of the interwar Second Polish Republic—stood at the very heart of efforts to preserve the memory of Katyń among Polish émigrés. One of the principal tasks that émigré politicians set for themselves was lobbying successive American and British governments—in the former case, with only limited success, in the latter, with no success at all 25 —to hold the Soviet Union responsible for the Katyń Forest Massacre uncovered by Germans. 26
In 1943, the Polish government-in-exile seconded Nazi Germany’s proposal to arrange an international investigation by the Red Cross at the site at which the mass graves had been discovered. Joseph Stalin reacted swiftly and violently to this proposal, declaring in telegrams transmitted simultaneously to Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt on 21 April 1943: “The fact that the anti-Soviet campaign was set in motion simultaneously in the German and the Polish press and follows the same line of argument can be taken as irrefutable proof of contact and secret agreement between Hitler and the Sikorski government.” 27 Stalin then broke diplomatic ties with the London government. The birth of Polish memory of Katyń is thus connected also to the birth of Communist Poland, since, immediately following Stalin’s cessation of ties with the exile government, the Soviet Union established ties instead with a committee of underground Polish Communist activists of their own choosing, thereafter treated as the sole legitimate government of Poland. 28
In the course of the two final years of the Second World War, the Soviet Union succeeded in selling Katyń to the world as a “German crime.” In fact, it was Soviet researchers who first used the term crime—since the war the universally adopted term in both Polish and Russian for the events at Katyń, rather than the English, French, or German massacres. The USSR launched an investigation in 1944 that concluded that the massacres had taken place in 1941, rather than 1940. 29 Like the earlier German exhumations, the Soviet “investigation” sought to provide fodder for propaganda. Here, too, international witnesses were brought to the forest, including U.S. Ambassador to the USSR W. Averell Harriman’s twenty-five-year-old daughter, who would publicly endorse the Soviet account. 30 Unlike the Nazis, however, the Soviet investigators coordinated by Nikolay Burdenko tightly constrained witnesses’ access to the site and—as exhumations since 1989 have made clear—planted manufactured evidence inside the mass graves in the Katyń Forest to attempt to build a case that it could then broadcast internationally. Soviet authorities went so far as to use the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1945–1946 to attempt to foist blame for Katyń on the German wartime leadership—filing formal charges of “crimes against humanity”—but these charges were quickly dismissed by the presiding judges when it became clear that Soviet prosecutors had no specific evidence tying any German defendants to the massacre. 31
As the Iron Curtain became fact in the second half of the 1940s, Katyń memory rapidly became a hot potato for former Allies jockeying for memorial standing and probity in the emerging Cold War conflict. London-based Polish exiles made the rounds of Western capitals with reports—some based on eyewitness testimony, some merely on propaganda or conjecture—on Soviet perpetrators and Polish victims, all the while attempting to convince British and American politicians to take a public stand against the Soviet Union. Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the controversial second wartime prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, was one of the self-appointed leaders of these exile lobbyists. 32 As Tadeusz Wolsza has underscored in his foundational work on these lobbyist networks, “without their unprecedented engagement, however doomed it may have been from the start, the matter of uncovering the conditions [of the killings] and the identification of the perpetrators would have been shamefully consigned to oblivion, with the silent approval of the Anglo-Saxons.” 33
By the time that World War II had ended in Europe, the Polish émigré writer Józef Mackiewicz was already at work collecting interviews, diaries, correspondence, and official state documents from the months and weeks leading up to and following the spring 1940 disappearance of the Polish POWs whose remains were found three years later by the Germans. Indeed, Mackiewicz himself had himself been to the Katyń Forest in April 1943 while the German investigation was in progress. By 1947, inspired by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, this work had taken on a concrete goal: “generating Anglo-Saxon interest in explaining the matter as well as presenting it before an international tribunal modeled on the Nuremberg tribunal.” 34 Mackiewicz’s research led to the publication of a volume of document excerpts that appeared with a foreword from General Władysław Anders, who as part of the Allied war effort had led a Polish army constituted in 1941, among others, with repatriates from the Soviet Union, among whom the Katyń Massacre victims would likely have found themselves, had they not been executed in 1940.
Although the campaign to mobilize international support for a tribunal to investigate the Soviet Union was a complete failure, 35 years of sustained activism by Mackiewicz, Mikołajczyk, and other leading émigrés attracted—at least, in the United States—the passionate interest of key individuals who ultimately made a larger public campaign possible. Thanks to the writings of maverick Austrian-born American journalist Julius Epstein—who worked closely with the Polish émigré community in the United States—American wartime efforts to sideline investigations into Katyń became public news. Former U.S. ambassador to Poland Arthur Bliss Lane announced his own investigation into the massacres, which in turn generated congressional interest in the matter.
In August 1951, Congressman Ray J. Madden (D-Indiana) submitted two resolutions to the U.S. House of Representatives (H.Res. 375 and 390) stipulating the creation of a select committee to investigate the Katyń Forest Massacre. The subsequent investigation—lasting over a year—proved exhaustive, ultimately comprising 81 witness interviews; 183 exhibits examined; more than 100 depositions taken; and 8,000 pages of documentation accumulated or created. The select committee’s final report, authored by Madden himself, spoke in no uncertain terms of the killings as “Soviet Communist crimes.” 36 Nonetheless, the Madden investigation had no practical consequence as a matter of international law. After Stalin died in 1953, the new American president Dwight D. Eisenhower chose to attempt rapprochement with the USSR, and the hour of the exile lobbyists’ influence had passed. 37
The Polish government-in-exile in London became weaker and weaker over the course of the 1950s. After the return to power in 1956 in the People’s Republic of Poland of the “non-Stalinist” Władysław Gomułka, initiatives connected to Katyń within émigré communities came increasingly from non-governmental organizations.
This was the case above all for the Catholic Church. Surviving documentary evidence—memoirs, engravings, letters—from the Kozelsk POW camp suggests that scores, if not hundreds, of prisoners prayed on occasion to Our Lady of the Gate of the Dawn (Ostra Brama in Polish), one of the principal objects of veneration in Polish Catholicism, inspired by a seventeenth-century icon located in present-day Vilnius, Lithuania. One of the prisoners produced a wood engraving in February 1940 copying the original icon; this image survived the war, even though its creator did not. Already at Kozelsk, it inspired at least two copies, and more versions of the so-called “Our Lady of Kozelsk” followed after the war in Polish émigré communities across the English-speaking world. 38 Thus was born the cult of Our Lady of Kozelsk, an iteration of the long-standing Polish-Lithuanian cult of the Gate of the Dawn. One of the centers of the new cult was the London parish of Saint Andrew Bobola, which assumed the role of a site of memory in exile for the Katyń dead. Beginning in 1963, it featured on permanent display one of the wooden engravings from Kozelsk as an object of veneration. 39
Émigré communities also inspired campaigns to raise funds for the erection of monuments to the Katyń victims. In 1971, British-based exiles joined forces with a handful of sympathetic Britons under the auspices of the Katyn Memorial Fund, operating under the patronage of Prince Eugeniusz Lubomirski. The driving force behind this initiative was Louis FitzGibbon, an English businessman and member of multiple non-governmental organizations who became one of the most aggressive British voices militating on behalf of Polish émigrés and, more generally, Polish sovereignty vis-à-vis the Soviet Bloc. FitzGibbon published several books and pamphlets over the course of the 1970s 40 and succeeded in raising sufficient funds to begin construction in London (at Gunnersbury Park) of an obelisk commemorating the Katyń victims, inaugurated in September 1976. 41
FitzGibbon likewise sought in his public activism to combat the confusion of Katyń with a massacre committed by Germans in the Belorussian village of Khatyn, which became famous in the wake of Richard Nixon’s visit to that village in 1974. Though he became almost overnight a veritable hero of the London community of Polish émigrés, FitzGibbon nonetheless did damage to the cause of commemorating Katyń in England by associating himself beginning in 1979 with the Institute for Historical Review, an organization of Holocaust deniers styling themselves as “revisionists.” 42
The story of the Gunnersbury Park memorial is emblematic of a broader shift within the Polish diaspora’s memory of Katyń. As the generation of exiled Polish wartime leaders began to die in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Mikołajczyk in 1966, Gen. Anders in 1970), émigré communities’ priorities shifted from active political lobbying to the inauguration of regular collective rituals of commemoration. Some took place under the auspices of a church, others around a monument like the one erected on the outskirts of London. The 1970s marked a moment of efflorescence for grassroots fundraising campaigns, as about half a dozen sprouted up roughly in parallel to, but mostly independently of, one another. The first was the London campaign. The next monument followed in Adelaide (dedicated in 1977), Buffalo (1980), Toronto (1980), Johannesburg (1981), Jersey City (1991), and most recently, Baltimore (2000). 43 In each case, the campaign usually began with one committed individual, either from the local émigré community or, as in FitzGibbon’s case, a prominent local citizen without Polish ancestry but with strong ties to the Polish diaspora. For political reasons, such campaigns remained impossible in Poland until 1989, except for the brief interlude of political liberalization in 1980–1981, made possible by of the Solidarity trade union movement.
“People’s Poland”
On Polish territory, during the first decade after the Second World War, the new postwar Communist establishment waged a concerted campaign to turn Katyń into the symbol par excellence of Nazi barbarism. Any Pole who spoke out publicly in terms other than these risked arrest, torture, and prison. The hybrid category of class and national identity employed by Beria to determine who among the wartime prisoners should live and who should die seemed to pass into oblivion. No one in Stalinist Poland used the category of “class” to describe the Poles allegedly killed by Nazi death squads. In 1952, one of the new principal publishing houses of “People’s Poland” published the only book about Katyń to appear legally in Poland at any point throughout the Communist period. Its title was Prawda o Katyniu (The Truth about Katyń). This book purported to document German culpability for the massacres, while also lashing out against the U.S. Congress—more specifically, against the Madden Committee of 1951–1952—for its supposed attacks on Polish sovereignty. 44
In 1956, the last traces of public discourse about Katyń vanished in Communist Poland. Polish state censors received instructions to strike any mention of Katyń from prospective publications crossing their desks. 45 Katyń thereby passed into the realm of counterculture. In 1959 and 1960, small wooden crosses inscribed with the word KATYŃ in capital letters appeared in Warsaw’s Powązki Military Cemetery (one of two constituting the necropolis called Powązki—Warsaw’s oldest). These crosses were then removed in the middle of the night by officers of Poland’s state security apparatus, who each time immediately initiated an investigation into their origins. As officers of the Warsaw milicja reported in a 6 November 1964 note to the Polish Ministry of the Interior—which was responsible for the security apparatus—“One cannot ignore the fact that the number of people visiting this site has grown steadily each year.” 46 From 1959 through 1980—the year of the establishment of the Solidarity trade union network—a handful of new crosses would appear each spring at the same spot in the cemetery, which became known as the Dolinka Katyńska (Katyń Hollow). This site was adjacent to the section opened in 1946 devoted to the wartime Home Army underground. 47
After Solidarity’s legalization, the liberalization of Polish state and society led among other things to the birth of a range of grassroots initiatives focused on the commemoration of Katyń on a much grander scale. Solidarity activists embraced the previously clandestine “Katyń Institute,” an underground publishing network founded in 1978 and devoted to distributing across Poland its own editions and translations of Katyń documentation and research published outside Poland—including the Madden Committee report.
Yet another clandestine circle—calling itself the “Katyń Committee,” led by Stefan Melak and Rev. Wacław Karłowicz—devoted itself to the production of a more permanent cross commemorating Katyń, which it ultimately unveiled in the Powązki Military Cemetery on 31 July 1981. Despite the liberalization inaugurated in Polish public life by Solidarity, the Polish security apparatus removed the cross in the early morning hours of 1 August 1981. That cross then remained “missing” until the collapse of communism: rediscovered in many pieces in July 1989 and returned to the Katyń Committee (a legal organization beginning in 1989), the cross returned on 8 September 1995 to the site where it had first been unveiled fourteen years earlier. It was in this very spot, in the Dolinka Katyńska, that a large “Katyń” cross had been unveiled by the Polish government in 1985. This “official” cross sported a plaque containing the false Soviet-inspired account, in which the perpetrators had been German. With the coming to power in September 1989 of Tadeusz Mazowiecki’s government, however, that plaque was replaced by another identifying the Soviet Union as the state responsible for the Katyń killings.
In the course of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—indeed, until 1989—only in the realm of “post-memory” could Polish memory of Katyń thrive, even grow, without interruption. 48 In other words, given that their attempts at public commemoration of their murdered relatives were strictly prohibited, the broadly understood families relegated to the private sphere their reflections on the fates of their fathers, brothers, uncles, and grandfathers. 49 On occasion, this discussion could encompass also friends and religious communities.
This debate—playing out simultaneously in tens of thousands of homes across the People’s Republic of Poland, however privately—transformed the word “Katyń” into a symbol of all things detestable in Communist Poland. A number of books and pamphlets manifesting the strength of this post-memory appeared either in clandestine or in émigré presses, including the historian Jerzy Łojek’s comprehensive 1980 Dzieje sprawy Katynia (History of the Katyń affair). 50 As Anne Applebaum wrote in her review of Andrzej Wajda’s 2007 film Katyń, Katyń embodied, in the minds of the underground activists, an entire “series of lies and distortions, told over decades, designed to disguise the reality of the Soviet postwar occupation and Poland’s loss of sovereignty.” 51
Throughout the duration of Communist Poland, Katyń thus emerged as an émigré cultural memory on the one hand and, on the other, the post-memory of families remaining on Polish soil. The rise of a social and political opposition in Poland over the course of 1970s and 1980s resulted in the re-imagining of family-based post-memory as a wider cultural memory understood in national terms. 52 By the time of Solidarity’s creation, Katyń was no longer a tragedy of twenty-two thousand families or of Communist Poland’s budding democratic opposition, but rather a national tragedy in the fullest sense of the term.
Poland since 1989
The successful conclusion of Poland’s Round Table talks in April 1989 and the election of more than one hundred sixty Solidarity activists to the Polish legislature in June 1989 meant that, slowly but surely, one could begin to speak of topics that had previously been taboo—if not downright illegal—for decades. And yet, in August 1989, the new Polish prime minister Mazowiecki—the Soviet Bloc’s first non-Communist head of government since the Second World War—adopted his famous policy of a “thick line” separating the present from the past. His principal declared priorities were Poland’s economic salvation and the country’s integration into Europe’s supranational structures. These implied a conscious choice by Mazowiecki not only to reject legal action against former Communists and their collaborators, but indeed to demur at any attempt to define a consistent politics of history toward the USSR and its Polish Communist allies. 53
Even prior to 1989, Gorbachev’s glasnost had permitted relatively free discussion in the pages of Pravda of topics long or never before seen in the Soviet press, with the paradoxical result that the censors of Communist Poland and the other countries of the Soviet Bloc found themselves censoring Pravda. In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev and the Polish head of state Wojciech Jaruzelski established a bilateral commission of academic historians with the task of “filling in the blanks” in Polish contemporary history. Nonetheless, as Victor Zaslavsky has demonstrated in his study Class Cleansing, two topics were consistently excluded from Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost: the secret annexes to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939 and the Katyń Massacres. 54
When Mazowiecki and his ministers came to Moscow on an official state visit in the fall of 1989, a mere few weeks after the parliamentary vote of confidence that brought them to power, Gorbachev asked that they agree to set aside for the time being the issue of Katyń, neither demanding more documentation nor pressing the issue in public. After initial hesitation, Mazowiecki assented. 55
The Soviet press agency TASS made the official announcement only in April 1990 of Soviet responsibility for the massacres. It took even longer—until 1991—to deliver documentary evidence of Beria’s execution orders, by which time Boris Yeltsin had become Russia’s president. According to Victor Zaslavsky, Gorbachev is personally to blame for the failure to declassify Katyń sooner: “Gorbachev’s resistance to the release of the compromising documents, his suggestion that these documents were better destroyed than made public, remain an indelible stain on his image.” 56
By this time, the Katyń victims’ families in Poland were at last able to organize themselves legally and openly. Local chapters of Families sprouted up beginning in 1989 in urban centers across Poland, leading to the creation in 1992 of the Federation of Katyń Families (Federacja Rodzin Katyńskich). Altogether, there are close to thirty Families on Polish soil, as well as affiliate émigré Families abroad. These are children, grandchildren, wives, and nephews and nieces of the dead.
They began by establishing ties with the Russian organization Memorial, the principal voice since 1987—first in the USSR, and beginning in 1991 in the Russian Federation—demanding the declassification of documents and the legal acknowledgment of state culpability in NKVD-executed mass deaths in the 1930s and 1940s. 57 Together, the Katyń Families and Memorial lent support to a range of civic initiatives beginning already in the early 1990s, geared toward public education about Katyń: for example, the 1990 documentary film directed by Marcel Łoziński, campaigns for a state museum devoted to Katyń, monuments to the dead, and published memoirs by family members recounting the experience of growing up in Communist Poland unaware of what had happened to their lost relatives and scared to broach the subject in public. 58
The committee established by Jaruzelski and Gorbachev continued its work even after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the re-christening of the Polish People’s Republic as the (Third) Polish Republic in December 1989. Indeed, only then could Russian historians contributing to the committee’s research—most importantly, Natalia S. Lebedeva—publicly admit having found documentary traces of Katyń in state military and security archives. Together with Polish political historian Wojciech Materski, Lebedeva began to accumulate key documents with the goal of publishing them in both Polish and Russian. Four volumes of published archival documents appeared in each of these languages over the course of the 1990s. This was the moment—however short-lived—of intensive Polish–Russian cooperation in both academic and diplomatic domains that Alexandra Viatteau would later describe as follows: “If Katyń was a symbol of Polish-Soviet enmity throughout the era of oppression and lies, this tragedy nonetheless became a sign of reconciliation between Poles and Russians starved for truth and liberty when the time came for admissions, for research freed from fear, and for mourning, freely expressed at last.” 59
Russian president Boris Yeltsin positioned himself at the forefront of opposition to continued suppression of information and documentation about Katyń. In an attempt to facilitate rapprochement at the state level between Poland and the nascent Russian Federation, he came to Warsaw’s Powązki Military Cemetery on 25 August 1993 to pay homage to the dead before the two crosses in the Dolinka Katyńska. In a scene recalling Willy Brandt’s 1970 act of penance before the Warsaw Ghetto Monument, Yeltsin begged Poles’ forgiveness for Katyń, which he himself described as a Stalinist “crime.”
Within the nascent, rapidly growing network of social and political activists concerned with Katyń, it seemed initially that all nodes were proceeding in lockstep toward a more or less unquestioned goal of full disclosure by Russia and public commemoration within Poland. One of the most famous survivors of the Kozelsk POW camp, Rev. Zdzisław Peszkowski, in 1989 became chaplain to all of the Katyń Families, before going on to create a foundation devoted to what he called the “Golgotha of the East” (Fundacja Golgoty Wschodu). In the meantime, the scholars Jacek Trznadel, Marek Tarczyński, and Jędrzej Tucholski—the last of these was the son of a Katyń victim—were at the heart of a range of projects of commemoration. Together with Peszkowski, Bożena Mamontowicz-Łojek (the widow of Jerzy Łojek, Katyń’s early pseudonymous historian), and future prime minister Jan Olszewski, the three scholars “T”—as George Sanford has described them—co-founded multiple interlocking institutions devoted to researching and commemorating Katyń. 60 Following the creation of the first Katyń Families in September 1989, there came in October a self-styled Independent Historical Committee for Research into the Katyń Crime (Niezależny Komitet Historyczny Badania Zbrodni Katyńskiej); a Polish Katyń Foundation (Polska Fundacja Katyńska—founded in June 1990); and a state body devoted to public history of modern Polish victims of mass violence, the Council for the Protection of the Memory of Combat and Martyrdom (Ruch Ochrony Pamięci Walk i Męczeństwa).
Between 1993 and 1996, the state-sponsored Council coordinated the various activists’ participation in multiple exhumations at the burial sites of the massacres constituting the “Katyń” necronym: in the Katyń Forest itself, but also in Kharkiv and Mednoye. Marek Tarczyński, a colonel in the Polish Army and a military historian, launched and presided over the publication of a series of edited volumes (twenty-five in total between 1990 and 2010) summarizing major issues in the various dimensions of Katyń memory, for example, academic historical research, legal proceedings, archeological exhumations, proposed designs for monuments and cemeteries, and educational curricula.
The traditional image of this milieu is thus one of coherence and cooperation. Nonetheless, since 1989, the Katyń Families have also produced narratives dramatically departing from that image. For example, Witomiła Wołk-Jezierska, daughter of a corporal killed at Katyń, active in the Katyń, Families from the moment of their creation, called into question in a 2005 book the lion’s share of earlier “supposed” efforts on behalf of commemorating the victims. Out of respect for the bodies of those victims, she demanded the transfer of their remains onto Polish soil to newly created cemeteries where Poles could come to honor their dead without having to request a Russian or a Ukrainian visa. For her, in the absence of such repatriation of the victims’ remains, the Polish state and leaders of the Katyń commemoration movement had in fact left Polish heroes to rot in Stalinist mass graves, thereby committing “a horrible act of profanation against the murdered Poles, a profanation at the hands of Poles, made possible by those who had betrayed their Fathers and their Compatriots.” 61
Wołk-Jezierska was once a leading figure in the Families, but in recent years has played only a marginal role in the movement after coming into conflict with much of its leadership. Nonetheless, she was the first Family member to call for a joint application against Russia before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). 62 Her passion comes from the force of her post-memory of the massacres. Wołk-Jezierska’s prominence in the ECHR case is a testament to the power of even small groups within the Katyń commemoration movement. If even a small segment of the Families—who, after all, constitute the base of the entire commemoration movement—remained so disenchanted fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, one must conclude that the coherence of post-1989 Katyń memory suggested by much of its scholarly literature is, in fact, illusory. The key to understanding this “illusion” lies in the complicated history of the single state-sponsored site most responsible for public education about Katyń in the years when it functioned: the Katyń Museum.
Memory Boxes
Advocates for organized public commemorations of the Katyń Massacres began publishing histories of Katyń already in 1989 and 1990, all the while insisting that the massacres’ perpetrators be brought to justice and restitution made to the victims’ families. Nonetheless, the first half-dozen governments of the Third Polish Republic—and, with them, President Lech Wałęsa—limited themselves to investigating successive burial sites through exhumations. Most exhaustive was the work completed at Kharkiv and Mednoye, sites known prior to 1990 only to the highest authorities of the USSR. Arguably, from the standpoint of post-1989 Poland’s first governments, the question deserving most attention was not how to commemorate but rather what to commemorate—leading to a decisive emphasis on research, rather than public education.
In 1991, the Museum of the Polish Army made several rooms available at its permanent site in downtown Warsaw for a small exhibit of objects found at Kharkiv and at Mednoye that had belonged to the massacre victims. The crowds drawn by the exhibit gave the Federation of Katyń Families a basis for demanding that the Ministry of Defense install a larger, more permanent exhibit. The Czerniaków fort at the southern end of Warsaw became its home. On display outside the fort were tanks belonging to the Army Museum; inside, three small rooms (200 m2 in total) were seconded to the exhibition, called from June 1993 forward the “Katyń Museum.” Polish architect Jerzy Wolski, after having seen the rooms, recalled, “What shocked me most was that a subject of such importance was being cast in such a poor light, in such conditions. There was a need for an entirely different mode of presentation, stronger and more modern.” 63
The first director of this “museum” was the retired colonel Zdzisław Sawicki, who had participated in the exhumations at Kharkiv and Mednoye. He recalled in conversation with this author the sadness, even anger, of Katyń activists when, at the June 1993 inaugural ceremony for the museum, no dignitaries were present except for deputy defense minister Bronisław Komorowski—as fate would have it, now president of Poland—and a bishop. 64 Neither the president, nor even the defense minister could be bothered to attend the ceremony establishing the first, presumably permanent site of memory most explicitly devoted to the victims of one of the most famous sets of massacres in contemporary European history, even though the museum was charged with serving as a site of “martyrology and research.” 65
The museum’s inauspicious beginnings seem to defy the narrative arc of Katyń’s commemoration following 1989, begging the question of why the Polish state chose not to make any significant investment in commemoration efforts. The extreme Right crystallizing within Poland’s political spectrum over the course of the 1990s spoke at the time of a Russo-Polish conspiracy, accusing inter alia President Wałęsa of complicity in Russian interests. Yet one need not indulge conspiracy theories in order to understand the political calculations made by both Wałęsa and his presidential successor, the ex-Communist Aleksander Kwaśniewski, as they juggled an agenda of establishing an official historical narrative with a perceived need to normalize and stabilize Polish–Russian relations.
In the meantime, the Russian Federation initiated a criminal investigation into the Katyń Massacres. Prosecutor Anatoly Yablokov explained that he took very seriously historian Natalia Lebedeva’s assessment that the massacres represented, all at once, genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity pursuant to Article Six of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. 66 No Russian court has ever agreed with any element of this assessment, but—at least initially—they appeared willing to hear the matter. 67
On the Polish side, in 2000, Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek inaugurated memorial cemeteries at the three then-known burial sites—Katyń, Kharkiv, and Mednoye—of the victims taken from NKVD POW camps. 68 Both the Russian and the Ukrainian governments participated in these ceremonies, having supported the establishment of cemeteries on their sovereign soil. As Wołk-Jezierska’s critique demonstrates, however, this major event in the evolution of Katyń memory did not provoke a universally positive reception. Wołk-Jezierska, for example, took the cemeteries’ inauguration to indicate the Polish state’s definitive choice not to repatriate the victims’ remains, which she considered to be unacceptable. Nonetheless, the vast majority of Polish public opinion saw the opening of the cemeteries in partnership with the Russian and Ukrainian states as a great success in the pursuit of national and international truth and reconciliation over Katyń.
Yet even as Buzek was inaugurating the cemeteries in 2000, a sea change was in progress on both the Polish and the Russian sides, reshaping state-level approaches to cultural memory of Katyń. 69 In Russia, the rise to power of Vladimir Putin marked a turn toward nationalist politics that set aside the agenda of reconciliation pursued by his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. In Poland, successive corruption scandals at the highest levels plagued governments of the Right and Left, fueling the rise of a Center-Right defined by the aggressive pursuit of both present political corruption and past collaboration with the Communist state-security apparatus. The hard anti-Communist turn within Polish politics de-emphasized international reconciliation on the Polish side, just as Putin’s rise to power had done on the Russian side.
Indeed, the Russian prosecutor general’s office in 2004 went so far as not only to close the state investigation into Katyń but, in fact, reclassify 116 of the 183 dossiers of documentary evidence found by historians in the 1990s. Moreover, the very decision to classify those dossiers was itself classified, making it impossible for Russian prosecutors to disclose to their Polish interlocutors what had happened and why. All further Polish requests for Russian courts to consider the question of culpability for the massacres would be ignored. This was the point of departure for claims initiated before the ECHR inter alia by Wołk-Jezierska. The architect and principal executor of the victims’ families’ strategy before the Court was Polish legal scholar Ireneusz C. Kamiński.
Meanwhile, on Polish soil, the new Center-Right party Law and Justice (PiS, Prawo i Sprawiedliwość) drew heavily on cultural memory of mass violence against Poles during World War II. Their principal focus, however, was the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, not the Katyń Massacres. Indeed, Lech Kaczyński—mayor of Warsaw from 2002 until 2005, when he was elected president of Poland—considered the ultimately successful initiative to build a Museum of the Warsaw Uprising to be his greatest political achievement.
Eclipsed by the sixtieth anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising in 2004—during which the new museum was inaugurated—Katyń receded into the background of Polish memory of the Second World War. Its renaissance began three years later, courtesy of a film made by Andrzej Wajda, son of one of the massacres’ victims. 70 After a five-decade-long, storied cinematic career, including a Palmes d’Or at Cannes and an honorary Oscar, Wajda decided to make a film about the Katyń Massacres.
Removed from ongoing political debates, Wajda’s film represented a quintessential act of post-memory. Politically aligned with the Center-Left after having co-founded in 1989 the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza—against which, among others, PiS steered its anti-corruption, anti-Communist campaign—Wajda nonetheless has remained one of Poland’s greatest cultural icons, and his film succeeded in bridging political as well as international divides.
Wajda’s film represented a sort of latter-day memory box in the sense used by Aleida Assmann. 71 The film provoked endless debates about Katyń in the Polish press. Was cultural memory of Katyń merely the purview of one social group, that is, the middle-class men (and one woman) who belonged to interwar Poland’s active or reserve officer corps? 72 Should the Polish state more aggressively challenge the politics of memory suppression pursued by Putin’s Russia? What chance would historians have of discovering the remaining NKVD documentation of the massacres—or at least of learning whether or not it even still existed? All of the questions of memory set aside by Wałęsa, Mazowiecki, and other Polish heads of government and state after 1990 came to the fore following the release of Wajda’s film, which became a lightning rod for public debate.
On the Eve of the Seventieth Anniversary
Given the renaissance and resonance of public debate in Poland that followed the release of Wajda’s film, Polish memory of Katyń seemed to have moved at last beyond posing the questions of “whom” and “what” to commemorate—the dominant questions of the 1990s—to the question of “how.” This shift, in turn, implied a further question: “where?” The matter at hand concerned the construction of a physical lieu de mémoire that—unlike the three-room “museum” established in 1993—would provide a long-term, fully modern home both for researchers sharing the latest knowledge about the massacres and for generations of visitors (from Poland and from abroad) seeking to acquire that knowledge. Indeed, the question became all the more pressing when, in January 2009, the Katyń Museum was closed without prior warning after it became clear that the Czerniaków Fort risked structural collapse.
No official announcement preceded the 2009 shuttering of the museum. Wanda Horoś, one of its employees, explained that, beginning with the day after its closing, “We have received endless phone calls asking us ‘Why?’ We’ve been asked and indeed begged by visitors to show them our exhibit. Particularly since the release of Wajda’s Katyń, we had been virtually under siege. There were lines outside [prior to the museum’s closing].” 73 Indeed, it seemed a particularly cruel twist of fate that the Polish Ministry of Defense had discovered the structural risks and closed the museum at the very moment that Wajda’s film had provoked substantial interest in the museum’s holdings.
The first Polish-language article to investigate the museum’s closing appeared on 13 March 2009 in the conservative Catholic daily Nasz Dziennik (Our Daily). Janusz Cisek, the director of the Museum of the Army, explained there that it was necessary to close the building because of technical problems that had come to light. 74 At the same time, Cisek promised that the museum would reopen in April 2010 in a new location. As of January 2010, however, the Museum had still not chosen an architect. 75 Already in March 2009, an article in Nasz Dziennik quoted Witomiła Wołk-Jezierska as expressing the fears of some Katyń families that the museum would never come to fruition: “This is not the same army. A total lack of interest on the part of current members of the armed forces in their predecessors.” 76
The year 2010 marked the seventieth anniversary of the Katyń Massacres. In advance of the actual commemorative ceremonies to be held in April—the month in which the 1940 killing campaign ended—there appeared online at www.muzeumkatynskie.pl a beta version of a virtual museum of Katyń. One of the site’s principal functions was to announce on behalf of the museum’s staff that they welcomed “testimony regarding the fates of those who died in the East.” 77
This site was to have opened in conjunction with an announcement of the results of the architectural contest for the best design for the Katyń Museum’s new installation within the Warsaw Citadel, with a prize of 60,000 Polish złote (approximately $20,000). Indeed, on 8 April 2010, Polish defense minister Bogdan Klich announced the winner in a ceremony at the museum, where he also declared, “Here the truth about Katyń will find its home. We believe that memory and truth taking the material form of this museum will have such power. We believe that, thanks to it, we will be able to transform violence and lies into truth and reconciliation. The truth about Katyń will serve Poland’s future. This will be the victory of the Katyń soldiers.” 78
Crafted as this statement was to highlight the key catch phrases of “truth and reconciliation,” “memory and truth,” and “victory,” the statement could not efface the fact that on the seventieth anniversary of the massacres, there was no functioning museum to which Poles could go to learn about the events. Other state institutions—most notably, the Institute of National Remembrance—chipped in with temporary exhibits about Katyń, but there was no permanent, dedicated institution.
The absence of the museum on the arrival of such a key anniversary seems unthinkable from the standpoint of a cultural memory still in the process of formation. The seventy-year mark highlighted a generational sea change within the Katyń Families, in the face of the passing of ever more children of the victims, who had spent their lives as witnesses to the development of Katyń memory and post-memory. Indeed, two days later, all of Poland would realize just what a turning point the seventieth anniversary had become, when almost the entire leadership of the Katyń commemoration movement perished in the crash of Polish president Lech Kaczyński’s plane outside Smolensk, Russia, en route to the Katyń Forest to commemorate the anniversary.
The museum is now scheduled to open its doors to visitors in September 2015. Construction work at the new location—Warsaw’s Citadel fortress, on the banks of the Vistula in the center of the city—commenced in October 2013. The Federation of Katyń Families—in particular, its president Izabella Sariusz-Skąpska—has been consulted at every stage of the museum’s redevelopment, allowing the Families to play a leading role in monitoring the development of the new museum site and in designing the new exhibits that the revamped museum will feature. As the 2013 annual bulletin of the Federation of Katyń Families declares, “We react to each announced delay and—even at the risk of being considered a pain in the neck—we attempt to provide a constant reminder that the heart of the Katyń Museum exhibit are the materials donated by the Families. This is OUR heart.” 79 The museum’s official re-launching took place at a ceremony on 17 September 2014 presided over by Bronisław Komorowski—President of the Republic of Poland, who twenty years earlier as deputy defense minister had inaugurated the original site.
It is important to note, however, that, even absent a functioning museum, the seventieth anniversary of the Katyń Massacres did not come and go without public campaigns to promote knowledge of Katyń. In addition to the exhibits and publications organized by the Institute of National Remembrance, President Lech Kaczyński’s office gave his imprimatur to a range of grassroots initiatives across Poland, including a campaign called “Katyń . . . saved from oblivion” by the Catholic youth association Parafiada. 80 Launched in the spring of 2008, the campaign centered on mobilizing middle- and high-schoolers to commemorate massacre victims hailing from their respective localities and regions by researching those victims’ biographies and planting a tree for each victim.
The project was a success: youth reached by the association had planted close to twenty-two thousand trees by April 2010. Part of a larger Parafiada initiative called “My little fatherland”—whose goal was to facilitate locally based, grassroots activism inculcating Polish youth with “patriotic” attitudes—the Katyń campaign earned the Polish president’s support by pledging “to pay homage to the memory of the Heroes of the Katyń Crime, by bringing them back to life in the collective memory of the nation through 21,473 memory trees [planted] for the seventieth anniversary of the Katyń Crime.”
Whatever one thinks of the politics of the larger Parafiada campaign, the success of the tree-planting initiative shows that even at a moment when the Polish state apparatus was floundering in its efforts to shape cultural memory of the massacres through a rededicated museum, that memory was flourishing at the local level. The tree-planting project also had the unique feature of disaggregating the massacre victims from a nameless collective, restoring individual subjecthood to each, given the assignment of individual victims to young Poles who planted dedicated trees connected with those specific individuals, whose biographies they had researched.
On the eve of President Kaczyński’s 10 April 2010 flight to Smolensk, then, the balance-sheet of Katyń memory in Poland seemed rather indeterminate. On the one hand, much of the memory activism of the 1990s had dissipated, with the limited attention paid by Polish state institutions to the Katyń Massacres going toward fighting the Russian decision to reclassify and block access to historical documents. The museum, meager as it had been since 1993, vanished from public sight altogether in 2009. Then again, the museum was slated to reopen imminently, and the release of Andrzej Wajda’s film Katyń in 2007 had led to an explosion of interest in the events themselves and in the development of a sophisticated, permanent home for historical documentation and public education concerning the Katyń Massacres. Grassroots initiatives like the Parafiada tree-planting campaign capitalized on renewed popular interest in the massacres both to give Poland’s youngest generations a stake in cultural memory of Katyń and to return a measure of individual subjecthood to the commemorated massacre victims.
And yet, all of this came crashing to a halt on the morning of 10 April 2010, when the Polish public woke up to the shocking news that its president, first lady, military general staff, and top Katyń commemoration activists—ninety-six people in total—had perished when the presidential plane crashed in a forest outside Smolensk. Leaders of the Katyń Families, of the state institutions most directly connected to Katyń memory (including the heads of the Institute of National Remembrance and of the Council for the Protection of the Memory of Combat and Martyrdom), and of various grassroots initiatives (including both the Polish Katyń Foundation and the Parafiada Association) all perished. Poland discovered a new object of mourning, embedded within cultural memory of the Katyń Massacres, and yet fundamentally distinct from that memory. 81
Furthermore, the entire Katyń commemoration movement—especially the Federation of Katyń Families—confronted the task of rebuilding its decimated leadership. Given the generational shift already in progress prior to April 2010, with the generation of the commemoration movement’s founders passing out of public life or passing away altogether, the risk of the movement’s disappearance—and, with it, of the erasure of Polish cultural memory of Katyń—seemed altogether real.
Beyond “Katyń #2”
The presidential plane carrying Lech Kaczyński and his guests crashed less than ten miles from the forest containing the mass graves of more than four thousand Polish officers executed by the NKVD in the spring of 1940. 82 In the eyes of many observers who were in Poland at the time—including this author—there seemed to be an eerie, ethereal link between the killings at Katyń in 1940 and the deaths so close to Katyń seventy years later, that the dead of 2010 had also become “victims” of Katyń. Former Polish president Lech Wałęsa even went so far as to label the plane crash “Katyń #2.” 83
It seems self-evident that the social activists seeking to commemorate 1940 who died in 2010 constituted an organic link—in death as much as in life—between the Katyń Massacres and the Smolensk plane crash. For the most part, little attention was devoted to the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of Katyń victims who lost their lives near the mass graves of 1940. It therefore seems crucial to recognize, in particular, the members of the Katyń Families who traveled to Russia to pay homage to their murdered relatives. Particularly telling is the example of Franciszek Borowski, son of Anna Maria Borowska, who until her death in the plane crash served as vice president of the Katyń Family in the Polish city of Gorzów Wielkopolski. As her son recounted in press interviews in the days following the crash, she had felt it to be a great honor to be able to travel to Katyń with the Polish president. Indeed, she had taken with her on the plane her grandson Bartosz Borowski. And so, both perished a mere few miles from the final resting place of Anna Maria’s father, a victim of the Katyń Forest Massacre. In this macabre scenario, it was the representative of Poland’s first Katyń post-memory generation—Franciszek Borowski—who lost on Russian soil his grandfather, his mother, and his son: the first in a massacre, the latter two in a plane crash. 84
Yet a plane’s fall from the sky in peacetime is hardly equivalent to a series of massacres of twenty-two thousand prisoners in wartime. Indeed, any such identification in and of itself constitutes an act of mnemonic merging. One event need not replace the other per se, but thereafter the two can never exist independently of one another. In the case of the Katyń Massacres and the so-called Katyń #2, the newer addition to Polish cultural memory has visibly inherited many of the discursive features of its predecessor—above all, martyrology. The plane crashed on a Saturday morning. Beginning on Monday, different posters representing a range of competing political organizations papered the streets of Warsaw, some showing only the faces and names of the dead, others focused on the late president, for example, with the following commentary: “In the fight for truth, honor, and the dignity of Poles, he has made the greatest of sacrifices. Glory to the heroes! Honor their memory!”
In the first days of the national mourning declared by Bronisław Komorowski, the speaker of the lower house of the Polish parliament who became acting president of Poland upon Kaczyński’s death, the time of national tragedy seemed also to present an opportunity for the resolution of multiple traumas haunting Polish cultural memory. The outpouring of warmth by Russian society toward Poles in the crash’s immediate aftermath—difficult since 2013 to remember amidst the pitched geopolitical conflicts surrounding Russia’s promotion of separatist rebellion in eastern and southern Ukraine—affected Poles across the political spectrum. In the days following the crash, Russian president Dmitri Medvedev spoke of Katyń as a “Stalinist crime,” reprising Yeltsin’s 1993 call for forgiveness from Poles. Survey results suggest that between March and May 2010, Polish public opinion underwent a dramatic shift: Polish society no longer seemed to demand of Russia apologies for Katyń, but rather only the declassification of all documents concerning the matter held in Russian archives. 85
Yet what began in April 2010 as a remarkable moment of national mourning and unification across political and confessional divides soon left Poland socially and politically fractured. These divisions, as Joanna Niżyńska has put it, have eventuated in “a deep crisis of the communal symbolic language.” 86 At stake are two separate issues: how Poles relate to each other and how the Polish state has dealt with Russia.
Culture clashes bred by socioeconomic divides and intensified by different approaches to religious practice—which have combined with xenophobia and resentment against the greatest beneficiaries of Poland’s free-market transition—have haunted Poland since its negotiated exit from communism in 1989, 87 but since 2010 Poland has experienced full-blown culture wars. 88 The moment of national unity lasted between three days and a week—depending on one’s benchmarks—running aground over the proposal to inter President Kaczyński and his wife alongside kings and queens in Kraków’s Wawel Castle. Although this is where they were ultimately laid to rest, that happened in spite of a public protest campaign launched by Andrzej Wajda and his wife Krystyna Zachwatowicz-Wajda. 89 By the end of April, thousands of votive candles and images placed on the Krakowskie Przedmieście Street in front of the Presidential Palace in Warsaw had given way to hundreds of protesters seeking to continue leading the nation in mourning, while others sought to move on. The most radical opponents of prolonged mourning in fact confronted the protesters in an iconoclastic “happening” that featured dancing, gleeful twenty-somethings making light of the candles and religious symbols that, only a few months earlier, had been met with reverence, seemingly undergirded by a national consensus. 90
Among those symbols, a cross erected by scouts in front of the palace on 15 April 2010 demonstrated the greatest staying power as an element of ritual mourning. In subsequent weeks and months, the cross became a rallying point for the mourners, who, together with Catholic priests, politicians, and media figures identified with the Kaczyński brothers’ Law and Justice Party (PiS), organized sermons, speeches, and demonstrations in front of the cross. By the end of the Communist era, Polish cultural memory had treated as an act of principled civil disobedience any protest against the removal of publicly displayed crosses—such as the cross erected by the Katyń Committee in 1981 and immediately dismantled by the Polish secret police. Since 1989, this practice has persisted. A debate that began in the 1980s over the propriety of erecting Christian crosses at Auschwitz culminated in protracted protest and civil disobedience that only ended in 1999 when the protest movement’s leader Kazimierz Świtoń made a bomb threat that led to his arrest. 91
The Presidential Palace is obviously not Auschwitz. Nonetheless, its role as Poland’s principal site of national mourning in the wake of the crash took on both religious and political overtones as conspiracy theories began to multiply in the face of the Polish government’s inability to press Russia into quickly and transparently resolving the investigation. As a result, even since Komorowski ordered the cross’s removal on 16 September 2010, protesters have still come out on the 10th of every month to assemble in prayer in front of the Presidential Palace.
By the time of the cross’s removal, former PiS prime minister Jarosław Kaczyński had lost the snap summer presidential election to Komorowski. 92 Following the loss, Kaczyński divested himself of a conciliatory posture that had included an open letter of gratitude to “our friends, the Russians” for solidarity with Poland in the crash’s wake. 93 After the elections, Kaczyński and his closest PiS colleagues began to make opaque accusations against Komorowski, Prime Minister Donald Tusk, and the entire Polish government of having conspired with Vladimir Putin first to bring the plane down, then to cover up the truth. 94
Since the fall of 2010, a mainstay of Polish public discourse has been debate over the “plane”—all Poles immediately know which plane one means. Because the plane crashed on Russian soil, jurisdiction over the investigation automatically went to the Russian-run International Aviation Committee, which allowed Poland limited participation. Both the committee and its Polish liaison Edmund Klich indeed botched the investigation. Russia limited Polish investigators’ access and refused to return the wreckage of the plane to Poland; once completed, the investigation produced a report that contained multiple unsubstantiated and contradictory claims. 95 It is hardly surprising that conspiracy theories have proliferated as a result, even in hearings held in the halls of the Polish parliament. 96
Longtime Polish dissident Adam Michnik has popularized the adage that Poles should approach their former international adversaries with the formula “amnesty—yes; amnesia—no.” 97 Yet as Paul Ricoeur has pointed out, the act of reconciliation is contingent on a certain discursive symmetry between one side’s confession and the other’s forgiveness (or amnesty). 98 In the case of the Smolensk crash, the difficulty is that Polish collective expectations toward Russia remain entangled in unresolved past experience of victimization by imperial aggrandizement and political violence—of which the Katyń Massacres are certainly among the most drastic of examples. In the absence of any party’s admission of responsibility for the crash—regardless of whether or not a responsible party indeed exists—Russia, and by association the Polish state structures that investigated the crash alongside their Russian counterparts, have emerged as de facto guilty parties, fueling their antagonists’ ongoing pursuits of “truth.” The catch-22 continues.
The discourses of Katyń and Smolensk share many structural features that have entangled the events’ fates within Polish memory. Katyń itself has taken a backseat to debates on raison d’État and international diplomacy that keep the crash front and center. If not for the Katyń Massacres, there likely would have been no presidential flight to Smolensk in April 2010. And yet, little attention has been paid to the Katyń commemoration activists who perished alongside the Polish president—and whose commemorative efforts over the past twenty or more years had, in fact, been the very reason why he chose to make his pilgrimage to Katyń on 10 April 2010. Moreover, from among the families of the ninety-six crash victims, dozens have joined together in the Katyń Families 2010 Association, whose name leaves no doubt as to the conscious choice on the part of its founders to draw on the name recognition and legacy of the Federation of Katyń Families.
The 2010 association promotes the establishment of monuments and plaques across Poland to the crash victims, describing the crash as “Katyń 2010” without any reference to the 1940 massacres. Of the ten declared statutory goals of the association, the first remains “explaining the circumstances and causes of the catastrophe of the government airplane near Smolensk on 10 April 2010” and the fifth—“educational and pedagogical activities, particularly with respect to initiating, supporting, and aiding educational-cultural initiatives geared especially toward children and youth.” 99 In other words, the Katyń 2010 Association is targeting precisely the kind of activism that worked best for the Katyń commemorative movement between 1989 and 2010: grassroots campaigns combined with state resources for national initiatives like cemeteries and monuments. Although there is no specific mention of a museum, the Association declares explicitly its intention of “supporting and promoting scholarly and cultural initiatives connected to the Smolensk catastrophe.”
With the Katyń Museum scheduled to re-open in 2015—the year of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the massacres—it is perhaps easy to dismiss the idea that a Katyń #2 martyrology could co-opt, let alone supplant, the cultural memory of the Katyń Massacres assimilated in Poland over generations, through exile, political dissidence, and extensive organic work since the fall of the Iron Curtain. The Federation of Katyń Families remains buoyant in its activism: not only has it helped to reconceptualize the Katyń Museum’s exhibit, but it also helps to adjudicate contests organized by the state Institute of National Remembrance promoting awareness of the 1940 massacres among middle-schoolers and high-schoolers. 100
Since 2012, the Federation has published an annual bulletin of both past research and current news pertaining to the Katyń Massacres’ presence in education, law, politics, and culture. This bulletin is, in some sense, a replacement for the Zeszyty Katyńskie (Katyń Notebooks) once published annually by the Independent Historical Committee for Research into the Katyń Crime. Independently of the Federation, the Institute for National Remembrance continues to negotiate the possibility of obtaining new historical documentation of the massacres, and a decade’s worth of valiant efforts by Polish legal experts kept the Katyń case alive before the ECHR until April 2012.
Yet it is difficult to describe the trajectory of Katyń memory since 2010 as anything other than a time of trials. The museum’s re-opening to visitors in 2015 will be certainly be a defining moment in the determination of what remains of Polish cultural memory of the Katyń Massacres. Prescient were the words spoken in a 19 April 2010 radio interview by Izabella Sariusz-Skąpska, who took over as President of the Federation of Katyń Families for her late father Andrzej Sariusz-Skąpski, who perished in the plane crash: While holding on to the memory of our personal tragedy, we must always remember the first Katyń, as well as what remains to be done for it. Many people will associate Katyń with the tragedy of 10 April 2010, not with that 70 years prior. The danger lies in mixing history and politics, that is to say, in every temptation to allow into political discourse either the first Katyń of 1940, or the tragedy of 10 April. We, as Katyń Families, know what the consequences are of confusing history with politics, and we are aware that the temptation of political instrumentalization may become very great.
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Making Sense of Katyń Memory
Even if every Pole has at least heard the word “Katyń”—if only in the context of Wajda’s film or of the presidential plane crash—Polish memory of Katyń remains fragmentary. The efforts of the postwar political émigrés have not found a permanent place in cultural memory of the massacres, while post-memory is in the process of dying along with the children of the victims. Still, the Katyń Museum set to reopen in 2015 may do for the Katyń Massacres what the Museum of the Warsaw Uprising has done for that event: turn it into a tourist hotspot responsible for substantial commercial output, whether concerts of Uprising-era music or board games for children “playing” Uprising resistance fighters. 102
Yet it is far more difficult to imagine a board game based on thousands of prisoners being herded unknowingly to their deaths than on fighters hiding, shooting, and living or dying (perhaps even heroically). Martyrology lacks the commercial—and pedagogical—attraction of heroism. As Brian Porter-Szűcs has wisely noted, “Increasingly younger audiences are eager for stories of success, not heroic defeat, and they are more interested in resolving the problems of their compatriots today than avenging the wrongs done to their forbearers.” 103 Martyrology, at any rate, mobilizes most effectively when married to explicitly political ends.
In the case of Katyń, the future fate of Polish cultural memory must undoubtedly remain linked to both national and geopolitical contingency. Since the fall of 2013, it has become virtually impossible to find in Polish public discourse any trace of the goodwill generated by the week of Polish–Russian solidarity in April 2010. Unrest in Ukraine since the autumn of 2013—the Euromaidan Revolution, followed by the Russian takeover of Crimea and launch of a protracted armed conflict in the Donbas—has placed Poland squarely at loggerheads with Russia as a matter of geopolitical interest.
Whatever the course charted by the Russian state, and whatever the ultimate outcome of the present situation in Ukraine, it is clear that there remain multiple valences to Polish cultural memory of Katyń. The toponym cannot be separated from the geopolitics of Polish–Russian relations, just as it cannot be extracted from the broader dynamics of intergenerational transmission of memory in Poland since 1989. Given the principally pedagogical and commemorative functions sought by Poland’s remaining Katyń commemoration activists, perhaps the best for which they can hope is a permanent physical home and a stable source of funding for a re-opened museum. Serving both as a site of memory and as a carrier of the exhibits into which the Katyń Families have had their input, this museum can assure—whatever the political winds out of Poland or out of Russia—that seven decades’ worth of memory formation will leave Katyń as more than a set of hidden signifiers in Poles’ collective understanding of their past.
Footnotes
Author’s Note
Portions of this article—here in substantially revised and expanded form—are drawn from a text originally published in French as Piotr H. Kosicki, “Les lieux de mémoire polonaise de Katyń, 1943-2010: d’une fôret à un musée,” in Commémorer les victimes en Europe: XVIe-XXIe siècles, ed. David El Kenz and François-Xavier Nérard (Seyssel: Éditions Champ Vallon, 2011), 265–88. This article was prepared while the author held the 2014-2015 Bittson Fellowship and the Campbell National Fellowship at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.