Neil Ascherson
17th April, 2010
A human being cannot be beheaded twice. But a nation can. Twice in less than a century, Poland‘s elite – political, military, ministerial – came to a terrible death in the woods around Smolensk. Ordinary Poles with history in their bones can’t be blamed for fearing, last weekend, that the beheading axe was swung by the same hands.
But it was an accident. The fact that President Lech Kaczynski and his retinue had flown to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, only a few miles away, was one of those malign coincidences that haunt Polish history. And it happened at a moment when Russia and Poland were trying, with some success, to put their long and dreadful past behind them. The spontaneous, great-hearted grief of ordinary Russian people in the days after the air crash amazed and then moved the Poles.
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