President Obama didn’t make it to Krakow the other day for
the funeral of Polish President Lech Kaczynski. And so passed my
one chance to have something in common with our president. This
would have been his first time in Poland, and Krakow the first
city in Poland he would have visited. My first time in Poland,
shortly after high school, also had Krakow as its first stop.
Obama planned to stay all of three and half hours. I stayed
considerably longer, though that’s neither here nor there. What
matters is that Krakow — like Poland — is a very different
place today from the drab, gray victim of communism I first
encountered. It’s attractive enough that on a happier occasion
Obama probably would want to take his wife out to dinner
there.
Poland’s recent unspeakable tragedy will take many months
and years to play out, but there’s no reason to expect the
country’s performance will be any less impressive in the long
term than it has been since April 10. That said, so much has
happened in the wake of the trauma that one doesn’t exactly know
where to begin — at least if one is Polish or interested in
things Polish. Let me sort a few of them out.
Are better relations with Russia really in the offing? Many
people I spoke with immediately smelled the dirty hand of Moscow
in the Smolensk crash, no present evidence required. The great
historian Richard Pipes was quoted in the Polish press predicting
a worsening of Polish-Russian relations, mainly because of the
Poles’ historically grounded distrust. Instead, we’ve seen just
the opposite, noble gestures toward one another on both the
Polish and Russian side and genuine talk of reconciliation and
Slavic brotherhood, all this without any soft-pedaling at all
regarding Stalinist Russian responsibility for the Katyn
massacres. If even the likes of Putin and Medvedev subscribe to
the notion that the truth shall set you free, who knows what good
things lie in store.
Of course, there’s no reason to get carried away. As
Poland’s formidable foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski noted,
Russia’s human reaction to the Smolensk tragedy shouldn’t obscure
the fact that Poland and Russia have different interests. In that
respect, I was happy to see a resort to that old standby of
Russia watching, tea-leaf reading, as revealed in Cathy Young’s
fine
column on the Polish-Russian situation.
According to a independent Russian website cited by Young, recent
discovery of large shale gas reserves in Poland has given energy
giant Russia a reason to treat the Polish government with greater
respect.
Polish-Russian reconciliation — an issue raised most
pointedly by Cardinal Dziwisz at Kaczynski’s funeral
— was not the only healing under discussion.
There were also calls for “Polish-Polish reconciliation,” a
formulation that sounds even odder if one considers that Poland
is currently as center-right a society as any in Europe. I hope
it’s not simplifying matters too much to argue that the main
political division in Poland of late has been between the
paleoconservative Law and Justice party of the Kaczynski brothers
and current prime-minister Donald Tusk’s Reaganite-free market
Civic Platform. The former has stressed social conservatism,
nationalism, and anti-Communism, the latter privatization, tax
cuts, and economic growth (without abandoning its own Christian
Democratic tendencies) — by now surely everyone knows that
Poland is the one European country whose economy continued to
grow during the recent great recession, to the point that the
country has had to take steps to devalue its strong currency. The
head of the Polish national bank responsible for that measure was
one of the 96 fatalities in Smolensk.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the crash one had to wonder why
Tusk and Kaczynski had each scheduled different Katyn
commemoration events, with each side striking its own deal of
sorts with Russians. At its worst, it’s the kind of behavior that
helped bring about the partitions and disappearance of the Polish
state in the 18th century.
Having experienced only short periods of political
independence ever since, Poles are understandably jumpy at any
threat to their statehood and thus politically more intense than
most. But there was no panic after April 10, and the displays of
genuine national unity and mourning were a victory for
civilization. To be sure, in a matter of days there was strong
revulsion in many quarters at news that Kaczynski would be
encrypted in Krakow’s Wawel Cathedral, amid the truly great
figures of Polish history. A country that takes its history very
seriously doesn’t like to see it cheapened.
Most unusual in this jaded age were the many young people
who came to pay tribute to the late president even if they had
strongly opposed him and even if they weren’t particularly
pleased about where he finally would be laid to rest. They
respected both his final sacrifice and his role as head of state.
A polity that can rise above personal likes and dislikes to do
the right thing is one that intends to stick around.
