Euro latest

Estonia and the euro 

Long euros
May 12th 2010
From Economist.com


Estonia gets a step closer to adopting the single currency

SURPRISES are Estonia’s stock in trade. Its return to the world map in 1991 after a 51-year absence startled outsiders. So did what came next: a fast-growing economy, based on flat taxes, free trade and a currency board. It confounded pessimists’ expectations by joining the European Union (in 2004) and NATO (in 2004). Now the country of 1.4m people is set to pull off another coup, gaining green lights from the European Commission and the European Central Bank for its bid to adopt the euro on January 1st 2011.

Many thought that highly unlikely. Only two years ago a property bubble collapsed, rocking the banking system and sending GDP plunging by 14.1% in 2009 (see story). Doom-mongers said devaluation was inevitable. But they were wrong. Flexible wages and prices have helped the economy stabilise: unit labour costs fell by 7.5% in the final quarter of 2009. Exports were up by a sixth in the first quarter of 2010 and the central bank forecasts growth this year of 1%. Estonia easily meets the euro zone’s rules on public finances. Its gross debt in 2009 was only 7.2% of GDP, and the government deficit is 1.7%. The only real concern is whether inflation will stay low: in the past 12 months the average was negative, at -0.7% comfortably below the 1% target. But the ECB report called for “continued vigilance” on that.

The real problem for Estonia is political, not economic. Some euro zone members (France is often mentioned) think that allowing an obscure and volatile ex-communist economy to join a currency union that has too many dodgy members already should not be a priority. If Estonia is really so solid, why not wait a year to be sure?

Yet that would send a perverse message. Estonia is one of two countries in the whole EU that actually meets the common currency’s rules (Sweden being the other). All the rest (even those that use the euro) have gaily breached the deficit and debt limits. The grit shown by Estonian politicians and the public in shrinking spending, raising taxes, and cutting wages has left outsiders awestruck (see leader). Punishing Estonia which obeyed the rules, while bailing out Greece which has breached them flagrantly, would do little for the euro’s credibility with governments and investors alike.

Estonia has two more hurdles to jump before it can humiliate the scoffers. An EU committee meets at the end of May, followed by a finance ministers’ summit in early June. Few think that France and other doubters will actually block its euro bid: a combination of persuasion and horse-trading will probably bring agreement. Then the decision will be irrevocable. That will give heart to Latvia and Lithuania too, who hope to join the euro later in the decade. Like Estonia, their currencies are pegged to the euro, so they have all the pain of a rigid monetary regime, but miss out on the lower borrowing costs and higher investment that the euro zone brings.

The longer-term question is what Estonia focusses on next. On May 10th it passed another benchmark, joining the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based rich-country thinktank—the first country from the former Soviet Union to do so. The hunt is on for a new national project. Estonia’s presidency of the EU in 2018 will coincide with the country’s 100th birthday. Finding something to surprise outsiders then is a pleasant challenge for the future.

My election take

A welcome uncertainty, a shameful chaos. That is what Britain woke up to after the strangest election night in living memory.  The chaos is as simple to describe as it is hard to justify. Thousands of people waited in vain to vote but couldn’t because pollings stations were under-staffed or ran out of ballot papers.

 

That would disgrace a country learning about free elections after decades of totalitarian rule. If it happened in Afghanistan or Ukraine, British election observers would tut-tut in disapproval. It is shameful in the country that likes to think of itself as the epitome of parliamentary democracy. Nothing better could epitomise the overpaid, underworked, out-of-touch public sector created by Labour than the useless electoral officer in Sheffield who said “I’m not blaming anybody”. What he failed to realise was this: we were blaming him.

 

Failure to run and to reform public services properly, despite showering them with money, is one reason that Labour has lost so many seats. But it has not lost office automatically. The Conservatives have won, but not by enough to gain power straightaway. And the Liberal Democrats have failed to make their hoped-for breakthrough, but won enough seats for their voters’ wishes to matter more than ever.

 

Sure that means uncertainty, of a kind that is unfamiliar in Britain and harder to explain to outsiders. We are used to simple results. We have two parties, Labour and the Conservatives. One wins, the other loses. Minor parties such as the Liberal Democrats may poll quite well, but their votes don’t count.

 

That system was perhaps defensible in the days when the two main parties won 90% of the vote between them. But it doesn’t fit a system in which the electorate is split three ways. In this election, the Liberal Democrats won nearly a quarter of the votes and gained less than a tenth of the seats.

 

The first big question is whether Labour will be able to hang on by offering the Lib Dems a shift to a fair voting system. That could even include Gordon Brown resigning as Labour leader, making way for another prime minister. If that fails, then it will be time for the Conservatives to try—perhaps with a formal arrangement with the Liberal Democrats, perhaps in a minority government. The Conservatives had a good night—they pushed up their overall share of the vote to more than  36%. But their claims to have a convincing mandate sounded hollow. They made tremendous gains in the easy seats—but failed to win the difficult ones that would have given them a majority in the 326-member lower house of parliament.

 

Anywhere else in Europe, this kind of uncertainty is normal. Election results alone do not determine the government: that comes only after negotiations between the parties. Mostly, whichever government forms has the backing of a majority of the voters. That is something that Britain has not enjoyed since 1955 (even Margaret Thatcher’s greatest Conservative victory in 1983 came with just 44% of the vote)

 

In Britain, we are not used to this. The result comes in the midst of a huge economic crisis. The markets are unhappy. They want a government that can repair Britain’s shattered public finances. Our deficit at 12% of GDP, is likely to be bigger than Greece’s this year. We have to borrow billions of pounds every week. Who will lend it to us? Given the scale of spending cuts and tax rises ahead, some politicians may wonder if now is a good time to be in opposition, not government. Whichever government takes office is unlikely to last its full five-year term.

 

Yet for all that the uncertainty is welcome, because it brings the chance of a change in Britain’s outdated electoral system. This no longer delivers the one thing it is supposed to deliver: a clear result. It was always a scandal that votes for the smaller parties such as the Liberal Democrats piled up uselessly in third place in our first-past-the-post constituencies. Now the scandal is intolerable. For the first time in my lifetime, there is a real chance of that system changing.

Apple and Yalta

Cupertino's cold warriors
May 6th 2010
From Economist.com


What has Apple got against eastern Europe?

WHAT have the following places got in common?

America, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, France, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, the Philippines, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Vietnam.

Clearly the size of the market is not the determinant. China and Russia don’t appear, but Luxembourg does. It is not about prosperity: Iceland—which, believe it or not, is still one of the richer countries in the world—is out, whereas Vietnam is in. Political freedom or the rule of law are not the binding factors. The Philippines and Thailand are on the list, whereas impeccable democracies such as Slovenia are not.

Perhaps the list comprises the target markets of some tiresome company from “old Europe” that has not noticed that the Berlin Wall has come down and that the division of Europe at Yalta into consumer-citizens in a rich, free west and captive east is long out of date.

But no, the list comes from a company that prides itself on being an icon of über-cool internationalism, with a post-modern disdain for clunky convention and tiresome rules. It is from the Apple Store, where eager customers from all over the world end up in the hope of buying an iPad, or a humble $25 gift card.

First-time visitors are assumed to be from America. If you come from one of the countries listed above, you can switch. But if not, you are out of luck. No matter if your country is in the European Union, NATO and the OECD. For Apple, the eastern half of Europe is still both terra incognita and non desiderata.

Still, you can always buy your Apple hardware from an authorised reseller. The real irritation comes when you want to buy electrons, not atoms. Sign up for an iTunes account, and the opening windows offer a glimmer of hope.  It offers not just two kinds of Portuguese, but Polish and Russian too, as well as the mysterious “Spanish (International Sort)”. It looks fine. So—at first sight—does the iTunes store, which offers a tempting array of countries.

But some are more equal than others. Visitors from Finland, for example, are presented with a full array of music. But register with an address in Estonia, just half an hour away by plane, and you get only a list, admittedly rich, of games, gimmicks and lectures. Films and music are out of bounds.

This approach annoys a lot of people. One organisation in Poland has been berating Apple for its approach to the biggest and most advanced market in eastern Europe. It is now celebrating a partial victory (Apple has agreed to open up its distribution market). But even in Poland, the company’s offering is nothing like what you get across the border in Germany. Other countries in the region have yet to see any improvement at all.

One of those most irked by the company's approach is the iPhone-toting president of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a loyal customer since 1982, when he bought an Apple IIe. Estonia, he notes, is one of the most wired countries on earth. Tallinn is the centre of NATO’s cyber-warfare research, and Estonians invented another icon of internet cool: Skype. Skype’s director of new products, Sten Tamkivi, has an iPhone, an iPad and a Mac at home. He describes the Apple rule as “a weird relic of commercial east-west segregation inside what is otherwise known as the European Union".

Why doesn’t Apple, a company so irritatingly up to date in its products and marketing, update its worldview when it comes to sales? Apple’s global headquarters did not respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman in Britain promised to investigate. When we get an answer, we’ll post it here.

Greece and its neighbours

Greece's woes and the neighbours 

Greased up
May 6th 2010
From The Economist print edition


The region may share in some of Greece’s pain

AVERTING a meltdown in Greece, at least temporarily, is good news for that country’s fragile ex-communist neighbours. Their big worry is Greek-owned banks, which account for as much as a quarter of banking assets in Bulgaria, some 15% in Romania and a tenth in Serbia. These institutions have been facing potential runs by depositors, as worries have grown over Greece’s solvency and thus over the Greek banks.

The financial authorities in some nearby countries had already imposed emergency-notification rules to delay (and if necessary to prevent) local banks from being drained dry by cash-hungry headquarters in Athens. The bail-out from the IMF and the European Union includes €10 billion ($13 billion) in recapitalisation for Greece’s banks, and adds a condition about keeping their foreign subsidiaries alive and lending.

This echoes the efforts made last year to bolster foreign-owned banks’ confidence in central and eastern Europe and stop them from pulling out in panic. In that process, as it happens, Greece was particularly unhelpful. Outside advisers have been pressing the IMF and other lenders to make sure that the authorities in Athens behave differently this time.

Any further tightening of credit in Greece’s region is unlikely to be too severe. Other foreign banks may expand their market share as Greek-owned rivals contract. But Greece is not just a provider of capital, it is also a big export market (taking a tenth of Bulgaria’s exports last year). And Greece employs plenty of migrants, especially from Albania, where remittances make up about a sixth of GDP. A deep recession in Greece will surely dent both growth and confidence in its northern neighbours.

Yet some think that the troubles in Greece may also provide a welcome refutation of the notion that Europe’s big divide is between a feckless ex-communist east and a virtuous old capitalist west; it is, rather, between a prudent north and a profligate south. In July Estonia expects the go-ahead to adopt the euro in 2011. With no net public debt, a deficit of 1.7% of GDP and 1.7% inflation, Estonia meets the Maastricht criteria better than any existing member. But nerves may yet trump logic.

Enthusiasm for enlargement is cooling. Any country with Greek levels of debt and hubris (eg, Hungary under its cocksure new government) will meet a particularly chilly welcome. And the sight of Greece’s agonies may make others, especially larger countries such as Poland, think again about the single currency’s advantages. In a crisis being able to devalue and to control your own monetary policy can prove an advantage.

Long piece on power and history

Report No. 30: Putin, Power and History: Does the Past Still Matter?
Posted Date: 3 May 2010

Following last month’s joint Polish-Russian memorials to commemorate the Katyń massacre, and the outpouring of Russian sympathy since the plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczyński and 95 others, CEPA Senior Fellow Edward Lucas offers a penetrating look at the politics of historical reconciliation in Central Europe.

Executive Summary
In the aftermath of communist rule, a fierce moral debate ensued in the east that raised profound questions about the intellectual framework which shaped history and politics under the old regime. Did Russia’s new leaders really accept the enormity of what the Soviet Union had done or did they still regard it as a success story brought down by bad luck and bad leadership? Under Vladimir Putin, it would be incorrect to say that historical revisionism wholly dominates Russia’s dealings with its neighbors. However it would be equally wrong to view recent signs of reconciliation as a sincere change of heart on the part of Putin and his ex-KGB colleagues. Nevertheless, Russia’s efforts to blunt long-standing historical disputes with Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland could lead to further attempts at reconciliation with Ukraine and the Baltic States. If successful, then the smoothing over of historical rows is potential game-changer for the region.

Accounting for History

Moral superiority and a sense of historical injustice have been the twin fuels of European politics since 1939. But what happens when truth intrudes, memories fade and differences blur? Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s presence at the joint Russian-Polish memorial service in Katyń on April 7, and the outpouring of sympathy in Russia for Poland since the plane crash that killed President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others, raises profound questions about an intellectual framework that has shaped local and outside understanding of the European continent’s history and politics.

The story used to be simple. Totalitarianism was the continent’s curse in the past century. But whereas Germany atoned for its evil deeds, Russia (the legal successor to the Soviet Union) did not. From that blindness and moral laziness, all manner of ills flow and until they change, Russia will neither reconcile with the former Soviet empire; nor, so the argument goes, will it be able to shed its own burden of authoritarian rule.

It is important to state at the outset that this approach was always open to serious criticism. To illustrate that, try unpicking the version of European history that many people in the English-speaking world would count as the bare-bones version, which would go something like this.

The story starts with Nazi aggression in the 1930s. That was wicked, and Western collusion was admittedly shameful—chiefly in the Munich agreement in which France and Britain arm-twisted Czechoslovakia into submission. But then things got better. Britain bravely fought alone until the mad and evil Adolf Hitler attacked the Soviet Union and the mad and evil Japanese attacked America. Then the “allies” liberated Europe, with the landing on the Normandy beaches epitomizing the Anglo-American sacrifice in the cause of freedom. Yalta was a blot on the record (blame FDR’s illness, or Churchill’s weakness) but the Western allies soon regained the high ground, fighting the Cold War, epitomized by the Berlin Airlift (good) and the Soviet-built Berlin Wall (bad). The (good) Germans soon accepted how wicked they had been under Nazism and made amends. That contrasted sharply with the Soviet Union which was always tied up in knots about Stalinism. When the evil empire collapsed, we continued our stellar record, embracing the newly free countries in the east and bringing most of them (in some cases a bit too quickly) into the European Union and NATO.

Such versions of the past are not wholly false. But they are at best incomplete and at worst highly partial. They leave out huge chunks of what really happened, inflate the importance of sideshows and ignore causation and context.

When the entire picture emerges, the sunshine on the moral high ground dims. Take what many would regard as the central fact of the 1930s and 1940s: the transcendent wickedness of Nazi Germany. Nothing can take away from the bestial crimes committed by the Hitler regime. But the Nazis did not arrive on asteroids. Imagine that World War One had finished with a Marshall Plan, rather than the humiliation and punitive reparations imposed on Germany by the Versailles agreement, and the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Had hyperinflation not destroyed the middle classes, and without the multiple (and quite unnecessary) humiliations imposed on Weimar Germany by the victorious allies, Hitler would have remained a bar-room bigot and the Nazis a loathsome irrelevance.

Second, it is simply not the case that Britain and America went to war to stop the Holocaust. For most of the war they ignored the fate of the Jews or dismissed it as an irritant. Nor does the idea that the war was a crusade for democracy and freedom square easily with the decision to declare war on (democratic, free) Finland in 1940, and the enthusiastic alliance with Stalin’s Soviet Union from 1941, let alone the determined refusal to see the horrors that regime inflicted on Russians and tens of millions of the empire’s other subjects. The reluctance of the British and American authorities to accept the truth about the Katyń massacre when the corpses were first exhumed in 1943 (and indeed for decades afterwards) is evidence of that.

That disgraceful episode in history undermines another myth: that the war was fought to save Poland and rescue Czechoslovakia. That was a fine point of principle at the start—but not one that Britain and the other allies adhered to as the war went on. Besides Katyń, other examples abound: foot-dragging in support of the Warsaw Uprising (imagine if the same thing had happened in Paris); Poland’s treatment at Yalta; derecognition of the London-based Government-in-Exile; and the decision to ban Polish forces from the victory parade in London in 1945.

The automatic response is to plead realpolitik or human error. What else could we have done? Voters in 1918 wanted revenge (“Hang the Kaiser”) on Germany and would not have accepted war any earlier than 1939 (in Britain’s case) or 1941 (for America). Munich bought valuable time for rearmament. By the time of Yalta, Poland was already doomed (“wrong place, wrong time, old boy, sorry”). Similar arguments are made on every other question where the moral foundations look soggy. So bombing of German cities was perhaps unnecessary or excessive or even mistaken in retrospect? War is full of mistakes; hindsight is 20/20. Handing the anti-communist Cossacks and Yugoslav royalist Chetniks back to be murdered in 1945 was terrible? Yes—but it was the price of getting back “allied” prisoners of war from communist clutches. Perhaps we should have done some things differently. But what matters is that we won and the Nazis lost.

Such arguments are wholly defensible. Nobody would argue that Britain should have simply surrendered because it could not stay on the moral high ground, or that America should have stayed out of the war in Europe because both sides were equally bad. Fighting to stop and defeat a potential invader requires no further justification. That you start late and finish badly is beside the point. But dodging so quickly and so often between principled and pragmatic arguments easily looks opportunistic and even propagandistic. It is a slippery basis for firing accusations against other countries in other ages, such as Russia now.

It is also odd when commentators criticize modern Russia for sentimental over-indulgence in wartime memories without mentioning their own countries’ predilection for exactly the same thing. Britain’s annual Poppy Day celebrations (when the guns fell silent at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month) have largely lost the original haunting, somber tinge of personal tragedy and bereavement. Instead, they are a media-led bath of insipid (or worse, fetid) nostalgia and self-congratulations. It is easy to see similarities: two declining countries looking back on their glory days and reliving their defining moments of heroism (the Battle of Britain on one side, the Siege of Leningrad on the other). Modern politicians yearn to stretch their shadows to match those of the giants of yesteryear. It would be quite unfair to equate Churchill with Stalin in terms of character or deeds. But the unreflective way in which they are remembered by Britons and Russians respectively can be strikingly similar.

The self-centeredness is a shared sin. American films (“Saving Private Ryan” and “U-571”) grossly distort the historical record. Britain likes to say that it “stood alone” in 1940, conveniently forgetting the Polish Home Army, as well as Greek, French, Dutch, Norwegian and Yugoslav resistance. That is not quite as bad as the Soviet historiography that forgets the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and starts the war with Barbarossa in 1941. But Western critics of the Soviet approach all too easily overlook the failings in their own accounts of the past.

Nor does the simplistic version of the next chapter of history, the Cold War, emerge intact from scrutiny. To take just one example: denazification in West Germany was partial and incomplete. It was more important to preserve a functioning legal system than to sack all the Nazi judges. Nor could the Third Reich’s intelligence assets or rocket scientists be discarded: they were needed to build weapons and spy on communism. Both decisions are defensible on pragmatic grounds. The result was that the Federal Republic became a staunchly and admirably free society. Its success, both economic and political, showcased the Western system and helped win the Cold War. But the idea of unquestionable moral superiority does not fit easily with hiring Germans who had enthusiastically served the Nazi war machine, while sending to the firing squad the Chetnik Yugoslavs, whose only crime was to have fought the communists.

These flaws and blunders do not create the moral inferiority pushed by Soviet propagandists in the past, nor the moral equivalence promoted by Kremlin spin-doctors now. Everybody is not as bad as each other. The West emerged at the end of the Cold War as the victor and justly so. Welfare capitalism, the rule of law, political freedom and human rights (loosely labeled “democracy”) was a model yearned for by more than 200 million people in the east, freed from a system marked by atrocious economic, political and social failure.

The combination of Soviet failure and Western success brought a victory that was rather more resounding than deserved; it was unexpected almost everywhere, and it was even unwished for in parts of the West that liked having illusions about socialism, or thought Western Europe was well rid of the barbarians in the east.

But come it did, and in its wake a fierce moral debate in the east about history. The legitimacy of communist rule in Eastern Europe rested on lies, chiefly about the origins and aftermath of the war. It was necessary to paint the pre-war (“bourgeois nationalist”) era blackly and to overlook the dirty tricks and violence that allowed the Communists to take power between the Baltic and the Black Sea.

Once communist rule ended, the demand for historical truth was burning not only inside the former captive nations, but between them. A century’s worth of grievances had been concealed behind the phony façade of socialist brotherhood. Lithuanians and Poles wanted to talk about Vilnius. Hungary wanted to talk about Trianon. Germans wanted to talk about the Beneš decrees. And, with ghastly results, Yugoslavs didn’t just talk about how they ended up in six artificial provinces of an artificial country: they fought.

But the biggest issue was with Russia. Did the country’s new leaders really accept the enormity of what the Soviet Union had done or did they still regard it as a success story brought down by bad luck and bad leadership? Would they pay compensation (or at least give back stolen property)? Would they withdraw their troops from the old empire or leave them to protect their interests (whatever they might be)? Would they open the archives? The agenda was impossibly crowded. Czechoslovaks wondered if the NKVD archives might reveal the truth about the murder (or suicide) of the much-loved Jan Masaryk in March 1948. Estonians wanted their presidential seal and regalia, confiscated in 1940. Romania wanted its gold. Poles wanted more details about Katyń. And so on.

Many Russians regarded these concerns as tiresome, irrelevant or ungrateful. They wanted due credit (i.e., a lot) for their own suffering under communism and their role in its downfall. They felt they had given up, almost entirely peacefully, an empire that included places where Russians had lived for centuries. In Ukraine’s case, they had given up (from a Russian viewpoint at least) an integral part of their spiritual and cultural patrimony. It is rather as if the Third Reich had collapsed 1991, leaving a democratic Germany to be confronted not only with furious Poles, Czechoslovaks and Danes wanting justice and reparations, but also an independent Bavaria.

The new historical debate was comfortable and familiar ground for old cold warriors. Instead of bemoaning the Soviet Union’s misdeeds in dusty meeting rooms in west London and New Jersey, it was possible to visit the scene of the crime and discuss it with the victims and their relatives. History became a white-hot subject and a vital ingredient in nation building. Where Soviet propagandists demonized “bourgeois nationalism” as a hellish mixture of injustice and exploitation, the temptation after 1989 was to see the pre-war era as an idyll and problems such as authoritarian rule, pig-headed diplomacy and economic failure were set aside. At least, people argued, these mistakes were our own mistakes, made by our own leaders, in our own country. What came next had been qualitatively worse.

The chance to speak honestly about the past, after 50 years of totalitarian propaganda and lies, was necessary, important and right. In another article I dubbed it “therapeutic historiography.”[1] But as time has gone on, the gloomy echoes of past betrayals and atrocities have faded. In 1991, the task of sorting out history was an urgent one. Now the present and the future look more compelling. Bilateral rows, unconnected with the communist era, have faded from being pressing political issues to the subject of academic debate (at one end of the spectrum) and name-calling in the blogosphere (at the other). Ten years ago, what really happened at the battlefield of Kosovo Polje in 1389 was a big issue between Serbs and their neighbors. Now it is becoming a (properly) remote one. The same goes for issues such as the Treaty of Trianon (which dismembered post-Hapsburg Hungary), or Żeligowski’s seizure of Vilnius (then Wilno) in 1920.

Some issues remain on the agenda: Lithuania’s squabbling with Poland about spelling remains a real nuisance. The Slovak language law really annoyed Hungary. The dispute between Greece and its northern neighbor about where the Macedonia label belongs and who can use it has paralyzed the expansion of the European Union and NATO, with dire results. But these arguments are increasingly seldom the central questions of real politics. And they are regarded with exasperation, not sympathy, by outsiders.

In the West too, public opinion began to rethink its view of Eastern Europe after 1989. Questions such as the fate of the Cossacks, the failed Anglo-American intelligence operations in the post-war Baltics, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Western silence over Katyń came onto the agenda. Western governments which had given Baltic gold reserves or embassy buildings to the Soviet Union paid compensation. Sweden, which had deported Latvians and Lithuanians to the Soviet Gulag in 1945, invited survivors back for an official apology and a meeting with the King. Countries that once regarded their policy of not recognizing the de jure Soviet annexation of the Baltic as an embarrassing historical relic started talking about it with pride. The idea that Stalin and Hitler were criminals of an equal hue sounded mainstream, not deranged. To some extent, even the heroic-sentimental self-image of the West changed. The British historian Norman Davies, and writers such as Timothy Garton Ash, deserve credit for their huge role in these changing perceptions. Another factor was daily life. Once, Eastern Europe was off the tourist trail. Now millions of outsiders have travelled to the ex-captive nations on business or on vacation, just as millions of east Europeans have gone to the west to relax, work or study. Their version of history has rubbed off on the Westerners, replacing or at least complementing the distorted and self-satisfied notions that used to be so widely accepted.

Behind that change is an even bigger conceptual difference. Western countries, on the whole, are not proud of their worst achievements. They are ashamed of them. And the discussion of history is not criminalized, or even politicized. The allied bombing of Germany has prompted agonized introspection from the middle of the war onwards. Britain contributed to the rebuilding of the beautiful Frauenkirche in Dresden and the Queen attended its reopening. That is in sharp contrast to Russian historiography, which is missing this mixture of atonement and sympathy towards the former adversary.

In the prevailing Russian version of history, as in the Soviet one that preceded it, the “fascist” enemy is demonized to the point of being inhuman. Even the most revolting war crimes, such as the mass rape of German and other women, are all but ignored. In Western Europe, taboos about the war have vanished. It is possible to discuss allied war crimes, the blunders of the generals, Churchill’s drinking habits. Roosevelt’s near-senility at Yalta, and even whether Britain should have gone to war at all without risking official displeasure or criminal prosecution.

Relevance and Relativism

But along with a wider perspective has come diminishing relevance. The generation with first-hand memories of the Second World War and its aftermath is dying out. The end of the Cold War has made history (especially European history) less relevant. The threat of nuclear annihilation made people want to know why we were in a military standoff with a totalitarian superpower. Now, the practical use of history is in understanding Islam and our relations with the Arab world. History is no longer a compulsory subject for British teenagers. Before they drop the subject, they learn little apart from a few anecdotes about the love lives of British monarchs, and a version of the Second World War that is even skimpier than the caricature with which this article begins. As fog descends on the public’s understanding of history, it is becoming similarly irrelevant for most policymakers.

In Russia too, interest in history has waxed and waned. In the 1990s, history was a national preoccupation. The crimes of Stalinism were one hot topic, the real history of the Russian revolution, and the missing history of the White (anti-Communist) Russians in exile was another. Much nostalgia for the Tsarist era remains—the popularity of Boris Akunin’s stories about the detective Erast Fandorin is a prime example.

But under Mr. Putin, the clock started to tick backwards in a more sinister way. His infamous remark that the Soviet Union’s collapse was the “geopolitical catastrophe” of the past century is well known. It came against a background of a new approach to the past that glorifies the Soviet Union, denigrates the West, and portrays the Yeltsin years as a period of disgraceful weakness and chaos from which Russia has now been rescued.

“Many school books are written by people who work to get foreign grants. They dance to a butterfly-polka that others have paid for. These books, regrettably, get into schools and universities,” Mr. Putin said in the summer of 2007.[2] He demanded new history textbooks that “make our citizens, especially the young, proud of their country” and insisted “no one must be allowed to impose guilty feelings on us.” Those textbooks portray Stalin as a tough leader who made some bad mistakes, not as a monster. These ideas were quickly appropriated by the mainstream Kremlin-controlled media. In September 2007 Rossiiskaya Gazeta, an official government newspaper, cast doubt on the idea that the NKVD was responsible for Katyń. That was as shocking for Poles as if a German government newspaper said that the evidence for gas chambers at Auschwitz was flimsy. Russia also denounced Estonia and Latvia for “fascism,” particularly after Estonia moved a Soviet-era war memorial from the center of town to a military cemetery in April 2007. The central ideological plank of the regime’s ideology is the idea that wartime heroism and sacrifice bestowed an unchallengeable moral legitimacy on both the Soviet Union and on Russia. This idea is both conceptually flawed and open to devastating empirical challenge. But its assiduous promotion has had an effect. According to a recent poll, only 20 percent of Russians believe that the Katyń massacre was the work of the NKVD.

A second plank is anti-westernism. Mr. Putin and his colleagues believe (or affect to believe) that Western moral superiority is nonsense based on hypocrisy. Western countries do not really believe in international law and human rights. They just pretend to — and use these notional moral frameworks as a way of constraining Russia. What really matters is power politics and the pursuit of market share. The same applies to history. Granted, Stalin was bad; but no worse, Mr. Putin has argued, than dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Western imperialism, the near-extermination of Native Americans, slavery and so on balance Russia’s presumed and alleged historical sins. Moreover, Russia has no direct responsibility for the Soviet Union.

That argument has some force. But it is not conclusive. The huge difference is that Britain, America and other Western countries do not celebrate the darkest parts of their history. They are ashamed of them. They certainly do not conceal them. Schoolchildren learn rather a lot about the bad side of European expansion into Asia, Africa and the Americas (some might think they learn too little about the good side). What is missing in Russia is an understanding that past imperialism had a dark side that was bleak indeed. To this day, many Russians believe that their mission in the Baltic States was a civilizing one: “We found this place in ruins, and we have built it up. Now how they thank us,” said my (Russian) fixer bitterly in Narva in 1990. The fact that Narva had been obliterated by allied bombing and the Red Army in 1944, in a war in which Estonia was guiltless, escaped her (she also thought that Britain had been neutral during the whole of World War Two).

The ignorance extends not only to the crimes of Stalinist expansionism, but also to the conquest of the Caucasus in the Tsarist era. Had a Britain or America massacred the Circassians in the way that the Tsarist General Suvorov managed in the 1860s, it would be a matter of national shame and sorrow.

It would be tempting but wrong to say that this revisionist approach to history wholly dominates Russia’s dealings with its neighbors. Seen from the Baltic States or (under the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko) from Ukraine, the historical gap looks unbridgeable. Russia makes no secret of its detestation of figures such as the wartime Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera. When Ukraine made him a national hero, Russia expressed disgust and outrage: in Russian historiography, Bandera and his followers were nothing more than brutal Nazi henchmen. Russia explicitly refuses to recognize the Baltic States’ version of their own history, in which they were occupied from 1940-91 and subject to “illegal immigration” by Russian and other Soviet migrants. Russia, by contrast, sees them as newly independent ex-Soviet republics, just like Moldova or Georgia.

But elsewhere the picture is rather different. That can come as a shock to those who see Mr. Putin and his ex-KGB colleagues as repellently unrepentant apologists for the Soviet era, and even for Stalinism. It would be overly optimistic to describe the shift as a sincere change of heart: nothing on the scale of Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung has taken place. But for all that, Mr. Putin has effectively damped down many of the most burning historical issues.

In 2006, as president, he visited Budapest to mark the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian uprising, where he told his Hungarian counterpart, “Certainly modern Russia is not the Soviet Union but I must tell you frankly that in our hearts we feel a certain moral responsibility for these events.”

On the same trip he went to the Czech Republic, endorsed (without repeating it) Boris Yeltsin’s apology in 1993 and said,

The only concern we have when talking about the tragic events of the past is that certain political forces use these events today to provoke anti-Russian feelings and try to give the impression that Russia is a somewhat incapacitated country. This makes us uneasy. But I must tell you absolutely frankly that while of course there is no legal responsibility here and indeed, there cannot be any, of course a moral responsibility exists. It could not be any other way.

In 2009, Mr. Putin went to Gdansk and uttered words on the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland that blunted the sharpest edges in Polish-Russian relations, “...one must admit that all the attempts to appease the Nazis undertaken between 1934 and 1939 by striking various agreements and pacts with them are inadmissible from the moral point of view and from the practical, political point of view are senseless, detrimental and dangerous.” He went on to say,

“Certainly, one must admit these mistakes. Our country has done it. We sincerely want Russian-Polish relations to be also cleared of this residue of the past, developing in the spirit of good-neighborliness and cooperation to be worthy of the two great European nations.”

At Katyń on April 7, Putin took a similar stance, saying:

We have been brought here today by common memory and grief, as well as common historical duty and faith in the future. Here lie Soviet citizens burnt in the fires of Stalin’s repressions in the 1930s, Polish officers shot by secret order and soldiers of the Red Army executed by the Nazis during World War Two.

Russia and Poland, and the Russian and Polish peoples, have suffered through practically all the tragedies of the 20th century like no other countries, like no other Europeans. They have paid a heavy price for the two world wars, the fratricidal, armed conflicts and the cruelty and inhumanity of totalitarianism.

Our people, who have lived through the horrors of civil war, forced collectivization and the massive purges of the 1930s, probably understand better than any other what Katyń, Mednoye, and Pyatikhatka mean to many Polish families, because the sites of massive executions of Soviet citizens are in the same mournful category.

(Stalinist) repression swept people away regardless of their ethnic origin, convictions or religious beliefs. Whole social classes became victims - Cossacks, clergymen, ordinary peasants, professors, officers…teachers and workers. The logic was simple - to sow fear, to awaken people’s basest instincts, to turn them against each other and to make them obey blindly and unthinkingly.

There is no justification for these crimes. In our country, we have passed a clear political, legal and moral verdict on the atrocities of that totalitarian regime. And this verdict cannot be revised.

It would be hypocritical to urge us all to forget, especially before these graves and the people who come here to honor the memory of their family members. It would be hypocritical to say that everything has sunk into oblivion.

No, we must preserve the memory of the past, and will do so, no matter how bitter it may be. We cannot change the past, but we can preserve and restore the truth and, hence, historical justice.

Russian and Polish historians, clergymen and representatives of the public have undertaken this laborious task. While studying the past they are working for the sake of the truth, and, hence, the future of our bilateral relations.

It is these concerted efforts to reflect on the past and heal historical wounds that can help us avoid misunderstanding, permanent stalemate and primitive interpretations dividing peoples as innocent or guilty, as irresponsible politicians sometimes try to do.

For decades, there were attempts to conceal the truth about the Katyń massacre with cynical lies. But to lay the blame for these crimes on the Russian people would be the same sort of lies and manipulation.

History written with malice and hatred is just as false and glossed over as history adopted to suit the interests of specific individuals or specific groups. I’m sure that this is increasingly understood both in Russia and Poland.

No matter how difficult it may be, we should meet each other halfway, realizing that it is impossible to live only in the past.

And so today we are here together. Here, in Katyń, at the commemorative ceremony devoted to the 70th anniversary of the Polish tragedy. And we were together in Gdansk as well, on the anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two. Our nations fought against a common enemy on the fronts.

I’m confident that we will also celebrate the anniversary of the Great Victory (in World War Two) together, which was primarily won by the soldiers of the Red Army, and which claimed the lives of thousands of soldiers of the Polish Army, the Armia Krajowa and the Anders Army, as well as lives of thousands of defenders of Moscow and Warsaw, Westerplatte and Smolensk.

The big breakthrough was that Putin accepted the Polish version of events: this was an NKVD crime, not (as the Russian government argues in a case in the European Court in Strasbourg) unclear; and certainly not the work of the Nazis. But he also relativized the crime, arguing that Soviet prisoners of war lay in the same soil (something that historians have not previously asserted). And he came out with an original argument that Stalin had ordered the killings to avenge the deaths of an even greater number (30,000) of captured Soviet prisoners of war in 1920. That is problematic for several reasons. First, the number of those prisoners’ deaths is disputed and almost certainly far fewer than Mr. Putin claims. Second, they died chiefly from typhus at a time when the Polish state was barely able to feed and care for its own people (not least because it had just been attacked in its infancy by the Soviet Union). To equate that with the deliberate massacre of captured Polish officers suggests an alarming degree of slipperiness and relativism.

What Mr. Putin did not do is condemn Stalin outright. Nor did he take the elementary steps that the Poles are asking for, in terms of opening the archives (noting that Britain has yet to open all the files concerning the death of Władysław Sikorski in 1943). He said that exposing the names of the perpetrators would be unfair to their surviving relatives.

Overtures

Yet for many Poles, particularly those in government, the trajectory is enough. More patient diplomacy with the Russians will steadily produce more results. But hoping for a “big bang” is unrealistic. The Polish parliament, for example (stung by “Katyń denial”) has categorized the massacre as “genocide.” That is disingenuous. The scale is so vastly different from the Nazis’ mass killings that it looks self-absorbed. It offends Jews (and Armenians) who think that the label is theirs by virtue of much greater suffering. Perhaps Russia would have accepted that at the height of the Yeltsin years (when the then Russian leader visited Warsaw in 1993 he knelt at the Katyń memorial, laid flowers, and whispered “prostite nas, jesli mozhete” [forgive us, if you can]. But that era is past. For politicians impatient to make their mark on history, it seems better to take what can be gained now, rather than waiting for a future Russian leadership that might, perhaps, adopt a more radical stance.

A similar quasi-reconciliation is in the cards for Ukraine. The departure of Viktor Yushchenko has ended, at least for the next four years, the period in which a radical Ukrainian-centered view of history clashed head on with the Kremlin’s neo-Soviet version. No more bashing on about the Holodmor. No more glorification of Stepan Bandera and the UPA (Ukrainian Insurrectionary Army). No more arguments about Kievan Rus and who brought Orthodox Christianity to the Eastern Slavs. No more rows — probably — about the future of the Black Sea Fleet at its base in Sevastopol. With Belarus, the argument has never started. Moldova is too small and poor to matter (not to the Moldovans, of course, but to the outside world).

It is increasingly likely that he will make a similar overture to one of the Baltic States — most likely Lithuania. It would be easy to imagine Mr. Putin (or perhaps Mr. Medvedev) on a trip to Vilnius, making a somber but not penitent speech about history. It could go something like this:

In 1939 the specter of fascist aggression cast a shadow across the whole continent of Europe. The Western countries had failed to form a convincing anti-fascist alliance. Worse, they collaborated with the Nazis in the Munich agreement. Some circles in Baltic States were planning their own alliance with Nazi Germany too. To forestall that, and to buy time, the then Soviet leadership came to a temporary tactical arrangement under which the Baltic States came under the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. That temporarily sheltered them from fascist aggression. In Lithuania’s case, it enabled the country to regain its historic capital Vilnius and some other territories. The incorporation [слияние] into the Soviet Union that then took place remains controversial to this day. Though it can be argued that it was technically in accordance with international law at the time, it clearly did not represent the freely expressed will of the Lithuanian people. That is a matter for regret as much for us as it is for you.

In return, Lithuania would drop its demands for compensation and for Russia to explicitly use the o-word (“occupation”). To ease the deal, Russia could agree to restore the oil pipeline to the Mažeikiai oil refinery, in return for a stake in it going to a friendly company (it is currently owned, but unloved, by the Polish PKN Orlen; Russia has cut off its supplies, claiming that the pipeline needs maintenance).

Such a deal would, it should be noted, leave the other Baltic States in a difficult position. Soviet rule in the Baltics during the occupation era was not uniform. Lithuania gained territory that it lost to Poland 20 years previously. In 1945, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Soviet Lithuania also regained Klaipeda. Under its long-serving (August 1940 to January 22, 1974) Communist Party chief Antanas Sniečkus, Lithuania avoided the Russification inflicted on its northern neighbors. The Soviet-era migration to Estonia and Latvia, and the citizenship and language laws adopted in response since independence, have raised legal issues, often poorly understood by outsiders, that do not concern Lithuania. In short: when Estonia and Latvia condemn the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its consequences, they do so in slightly different terms.

Clearly a unilateral Lithuanian-Russian deal would be troublesome for Estonia and Latvia. It would therefore be nice to think that Lithuania would not even consider such a step without close consultation with the other two Baltic States. On the evidence of the past, that does not seem likely. On May 9, the Baltic States seem set to repeat the fiasco of 2005, when two presidents (Arnold Rüütel of Estonia and Valdas Adamkus of Lithuania) stayed away from the Russian 60th anniversary celebrations of victory in World War Two, and one (Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga of Latvia) showed up. This year, Estonia’s Toomas Hendrik Ilves and Latvia’s Valdis Zatlers are going, and Dalia Grybauskaite is staying away (the result of a botched attempt to entice Dmitry Medvedev into coming to Vilnius for the 20th anniversary of Lithuania’s declaration of restored independence). If the Baltic States cannot coordinate their stance on something as predictable as an anniversary, what chance do they have when facing up to a serious Russian effort to play divide et impera.

Conclusion

This smoothing over of historical rows is potential game-changer. For 20 years, it has been an article of faith for people in the region and their friends that laying the ghosts of Soviet history was both a moral and political imperative. Those efforts have failed. Stalinist and neo-Soviet versions of the past have not died. They have revived, albeit in diluted form. The rest of the world —and many in the former communist world —seem increasingly ready to accept messy compromise, woolly words and half-truths in order to have normal relations with Russia. Resisting that tide is going to be tough.

It is worth it — not least because of solidarity with those Russians who do care about the past. Mr. Putin’s step is a profoundly important and welcome one. But it is only a necessary, not a sufficient condition for a real change.


[1] The Economist. The End of History, Revisited: The ex-communist states of eastern Europe are leaving their pasts behind. February 25, 2010, available at http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15577511.
[2] “Butterfly-Polka” (Polka-Babochka) is, incidentally, an unusual choice of phrase straight from the Stalinist propaganda lexicon, when it was used to indicate something utterly alien. See this explanation by Pavel Felgenhauer, a hard-hitting journalistic critic of the Kremlin, available at http://www.jamestown.org/edm/article.php?article_id=2372256.

Norman Stone book review

he cold war

Feel of history
Apr 29th 2010
From The Economist print edition


The Norman Stone story

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War. By Norman Stone. Basic Books; 668 pages; $35. Allen Lane; £30. 

IMAGINE that you are invited to lunch at Oxford University. Sherry, wine and port flow like the Isis, with facts, anecdotes, bons mots and sparkling insights swirling past in a bewildering but entertaining array. The conversation continues on a punt, then on a brisk walk around the university parks, then over tea, which slips into (more) sherry, and afterwards a splendiferous “high table” dinner. Late at night you wobble through the darkened streets, still talking, feeling pleasantly at one with the world. It is great fun, but no substitute for actually studying history.

That is how reading Norman Stone’s book about the cold war feels. He has a terrific eye for detail, bringing to life everything from the ruins of Germany to Ronald Reagan’s White House with a wonderfully waspish turn of phrase: Nikita Khrushchev, unlike his colleagues, “did indeed have a human face, though pachydermic”. Sometimes it runs away with him. Boris Yeltsin is dismissed in barely a page as a “sinister clown”. He captures well the West’s weakness, as well as the seemingly powerful challenge that eastern-style socialism posed to Western freedom.

At the end of this work you will know a lot about Europe, about the cold war and about Mr Stone himself. But the book has a careless air. The prose reads as if it had been dictated rather than written, and was then sent straight to the printers. The word “besides” appears with alarming frequency as a way of linking page-long paragraphs. Colloquialisms that would be charming once become grating and lazy when you meet them page after page. Episodes that normally count as rather important, such as the Polish shipyard strikes in 1980, pass in a blur, whereas hobby-horses such as the decline of British universities get an energetic ride.

Nor is there any sign of research. When Mr Stone does not know a fact, he shrugs his shoulders. The reason why Russian immigrants poured into occupied Estonia and Latvia in the Soviet era, but not into Lithuania, is an interesting historical question which affects the present. He recounts it, adds “for whatever reason” and moves on. Teresa Toranska, a Polish author, wrote a magnificent book called “Them”, based on interviews with dinosaur communists. Mr Stone refers to her book but cannot be bothered to name it or her. Instead of footnotes, there is a section called “further reading”. For a polyglot, he is remarkably careless in his spelling of names. Diacritical signs are distributed at random. Experts and lay readers alike will feel increasingly short-changed.

Most annoying of all is the lack of a conclusion: the book ends with a garbled account of the downfall of Margaret Thatcher and the limp observation that the 1980s were by far the most interesting part of the post-war era. Mr Stone’s colossal talents and his epic subject surely deserve better.

Rewriting the map of Europe

This lighthearted piece has proved surprisingly popular--largely I think thanks to the brilliant Economist cartographer who made this map

Europe.view 

Redrawing the map
Apr 29th 2010
From Economist.com


The European map is outdated and illogical. Here's how it should look

PEOPLE who find their neighbours tiresome can move to another neighbourhood, whereas countries can’t. But suppose they could. Rejigging the map of Europe would make life more logical and friendlier.

Britain, which after its general election will have to confront its dire public finances, should move closer to the southern-European countries that find themselves in a similar position. It could be towed to a new position near the Azores. (If the journey proves a bumpy one, it might be a good opportunity to make Wales and Scotland into separate islands).

In Britain’s place should come Poland, which has suffered quite enough in its location between Russia and Germany and deserves a chance to enjoy the bracing winds of the North Atlantic and the security of sea water between it and any potential invaders.

Belgium’s incomprehensible Flemish-French language squabbles (which have just brought down a government) are redolent of central Europe at its worst, especially the nonsenses Slovakia thinks up for its Hungarian-speaking ethnic minority. So Belgium should swap places with the Czech Republic. The stolid, well-organised Czechs would get on splendidly with their new Dutch neighbours, and vice versa.

Belarus, currently landlocked and trying to wriggle out from under Russia’s thumb, would benefit greatly from exposure to the Nordic region, whose influence played a big role in helping the Baltics shed their Soviet legacy. So it should move northwards to the Baltic, taking the place of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. These three countries should move to a new location somewhere near Ireland. Like the Emerald Isle, they have bitten the bullet of “internal devaluation”, regaining competitiveness by cutting wages and prices, rather than taking the easy option of depreciating the currency, or borrowing recklessly as Greece has. The Baltics would also be glad to be farther away from Russia and closer to America. Amid the other moves, Kaliningrad could shift up the coast towards Russia, ending its anomalous status as a legacy exclave of the second world war and removing any possibility of future Russian mischief-making about rail transit.

Into the slots vacated by Poland and Belarus should come the western and central parts of Ukraine. Germany, with the Ukrainian border now only 100km from Berlin, would start having to take the country’s European integration seriously. The Ukrainian shift would allow Russia to move west and south too, thus vacating Siberia for the Chinese, who will take it sooner or later anyway.

Next comes some reordering of the Balkans. Macedonia, Albania and Kosovo should rotate places, with Macedonia taking Kosovo’s place next to Serbia, Kosovo moving to Albania’s slot on the coast, and Albania shifting inland. Paranoid Greek fantasies about territorial claims from the deluded Slav irredentists from the north would evaporate. Bosnia is too fragile to move and will have to stay where it is.

Switzerland and Sweden are often confused. So it would make sense to move Switzerland north, where it would fit neatly into the Nordic countries. Its neutrality would go down well with the Finns and Swedes; Norway would be glad to have another non-EU country next door.

Germany can stay where it is, as can France. But Austria could shift westwards into Switzerland’s place, making room for Slovenia and Croatia to move north-west too.* They could join northern Italy in a new regional alliance (ideally it would run by a Doge, from Venice). The rest of Italy, from Rome downwards, would separate and join with Sicily to form a new country, officially called the Kingdom of Two Sicilies (but nicknamed Bordello). It could form a currency union with Greece, but nobody else.



* A welcome side-effect of these changes will be to make space for previously fictional creations such as Anthony Hope's Ruritania, Hergé's Syldavia and Borduria, and Vulgaria, the backdrop for “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”.

Belarus Govt in Exile

While I was away I missed the chance to interview Ivonka Survilla, president of the Belarusian Government in Exile (BNR). An audio interview is available here on the Economist website

Europe view on Poland. Politics as normal?

Winners and losers
Apr 22nd 2010
From Economist.com


Normal politics, and hard questions, loom in Poland

IN THE churches of Warsaw and other Polish cities, the funerals continue but questions are looming. Why were so many of the country’s top brass on the plane that crashed on April 10th, killing President Lech Kaczynski, his wife and 94 others, including some of the country’s brightest and best military officers? Some of the relatives are, privately, furious. They say that their menfolk were ordered to travel to the Katyn memorial service as a backdrop for the launch of Mr Kaczynski’s re-election campaign.


Bosses often waste busy people’s time for reasons of their own. But every decision that led to the crash now looks questionable. The decencies of mourning mean that media and political opponents are behaving gently. But that won’t last, especially when an even bigger question is in the air: what made the pilot decide to try to land at fog-bound Smolensk? He could have landed at Minsk, which would have been safer but would have ruined the commemoration ceremony by making the president late.


Was that just the pilot’s decision? Did he have doubts? Was there any pressure from Mr Kaczynski? (In 2008 the president publicly berated a pilot for “cowardice”.) The answer may never be known. The cockpit voice recorder includes only the crew’s preceding 30 minutes of conversation; the decision to ignore an air-traffic controller’s suggestion to land at Minsk was made nearly 45 minutes before the disaster.


A third question is whether Mr Kaczynski deserved burial at the Wawel Cathedral in Cracow. That honour is normally reserved for Poland’s greatest heroes: the most recent to be buried there was Wladyslaw Sikorski, the country’s legendary wartime leader. Mr Kaczynski’s death was tragic. But he was a divisive figure, not an epitome of Polish greatness.


The answers to these questions may determine another: who wins the June presidential election. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the late president’s twin, could stand, perhaps buoyed by a sympathy vote. But his chances look fragile. If some of the blame for at least the scale of the disaster ends up falling on the late president, the Kaczynski legacy would look even flimsier.


Mr Kaczynski’s rival, Bronislaw Komorowski, is leading the opinion polls. In accordance with the constitution, Mr Komorowski, the speaker of the Sejm (the lower house of parliament) is already acting president. He should be a shoo-in. But his two public appearances since the crash have seemed wooden and unsympathetic. Some wonder if a cross-party candidate would be a good move, epitomising the new mood of national unity. But who? Despite the largely trivial political differences between the country's two main parties, Polish politics is sharply polarised.


Away from the backbiting world of domestic politics, the immediate question is whether Poland’s relations with Russia have been genuinely transformed or if the changes are just cosmetic. Some see realpolitik at work, assuming that Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, considers it worth making minor concessions over historical questions in order to fix relations with its large western neighbour, particularly given growing awareness of Poland's potential gas reserves. As for the Polish business lobby, profits in Russia loom larger than fiddly questions about history and justice.


The biggest question is about Russia. Openness about Katyn and Stalinist crimes against Poland inexorably leads to questions about the still greater crimes of the communists against Russians themselves. Pull on the thread of truth and all sorts of things will start to unravel. Why is the mass murderer Lenin, the author of the Red Terror, still venerated on Red Square? Answers on a postcard to Mr Putin.

A Lithuanian view on Katyn and Smolensk

Ramunas Bogdanas, the former adviser to Lithuanian president Vytautas Landsbergis, has written this interesting commentary on Katyn, which I am glad to give a platform to.

KATYN: TRUTH VS LIE
Ramūnas Bogdanas

For 70 years the word Katyn is an open wound in the memory of the Polish nation. It can be healed only by the victory of truth against lie. This battle lasts since 1943, when Goebbels wrote in his diary on the day the Germans were retreating from Katyn: with no doubt the Russians shall blame the Germans for this crime. The Nazi ideologist guessed right because there was no difference in the essence of these enemies. During the trial in Nurnberg the Soviets tried to accuse Nazis of the Katyn massacre but the allies didn’t dare to confirm the fake, and it was nonsuited due to the “lack of evidence”.
The first Katyn annihilated the officers of the Second Republic, and the second – all the top commanders of the Third Republic.
For 70 years Katyn means the opposition of justice against iniquity. On one side – 21,680 killed, on the other – pragmatism, indifference, secrecy.
When the prime minister in exile Wladislaw Sikorski, residing in London, learned about Katyn in April, 1943, he asked Winston Churchill to approach Stalin for explanation. Churchill, knowing the truth, wouldn’t disturb his ally. Stalin suspended all the relations with that Polish government, and just after a month the plane with W.Sikorski crashed when taking off in Gibraltar. At that time the famous soviet spy Kim Philby was operating in Gibraltar as the British intelligence officer.
The President of the USA Franklin d Roosevelt got all the information about the massacre of the Polish from his special emissary in 1944 but he suppressed the report and officially rejected the conclusion.
The first to partially acknowledge the responsibility of NKVD for Katyn was Michail Gorbachev. Later Boris Jelcin handed to Poles a section of documents about Katyn which were always kept in the file No.1 of the First Secretary of the Communist party. The trial was started by the Russian military prosecutor in 1990 but it was closed with no results in 2004. The relatives of the victims approached the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Vladimir Putin invited the Polish prime minister Donald Tusk to visit Katyn on April, 6. On the eve the court in Strasburg received the answer from Russia to the request. It states: “It appeared impossible to get the information about the execution of the decision to shoot particular persons as all the notes are destroyed, and it is impossible to restore them”. So to whom Putin bowed his head next day? According to the official answer to Strasburg it is impossible to tell were almost 22,000 Poles have disappeared.
Another half-true of Russia was the explanation of Putin that the documents are kept secret because of the humanistic reasons as the guilty have offsprings and relatives. According to these logics, all the murders and rapists should be classified. Putin spoke only about the abstract victims of totalitarianism and claimed that Russia has already evaluated the crimes of Stalinism. O course! Moscow is under preparation to welcome the guests of the Victory parade on May, 9 spruced up with the portraits of Stalin. Somehow the Germans don’t display Hitler for eliminating unemployment in the pre-war Germany. When then German Chancellor Willy Brandt visited the ghetto of Warsaw he didn’t start explanations what is the difference between FRG and the Third Reich. Being the antifascist and social democrat from his young days, he performed penance bending his knees on the pavement of the ghetto.
The politics of half-step could be felt in all the setting of the prime ministers meeting. Russia never showed the movie of Andziej Wajda “Katyn” (2007) before. It appeared on TV on the eve of the visit to Katyn but it was on the channel “Kultura” which has a low popularity. V. Putin did invite D.Tusk to Katyn but came himself very late making the Polish prime minister wait for him almost an hour. In the language of diplomats this means: “You must know your proper place”.
The aircraft of the President of Poland plunged into the hardly transparent mist above Katyn both figuratively and directly. That was a private visit, and no high Kremlin officials were waiting for him. As one Russian pilot said on the radio “Echo of Moscow”, the special landing equipment which was brought to the airport to harbor the planes of Putin and Tusk has been removed. But in his not delivered speech Lech Kaczynski wanted to express his delight that the move towards the truth has started in Russia. As his last will the President left his unspoken wish “not to stop by any means” till the truth is revealed. As J.W. Goethe has said, the truth heals the evil. When a man can watch the truth directly into the eyes, he is free.
The meeting of two prime ministers paved the way to the relations based on the marginalizing the uncomfortable truth for the sake of the pragmatic interests of today. But such half-truth would leave Russians with a burden of guilty conscience which then raises the troublesome questions : why does nobody love us?; why don’t we enjoy confidence around? And the Poles would stay with a bleeding wound under a nice bandage. The crash of the Presidential plane didn’t leave a chance for lip–deep truth.
The sudden change in the behavior of Russia might be the reaction to the attempts taken by the American companies to explore the promising fields of shale gas in Poland. They declared the start this month. The success would mean the weakening of the main weapon of Putin’s politics which is Gazprom. If the shale gas is a success that will change the situation all over Europe. It is very pragmatic to get as close to Poland as possible, maybe becoming involved in the gas sector now, at the very start of the shale gas exploiting.
According to one of the US founding fathers Thomas Jefferson, the tree of freedom now and then must be watered with the blood of the patriots. Katyn-2 illuminated the wandering in the twilight like a lightning. “Katyn” of A.Wajda was replayed on the main Russian TV channel in the primetime. The hearts of Poles are full of gratitude for Russian compassion. The sharp Russian journalists declare to be proud of state authorities for the first time after many years.


Lech Kaczynski was mocked not only in Poland where he had almost no chances in the Presidential elections to be held this autumn. He was uncomfortable for EU for his firm principles, and the Western mass media used to sting him. Even after his death the biggest Antwerp newspaper published a contemptible cartoon “The eagle landed” with a picture of the eagle of the Polish coat of arms fallen on the Polish red and white flag.
After the crash there was a version spread that L.Kaczynski himself could press on the pilot to land in spite of the adverse air conditions. This was proven by the false story that he urged the pilot to land in Tbilisi during the military conflict in August, 2008, and after the pilot refused, later he put attempts to fire him. I specifically asked about this the former President of Lithuania Valdas Adamkus who was on that flight, and he was seated directly in front of L.Kaczynski so they could communicate during the flight – by the way, that was the same plane that crashed near Smolensk, and the first pilot in the flight to Smolensk kpt. Arkadiusz Protasiuk was a second pilot on the flight to Georgia. Mr. Adamkus witnessed that L.Kaczynski listened to the report of the pilot to land in Azerbaijan instead, and the only question he asked was if the cars to move to Tbilisi were arranged.
Death purified the essence of that man, and the Poles spend long hours queueing to pay homage for this small man with a big heart devoted to his motherland. I t happens often that a person is appreciated only after death. Only then appears the perception that the foundation of the state rests on the basic principles but not on the optimum of pork export.
According to the Constitution the early presidential elections shall be held in June. Thanks to the unknown will on the eve of the flight the twin brother of the President refused to fly together. The explanation about their mother in the hospital is not really sound: the trip would last just half a day.
Due to that decision there is a man in Poland now who is called the strategist of the tandem, the former prime minister in 2005-2007. It seems that the faith points him to continue standing for principles that his brother died for. Jaroslaw Kaczynski is an identical twin. Emotionally, he will seem to the electorate as the embodied president who is buried with the kings in the royal palace of Wawel in Cracow. The memoirs of the Sunday ceremony will still be alive, when only the nice words came from the lips of the visitants, the mighty of this world. Even the future rivals of the election campaign have to select the words of respect at the farewell ceremony. If Jaroslaw Kaczynski participates, the election campaign shall differ. The sceptical words against the gone President will be accepted as a scorn to Poland. The compliments to Lech Kaczynski the Poles accept now as the compliments to Poland. In Poland especially, no one can criticize what brings glory to the state. And the electorate even visually will see the copy of so honoured Lech Kaczynski in the face of Jaroslaw.
Bearing in mind that the accident near Smolensk paves the way to the truth in the story of Katyn, and not forgetting the Polish deep sense of honour I wouldn’t be astonished if J.Kaczynski is elected as the President. His destiny would be to start a new page of Polish – Russian relations which his twin brother opened with a sacrifice of his life.

Norman Davies

We were lucky to be able to get Professor Norman Davies into the Economist audio studio. Here's my interview with him

leader on Poland

Poland's loss

A president dies, a country lives
Apr 15th 2010
From The Economist print edition


The plane crash that killed Poland’s president, Lech Kaczynski, could bring good out of tragic loss








NO COUNTRY can endure the loss of dozens of its leading military, political and cultural figures without great pain. And in Poland, a place where history is punctuated by tragedy, it is all too tempting to link the plane crash that killed 96 people on April 10th, including President Lech Kaczynski (see obituary), with such other sorrows as the wartime Katyn massacre that they were flying to Smolensk to commemorate. But that linkage is both lazy and misleading.

The Katyn killings marked the deliberate decapitation of the pre-war state. The 22,000 prisoners-of-war murdered by Stalin’s secret police were not just the military leadership; they were also reservists—doctors, lawyers, teachers, officials—who formed the middle-class backbone of Poland. Stalin knew they were the biggest human obstruction to his plan, cooked up with Hitler, to wipe Poland from the map.

The plane crash was no decapitation. The empty posts are being filled calmly and correctly. Poland’s constitutional order has been scrupulously maintained (no Slavic Alexander Haig rushed in front of the cameras to proclaim “I’m in control”). The markets have been quite unmoved by the news.

A second difference is that Katyn was a crime compounded by a lie. Until 1990 the Soviet authorities blamed the murders on the Nazis. Under Vladimir Putin, the archives stayed sealed, judicial rehabilitation of the victims stalled and the excuses and deceits crept back. Those trying to raise the issue of Katyn felt that they were fighting a lonely battle. Not any more. The Katyn campaigners and relatives who perished this week have achieved in death a level of worldwide recognition for their cause that they never saw in life.

The crash has also brought unprecedented Russian openness and sympathy towards Poland. Mr Putin, not always this newspaper’s favourite ruler, deserves great credit. He had already denounced the Katyn massacre at a joint ceremony a few days earlier. Russian state television screened a gut-wrenching Polish film about the atrocity. After the crash it did so again. And far from covering things up, Russia’s co-operation with the Polish authorities in the aftermath of the crash has been exemplary. Even the most determined conspiracy theorists are finding no grist for their mills. Footage of Mr Putin embracing his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, at the crash site may come to exemplify a new relationship of trust and friendship, just as the smashed skulls and rotting bodies of Katyn victims of 70 years ago stood for the horrors of the past.

Mr Putin could do more to banish the spectre of Soviet nostalgia from Russia. But the main task is for Poland. Katyn came at the nadir of the country’s fortunes; the latest tragedy comes at a time when it has never been stronger, more prosperous or more secure (see article). Poland was the only European country whose economy grew last year. In 2011 it will hold the rotating six-month presidency of the European Union, preceded by its close ally, Hungary. That will be a salutary shock for those who think the EU is run out of Brussels by France and Germany. Then comes another moment in the spotlight: the 2012 European football championships, shared with Ukraine.

The best legacy

Yet the old stereotypes of a poor, neurotic country still have some claim on reality. A million or more enterprising Poles, fed up with grotty public services and a poor quality of life, have voted with their feet to work abroad. The country needs a dose of energetic reform to give them a reason to return. And a worrying whiff of sleaze hangs over public life. Fighting corruption was one of the things that most animated Lech Kaczynski and his twin brother Jaroslaw. To make Poland a shining success would be the best tribute to those who died in Katyn 70 years ago and at Smolensk airport on April 10th.

obituary (print edition)

Lech Kaczynski
Apr 15th 2010
From The Economist print edition


Lech Kaczynski, president of Poland, died in an air crash on April 10th, aged 60

CHARMING in private, awkward in public, scrupulously honest and a bit out of touch, Lech Kaczynski exemplified the strengths and weaknesses of the political milieu from which he came. His formative years were the long bleak decades of Poland’s communist era, first in Warsaw and then in provincial Gdansk. He and his twin brother, Jaroslaw, idolised their father, a veteran of the Polish Home Army, which fought an underground war against the German occupiers, only to be persecuted by the Soviet “liberators”. Each night at bedtime, the two boys used to sing the country’s national anthem: “Poland is not yet lost, while we still live.”

As 12-year-olds the twins starred in a popular Polish fantasy film, “The Two Who Stole the Moon”, though in real life the swotty duo had little in common with the scamps they portrayed. Both became academic lawyers, Lech specialising in labour law. That proved useful during the Solidarity era, when he advised the opposition trade union’s leaders in their talks with the communist boss-class. After the imposition of martial law in December 1981, he was interned for ten months.

He helped negotiate the communist regime’s surrender in 1989 and was one of the victors in the electoral triumph that followed. Soon after, he became security minister, developing a lasting distaste for the continuing influence of old communist spooks in public life. He resigned after falling out with his former friend, the Solidarity leader-turned-president, Lech Walesa, whom he later accused of having collaborated with the communist secret police. He was a crime-busting justice minister and then mayor of Warsaw. His legacy there is the capital’s haunting museum of the 1944 uprising, crushed by occupying German forces while a nearby Soviet army kept aloof. Both his parents fought in it.

But few saw him as a likely head of state. He was the less prominent of the twins: their all-but-identical appearance (Lech had a mole on his cheek; Jaroslaw did not) belied big differences. Lech was the younger and shyer, Jaroslaw the brainier, the bossier and the mastermind of the Law and Justice party (PiS in its Polish acronym) which they founded in 2001.

A surprise victor in 2005, Lech Kaczynski proved an uneasy president. He looked nervous at public occasions. Foreign ambassadors in Warsaw traded horror stories about protocol snafus in his chaotic chancery. His public relations were awful, consumed by suspicion of media plots against him. But content as well as form was adrift.

His grasp of economics was hazy, but that of foreign affairs was weaker still. Before his election Lech (like his brother) displayed scant interest in them. He spoke no foreign languages and had travelled little. His worldview was fixed: America, good, Russia and Germany, bad. Fellow-victims of communist imperialism, such as Lithuania, Ukraine and Georgia, needed help against the ex-KGB regime in Russia. Poland should always support Israel. The EU was overmighty and too secular. Most other countries did not matter at all.

Those views were popular among many Poles. But Mr Kaczynski pursued them clumsily, sometimes disastrously so. His performances at European summits were petulant and destructive. Repeated attempts by Angela Merkel, the polonophile German chancellor, to build a strong relationship with Poland were rebuffed. He told Germany to give Poland voting rights to reflect her wartime population losses. He cancelled his attendance at a trilateral French-German-Polish summit in 2006 in protest at an insulting German newspaper article. Bemusingly, he demanded a government apology.

Such gaffes and inexperience made Mr Kaczynski easy to lampoon. So did his socially conservative views. As mayor he banned gay parades in Warsaw. His stance was mainstream in Catholic Poland but shocked secular European opinion. Hostile journalists at home and abroad enjoyed ridiculing him.

But his critics often missed his virtues and overstated his faults. He was a patriot, but not a nationalist. He was no bigot: his daughter divorced, and then married someone active in Poland’s left-wing party, the SLD, which has its roots in the former communist party. Mr Kaczynski treated his new son-in-law with impeccable kindness.

Nor was he simply right-wing in the traditional sense. If anything, his views were those of Poland’s pre-war Socialist party. He was rather sceptical of big business (not least because of his concern for workers’ rights). Free-marketeers found him frustratingly unsympathetic to demands for more liberalisation and less bureaucracy.

Honest to a fault

His great concern, and that of many founding members of PiS, was corruption. Scrupulously honest themselves (his brother Jaroslaw does not even have a bank account) the twins could hardly have been more different from the sleek cronies who populate large parts of the Polish political spectrum. The Kaczynskis’ real failure was overzealousness: their anti-corruption crusade too often trampled over the rule of law that they wanted to uphold.

Mr Kaczynski was trailing badly in the re-election race due in October. Poles like honesty. But they like competence, effectiveness and modernity, too.

three-pager on Poland from this week's print edition

Out of tragedy, normality
Apr 15th 2010
From The Economist print edition


Poland’s prospects look bright, despite the aeroplane crash that killed its president on April 10th. But Poles still have a lot to do to make the most of their chances

COMMUNAL mourning after a national tragedy is deep but transient. People thought that the death in 1997 of Diana, Princess of Wales, would change Britain for ever. After a few weeks, things got back to normal. The same was true in Poland after the death in 2005 of the country’s most famous son, Pope John Paul II. The sense of national solidarity and the kindness between strangers were overwhelming. But they didn’t last.

And so, almost certainly, it will be with the great convulsion of grief that has swept Poland since the death of President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others in an aeroplane crash in Russia. After the funerals on April 17th, the media will doubtless resume its backbiting and excitability; politics will once again be bad-tempered, and people will ask hard questions about the crash.

Some of these will deserve answers more than others. It is not inherently scandalous, for example, that the Polish president was flying in a Soviet-made plane, recently serviced in Russia. The Tupolev 154 is thirsty and noisy, but robust and reliable. Nor do the conspiracy theories deserve a nanosecond’s attention. It is true that Poland’s wartime leader, Wladyslaw Sikorski, died in a mysterious aeroplane crash in Gibraltar in 1943, just as he was demanding the truth about the newly discovered massacre at Katyn. But the terrible coincidence is just that: a coincidence. Russia’s co-operation with the investigation cannot be faulted. It may even be the start of a deeper reconciliation between the two countries.

What does look questionable is the concentration of talent on the passenger list. The crash cost Poland’s armed forces six of their top seven commanders, and killed dozens of other notables. Countries and big companies usually have strict rules about how many of their most vital people can fly in the same plane. The crash shows the wisdom of such practices.

The investigation may reveal other misjudgments, too. Mr Kaczynski publicly berated for cowardice a pilot who refused to fly him and four other heads of state to Tbilisi during a mission to support the Georgian leadership during the war in August 2008. (The pilot later got a medal for refusing to obey the president’s reckless order.) The theory that on April 10th the pilot felt unduly pressured to get the president to the commemoration of the Katyn massacre, despite severe fog at Smolensk airport, deserves scrutiny. Some also wonder if it is overdoing things to give the late president, a divisive figure, the honour of burial in the crypt of the Wawel cathedral in Cracow, alongside Poland’s greatest leaders.

But whatever combination of incompetence, recklessness and sheer bad luck turns out to have caused the disaster, the bigger picture of Poland is a bright one. Foreigners used to stereotypes about Polish disorganisation, backwardness and prejudice find plenty to surprise them.

The clearest success is the economy. Poland is not only doing well in the “ex-communist” region (already a dated category). It is doing well by any standard. Its economy was the only one in Europe to boast growth last year, of 1.7%. Though the budget deficit is a whopping 7% of GDP, outsiders are unbothered. Poland’s banking system is solid, being largely unburdened by the rotten foreign-currency loans made in places such as Hungary and Latvia. Outside investors like Poland. It attracted more than $10 billion in foreign direct investment last year. Debt, at 53% of GDP, is manageable. Countries such as Britain might drool at that.

Poland’s success is partly a matter of luck. Its size (the biggest economy by far of the European Union’s newer members) means that domestic demand cushioned a fall in exports. EU taxpayers’ money for new roads, railways and other modernisation provided a fiscal stimulus at the right time. Growing interest by outside investors in Poland’s big gas reserves has raised the prospect of both a bonanza and greater energy independence—a big deal in a country fearful of over-dependence on Russian gas.

There was also good judgment. Poland has used monetary and fiscal policy well during the crisis. It has made a stab at reforming the pension system—a weak point in all ex-communist countries. It is using EU money more effectively than in the past. One of the biggest successes of Donald Tusk, the prime minister, has been to push squabbling local politicians to agree quickly on road-building programmes. Transport bottlenecks were an infuriating and growth-stifling feature of Polish life.

The government now exudes confidence. Mr Tusk heads a stable coalition with a solid parliamentary majority (unknown in modern Polish history). Business likes that. Among its prominent members are the finance minister, Jacek Rostowski, an economics professor from Britain; and Radek Sikorski, the foreign minister. A teenage refugee from communism, Mr Sikorski boasts a degree from Oxford and a high-profile American wife (who was a former Economist journalist). Both men have the connections and language skills to get Poland’s message across in a way that stirs envy among other politicians, working in laboured English or through interpreters.

Under the previous government, led by the late president’s twin brother Jaroslaw, Poland was turning into a laughing-stock. The Kaczynskis’ policy seemed to be to pick noisy fights with Germany, Russia and the rest of the EU, over, for example, support of the beleaguered Georgians. Some of the criticism was no doubt grossly unfair but the twins’ woeful tactics left Poland marginalised.

Since Mr Tusk’s government took office in 2007, however, that has begun to change. The country has offered loans to stricken economies such as Iceland, Latvia and Moldova. Some wonder if it might help Greece, undermining the notion that Europe has a rich, well-run western half, and a poor, backward east.

Polish leaders have also made friends with Germany, seeing in Angela Merkel’s leadership an opportunity for a powerful friendship. Many noticed when Guido Westerwelle, the German foreign minister, paid his first visit not (like his predecessors) to Paris, but to Warsaw.

Poland has always been a military heavyweight by European standards, able to deploy its 100,000-strong armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. America likes that, seeing a sharp contrast with the feeble efforts of some other NATO allies. In return, Poland has gained the main role in America’s anti-missile plans. The Obama administration clumsily ditched a scheme promised by the Bush administration but says the new programme will be bigger and better. American energy companies’ interest in Polish gas reserves may make the connection even stronger. Poland has also earned NATO attention on what was once the neglected home front. The alliance developed contingency plans to defend Poland, and is extending them (using mainly Polish troops) to protect the vulnerable Baltic states.

But Mr Tusk’s biggest diplomatic achievement since taking office has been to steer Poland towards a rapprochement with Russia. The biggest sign of that was the participation of the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, at a ceremony on April 7th to mark the anniversary of the Katyn massacre. The Russian government’s reaction to the deaths of Mr Kaczynski and his entourage seems designed to take the process further (see article).

This is a big change. Poland used to be the most forthright critic of Mr Putin’s regime. The Russian leader said that Poland would be a nuclear target in wartime.

The countries’ reconciliation still has a long way to go. Mr Putin has expressed sympathy for the victims of Katyn. But he has not publicly condemned their executioners. And in a response to a lawsuit at the European Court of Human Rights brought by relatives of Katyn victims, Russia still claims that it is not clear who perpetrated the massacre. Many Poles find that outrageous: it is as if, they say, modern Germany were to admit the Holocaust was not a myth yet still hesitated to condemn Hitler outright.

Such feelings brought Mr Kaczynski, along with almost the entire foreign-policy leadership of his party, the commanders of the armed forces, senior intelligence veterans and top historians, to board the plane that crashed on April 10th. They were paying their own unofficial visit, an alternative to the (in their eyes, phoney) reconciliation of the earlier event attended by Messrs Tusk and Putin.

In many countries, the destruction of so great a part of the top echelon would have precipitated a crisis, domestically and on foreign-exchange markets. It is hugely to Poland’s credit that this has not happened: the country’s institutions and constitution have passed the test almost serenely.

But it has taken a great tragedy to remind Poles of this achievement because, for many of them, too little has changed in daily life. A million or more have gone to work in other EU countries, chiefly Britain and Ireland. Despite the downturn there and Poland’s economic success, they are so far mostly not coming back.

The reasons are complex. Poland has little tradition of internal labour mobility, so shortages in Warsaw and the country’s booming western crescent can coexist with deep joblessness in the east. It can be easier, with a budget airline, to commute weekly to Britain than to drive to a job 100km away. Petty corruption in health care and education is endemic. Perhaps most worrying, social mobility is stagnating. After the collapse of communism, a bright young person could aim high. Now many feel that without good connections, it is best to head abroad.

The suspicion lingers that the country’s old communist elite and their children have morphed into a new nomenklatura. Poles call this idea the Uklad, an all-but-untranslatable word meaning “deal”, “arrangement” or “system”. The price of the communist surrender in 1989 was that the old elite was able to turn its power into wealth, using connections, slush funds and privileges to gain a head start in the country’s shift to capitalism.

The Kaczynskis found that idea repellent. They wanted a fresh start and called it a “Fourth Republic”. But during their ill-starred government of 2005-07, the atmosphere was more reminiscent of Robespierre than Benjamin Franklin. Prosecutors conducted trial by press conference, denouncing victims live on television on what often seemed the flimsiest of grounds. Overzealous sleaze-busting was matched by an apparently obsessive focus on reforming the over-mighty military-intelligence service.

Disquiet about the brothers’ vengeful, chaotic and weird reputation led to their downfall in 2007 and the election of Mr Tusk’s Civic Platform party. The big criticism of his government is that presentation outweighs substance. Poland’s prosperity rests on a surprisingly narrow base. It needs structural reforms to deal with, for example, a rapidly ageing workforce, only just over half of whom are economically active.

The deaths of Mr Kaczynski and many of his closest allies leave a big political hole but also create an opportunity. The late president was already facing a tough challenge from Mr Tusk’s party in the presidential race that was due in October. That election will now be in June. Bronislaw Komorowski, who is acting president by virtue of his position as speaker of the lower house of parliament, the Sejm, is also the Civic Platform candidate. A victory for him would make Mr Tusk’s efforts to consolidate the centre-right of the Polish political spectrum start to look unstoppable.

The most powerful candidate for Law and Justice would be Mr Kaczynski’s twin, Jaroslaw. His intentions are unclear. If he stands, he could gain a big sympathy vote. But he might also remind Poles why they voted him out of office as prime minister. Some Poles believe that a cross-party candidate would be the right step.

One of Mr Tusk’s biggest excuses for his government’s cautious approach to reform is that anything radical might be met with a presidential veto. That was not a complete excuse. But if Mr Komorowski or a non-partisan figure is elected, it will be no excuse at all. Poland has done a tremendous amount to make up for five decades of sometimes bestial misrule after 1939. But it has more to do if it is to establish a position as one of the powers of Europe.