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Opinion: Thirty years on as 'new Cold War' looms, US and Russia should remember the Rekyjavik summit

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 14:09:53 +0000

In what looks very like a tit-for-tat downgrading of bilateral relations, Russia and America have traded diplomatic insults in recent weeks over nuclear weapons, geopolitics and economics, prompting speculation about “a new Cold War”.

Moscow acted first, announcing on October 3 that it had suspended its agreement with Washington on the disposal of surplus weapons-grade plutonium. Russian president, Vladimir Putin, accused the United States of “creating a threat to strategic stability as a result of unfriendly actions towards Russia”. He cited the recent build up of American forces in Eastern Europe, especially the Baltic states.

For its part, the US suspended talks with Russia over the war in Syria, on top of its existing sanctions against Moscow over Russia’s 2014 military actions in Ukraine.

How to escape from this standoff? Are there any lessons to be learned from the era of détente and the end of the Cold War in the 1970s and 1980s? In particular, about the role of international statecraft and personal dialogue between leaders?

Icelandic freeze

October 2016 marks the 30th anniversary of the summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland which had aimed for an agreement on bilateral nuclear arms reductions. At the time the meeting was depicted in the media as a total failure, particularly over Star Wars, the US plan for a sophisticated anti-ballistic missile defence system. “No Deal. Star Wars Sinks the Summit,” Time magazine trumpeted on its cover with a photo of two drained and dejected men, unable to look each other in the eye.

How Time magazine reported the summit failure. TIME Magazine

̽��ֱ��last session ended in total deadlock between the two leaders – maybe a fateful missed opportunity. “I don’t know when we’ll ever have another chance like this,” Reagan lamented. “I don’t either”, replied Gorbachev. They wondered when – or even if – they would meet again.

This familiar, negative narrative was – and is – shortsighted. In reality, both leaders soon came to a more positive view of the summit. Far from being a “failure”, Gorbachev judged Reykjavik to be “a step in a complicated dialogue, in a search for solutions”. Reagan told the American people: “We are closer than ever before to agreements that could lead to a safer world without nuclear weapons.”

Reagan and Gorbachev had both learned how open discussion between those at the top could cut through much of the red tape and political misunderstanding that ties up international relations. At Reykjavik, even though Stars Wars proved a (temporary) stumbling block, both sides agreed that they could and should radically reduce their nuclear arsenals without detriment to national security. And this actually happened, for the first time ever, just a year later when they signed away all their intermediate-range nuclear forces – Soviet SS-20s and US Cruise and Pershing II missiles – in Washington in December 1987.

̽��ֱ��treaty testifies to the value of summit meetings that can be part of a process of dialogue that deepens trust on both sides and promotes effective cooperation. Reagan and Gorbachev clicked as human beings at Geneva in 1985, they spoke the unspeakable at Reykjavik in 1986 with talk of a nuclear-free world – and they did the unprecedented in Washington in 1987 by eliminating a whole category of nuclear weapons. All this helped to defuse the Cold War.

It’s good to talk

Today, however, the world seems in turmoil and trust is once again in short supply. We seem to be back to political posturing, megaphone diplomacy and military brinkmanship. Is there is any place for summitry in a situation of near-total alienation? This question was, of course, at the heart of the easing of hostilities in the 1970s, when East and West tried to thaw relations and find ways of living together peacefully.

Helmut Schmidt, West Germany’s “global chancellor” of the 1970s, was a great practitioner of what he called “Dialogpolitik”. He argued that leaders must always try to put themselves in the other person’s shoes in order to understand their perspective on the world, especially at times of tension. He favoured informal summit meetings as a way to exchange views privately and candidly, rather than feeding the insatiable media craving to spill secrets and proclaim achievements.

Rapport matters. EPA/Stephane Mahe

In the early 1980s, when superpower relations were stuck in a deep freeze, Schmidt conducted shuttle diplomacy as the self-styled “double-interpreter” between Washington and Moscow. Even when no real deals were in the offing, he believed it particularly vital to keep talking.

̽��ֱ��German chancellor, Angela Merkel, recently revived Schmidt’s approach, emphasising the need to maintain lines of communication with the Kremlin at a time of renewed East-West tension. Equally, however, she has insisted on the importance of a strong defence capability. Merkel is surely right. There is always a delicate balance to be struck between the diplomacy of dialogue and the politics of deterrence – making up your mind when to reach out and when to stand firm. Three decades on from Reykjavik, that remains the perennial challenge for those who have the vision, skill and nerve to venture to the summit.

David Reynolds, Professor of International History, Fellow of Christ's College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and Kristina Spohr, Associate Professor of History, London School of Economics and Political Science

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

David Reynolds (Faculty of History) and Kristina Spohr (London School of Economics and Political Science) discuss current relations between the US & Russia, and whether there are any lessons to be learned from the era of détente and the end of the Cold War in the 1970s and 1980s.

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Reagan Bids Gorbachev Farewell

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Mitrokhin’s KGB archive opens to public

sjr81 — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 23:01:00 +0000

From 1972 to 1984, Major Vasiliy Mitrokhin was a senior archivist in the KGB’s foreign intelligence archive – with unlimited access to hundreds of thousands of files from a global network of spies and intelligence gathering operations.

At the same time, having grown disillusioned with the brutal oppression of the Soviet regime, he was taking secret handwritten notes of the material and smuggling them out of the building each evening. In 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he, his family and his archive were exfiltrated by the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service.

Now, more than twenty years after his defection to the UK, Mitrokhin’s files are being opened by the Churchill Archives Centre, where they sit alongside the personal papers of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.

Professor Christopher Andrew, the only historian to date allowed access to the archive, and author of two global bestsellers with Mitrokhin, said: “There are only two places in the world where you’ll find material like this. One is the KGB archive – which is not open and very difficult to get into – and the other is here at Churchill College where Mitrokhin’s own typescript notes are today being opened for all the world to see.

“Mitrokhin dreamed of making this material public from 1972 until his death; it’s now happening in 2014. ̽��ֱ��inner workings of the KGB, its foreign intelligence operations and the foreign policy of Soviet-era Russia all lie within this extraordinary collection; the scale and nature of which gives unprecedented insight into the KGB’s activities throughout much of the Cold War.”

Among the 19 boxes and thousands of papers being opened are KGB notes on Pope John Paul II, whose activities in Poland were closely monitored before his election to the Papacy; maps and details of secret Russian arms caches in Western Europe and the USA; and files on Melita Norwood, ‘the spy who came in from the Co-op’.

Norwood, codename Hola, was the KGB’s longest-serving UK agent, who for four decades passed on classified information from her office at the British Non Ferrous Metals Research Association in Euston, North London, where nuclear and other scientific research took place.

“ ̽��ֱ��Mitrokhin files range in time from the immediate aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the eve of the Gorbachev era,” said Andrew. “Initially he smuggled his daily notes out on small scraps of paper hidden in his shoes. After a few months, he began to take them out in his jacket pockets then buried them every weekend at the family dacha in the countryside near Moscow.

“ ̽��ֱ��enormous risks in compiling his secret archive might well have ended with a secret trial and a bullet in the back of the head in an execution cellar. He was a dissident willing to make the most extraordinary sacrifice.”

Vasiliy Mitrokhin was born in 1922. From 1948, he worked in foreign intelligence before being assigned to the foreign intelligence archives in the KGB First Chief Directorate. From 1972 until 1982 he was in charge of the transfer of these archives from the Lubyanka in central Moscow to a new foreign intelligence HQ at Yasenevo.

Following his retirement in 1984, Mitrokhin organised much of this material geographically and, in ten volumes, typed out systematic studies of KGB operations in different parts of the world.

After his exfiltration to London, Mitrokhin continued to work on transcribing and typing his manuscript notes, producing a further 26 typed volumes, which, together with his notes, provided the basis for his publications with Professor Christopher Andrew. Vasiliy Mitrokhin died in January 2004.

Allen Packwood, Director of the Churchill Archives Centre, said: “This collection is a wonderful illustration of the value of archives and the power of archivists. It was Mitrokhin's position as archivist that allowed him his unprecedented access and overview of the KGB files. It was his commitment to preserving and providing access to the truth that led him to make his copies, at huge personal risk. We are therefore proud to house his papers and to honour his wish that they should be made freely available for research."

In accordance with the deposit agreement, the Churchill Archives Centre is opening Mitrokhin’s edited Russian-language versions of his original notes. ̽��ֱ��original manuscript notes and notebooks will remain closed under the terms of the deposit agreement, subject to review.

KGB files from the famous Mitrokhin Archive – described by the FBI as ‘the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source’ – will today open to the public for the first time.

There are only two places in the world where you’ll find material like this. One is the KGB archive – which is not open and very difficult to get into – and the other is here at Churchill College.

Chrisopher Andrew

Churchill Archives Centre

Mitrokhin's handwritten copy of the KGB First Chief Directorate Lexicon

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Russia: Up close

tdk25 — Sat, 18 May 2013 05:00:53 +0000

Rachel Polonsky, lecturer in the department of Slavonic Studies and author of Molotov’s Magic Lantern, is one of five judges for the new Pushkin House Russian Book Prize, whose winner will be announced at the Hay Festival on 29th May.

She will be taking part in a debate on Russian literature at the Festival, where the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge holds an annual series of talks. ̽��ֱ��aim of the prize is to further understanding of the Russian-speaking world by encouraging strong, intelligent, and accessible non-fiction writing in the English language (including translations) on Russian and Soviet history, culture, politics, economics, and everyday life, including biographies and memoirs. ̽��ֱ��judges will be looking for a book which can command a wide audience of non-specialists.

Dr Polonsky says that there is a need for more awareness of the complexities of post-Soviet Russian culture and where its deep faultlines lie, with the identity of the bombers of the Boston Marathon just one reminder of why this is important. She adds: "Recently, Russian violence has shown a tendency to spill over its borders, as the murders and unexplained deaths in Great Britain over the past few years show. London has become a refuge for Russian money and the setting for a real-life Russian crime thriller of baffling intricacy; drawing in governments, secret services and big business and inevitably giving rise to lurid media stereotypes. ̽��ֱ��many books that were sent to the judges of the prize by publishers give a most encouraging picture of the deeper understanding of Russian culture available to readers curious about the realities behind these stereotypes. They included books on the revival of Russian Orthodoxy, the fate of the discipline of archaeology in the USSR and the films of the director Andrei Tarkovsky.”

̽��ֱ��six shortlisted books trace a path from 1917 to the present day. Dr Polonsky says: "Together these books show that the political, economic, cultural and social spheres are inseparable. At one end of this century-long span is Douglas Smith’s Former People, which tells the story of the aristocrats who remained in Russia after the revolution, to perish or survive as Soviet citizens. At the other is Masha Gessen’s portrait of Vladimir Putin in ̽��ֱ��Man without a Face, which describes how the personality and convictions of Russia’s present leader were shaped by the rough culture of post-war Leningrad and his years as a low-ranking agent in the KGB.

"Karl Schloegel’s Moscow 1937 is a cultural history of the capital city in the darkest year of Stalin’s Great Terror, which covers everything from town planning to show trials, and begins with a scene of magical flight from Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, ̽��ֱ��Master and Margarita. Anne Applebaum’s Iron Curtain shows how the Soviet takeover of political power in Eastern Europe after 1945 depended on a takeover of all aspects of cultural, social and private life. She revives the word ‘totalitarianism’, which had fallen out of fashion among historians. Donald Raleigh’s oral history, Soviet Baby Boomers, is a portrait of the last, ‘post-totalitarian’, Soviet generation. In the background to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putinism is the story of Russian oil, which is told in Thane Gustafson’s Wheel of Fortune."

̽��ֱ��other judges for the Prize, which includes £5,000 in cash, are Sir Rodric Braithwaite (Chair), former British ambassador to Moscow and author of Afgantsy: ̽��ֱ��Russians in Afghanistan 1979-1989; Lord Skidelsky, Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at Warwick ̽��ֱ�� and author of How Much is Enough?; AD Miller, Economist journalist and author of the Man Booker shortlisted Snowdrops; and Dmitri Trenin, Director of ̽��ֱ��Carnegie Moscow Center and author of Post-Imperium.

Dr Polonsky says: "We live in an age of unprecedented access to information. Researchers have greater freedom than ever to travel in Russia and are rich in contacts with Russians of all kinds, if they choose to seek them out. In turn, Russians now have access to books written about Russia in the West, many of which are now translated into Russian. ̽��ֱ��result is a constantly enriched field of writing about all aspects of Russian culture, which the Pushkin House prize is intended to cultivate and celebrate."

A new book prize aimed at furthering our understanding of the Russian-speaking world will help the West to come to terms with the complexity of post-Soviet Russian culture and overcome media stereotypes, according to a ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge lecturer.

̽��ֱ��books that were sent to the judges of this prize give an encouraging picture of the deeper understanding of Russian culture available to readers curious about the realities behind the stereotypes.

Rachel Polonsky

Credit: Andrew Griffith from Flickr.

Red Square in winter.

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Behind the curtain: a history of Russian intelligence

tdk25 — Sat, 11 May 2013 08:00:49 +0000

Intellectual repression and technological backwardness imperilled the efficiency of Soviet intelligence and left Stalin completely unprepared for the German invasion in June 1941, according to a forthcoming book on the history of 20th century Soviet intelligence.

Jonathan Haslam, professor of the history of international relations, says the degree to which repression and lack of technological advancement affected the Special Service [codes and ciphers] is "shocking", as was the massacre of personnel in the late thirties. He states: " ̽��ֱ��degree of inefficiency of the GRU's immediate predecessors in the thirties was also quite a surprise."

Professor Haslam is to publish the first book on the history of all the Soviet intelligence organisations, including the GRU [military intelligence] and the Special Service as well as the KGB. He will speak about his research, which will be published next year by OUP, as part of the Cambridge Series at the Hay Festival at 2.30pm on 24 May.

Professor Haslam says it is important to see the role of Soviet intelligence agencies in the round, rather than through the eyes of only one agency. ̽��ֱ��KGB, which is by far the best known agency, deals only in human intelligence and with a focus on the civilian rather than military targets.

̽��ֱ��reason the KGB is almost the only agency researched is, says Professor Haslam, that by far the greatest leak of material from the former Soviet Union has been that of KGB documents and notes from such documents: notably the Mitrokhin archive [a collection of notes made secretly by KGB Major Vasili Mitrokhin], of which a small portion was edited courtesy of MI6 by Christopher Andrew and the files of Alexander Vasiliev, who obtained access while a trusted Russian historian and later absconded with his notes to the United States. ̽��ֱ��GRU has held tightly to its secrets, as has the Special Service, says Professor Haslam.

He describes the research process as "slow and painstaking", mainly as a result of difficulties in accessing material other than that obtained by Andrew and Vasiliev. However, uncovering information which has never before been published is, he says, "very rewarding".

For Professor Haslam, one of the most surprising findings was the degree of negligence with which codes and ciphers (decryption) were treated under Stalin and his immediate successors.

Has the system changed substantially since the end of the Cold War, though? Professor Haslam says: "Undoubtedly awareness of past errors has improved matters, but institutions and old ways of thinking do not change rapidly. They are glacial, as generations tainted by poor practice die away. Competition with the main adversary is a much greater influence than the truths of history!"

More information: /public-engagement/public-events/other-events/cambridge-series-at-the-hay-festival-2015 For tickets: www.hayfestival.org

Ahead of his talk at the Hay Festival, Jonathan Haslam discusses his forthcoming history of Soviet intelligence organisations, revealing, among other things, just how unprepared for Operation Barbarossa Stalin was in 1941.

Old ways of thinking do not change rapidly. They are glacial, as generations tainted by poor practice die away.

Jonathan Haslam

Credit: PDXdj and Creative Commons.

̽��ֱ��Lyubyanka - Former KGB Headquarters.

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Totalitarianism, violence and the silent majority

sjr81 — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 15:07:52 +0000

Her lecture ‘True Believers: Collaboration and Opposition under Totalitarian Regimes’ takes place at the Umney Theatre, Robinson College, tonight at 5pm.

Applebaum won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2004 book Gulag: A History, and is also the author of Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, and Gulag Voices: An Anthology. Her most recent book is Iron Curtain: ̽��ֱ��Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956.

She said: “ ̽��ֱ��horrifying genius of Soviet communism - as conceived in the 1920s, perfected in the 1930s and then spread by force to Soviet-occupied Europe was the system's ability to get the silent majority in so many countries to play along without much protest.

“A small proportion of people protested and small proportion collaborated. But carefully targeted violence, propaganda and state's monopoly on economic and civic institutions persuaded the rest to go along. These techniques were used to great effect in Eastern Europe after 1945.”

Applebaum, who is currently Philip Roman Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, a columnist for the Washington Post and Slate, is also a former Editor of ̽��ֱ��Economist, where she provided in-depth coverage of Eastern Europe before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Dr Rachel Polonsky, a lecturer at the Department of Slavonic Studies and organiser of tonight’s event, said: “We are proud to be hosting Anne Applebaum, whose work and life centre on the areas we study in the Department.

“As a historian of the twentieth century, Anne reminds us how intricately interwoven the political destinies and cultures of Russia, Ukraine and Poland have been, and how important it is to study them together. She is one of a series of high-profile lecturers (including the Polish intellectual Adam Michnik and the British historian Norman Davies) whose visits to Cambridge demonstrate the commitment of the ̽��ֱ�� to securing a future for Polish studies within the Slavonic Department, and the hope that this commitment will resonate outward to a wider public, both within and beyond the ̽��ֱ��.”

Head of Slavonic Studies, Dr Emma Widdis, said: “Our research and teaching in Ukrainian, Russian and in future, as we hope, Polish, reflect our sense of the importance of understanding this complex European 'neighbourhood', in which historical legacies remain politically contested. We are all very much looking forward to Anne’s talk this evening.”

Tonight’s talk at Robinson College is part of the CamCREES 2013 public lecture series, which also runs alongside a series of public lectures on Resistance in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Upcoming events in this series include:

'Resistance and Rights' on Thursday 7 March 2013, given by Professor Benjamins Nathans, ̽��ֱ�� of Pennsylvania
How and with what effects was the rhetoric of rights - the lingua franca of liberalism - deployed in an avowedly illiberal society like the Soviet Union? How do activists invoke rights in today's Russia? This lecture will analyse continuities and ruptures in the career of civil and human rights as a mode of resistance from the period of "developed socialism" to the Putin era.

'Resistance and Performance' on Thursday 25 April 2013, given by Dr John Freedman (writer, translator, critic, and scholar of Russian theatre)
Political resistance and social commentary are deeply ingrained in the Russian theatre tradition. Rarely, however, have they been as open and obvious as in recent years. Throughout the Soviet period (and Imperial era) theatre artists "spoke the truth" by way of metaphor and implication. This tended to remain true even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when artists, who achieved new freedoms, were more intent on creating new kinds of art than on speaking about social ills. But in one of the biggest breaks with tradition in the history of Russian theatre, some writers, directors and actors are currently becoming extremely outspoken in their works. This discussion will focus on current developments, putting them into a historical context.

'Resistance and Gender' on Thursday 2 May 2013, given by Dr Olesya Khomeychuk, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

̽��ֱ��‘horrifying genius’ of Soviet totalitarianism and its ability to control and quell protest will be examined tonight by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum.

̽��ֱ��horrifying genius of Soviet communism - as conceived in the 1920s, perfected in the 1930s and then spread by force to Soviet-occupied Europe was the system's ability to get the silent majority in so many countries to play along without much protest.

Anne Applebaum

Newhouse Design

Russian Poster 38

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Massacre and metaphor: remembering Katyn

bjb42 — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 09:43:09 +0000

In thick fog on 10 April 2010, the pilot of a Polish Air Force Tupolev Tu-154 struggled to bring his aircraft down at Smolensk North Airport in western Russia. Visibility was reduced to just 1,600 feet, and insofar as any subsequent investigation could establish, by the time he realised that he was flying too low, it was already too late. ̽��ֱ��plane hit trees on approach, turned upside down, and broke apart on the ground, parts of it eventually coming to rest a few hundred feet short of the runway. 96 people were on board; none survived.

Within hours, images of the wrecked fuselage were being broadcast around the world. ̽��ֱ��dead included the Polish President, Lech Kaczyński, his wife, Maria, and numerous senior politicians, military personnel and representatives of the clergy. In a heartbeat, the country’s leadership had essentially been lost. What was profoundly haunting was that the group had been on its way to a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacres, an incident in which 21,857 of the country’s elite had, under entirely different circumstances, also perished. ̽��ֱ��symbolism was unavoidable. Katyn is just a few miles west of where the plane went down.

What followed was an astonishing outpouring of emotion not just in Poland, but in Russia as well. Roads around the Polish Embassy in Moscow had to be closed as mourners rushed to lay flowers and sign a book of condolences. Russia organised a national day of mourning, and Vladimir Putin ordered that the film Katyn, by the Polish director Andrzej Wajda, be shown in a primetime slot on national television. As the Polish intellectual Adam Michnik observed: “ ̽��ֱ��Smolensk catastrophe broke something in our Polish and Russian hearts. In the hearts of the leaders and of regular people. It was as if a gigantic dam opened - a dam behind which unexpressed words and gestures were piled up.”

Throughout the Soviet era, the fact that the Katyn massacres had been perpetrated by Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, was systematically covered up by the Kremlin. After the Cold War, information and acknowledgement were more forthcoming but not at the rate many Polish activists wanted. ̽��ֱ��Smolensk disaster, quickly labelled Katyn-2, shook the status quo.

“Suddenly in Russia there was a new openness and a new willingness to confront the truth of what happened in 1940,” Rory Finnin, a lecturer in Ukrainian Studies at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, says. “There were visible scenes of commiseration with Poland in the Russian capital, and there was productive political growth on both the Russian and Polish sides. Months after the crash, for instance, the Russia Duma unequivocally declared Katyn a crime of the Stalinist regime. In Poland, politicians and civic figures repeatedly acknowledged Russia’s own painful past and noted that many ordinary Soviet citizens had themselves been victims of Soviet state terror. There was a newfound sense of shared suffering. It took a tragic accident with eerie connections to an historical atrocity to evoke these memories and to begin to transform them.”

Memory and its shifting nature are the central concerns of the new book Remembering Katyn, which traces the ways in which the Katyn murders have been represented in Eastern Europe since 1940. Coauthored by Finnin, his Cambridge colleague Alexander Etkind and a team of scholars, it examines how the tragedy has resonated through the words and deeds of generations of activists, politicians, filmmakers, and writers. It maps that legacy not just in Russia and Poland, but in Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic States as well.

Its scope reflects the fact that over 70 years, Katyn has evolved from the name for a single historical event into a metonym and metaphor – a shorthand for multiple killing fields in Eastern Europe and beyond. ̽��ֱ��book calls attention to the fact that, contrary to our popular understanding, the majority of the victims of the Katyn operation were executed far from the Katyn Forest itself. These Polish victims were buried in killing fields in Russia, Ukraine and, almost certainly, Belarus as well. “Katyn” has become the collective noun encompassing all of these places. It has also become a term for similar tragedies dissociated from those events. In 1949, for example, the Soviet massacre of many thousands of Ukrainians in the city of Vinnytsia during Stalin’s purges became known as the “Katyn of Ukraine”. In 1995, Srebrenica was dubbed “the new Katyn”. Like the words “Holocaust” or “Gulag”, “Katyn” has acquired a transcendent meaning.

Finnin and Etkind attribute such a phenomenon in part to the intersection, and mutual dependence, of history and memory. History may provide us with a chronicle and analysis of events, but memory refashions them for us to understand in more organic and unpredictable ways. ̽��ֱ��air crash of 2010 is an extreme example of what they call a “memory event”, a moment of rupture when the past is remembered and in effect repurposed. Other, less extreme incidents that can provoke memory events include the release of films and books, court decisions and political announcements.

“Memory events may be said to reboot cultural memory,” the authors write in the introduction to Remembering Katyn. “Much like a computer, cultural memory is dependent on an interaction between ‘hardware’ such as monuments, plaques and street signs, and ‘software’, like novels, films and marches. Monuments are inconspicuous if people are not writing about them, snapping photos of them, laying flowers at their pedestals. Marches have incomplete itineraries without a physical structure designated for commemoration and hewn from stone. Memory events reboot cultural memory by keeping this hardware and software in dialogue while refreshing and updating the code that facilitates their exchange.”

One reason that memory has become so essential to the Katyn story is because the historical truth was suppressed for so long. We now know unequivocally that on March 5, 1940, the leadership of the Soviet Union, including Stalin himself, approved a recommendation from NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria that his men shoot “Polish prisoners of war [located in camps in Russia and Ukraine] and arrestees located in prisons of western regions of Ukraine and Belorussia.” These were men who had been arrested and interned during the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939.

In 1942, after Germany and Russia had gone to war with one another, workers in German-occupied territory came across the graves at Katyn. ̽��ֱ��Germans elected not to release this information until the following year, Goebbels gleefully anticipating a PR coup against the Soviet enemy. After the German announcement, however, the Soviets responded by pinning the blame on the Nazis. As recent declassified US archival documents reveal, Roosevelt and Churchill tacitly recognised that Katyn had almost certainly been sanctioned by Stalin, but they towed the line for the sake of their alliance. “Let us think of these things always and speak of them never,” Owen O’Malley, British ambassador to the Polish Government-in-exile, said in a statement which summed up Britain’s ambivalence.

As the Soviet cover-up spread into the era of the Cold War, it was challenged by activists both within Communist Poland and the Polish diaspora. From the late 1940s, anonymous tributes to the victims started to spring up in key locations, notably Warsaw’s Powązkowski Cemetery. These tributes were repeatedly removed by the Polish security services. In April 1956, 20,000 Poles congregated in London to commemorate the massacres. By the 1970s, monuments had begun to appear in Stockholm and London, and in April 1980, on the 40th anniversary of the killings, Soviet dissidents issued a public statement “Look Back In Repentance” to mark the occasion.

In the late 1980s, the pending collapse of the Soviet regime allowed the Poles some limited access to Katyn, where the inscription to victims of the Nazi regime on the Soviet monument was changed, euphemistically, to a commemoration of “the fallen” that suggested no perpetrator. Mikhail Gorbachev nevertheless continued to deny Soviet state responsibility for the massacre. It was only in 1990 that this position became untenable with the discovery of new documentary evidence. Half a century after the killings, Russia finally acknowledged what Stalin had done. In 1993, Boris Yeltsin knelt before the Katyn cross in Warsaw and asked Poles: “Forgive us, if you can”.

As history, Katyn is the subject of competing narratives which, in the post-Soviet age, it has slowly become possible to test against the truth. As memory, however, the term now unquestionably goes beyond the historical event itself. As new generations grow up in Eastern Europe, they may well study the former, but their sense of who they are will also be shaped by the latter. In this respect, Katyn’s legacy is as a powerful example of what happens to history, after history has happened.

“If you look at how the past is made present to us, it’s clear that we learn as much from memory – transmitted through cultural texts like novels and films and memorials – as we do from the discipline of history itself,” Finnin adds. “Memory – how it affects us, influences us and changes us – has to be taken into account when we seek to understand society and ourselves.”

Remembering Katyn, by Alexander Etkind, Rory Finnin, Uilleam Blacker, Julie Fedor, Simon Lewis, Maria Mälksoo, and Matilda Mroz is published by Polity.

Swathed in conspiracy and suppressed by the Soviet establishment, the historical truth about the Katyn murders remained obscure for more than half a century. Yet at the same time, the memory of the massacre evolved. A new book shows how this memory defines Eastern Europe even today.

It took a tragic accident with eerie connections to an historical atrocity to evoke these memories and to begin to transform them.

Rory Finnin

Polity Press

Part of the fuselage of the aircraft which crashed near Smolensk in April 2010.

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