This past weekend’s fatal crash of Poland’s presidential aircraft, a Russian-made Tupolev Tu-154M, has had cataclysmic affects on the country’s national leadership. Among the 97 victims were the Polish president, Lech Kaczyński, and virtually the entire Polish armed forces’ leadership – the senior commanders of each branch of the service. Ironically, they were all on their way to a ceremony to commemorate the 1940 execution of 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia in the Katyń forest by the USSR secret police.
The Katyń executions were a cynical and ruthless act of genocide by the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin. The idea was to make sure that post-war Poland would be short of military leadership and other educated individuals who might fight for a Poland free from Soviet domination. Without them, Stalin reasoned, the Red Army could just walk in and take over. The killings carried out by the Soviet-era secret police, the NKVD, liquidated half of the Polish officer corps – including 14 generals – and thousands of other professors, lawyers, doctors, priests, police officers, and intellectuals.
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