Poles shed the last of their public tears at President Lech Kaczynski’s funeral yesterday. It was a grand affair but, because of volcanic ash, not quite as grand as expected. Dozens of leaders, including Barack Obama, had planned to come and subtly transform the occasion into a kind of 19th-century Congress of Europe: an informal stock-taking, a first tentative appraisal of what is now East and what is now West.
Their instincts were right. The funeral did mark an historic moment. Not just because of the magnitude of the crash, but because in a week of mourning, something has shifted in the geopolitical landscape. Poles and Russians have become emotionally closer. This sudden Slavic bonding — above all a recognition by ordinary Russians that terrible Stalinist crimes were committed on their neighbours — might, of course, wither. But it could also change the way that Europe looks at itself, shift attention from institution-building to the pressing question of how to Europeanise Russia.
