The Apocalyptic Absurd: Poland’s Plane Tragedy

The apocalypse, suggested Frank Kermode, is part of the modern absurd. Certainly, for the Poles, this must be true. The loss of 96 distinguished figures over the weekend in a crash of their 26-year old Tupolev 154 is yet another historical tragedy to complement a dark history. Again, its political and cultural elite have been excised in one fatal blow. Disturbingly, it was connected with the commemoration of another event which implemented the very same scheme, albeit in a more instrumental, vicious way: the 1940 massacre of over 20,000 members of the Polish intelligentsia by the Soviet NKVD in Katyn forest.

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Wreckage from the crash site, near Smolensk, Russia.

Russian investigators have scoured the recordings of conversations between the pilot and air traffic control in Smolensk, and have ruled out technical failure as a cause. ‘We will look in more detail in Moscow,’ claimed Alexander Bastrykin, head of the Russian prosecutor’s office, ‘but I repeat: the recording that we have confirms that there were no technical problems with the plane’ (Guardian, Apr 11). The finger is being pointed at the pilot, who ‘was informed about the difficult weather conditions, and yet he decided to make the landing.’

A glance at the fatalities on this crash reveal the decapitating nature of this event. In addition to President Lech Kaczynski, the list included the leaders of all branches of the military, the head of the Olympic committee, head of the national bank, notable resistance figures from the Communist era, historians and bureaucrats.

The struggle of memory against forgetting, according to Milan Kundera, is the characteristic thought process that underlies a totalitarian system. The crimes committed at Katyn, ‘a damned place’, as former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski termed it, were of such a nature. The perpetration of the crimes at Katyn had one sole purpose: the dismembering of the Polish elite, the crippling of a country to render it servile and pliant. The Soviet angle was a simple riposte: the Germans did it. Truth did eventually out, and efforts were being gradually made to reconcile the two historical foes over this sore.

That Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was at the commemoration of victims of the massacre might have been a fine gesture, but it did not go far enough. The Poles would have been disgruntled by his remarks of a ‘shared memory and shame’ behind the tragedies of Stalinism. A full, unqualified apology was not on offer. That said, Adam Michnik in the liberal Gazeta Wyborcza (Apr 8) was enthusiastic. ‘Something significant has happened: the meeting between the prime ministers of Poland and Russia at the cemetery at Katyn puts an end to the “lie of Katyn” that has poisoned Polish-Russian relations for years.”

Poland will, as it always does, recover. But it will no doubt be wondering where on earth it came in the absurd lottery of life. One can only hope that out of these deaths a catalytic re-appraisal shall be born – that those killed in this crash will provide salve for the historical wounds inflicted at Katyn. Let this event be a kick against the misery and horror of Stalinism. ‘Across Russia,’ observed the notable journalist Jarosław Kurski (Guardian, Apr 12), ‘people are crying together with us today.’

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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