
© Kacper Pempel/ReutersJaroslaw Kaczynski kneels before his twin brother's coffin at the Warsaw airport on Sunday, April, 11. Lech Kaczynski, the Polish president, was killed in a plane crash on Saturday.
For the second time in 60 years, Poles around the world have been horrified to learn that their country's best-known leaders have been killed, suddenly and tragically, in a forest outside the western Russian city of Smolensk.
Saturday's crash of an aging Tupolev 154 jet during a fog-blinded landing was a cosmic insult to the Polish imagination, a catastrophe that wiped out a generation of leaders and placed a stark punctuation mark on the political drama that has defined Polish affairs since the defeat of communism in 1989.
It occurs at a moment of glory for Poland, as the formerly poor country, almost alone in Europe, has managed to avoid recession. It is often said by Poles that they are a people who are punished for their triumphs; Saturday seemed to confirm this belief.
It was also, as every Pole knows, a freakish repeat of history. It was outside Smolensk, in Katyn forest in March of 1940, that Joseph Stalin's agents machine-gunned as many as 22,000 of Poland's top military, intellectual and civil-service leaders to death and dumped their bodies in mass graves, terminating the country's independence for half a century.
"Seventy years ago, the Soviets murdered the political elite in Katyn," Lech Walesa, the Solidarity hero and former president, said yesterday. "Now, again, the political elite has been killed on its way to the same place."
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