KATYN REMEMBERED

by MONITOR
IN a week dominated internationally by the signing of the nuclear disarmament agreement between Russia and the United States, and in Britain by the election news, a rather important ceremony in Poland did not perhaps get the attention it deserved. Every year at this time the Polish government and people mark the anniversary of the massacre of 22'000 Polish officers by the Soviet Union secret police in 1940. This year, for the 70th anniversary, the ceremony in the forest of Katyn was attended by the Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin in an unprecedented personal recognition of his country's guilt for the Katyn massacre. It took the Soviet Union half a century to acknowledge that its troops had carried out the killings; Mikhail Gorbachev, then the Soviet President, admitted that the outrage had been ordered by Joseph Stalin and that it had falsely been blamed on Nazi troops. But Mr Putin's presence, walking alongside the Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, was the first that any representative of Russia had taken part in the commemorative ceremony. And in a gesture that added an unusual dimension to the event the two prime ministers also paid homage to the thousands of Soviet Union victims who were killed and buried at Katyn by their own secret service. Relations between Russia, her neighbours and the western world have their ups and downs. But on balance the progress is decidedly positive.