Putin: Easing the burden of memory

Certain dates, events, and places become emblems of unforgettable suffering for an entire people. Auschwitz holds that meaning for Jews, as does the 1915 death march for Armenians or the 1922 Smyrna massacre for Greeks. Polish memory is haunted by the Red Army’s execution of 22,000 Polish officers and intellectuals in the Katyn forest in the spring of 1940.

So Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was making a valuable, if belated, gesture of reconciliation Wednesday when he laid a wreath at the Katyn gravesite, under a memorial inscribed with the names of the murdered Polish prisoners of war. During the communist era, Polish schoolchildren were taught that the Katyn crimes were committed by the Nazis. Poles knew this was an official lie. Finally, in 1992, then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin ended the lies by releasing a copy of a Stalin-era document resolving to kill the Polish prisoners because they were “inveterate and incorrigible enemies of the Soviet power.’’

Hard as it may be, Putin should now complete the work of reconciliation by recognizing the Katyn massacre as a war crime and ordering that all remaining Stalinist archives on that crime be opened to researchers. Truth is inseparable from reconciliation.

Source: boston.com/