Katyń: genocide?

Yesterday's ceremony which saw premiers Putin and Tusk marking the 70th anniversary of the Katyń Massacre is a significant step forward in the improvement of relations between Russia and Poland. The showing of the Andrzej Wajda film Katyń on Russian TV and the lack of denial stories in the mainstream Russian media in the run-up to yesterday's event suggests a welcome shift in the mood in Moscow.

Putin did not apologise, nor was there talk about compensating the heirs of the victims nor of punishing any surviving murderers. But there was regret and clarity that Stalin's Soviet Union was responsible for the massacres, thus nailing down the lie that the Nazis did it.

The biggest dispute within Poland about the historical truth about the murder of 22,000 Polish officers at Katyń in April 1940 is about whether it can be defined as 'genocide'.

I would argue that Katyn was not genocide. The essence of Soviet communism was class hatred - not race hatred. Katyń was not about wiping the Polish people off the face of the earth. It was about removing, in a calculated and barbaric way, as much of Poland's elite as Stalin possibly could, leaving the Polish workers and peasants (deemed as malleable by Soviet ideology), to inhabit a Soviet-led People's Poland.

Stalin, the very epitome of evil in human form, cared not a jot whether the peoples he was murdering wholesale were Poles, kulaks, Ukrainians, the bourgeoisie, Georgians, Cossacks, the intelligentia, Belorussians, Balts, philatelists, the Orthdox clergy, Esperantists, 'rootless cosmopolitans' or Tatars. Or indeed Russians - the single largest national group among his victims. Any person, any group, deemed to be standing in Stalin's way could be put to death. The Trotskyite-Kamenevite-Zinovievite-Leftist-Counter-Revolutionary Bloc. They all had to die. Stalin was pure evil - but this was not genocide. Just as Hitler was pure evil but no class warrior.

The Gulag, the Purges, the shtrafbatallions had no regard for nationality - none*. Some Poles, convinced of the unique nature of our nation's martyrdom, insist that Poland was singled out for special treatment. Indeed, many Polish families were touched by what happened at Katyń**. Yet a look at the Black Book of Communism, Crimes, Terror and Repression edited by Stéphane Courtois suggests that wherever communism dictatorship appeared, mass murder, starvation and widespread repression were bound to follow - from Cambodia and North Korea to Cuba and Nicaragua. You did not have to be Polish to be hurt by communism.

Accusing Russia of genocide at Katyn is only forcing the Russian people ever deeper into a laager mentality. What happened at Katyń yesterday is certainly a step forward, a vindication of a wiser and more grown-up foreign policy than the one pursued by the previous Polish government.

My own take on 20th Century Russian history is as follows: In 1917, a terrorist gang, in the right place at the right time, armed with a bizarre ideology designed to play to the masses, happened to seize power and capture a severely weakened Russian state. (There was no Marixst 'historical inevitability' about this. It happened like a virus overrunning a immunologically weakened body.) This gang then ruthlessly proceeded, through inhuman brutality and systematic terror to take over the Russian empire, claiming to do so in the name of workers and peasants. Clever marketing, given the relative size of Imperial Russia's proletariat and the vacuous, venal nature of its ruling classes. The heirs to this gang held onto Russia and its empire for 72 years, until the whole charade imploded through the internal contradictions of its economic ideology.

Russia at least has the excuse that 'no one voted for Stalin'. Unlike Germany. My appeal to Russians - come to terms with your past. Face it, your country was hijacked by evil people with a warped ideology, evil things were done to your country, and to your neighbours. The problem lies in the Russian people's rather warped sense of patriotism. Stalin who drove out the fascist invaders and captured Berlin; Stalin made the Soviet Union an atomic power, Stalin created the infrastructure to get ahead in the Space Race - the Russian narod was great. But would it not have been infinitely greater had it become a free-market democracy in 1917?

An equally significant toxic legacy of communism is the low level of social trust in Russia. The system dismantled trust in Russian society, on purpose. Neighbours mistrusting one another, family members mistrusting one another; the Party usurping and monopolising the roles of all civic institutions. Mistrust is corrosive. Without trust, societies do not run, they limp. And Russia needs to take a less paranoid view of the other countries with whom it shares the planet. Russia must learn to trust again; foreigners crying 'genocide' only exacerbate Russia's deep post-communist complexes.

Take a look at Poleconomy for an excellent and wide-ranging piece about the geopolitical implications of what happened yesterday at Katyń.

* I'm undecided about the Hlodomor - Stalin's artificially-created famine that was applied primarily in the Ukrainian SSR. Six to ten million died between 1932 and '33. There are few who would deny this. The issue is interpretation. Was Stalin's intention to destroy the Ukrainian people, or to force collectivisation onto all forms of agriculture right across the entire USSR?

** Although my own family was not affected by the Katyń massacres, my mother-in-law lost her father at Katyń, my late father-in-law two of his brothers.