The 1956 revolution is seen by many Hungarians as one of the proudest moments in their history. Mr Nagy was prime minister during the Hungarian revolution, which was crushed by Soviet tanks after only 12 days.

The Communist authorities then put Mr Nagy and his associates on trial in the Hungarian capital Budapest.  It started on 9 June 1958 and lasted for a week. Mr Nagy, 62, was sentenced to death by hanging on 16 June 1958.

The tapes will be broadcast at times corresponding exactly to the original trial.

The idea of playing the tapes in public came from the 1956 Institute in Hungary and the Open Society Archives. They had been held under lock and key at the state archives but were relinquished after pressure from intellectuals.

The BBC’s Nick Thorpe in Budapest said the 1956 revolution against Soviet domination is held in the highest regard by most Hungarians.  He added that even though the revolution was defeated, it dealt a blow to Soviet Communism from which many historians say it never recovered.

Isn’t it time to bid a final farewell to the ghosts of communism, and dot the i’s and cross the t’s in the recent history of our state? In other words, shouldn’t he do what his two predecessors failed to, or did not want to do?

The authors of the appeal say the proposed memorial is necessary not only to remember the era but also to help understand how so many millions of people could have become victims. As those who witnessed these events pass away, genuine history is being replaced with myths and the dry lines of text books, where “a sinister figure of Stalin, this time as an ‘effective manager,’ is being revived on barren memories.” This is a direct reference to a new history textbook, from which our children and grandchildren are supposed to gain an understanding of the communist era.

But it is not the only case in point. Numerous “scholarly” and “fictional” works, as well as TV “documentaries,” have appeared in recent years which make glaring omissions, or even contradictions, of the facts, and seek to present “the leader of all nations” and his bloody entourage in a favorable light.

As for the “ever-living” founding father of the authoritarian Soviet system, one of the signatories of the appeal, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, proposed that his corpse should be removed from the mausoleum and buried in a normal way. He also suggested removing the cemetery next to the Kremlin wall on Red Square, where real villains, guilty of the most horrendous crimes, lie buried alongside genuinely outstanding people. The idea is not new, but it is still topical. The more radical democrats pressed for such a move in the early 1990s but the general public did not support them, and the authorities did not dare to take such a radical step.

But the public mood has shifted. In the past the ratio between supporters and opponents of Lenin’s reburial was approximately fifty-fifty. Now, according to the Public Opinion Fund (POF), it is 46% to 29%. The ratio is approximately the same on the issue of removing the sculptures of Lenin that adorn the main streets of almost every Russian city and village. Incidentally, the VTsIOM pollster found that only a quarter of Russians support the return of “Iron” Felix Dzerzhinsky’s statue to Lubyanka Square.

Yet, these proposals are aimed at more than the removal of Lenin’s relics and other communist symbols from our streets. We must resolutely pass the point of no-return, and shut the door to the past once and for all. Gorbachev believes that to do this we should complete the rehabilitation of those who perished in Stalin’s purges. This process has been interrupted more than once, which, he says, shows that “some people do not want it,” and that “the situation in this country is still far from normal.”

It is certainly not normal that the victims of the Katyn tragedy have not been rehabilitated. In 1990, the government issued an official statement acknowledging Soviet guilt in shooting 22,000 Polish officers taken prisoner during the partition of Poland in 1939. The Soviet and Russian presidents confirmed our responsibility for this crime. Though Vladimir Putin refused to put an equation mark between Nazi and Stalinist reprisals, he said that it was possible to rehabilitate the murdered Poles.

However, when their relatives addressed the Moscow Court, their case was dismissed. The Chief Military Prosecutor’s Office halted its investigation into the massacre altogether on the grounds that “there is no evidence of the crime of genocide,” and the perpetrators are dead. Moreover, it also classified most of the volumes (116 out of 183) of material gathered during the 15-year investigation.

Over the past few years it has become almost politically incorrect in Russia to criticize the Soviet era or talk about historic responsibility for the policies of previous regimes. Not a word is said about the massive famine of the 1930s, the millions of people who perished in our concentration camps, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or the criminal deportation of whole peoples. The stubborn refusal to discuss or even acknowledge this grim history plays directly into the hands of nationalists in neighboring states, who are equally unscrupulous in exploiting these episodes for their own self-centered political aims.

This ostrich-like denial has another effect. The clarity with which the criminality of the Bolshevik leaders and the inhuman nature of their ideology were once understood in the public mind is becoming clouded. The POF estimates that some 40% of Russians believe that the October 1917 coup was on balance more positive than negative for Russia, and 54% of young people polled by the Levada Center are convinced that Stalin’s actions were more good than bad.

In his teenage years Wajda joined the resistance against the Nazis. His father had taught him to draw, which inspired him to study fine arts in Krakow, Poland. But three years later he transferred to the Lodz film school, where he found his true profession: cinema.

Now 82 years old, he is one of the most renowned Polish film directors. In the 1950s, he was a leading member of the “Polish film school,” a group of highly talented individuals whose films brought international recognition to Eastern European cinema.

His film oeuvre depicts the key historical events in Poland during the second half of the 20th century with a tragic veil that is very characteristic of Wajda: his films focus on WWII (Ashes and Diamonds, 1958), pass through the period of political oppression and social agitation of the 70s and 80s (Man of Marble, 1977), and continue up to the birth of Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement (Man of Iron, 1981).

Wajda’s devotion led him to stand as a Solidarity candidate in the first free Polish elections in 1989. In the early 1980s the Solidarity movement, a Polish trade union, had become the first independent labor union in a Soviet bloc country. Solidarity went on to play a central role in the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe. Wajda served a two-year term in the Senate.

His film work has been consistently praised. In 2000 he was awarded an honorary Oscar by the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences for his lifetime contribution to world cinema. In 1981 he won the Golden Palm award at the Cannes Film festival for Man of Iron. His latest film, Katyn, was nominated for an Oscar in the foreign film category for the 80th Academy Awards.

The Katyn Massacre

Katyn is the most personal film Wajda has made: he lost his father in the Katyn massacre. He also was a witness to his mother’s desperate and hopeless efforts searching for his father and her ultimate discovery of his tragic fate.

In 1940 22,000 Polish citizens were executed under the orders of Josef Stalin in the Katyn forest in the western part of the Soviet Union. The tragedy was not revealed until the spring of 1943 when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and discovered the mass graves. The Nazis used the news of their discovery to deflect attention from their mass murders of Jews, Slavs, gypsies and other opponents. However the Soviet propaganda machine blamed Adolf Hitler for the deaths. Any Soviet citizens who spoke out to tell the truth were punished with harsh prison terms.

In Poland under the country’s post-war communist regime, talk of the massacre was taboo. Consequently the film’s premier last September in Poland was a major national event; around three million spectators viewed the film.

Throughout the Cold War, for almost sixty years, the secret was kept. Finally in 1990 the Kremlin confessed that Stalin’s secret police had been responsible for the crime. Nearly seven decades later, for Poles, even the mere mention of the tragedy still evokes incredibly painful memories.

In Katyn, Wajda dramatizes the fate of four fictional officers and their families whose lives begin to unravel along with Poland when it is attacked on two fronts in 1939 under a secret deal between Stalin and Hitler: the Nazis struck from the west on September 1st and then the Soviets hit the country from the east on September 17th.

The script, based on Andrzej Mularczyk’s book Post-Mortem – the Katyn Story, uses real accounts the victims’ family members found in letters and diaries pulled from the Katyn graves. The cinematographer is award-winning Pawel Edelman (The Pianist, Ray, All the King’s Men, and Oliver Twist).

Overall the film received passable to bad reviews in Germany, with every newspaper acknowledging Wajda’s cinematographic craft but also criticizing the direction he gave his actors that made most scenes melodramatic. The prestigious German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung for example said in its review: “When even people of his authority find it necessary to adapt their style to the excessive sentimentalism present in cinema nowadays, then what does this say about the state of historical movies? Probably nothing good.”

Symbolism

A recurring cinematographic element in Wajda’s filmography are graphic images charged with symbolism, which are at times perhaps a bit heavy handed. For example, in the opening scene of Katyn, he depicts Poland’s predicament by showing a group of Polish people on a bridge who are fleeing the Nazis; they meet other Poles coming from the opposite direction trying to escape from the Soviets.

Another charged scene ripe with metaphor shows a Soviet soldier removing a Polish flag from a building; he rips it apart and uses the white portion of the flag to wrap around his feet. The half that was red (the color of communism) is put back on the building. The message is clear: the communists are in charge.

Undoubtedly, for me the best scene of Katyn is the endless, chilling final scene, when the Soviet secret police mechanically shoot, in a calculated choreography, one Polish army officer after another in a dark cellar, washing away the blood with buckets of water. Although it is very hard to watch because it’s based on true events, it’s one of the few scenes that doesn’t show actors suffering an emotional overdose.

Katyn had its international premiere last February at the Berlin Film Festival, where it was screened out of competition. I had the chance to talk to Andrzej Wajda about his latest film, about Polish history, and about the Solidarity movement.

Q: Why is it still relevant to commemorate an event that occurred almost seventy years ago?

A: I consider it enormously important because if there are topics that are not being talked about or that are hidden, then they remain secret or taboo and that is very dangerous. Besides, I strongly believe that it is unbelievably important to make films like this one, in order to improve Polish-Russian relations. It’s also important that this movie is screened in Russia (author’s note: it was released there last March 2008. And a similar situation goes for the Polish-German relations. They’ve become better after our film was screened in Germany. (Author’s note: German Chancellor Angela Merkel attended a screening during the Berlinale last February.)

Q: How do Polish people remember the massacre now?

A: Historical memory becomes less and less visible with time. Especially for the younger generations who live with completely different issues and with completely different lives. But I think that it is crucial to have knowledge about our own history because it is educational for us. It was also important for me to show young people the kind of worries we had in the past, what we felt, how big our hope was.

Q: What was the reaction in Poland to the film?

A: For Poland it was like bidding farewell to the topic. It was an elegy to the subject.

Q: Is it still taboo in Russia to talk about Katyn?

A: Obviously there are two angles to the story. Not that all Russians find it taboo. Lots of artist friends there understand the problem and agree with the fact that we want to show it, and with the fact that this was one of the biggest European crimes in the 20th century. But there is another faction of people who still admire Stalin for his power. And a few are maybe sentimental about him.

Q: Would you say it is a patriotic movie?

A: Partly yes, because this mass murder shaped our national identity. But what was extremely painful for us was that the crime was not addressed by western countries like England or the United States.

Q: Was it possible for you to keep a distance when making the movie, since you were emotionally involved?

A: Yes, it was possible, because it happened so many years ago, in 1940, and now we are in the year 2008. And it is important to keep a certain distance. In this context I think I succeeded to keep it, although I had some memories and was emotionally involved.

Q: What questions did you want to raise internationally with the movie?

A: First of all, I want the film to be understood. My aim was to involve the audience, even those who maybe have never heard of Katyn. In order for the film to be understandable for everyone, we had to provide some historical background. But we’ll have to wait for the release in other countries abroad to see what kind of impact it may have internationally. But I mainly made this film for a Polish audience: that was my main target group.

Q: During the elections last September, the Polish government tried to use the movie for its campaign. Is it true that you protested?

A: That’s true, but they did not succeed. It was a good moment to use the film, because it was before the elections in Poland. I protested because this is not the film’s purpose. This was not the aim of the film, this is not why I made it. It was not made to generate political discussions or to suggest political issues. This is a film to commemorate, to give a hand to people who still remember their family members or friends who were killed in 1940.

Q: Why did you become a member of the Solidarity movement?

A: That was the most beautiful moment in my life. I joined Solidarity because it was the first movement that fought for freedom in Poland; it conjoined the forces of workers and members of the intelligentsia, like writers, politicians, doctors and film directors. Before that it was either the ones or the others who were uprising. They never had united before.

Q: Was it worth it, fighting for freedom?

A: Freedom creates other difficulties, those of choice, but choice is good. When people have no choice or when they have to make their decisions according to someone else’s will, then there’s something wrong.

Q: On your website you say that escape is one of the most important themes in your life. Why?

A: We always have a laugh with my friends when we tell the following joke: it’s always good escaping forward, but never good escaping backwards. Because when you escape forward, you can have new experiences. This topic is very much present in my more political movies. Besides, it’s important to have an element of surprise for the audience. My film The Man of Iron, has an unexpected turn that no one is able to foresee.

Q: What’s your new movie Tatarak about?

A: It’s a beautiful film that takes place in the sixties; it’s about a woman who falls unexpectedly in love and that totally surprises her. I want to leave politics. I’m not a maniac (laughs).

In general, older generations in Poland still have a deep-rooted mistrust of both the Germans and the Russians due to the historical reasons mentioned above. Unfortunately, the younger generations also feel that way as well, although perhaps not so strongly. I recently talked to a Polish acquaintance and when I asked him about how he felt about the Germans and Russians, he responded quickly that what happened in the past is still very much present. He also added that Poles feel more embittered about the Russians than the Germans.

While Wajda himself said during the interview that the Katyn massacre is part of Poland’s identity, he also said that it is important to look forward. It is very clear to me that it will take more than one generation for the wounds to heal completely.

According to the newspaper, the Military Prosecutor’s Office has not said the last word in the investigation into the Katyn massacre, which started 1990 and was discontinued in 2004. The majority of the files were made secret then.

In 1940, the NKVD murdered around 22,000 Polish officers in Katyn, Russia. After the Germans revealed the mass-murder to the world, the Soviet government put the blame on them.

In 1990, the Soviet government officially acknowledged NKVD’s responsibility for the murder, but refused to see the events as a ‘war crime’.

http://hnn.us/articles/48794.html

In March 1798, Tadeuz Kościuszko, a hero of the American and Polish revolutions, and Thomas Jefferson, Vice President of the United States, huddled in a cramped second-story room in Philadelphia to make a pact of honor centered on the Pole’s sizable American estate.

Kościuszko, who had returned to the United States to a hero’s welcome less than a year before, anxiously wanted to leave for Paris to avoid entrapment by the Alien and Sedition acts. (Jefferson, estranged from President John Adams and hoping to use Kosciuszko’s prestige on a secret mission to convince the French not to wage war with the United States, prepared a fake passport for Kosciusko.)  Before the Pole departed, he and Jefferson constructed a will to dispose of $15,000 (Kosciuszko’s Revolutionary pay) after his death. The two men labored together to produce a document with the potential to alter American history.

Kosciuszko died on October 15, 1817. After several years of vacillation, Jefferson withdrew from his pact of honor with Kosciuszko by pleading in a Virginia court in Charlottesville that he could not serve as executor of his friend’s estate and would not use the money to free his slaves. As William Lloyd Garrison would say many years later, “What an all-conquering influence must have attended his illustrious example,” if he had taken the lead to abolish slavery.

Merrill Peterson, for all his admiration for Jefferson, was anguished by this retreat: “The object of [Kosciuszko’s] will was lost. Had Jefferson felt stronger about the object, he would have ventured the experiment, despite statutory obstacles and the shortness of years, for the experiment [of freeing his slaves] was one he often commended to others and, indeed, one he may have himself suggested to Kosciuszko.”

As Kosciuszko’s will, abandoned by Jefferson, made its way through the courts, many complications arose. The estate was finally awarded by the Supreme Court in 1852, 26 years after most of Jefferson’s slaves had been auctioned on the rolling lawn at Monticello to extinguish his debts, to Kosciuszko’s descendants. For years in Poland, Kosciuszko’s countrymen held the view that the American Civil War could have been averted if the Polish hero’s philanthropic, abolitionist plan had been implemented. When the slaves at Monticello mounted the auction block to be sold off after the Founding Father died—the slaves that could have been freed if Kosciuszko’s will had been honored—a small-town editor in a Susquehanna River town asked how Jefferson, “surely the champion of civil liberty to the American people,” left “so many human beings in fetters to be indiscriminately sold to the highest bidder.” In biting words, the editor wrote: “Heaven inspired Jefferson with the knowledge `that all men are created equal.’  He was not forgetful—in his last moments he `commended his soul to God, and his daughter to his country;’ but to whom did he commend his wretched slaves?”

She is going home.

Just four years after Britain was caught by surprise by a massive influx of workers from Poland and elsewhere in eastern Europe, the mostly young immigrants are turning around in large numbers and leaving Britain.

“Wages are really going up in Poland and the pound is getting weaker so it is harder to save good money in London.

“Lots of my friends have left and now they are getting good jobs at home because they have learned good English and got good experience here.”

The Institute for Public Policy Research in the UK estimates that about a million workers from Poland and the seven other eastern and central European countries that joined the EU in 2004 shifted to Britain, the only large EU economy that kept its labour market open to the new entrants.

That shift has been one of the world’s largest and smoothest migrations of workers across any border, and has been described by historians as the largest influx into Britain in 300 years.

Danny Sriskandarajah, one of the report’s authors, says this massive wave of migration has been unique in British history because most of the arrivals in previous influxes stayed permanently. At this stage, Britain’s experience with what are dubbed “the Polish plumbers”, suggests the EU’s flexible labour market has actually worked the way it is intended, providing extra labour when the British economy was booming, allowing more growth while keeping down inflation and interest rates.

Now that Britain’s economy is slowing, there are suddenly fewer workers looking for jobs.

Poland has benefited because many of its ambitious workers were able to find good jobs during a time of high unemployment at home and are now returning with the money and experience to start their own businesses or take on more highly paid jobs while stimulating economic demand.

Poland’s unemployment has halved since it joined the EU in 2004. Wages in some of its industries are up by 25 per cent this year, and the zloty has soared against the pound. In 2004, each pound saved by a Polish worker would buy 7.5 Polish zloty; today it buys only 4.5 zloty.

Given the higher living costs in London, rising wages at home and the tug of family ties, there are weaker incentives to stay.

The arrival of the eastern workers in the UK strained government services in many regions but soon prompted visible changes in many aspects of British life.

Supermarkets stocked hundreds of lines of Polish food and beers, street signs in some cities were duplicated in Polish, Catholic churches saw fuller pews and nightclubs introduced special Polish pop music nights.

Local councils and even political parties translated their hand-outs into Polish, and dozens of medium-sized newspapers began printing regular Polish-language editions.

Even The Sun, which revels in British nationalism, is considering printing special 48-page Polish language editions during the Euro 2008 football tournament. With England failing to qualify, retailers and publicans hope to cash in on Polish fans by advertising Polish beers and snacks.

Wojciech Pisarski, a spokesman at the Polish embassy in London, told The Weekend Australian that his Government “is doing everything it can to encourage workers to come home because we need them now in Poland.”

“We are running a publicity campaign to convince them that they can use the expertise they have gained here to set up businesses or get good jobs back home,” Mr Pisarski said.

The Polish Government had offered cheap loans to returning workers hoping to set up new businesses, and a tax amnesty on remissions of cash so workers could shift their money home without worrying about being double-taxed on foreign earnings, he said.

“Gdansk council has also introduced its own incentives to get people to shift home. It is quite important because, just like London is getting ready for the Olympics, we are hosting the 2012 Euro (football championship) and a lot of work has to be done.

“We need to build stadiums, hotels and infrastructure and we need to bring home people with the skills to do that,” Mr Pisarskisaid.

“At one point we had about 1000 Polish people a day coming to Britain but that has levelled off and now it seems to be flowing the other way.”

Miles Quest, a spokesman for the British Hospitality Association, said hotels and other catering businesses would suffer if east Europeans kept returning home: “Around 80 per cent of workers in hospitality in London are from overseas and … the eastern Europeans have been extremely valuable.”

Ministers will today launch a £200million project to create an “army” of British workers with the same skills as eastern Europeans. It will pay for specialist training colleges supplying staff for the construction, IT, science and engineering industries.

The move comes amid warnings the UK faces a shortage of 600,000 skilled building workers, 500,000 IT staff and more than 300,000 trained in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Skills Secretary John Denham also warned firms could not rely for ever on Polish and other eastern Europeans plugging the skills gap. He said: “Eastern European migrants have filled shortages but, in the longer term, this is not something we want to rely on. People can go as quickly as they come.”

He could tell her how the Soviets and the Nazis closed in on his home town of Lvov in September 1939 and how the town council chose the Soviets to surrender to. Then he might tell her how the fathers of his friends were taken to the woods at Katyn and shot by the communists.

Its been almost 60 years since my grandfather’s arrest and 50 years since the Soviets invaded Hungary. The Prague Spring has come and gone, the Gdansk shipyard strike is history, the Berlin Wall has fallen. We’ve read Robert Conquest tell of Stalin’s murderous deeds and Jung Chang tell of Mao’s.

We’ve watched films about the Stasi and recoiled in disgust at the opulent lives of the Ceaucescus. We know that Alger Hiss was guilty and that there was, after all, a communist conspiracy in America. We’ve read Solzhenitsyn and Sharansky. We know.

Yet still the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, the Leader of the House of Commons, a member of the Cabinet, is in love with Fidel. When asked, earlier this week, in an interview: “Fidel Castro - authoritarian dictator or hero of the Left?” she answered unhesitatingly - “hero of the Left”.

Which brings me to this question - Why? Why does she think that? Why would she say that?

Let’s eliminate from our inquiries the idea that Fidel was somehow better than the rest of them, better than Honecker and so forth. Those cigars, those battle fatigues, that beard. Kinda cool, no? No!  Death sentences for those who want to flee, prison sentences for dissidents, gags for the press, jail for homosexuals, ruinous central planning for the economy, his support for a nuclear first strike against America, his opposition to any kind of reform, his four-hour long speeches, his personality cult. Fidel Castro was just like the rest of them.

So if we want to understand Ms Harman’s response, it is not enough just to think about Cuba. We have to understand why parts of the Left, people who think of themselves as impeccably liberal, still think of communism as a heroic doctrine and communists as basically well meaning and a bit “alternative”. It’s a pervasive attitude that goes well beyond politicians. Go to Tate Modern and you will find an exhibition of Soviet art - workers joyfully producing tractors or some such. In the bookshop you can buy a book of posters from the cultural revolution. Hitler memorabilia is not on sale. They wouldn’t dream of having a room full of artfully designed Juden Raus! posters.

I struggle a little to understand the distinction being made here, but I think it is this. It’s not that the liberals are unaware that millions died under Mao and under Stalin. It’s just that they think it was different. Hitler had a killing machine; under Mao (”the greatest man of the 20th century”, according to Tony Benn) and Stalin many people just up and died.

I’ve heard this argument made before. When I wrote that my mother had seen Anne Frank arrive in Belsen, I had an e-mail from a Nazi claiming that I was wrong to describe the little girl as having been killed by the Nazis. She had, he said, died of typhoid. I responded that if you imprison an innocent person in terrible conditions or starve them, or both, and they die, you have murdered them. The same goes for the communists.

There is another reason why people prefer communists to fascists. It is that the latter believe we are entirely the product of our genes, while the former regard us as entirely the product of our environment. Somehow genetic determinism is regarded with greater distaste than environmental determinism. I am not entirely sure why. In any case, scientific evidence now shows that both views are wrong. Even if they weren’t, neither justifies the killings carried out in their name.

Which leaves me with one final reason for the Left’s attitude to communism - that anyone who defies the United States is somehow seen as a valiant progressive, whatever their crimes. I am sure that Castro’s resistance to the US is a major reason for Harriet Harman’s admiration.

From time to time, Left thinkers make an effort to reconcile liberals and America. From Tony Crosland in the Fifties to Jonathan Freedland’s admirable and convincing book Bring Home the Revolution, the efforts have failed. Almost anyone - a homophobic, misogynist Islamist cleric for example - is given some credit if the US is their punchbag.

A few months ago the Tory candidate Nigel Hastilow had to resign for saying that Enoch Powell may have had a point. And it was right that
he went.

The Polish cosmologist Michael Heller has won the 2008 Templeton Prize. Heller, who is also a Catholic priest, was awarded the $1.6m prize in recognition of his scholarship and research which has pushed at the metaphysical boundaries of science.

The Duke of Edinburgh will officially present the award to Michael Heller at a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace on 7 May.

Reviewed by Denis MacShane
Friday, 7 March 2008

Poland in 1980 was when communism was peacefully pushed into history’s bottomless dustbin by the workers of the union, Solidarity. Poland in 1940 was when 20,000 of Europe’s intellectuals, doctors, teachers and army officers were taken out and shot on Stalin’s orders - a mini-Holocaust not matched by Hitler until the following years. Poland in 1920 was where Lenin’s attempt to convert Europe to Bolshevism at the end of machine guns and bayonets came to a dead end.

Now we have a thorough, beautifully written account of one of the great turning-points in Europe’s history. Adam Zamoyski knows Polish, Russian and European archives as few others do, and writes with the dash of a Polish cavalry officer.

In 1920, Lenin ordered the invasion and occupation of Poland as a prelude to exporting the Russian revolution into the heart of Europe, Germany. In a desperate war in the spring and summer, the Poles held off much greater Russian armies, culminating in the Battle of Warsaw in August 1920. Lenin’s military ambitions were defeated and Europe was saved from the full-scale dictatorships that arrived in Germany after 1933 and the eastern half of Europe after 1945.

Lenin thought the huge numbers he could muster would be enough to see off the Poles. Giant cavalry armies raced for Warsaw. The Russians invented a new weapon - a machine gun mounted on a horse-drawn pram. These raced across battle-fields with scything effect. But as the lines of communication got longer and longer, the Poles were able to cut off and mash up the various red armies.

The Poles broke all the Russian codes and were able to listen to all communications. The training proved vital two decades later as Polish code-breakers and the Polish underground’s capture of the Wehrmacht’s Enigma coding machine let London read German war plans. The Red Army had no time for hearts-and-minds campaigns. Women were raped, peasants slaughtered and the Jews blamed as the capitalist paymasters of the hardly philo-Semitic Poles under Pilsudski. Trotsky ordered leaflets to be printed in German as he believed fondly that first Polish, then German workers and peasants would rise up to embrace their Russian liberators.

Today, again, Poland and Britain are linked as hundred of thousands of Poles and Brits live in each other’s nations, commute, settle and form households. The Poles know and cherish Britain’s history as do few other European nations. Now Zamoyski is repaying the compliment as he rightly insists on the centrality of the Polish narrative to understanding Europe.

The Weimer Republic is the name given to the German state in 1919-1933 - before Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Estonia-Russia ties have been tense since the collapse of the Soviet Union. “The Weimar mentality… is so similar that I really hope we do not go off in the wrong direction,” Mr Ilves told the Moscow Times.

He was speaking as Russia prepared to elect a new president. However he declined to discuss the polls. President Vladimir Putin is stepping down after serving two terms in office and his endorsed heir, Dmitry Medvedev, was widely expected to win the 2 March elections.  None of Russia’s liberal opposition parties had a candidate in the race.

I lit this candle to remember someone I never knew
Somebody I just heard about when I was as little as you.
This is for my grandparents who never got the chance to see
Their homeland again and a new world with just me.

They lived in a time when their Polish freedoms were taken
On a cold February winter night, all humanity forsaken.
I only knew them from the many stories that were told
How they struggled to survive with hunger and bitter cold.

They never had the chance to get back what they knew
Their lives were destroyed and there was nothing they could do
Their last steps on earth were struggling to return
And I try to remember this as the memory candle burns.

I missed the warm hugs they might have given me
If they had just been given another chance to see
But in my heart I always felt their love stream thru
And from my heart I give Babunia and Dziadek to you.

They were warriors of faith and loved their land
Their fate was unnecessary and hard to understand
They were proud people, gentle and strong
Trapped in a world where so much went wrong.

When the 10th of February comes, remember this light
And the story I will tell you about them tonite.
May the candle burn bright and their memory survive
As their spirit touches us as if they were here and alive.

n 1932, Soviet leader Josef Stalin unleashed genocide in Ukraine, Stalin determined to force Ukraine’s millions of independent farmers - called kulaks - into collectivized Soviet agriculture, and to crush Ukraine’s growing spirit of nationalism.

Faced by resistance to collectivization, Stalin unleashed terror and dispatched 25,000 fanatical young party militants from Moscow - earlier versions of Mao’s Red Guards - to force 10 million Ukrainian peasants into collective farms. Secret police units of OGPU began selective executions of recalcitrant farmers.

When Stalin’s red guards failed to make a dent in this immense number, OGPU was ordered to begin mass executions. But there were simply not enough Chekists (secret police) to kill so many people, so Stalin decided to replace bullets with a much cheaper medium of death - mass starvation.

All seed stocks, grain, silage and farm animals were confiscated from Ukraine’s farms. (Ethiopia’s Communist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam used the same method in the 1970s to force collectivization. The resulting famine caused one million deaths.)

OGPU agents and Red Army troops sealed all roads and rail lines. Nothing came in or out of Ukraine. Farms were searched and looted of food and fuel. Ukrainians quickly began to die of hunger, cold and sickness.

When OGPU failed to meet weekly execution quotas, Stalin sent henchman Lazar Kaganovitch to destroy Ukrainian resistance. Kaganovitch, the Soviet Eichmann, made quota, shooting 10,000 Ukrainians weekly. Eighty per cent of Ukrainian intellectuals were executed. A party member named Nikita Khruschchev helped supervise the slaughter.

During the bitter winter of 1932-33, mass starvation created by Kaganovitch and OGPU hit full force. Ukrainians ate their pets, boots and belts, plus bark and roots. Some parents even ate infant children.

Britain, the U.S. and Canada were fully aware of the Ukrainian genocide and Stalin’s other monstrous crimes. (Soviet Leader Josef Stalin committed genocide in the ’30s, then became an ally against Hitler in the ’40s)

The precise number of Ukrainians murdered by Stalin’s custom-made famine and Cheka firing squads remains unknown to this day. The KGB’s archives and recent work by Russian historians show at least seven million died. Ukrainian historians put the figure at nine million or higher. Twenty-five per cent of Ukraine’s population was exterminated.

Six million other farmers across the Soviet Union were starved or shot during collectivization. Stalin told Winston Churchill he liquidated 10 million peasants during the 1930s. Add mass executions by the Cheka in Estonia, Lativia and Lithuania, the genocide of three million Muslims, massacres of Cossacks and Volga Germans, and Soviet industrial genocide accounted for at least 40 million victims, not including 20 million war dead.

Kaganovitch and many senior OGPU officers (later, NKVD) were Jewish. The predominance of Jews among Bolshevik leaders and the frightful crimes and cruelty inflicted by Stalin’s Checka on Ukraine, the Baltic states and Poland led the victims of Red Terror to blame the Jewish people for both communism and their suffering. As a direct result, during the subsequent Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, the region’s innocent Jews became the target of ferocious revenge by Ukrainians, Balts and Poles.

While the world is now fully aware of the destruction of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis, the story of the numerically larger holocaust in Ukraine has been suppressed, or ignored. Ukraine’s genocide occurred eight to nine years before Hitler began the Jewish Holocaust and was committed, unlike Nazi crimes, before the world’s gaze. But Stalin’s murder of millions was simply denied or concealed by a left-wing conspiracy of silence that continues to this day. In the strange moral geometry of mass murder, only Nazis are guilty.

Socialist luminaries like Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb and Premier Edouard Herriot of France, toured Ukraine during 1932-33 and proclaimed reports of famine were false. Shaw announced: “I did not see one under-nourished person in Russia.” New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Russian reporting, wrote claims of famine were “malignant propaganda.” Seven million people were dying around them, yet these fools saw nothing. The New York Times has never repudiated Duranty’s lies.

Modern leftists do not care to be reminded their ideological and historical roots are entwined with this century’s greatest crime - the inevitable result of enforced social engineering and Marxist
theology.

Western historians delicately skirt the sordid fact that the governments of Britain, the U.S. and Canada were fully aware of the Ukrainian genocide and Stalin’s other monstrous crimes. Yet they eagerly welcomed him as an ally during the Second World War. Stalin, who Franklin Roosevelt called “Uncle Joe”, murdered four times more people than Adolph Hitler.

“Katyn” was one of five films to receive an Academy Awards nomination in the best foreign film category. It takes its title from the forest in the former Soviet Union where many of the 22,500 Polish army officers captured by the Red Army were massacred during World War II. The film is primarily fictional, but the fact that it is based on real events adds to its emotional pull, Wajda said. It also uses archive material shot by both the Nazi Germans and Soviet authorities.

Much of the film is set in the southern Polish city of Krakow between 1939 and 1950, and tells the story of the agonising wait of local women for news of their loved ones. Wajda’s father, Captain Jakub Wajda, was one of the victims of the killings, making the movie a deeply personal affair for the director, who himself fought in the Polish resistance and began his film career in 1950.

The massacre at Katyn and a swathe of other sites came in the wake of Moscow’s deal with Nazi Germany to invade and carve up Poland, in 1939. The Polish officers captured by the Red Army were deemed anti-communist “counterrevolutionaries” and picked out to be killed by the Soviet NKVD secret police.

The episode remained obscured for a long time, even when the Nazis revealed the existence of the mass graves they discovered in 1941 after they invaded the Soviet Union. Moscow blamed the Germans for the massacre, and the West remained silent so as not to antagonise the Soviet Union, then a valuable ally in the fight against Hitler.

The subject remained taboo in post-war Poland, which was part of the communist bloc until 1989. It was only in 1990 that then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev admitted his country’s responsibility.

“Russian cinema-goers will be surprised to discover things which were covered up or airbrushed from their history,” Wajda said. However, he said he was pleased that the film has not stirred anti-Russian feeling in Poland since its release last September — on the anniversary of the 1939 Soviet invasion.

“Katyn” is considered a serious contender for an Oscar. It competitors include Kazakhstan’s entry “Mongol,” which tells the epic story of the early life of warrior-leader Genghis Khan, and Russia’s “12,” about a jury deliberating its verdict on a Chechen boy accused of murdering his stepfather. The other nominees are Israel’s “Beaufort,” about Israeli soldiers based in Lebanon as they prepare to withdraw, and Austria’s “The
Counterfeiters,” a drama based on a Nazi-led counterfeiting operation in the 1930s.

Wajda noted that all five films have a violent, military or historical flavour. “Maybe people are afraid of a latent conflict in some unexpected part
of the globe. Maybe film directors have a premonition,” he said.

Sat Jan 12, 2008,  http://www.newsweek.com/id/90408

Since the Soviet archives yielded up vast numbers of newly declassified documents in the 1990s, scholars have been sifting through them to find previously unknown stories or new details that cast well-known events in a new light. “Lenin’s Brain and Other Tales From the Soviet Archives” by Paul R. Gregory draws on the author’s experiences presiding over a team of scholars who have mined the Hoover Institution’s extensive collection of documents from Soviet state and party archives. The result is an enticingly short (164 pages) sampler of stories from the archives that offer a glimpse into how the Soviet system worked in all its chilling inhumanity, not just under Stalin but also under his successors.

Cover-ups go hand in hand with obsessive secrecy, of course, and the archives reveal some behavior that is hard to fathom. After Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, his brain was preserved in a formaldehyde solution. Stalin’s idea was that scientists would study the brain to prove that the Soviet founder had been a genius. As Gregory points out, the files that document what happened between 1925 and 1936 make clear that this conclusion had been reached before any studies began. But once the “Institute for the Brain” confirmed what Stalin wanted to hear, he decided to keep those “findings” secret. Gregory speculates that by 1936 Stalin may have been worried about unflattering comparisons between himself and Lenin, but this hardly seems an adequate explanation.

More understandable, if depressing, was the Soviet leaders’ propensity for employing terms that betrayed their underlying contempt for their subjects. Nikolai Bukharin, one of the early purge victims who is often portrayed as less brutal than Stalin, explained that the aim of the revolution was “to create communist human material from capitalist human material.” Gregory lists other common Soviet terms such as “former people” and “marginals,” referring to those whose alleged offenses or lack of productivity made them unworthy of any consideration. Such language—just like Hitler’s use of the term Untermenschen—was the first step toward justifying mass murder.

Entire families could be wiped out just for belonging to the wrong class or for some alleged misdeed. In one case study, Gregory recounts the story of Vladimir Moroz, whose father was executed in 1937 and whose mother was sent to the gulag. Vladimir, 15, ended up in an orphanage and then was sent to a labor camp, where he soon perished. His crime: “defaming” Soviet leaders for what they did to his parents. “Under the pretence of progress, morality is collapsing,” he wrote in his confiscated diary.

When I first arrived here exactly 16 years ago, I stayed with Galina, a fearsome babushka, the indefatigable women who ran the Soviet Union. She would work from 6am-10pm in the market, screaming commands and comments at 120 decibels to her supplicants (shoppers), come home and get up at 1-2am to cook something for me in 2” of warm grease, then do it again next morning. She was a powerful machine, but when I returned late, the door would open a crack on the chain, and this small fearful beady-eyed face would peer out. “Are they coming for me”, the quivering face asked, “to be removed and never heard from again.” Such was the damage wrought by the Communist killers of the KGB-NKVD-OGPU-Cheka, that this terror was burned into her being 37 years after such nighttime raids nearly ceased.

One shouldn’t have to recite the litany of terror, but in Russia, one does. The Communists were estimated to have killed through murder, camps, starvation, deportations- at least 20 million people over 36 years (72 total). Yes, the number bandied around now is 12.5 million, but that
acknowledges millions more. Most of this lies at the feet of the greatest monster in history*, Joseph Stalin, a filthy psychotic who killed his family, friends, colleagues, and significant portion of his nation… along with a piece of Galina’s soul. He didn’t “save the country” in WW2, he was responsible for 10-14 million of the 28 million deaths by ignoring Hitler’s threat even after he invaded, slaughtering the entire officer corps in response to a hideously successful German misinformation plan, and expending humans like farm animals. Even the Battle of Berlin was set up as a race between Zhukov and Rokossovsky for Stalin’s amusement, rather than a coordinated attack. Industrializing Russia did not require the mass execution of kulaks, “rich” peasants who had a cow or hired hand, or the forced starvation of Ukraine, or the deportation of entire peoples, or the shipment of victorious Red Army trains straight to the Gulag because the soldiers had seen the West.

At Butovo Putin said, “Such tragedies have occurred more than once in the history of mankind. And they happened when ideals, ideals that were attractive at first glance but proved empty in the end, were placed higher than fundamental values – the values of human life, human rights and freedoms. Those who were executed, sent to camps, shot and tortured number in the thousands and millions of people… These were people with their own opinions… who were not afraid to speak their mind…. the most capable people… It seems incredible, madness.”

Dealing with genocides has always been almost impossible for afflicted nations: even the victor-imposed Nuremberg trials involved only 209 defendants of a country that had caused the deaths of 50 million people-about 2000 people were tried in all. In Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Russia, the killers return to live with their victims with near complete immunity. That’s because genocide creates something more awful than terror… respect. Respect for these godlike creatures who held the power of life and death, and a lingering conviction that they could still use it. So despite the rage and nightmares; the scars and sorrow, the killers often ascend to powerful positions in commerce or government- they have the connections, experience, and ruthlessness. They are resented, despised, feared… but respected.

But only Russia loves them, even worships them; and the more powerful and fiendish they grow, the greater the adoration. 35% now would vote for Stalin as leader, a poll says, informed by a 40 part TV series dramatizing his “good side”. This is the most incomprehensible thing about Russia to any foreigner: the blind obedience that deifies tyrants, instead of destroying them. 2 centuries of Mongol domination may have had a lasting effect. “We are an Asio-European people, not Euro-Asian” says Olga, a Moscow historical archeologist whose priest great-grandfather was killed at Butovo. “It is the mentality of our people,” says Boris Shumov, director of the Gulag Museum in Moscow. “The old ones want a firm and strong leader.” First the bully-leader becomes a father figure, and then is gradually elevated to godlike status; a belief in divine determinism that also propped up the czars.

This explains some of Putin’s astronomical popularity, which he has shrewdly managed in his persona as ruthless political operative, who has crushed the nascent democracy and concentrated all power into the Kremlin. In another persona, as KGB agent, he doesn’t mention a word about his agency’s culpability in the atrocities at Butovo (and uses phantom xenophobic threats to unify the people): the entire performance seems perfectly stage-managed to appease the West. Look, Putin gets it. But in his third persona, as a relatively competent technocrat ruler who values ability and results (after abject loyalty), his words sound sincere- what decent human couldn’t be appalled at the staggering waste of life, the destruction of so much-perhaps 100 million erased potential citizens of Russia/FSU 3-4 generations later?

There have been no trials, not even the hint of the possibility, in Russia for the worst depredations in history- it was accepted that guilt under the mandatory religion of Communism was so endemic that it was impossible to assign, a common story when the murderers co-opt and contaminate every level of society.

“They are the pride of the nation,” the President said of the disappeared. “We still remember this tragedy. We need to do a great deal to ensure that this is never forgotten.”

Yes, we do. Build a big central memorial to them, this lost nation of ghosts. Dig up Stalin and bury him in an unknown pauper’s grave. Crush the Stalin cult of rehabilitation- run endless documentaries about the truth of the Gulag. Bury Lenin- this macabre waxwork founding father of a deadly experiment. And let’s have some trials, finally, after all these years. Slay some monsters for the victims, Mr. Putin- you know better than anyone who they are.

The true enemies of Russia aren’t America or England, Estonia or Georgia, Ukraine or Poland. Russia isn’t the backward nation of yesteryear- it is a military, financial, and resource superpower. Though Russia has suffered horribly from invaders, equally bad have been the enemies from within, and until it learns to resist their enticements, it is condemned to repeat the past.

*Mao may have caused more deaths- the Great Leap Forward was estimated to kill 30 million in 58-60, but not as cold-blooded executions. Hitler’s crimes were predominantly not against his own people. The Mongols were the original genocidal maniacs, but again not against their own people and only till they attained control.