The Economist reports:
Few things symbolised the Soviet attitude to truth more than the Katyn massacre: having shot 20,000 Polish officers in cold blood, the Kremlin then blamed it on the Nazis. And few things symbolise better modern Russia’s lingering clinch with the Soviet past than the failure by relatives of the victims to get justice from the Russian legal system.
Last month a court in Moscow rejected a request to hear a case on two issues: the declassification of documents about Katyn and the judicial rehabilitation of the victims. That was shocking (imagine a German court telling Holocaust survivors that Auschwitz files were a military secret). But the Katyn relatives want to take their case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and for that other legal avenues must be exhausted first.
Last week, however, an appeal court overturned the lower court’s ruling and ordered it to hear the case. Other signals coming from the top, including an interview given to a Polish newspaper by an adviser to former President Vladimir Putin who called Katyn a “political crime”, suggest that the Russians are changing their attitude. One risk for them is a defeat at Strasbourg. Another is the effect on public opinion of a new film, “Katyn”, by Andrzej Wajda, Poland’s best-known director, that is filling cinemas in the West and in Russia.
I won’t be holding my breath.
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