12 April 2010

Katyn Forest

(Orthodox Crosses in the dark woods of the Katyn Forest near Smolensk)

We talked about oil and gas yesterday. Here is the deal: If oil costs more than $72 a barrel, Russia continues to get rich. With that wealth, they can invest in military equipment and mischief. Oil this morning is just south of $84 bucks a barrel. The game is afoot.
 
Oil is fueling the resurgence of Russian influence in the territories of its former empire. What is happening in Kyrgyzstan is part of it, just like the mugging of the EU on natural gas was, and the little military adventure in Georgia. The U.S. had emboldened the Georgians, and the Russians needed to reach out and swat them.
 
They did in a short, nasty and brutal incursion on August 7, 2008, over Georgia's breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
 
In Ukraine, Russia wants its fleet to remain headquartered in Sevastopol beyond May 2017, when its $93-million-a-year lease from Ukraine is set to expire. Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-western Orange Revolution Prime Iminister, had wanted the Russians out sooner. He even wanted to bring his nation into NATO. Newly-elected president Viktor Yanukovych has suggested he would allow Russia's Black Sea Fleet to remain indefinitely.
 
In the west, Poland was a much bigger and more immediate threat. American anti-ballistic missiles were being welcomed. The presence of those weapons, allegedly to counter the growing threat from Iran, will be a counter to Russia’s strategic deterrence. Something needed to be done.
 
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was having a ball, pulling the strings behind current President Dmitry Medvedev. As part of the campaign to neutralize the Polish government, he orchestrated an apology for the massacre at the Katyn Forest, located near the historic frontier town of Smolensk.
 
That is why the second massacre, 700 feet short of the runway at the
Smolensk-North military aerodrome is so inconvenient. It was fog that cloaked the field, and the insistence of the pilot in trying to get the aging plane on the ground. The Russians wanted the to divert, to Minsk or Moscow.
 
But the pilot refused, and pressed on with the approach to the mixed-use field. Visibility was less than 200 meters. Nothing but gray fog, and then…..horror.
 
Of course, you have to understand why virtually the entire leadership of the Polish Republic was on the twenty-year-old Tupelov-154 jet liner.
 
One tragedy to match another.
 
Part of Mr. Putin’s strategy to woo the Poles was to put a human face on the Kremlin. He was prepared to admit that a monster- an abberation of the Russian people- had actually been responsible for the wholesale execution of the flower of the Polish military, seventy years ago this year.
 
Smolensk is one of the most historic in European Russia. It dates back to the 9th Century as a trading post and fortress city on the Dnieper River. It was a major waypoint on the Amber Road from the Baltic Sea to the Byzantine Empire. The town was put to the sword by the Tatar hoards in 1240, and subsequently had the boots of the Lithuanians and the Russians on its neck. It was burned during Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812.
 
In 1939, Adolf Hitler was hoping to acquire Poland without force, as he had Austria the previous year. Clearly though, the Russians would view the annexation of the whole of the Polish state as a threat. Hitler wished to avoid a potential two-front war, which had sapped German war-fighting capabilities on the Western Front in WWI.
 
Accordingly, he had Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop strike a deal with Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov in Moscow. It came in two parts; an economic part, and a secret protocol for spheres of influence. Uncle Joe was delighted with the deal. He acquired a free hand in the Baltic east of Prussia, and half of Poland divided along the Narew, Vistula, and San rivers. He sent this secret telegram to Berlin:
 
“To the chancellor of the German Reich, Herr A. Hitler.
 I thank you for your letter. I hope that the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact will mark a decisive turn for the better in the political relations between our two countries. .
 J. Stalin”

The Germans exercised their option on Poland on the first of September, 1939. Britain and the West honored their obligations to the Poles and declared war. On the 17th of September, Stalin rolled west and Poland disappeared.
 
About 8,000 officers were taken prisoner, and they were concentrated in three major camps, the largest being Kozelsk,19 clicks from Smolensk. They were joined in short order by 14,000 Poles, arrested for the crime of allegedly being "intelligence agents, gendarmes, saboteurs, landowners, factory owners, lawyers, priests, and officials."
 
Between the officers, who were all required to be college graduates, and the rest, the prisoners comprised virtually the entire intellectual population of Poland.
 
Lavrentiy Beria, chief of the NKVD saw this as a potentially dangerous population to the Soviet annexation, and accordingly made a recommendation to Stalin that they all be shot. Uncle Joe liked the idea, and the entire Soviet Politburo signed off on the memorandum.
 
The murders began in a meat-packing plant in Smolensk, and the bodies were dumped in mass graves in the dark pines of the Katyn Forest.
 
The number of victims is estimated at about 22,000, the most commonly cited figure being around 21,700.
 
Stalin believed he had eliminated a political threat by decapitating the leadership of his enemy, and secured a buffer necessary to protect himself from the Nazis. He was a happy man.
 
For his part, Hitler had the independence to concentrate on the west after the speedy victory in Poland. The astonishing disintegration of France allowed him to consider his options. It is amazing today that he left Britain wounded but not vanquished, as he turned his attention to the East. Mad, I guess.
 
Smolensk was occupied by the Germans from 1941 to 1943, an early casualty of Operations Barbarosa. When the panzers arrived, the Germans made a disturbing discovery in the woods near town, which they announced through the usual channels in the ministry of Josef Goebbles.
 
The revelation led to the end of diplomatic relations between Moscow and the London-based Polish government-in-exile. The Soviet Union continued to deny the massacres until 1990, when it finally acknowledged the perpetration of the massacre by the NKVD,
 
The Prosecutor's General Office of the Russian Federation conducted an investigation, and acknowledged that the Soviets were responsible. The report did not classify the executions as crimes against humanity, which would have required the prosecution of surviving perpetrators.
 
The Poles want that. They want to see the last of the doddering old killers in the dock of justice. Vladimir Putin was attempting to finesse the issue until all the old men were dead, and the matter could be marked off as an unfortunate period of history.
 
The seventieth anniversary of the murders is why the Polish government Tupolev 154 was trying to make the foggy field, flying too low, seeking the non-directional beacon that it snagged, tumbling into the trees short of the runway. On the ground were scattered the bodies of President Lech Kaczy?ski, his wife and an official delegation of 89 of the most senior members of the Polish government. The other dead include the president of the national bank, deputy foreign minister, army chaplain, head of the National Security Office, deputy parliament speaker, civil rights commissioner and at least two presidential aides and three lawmakers.
 
It is as the audience of the joint session of Congress assembled for the State of the Union address were all killed instantly. The horror is numbing. A second Katyn.
 
President Medvedev was the very first on the phone to express his condolences to the Polish people. Mr. Putin himself is heading up the accident investigation at Smolensk. The matter must be handled with great delicacy, since this was not part of the game plan.
 
The twin brother of the President survives, and is virulent anti-Russian. Poland is required by its constitution to hold presidential elections no later than June 20th of 2010. It will be interesting to see how the Russians play the Poles, who will have every reason to remember the old murders as they greive over the newly dead.
 
There are other ghosts in the Katyn Forest, which only the Germans might remember.
 
It was in those dark woods that German General Henning von Trescow took a last short walk after learning the failure of the July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler. He had tried to kill the Fuhrer by smuggling a bomb aboard Hilter's Ju-52 as it prepared to take off from Smolensk for the flight back to the Rastenburg and failed. He then recruited Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenburg to lead what became Operation Valkyrie.
 
Having failed twice to kill the monster who will destroy the Reich, he held an improvised explosive at his neck. In those trees, he cheated the Gestapo that were coming for him. He pulled the cord and with the blast, another ghost joined those of the 22,000 Poles in the Katyn Forest.
 
I have to walk away from the woods, since work calls. Traffic is expected to be bad today, since there are the heads of state from forty nations in town to talk about nukes this week. Security will be heavy. I don’t know who is left from the Polish Government to attend.

We will be talking about nukes this week.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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