What difference does this make? After all, most Polish children born since the war have been taught the truth about Katyn by their parents, and learned to dismiss the official line of the Soviet and Polish Communist governments as a blatant cover-up. But that was what made the lie about Katyn all the more infuriating: the authorities insisted on it while knowing perfectly well that no one believed them. As Vaclav Havel spelled out in his early dissident essays, the communist system was based on lies that did not have to be believed, so long as people felt compelled to participate in public rituals that affirmed acceptance of those lies. It is no exaggeration to say that Eastern Europeans liberated themselves once they summoned the courage to proclaim historical truths in public as well as private.
Aside from its broader symbolic impact, Yeltsin’s decision to hand over the documents about Katyn may also prove liberating for Polish-Russian diplomacy. “Katyn is the symbol of the truth about our relations,” declared Polish President Lech Walesa, who said his legs trembled when received the documents. “Yesterday the crime was followed by a lie. Today the truth, which President Yeltsin decided to publicly proclaim, will be followed by understanding, trust and friendship.”
The Poles were acutely aware that Yeltsin was playing politics with the documents. His aim was to discredit Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he accused of continuing the cover-up of his predecessors. Gorbachev angrily claimed that he had seen the documents only as he was leaving office and handed them over to Yeltsin, urging him to make them public immediately. But for most Poles, the motive was irrelevant. The point was that the truth had come out.
The Russian revelation does not mean perfect justice: the perpetrators of the crimes are far beyond the law’s reach. But most Eastern Europeans have come to accept that the post-communist era offers them few opportunities to settle scores with their former oppressors. In a few cases, prosecutors managed to indict former officials for specific crimes, but most of those responsible covered their tracks, destroying evidence if it existed or relying on the sense of broader guilt to protect them. " Detective writers have apparently overlooked the only perfect crime: the one in which an entire society is complicit," wrote German author Peter Schneider in “The German Comedy.” He was referring to East Germany but was expressing a frustration felt in any country that has emerged from communist rule. Was no one guilty? Can no one be punished?
Still, an even deeper fear haunted Eastern Europe: that the truth about crimes committed by communist regimes would be forgotten, thanks to official propaganda and the world’s fleeting attention span. In “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” Czech emigre Milan Kundera wrote: “The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.”
But that bleak vision was contradicted by another strain in the literature of exiles from the region, an almost mystical belief that nothing is forgotten, that no despotic system can instill collective amnesia. In 1980 Solidarity activists engraved the words of Polish emigre poet Czeslaw Milosz on the memorial outside the Gdansk shipyard to workers killed a decade earlier:
You who wronged a simple man Bursting into laughter at the crime, Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date.
It was all there last week–the deed, the date. For Poles and everyone else who fought against the system of lies, this was the ultimate moral victory.
