The leaders of Russia and Poland paid tribute on Wednesday to Russian and Polish victims of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and vowed to overcome painful historic memories that still hamper their bilateral relations. At a sombre ceremony in Katyn forest, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin urged Poles not to blame the Russian people for the murder of 22,000 Polish officers by Stalin's NKVD secret police in 1940 and to look to the future, not just the past.
"We cannot change the past but we can establish and preserve the truth and that means historical justice. Polish and Russian historians are now working to uncover this truth and to allow an opening between our countries," said Putin. The mass murder of thousands of Polish prisoners of war and intellectuals at Katyn in spring 1940 - just months after Nazi Germany and Stalin carved up Poland - is an enduring symbol for Poles of their suffering under totalitarian Soviet rule.
For many decades Moscow blamed the Nazis for the deaths and only acknowledged its responsibility in 1990, a year after the fall of communism in Poland. The Kremlin has resisted Polish calls to brand the Katyn massacre a "genocide". The tranquil site, set among pine and birch trees in western Russia, also contains the graves of many Russians executed on Stalin's orders, including during the Great Terror of the 1930s.
As expected, Putin, a former agent in the KGB, a successor organisation to Stalin's NKVD, did not apologise for the Katyn murders, and he stressed the common suffering of Russians, Poles and other ethnic groups under Stalin's rule. Wednesday's commemoration crowns a steady improvement in relations between Russia and Poland, though differences remain over energy security, missile defence and Nato enlargement.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a pragmatist who wants to build closer economic ties with energy-rich Russia, told a joint news conference that Putin may visit Poland this year. Putin said the two countries would sign "in the near future" a recently agreed deal securing Russian gas deliveries to Poland until the year 2037.
On Katyn, Tusk urged reconciliation based on honesty about past crimes. Putin and Tusk, both wearing black ties, laid wreaths in both the Russian and Polish cemeteries and heard prayers offered by Russian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Jewish and Muslim clergy. Among those attending the ceremony were ex-Polish president Lech Walesa, who as leader of the Solidarity trade union helped topple communism in 1989, and Andrzej Wajda, the Polish director whose film "Katyn" was recently aired on Russian television.