Lech Kaczyński, the fourth President of the Republic of Poland, died on 10 April 2010, after a Polish Air Force Tu-154 crashed outside of Smolensk, Russia, killing all 96 aboard. His wife, economist and First Lady Maria Kaczyńska, was also among those killed.
After the death of Kaczyński was announced, a week of mourning was declared by the acting President of Poland, Bronisław Komorowski, spanning 11 to 18 April with a state funeral for the couple held on 18 April. Several countries observed a day of national mourning on the date of the funeral. The couple were buried together in a crypt in the Wawel Cathedral, Kraków, afterwards.
In December 2005, Lech Kaczyński was sworn in as President of Poland, having won 54% of the vote in a close-fought race against rival candidate Donald Tusk. This was the first major election for Kaczyński’s newly-created populist conservative party “Law and Justice,” which he founded in 2003 alongside his identical twin brother Jarosław, but the pair were hardly political newcomers. Kaczyński’s political career went back to the Solidarity movement in the late 1980s, when he participated in the strikes that led to the collapse of Poland’s Soviet-aligned government. During the 1990s and early 2000s, he bounced around between various positions, including parliament, where he served in both the Senate and the Sejm (the lower house), as well as in the government of president Lech Wałęsa, where he held the post of Security Minister before being fired in 1992, and later as Minister of Justice and Attorney General under Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek, a post from which he was again fired after less than two years. Nevertheless, his outspoken anti-corruption rhetoric made him popular with the public, and when he and his brother split from the Solidarity movement to found Law and Justice in 2003, he was well-poised to become a major political force. It came as no great surprise, then, that he won election to the Presidency in 2005. And six months after that, he appointed his brother to the post of Prime Minister, at last cementing the control of the Kaczyński twins over Polish politics.
In office, Kaczyński focused on educating Poles and the world about crimes committed against Poland by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. One of the most significant of these was the Katyn Massacre, a horrific atrocity carried out on the orders of Lavrentiy Beria, the chief of Stalin’s secret police (or NKVD), following the 1939 invasion of Poland. Seeking to eliminate an entire generation of Polish military expertise, the NKVD systematically executed around 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia throughout April of 1940, many of whom were subsequently buried in a mass grave in the Katyn Forest outside the city of Smolensk in western Russia. Soviet authorities would not admit their involvement in the massacre until 1989, when General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged that Beria and Stalin had ordered the killings and expressed “profound regret” for their actions.
By 2010, plenty of friction remained between Poland and Russia over the extent to which the wounds inflicted by the massacre had been, or should be, reconciled. That year, with the 70th anniversary of the massacre approaching, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made several overtures indicating that reconciliation was on the table, as a documentary about the massacre was aired in Russia for the first time, and Putin invited both Polish officials and opposition members to attend a memorial service at the site of the massacre. The planned ceremony promised to be a major event in the history of Polish-Russian relations, and the guest list was soon filled with entire strata of the Polish elite, including President Kaczyński, who was by now gearing up to run for a second term. However, due to political in-fighting over the upcoming election, Kaczyński and most of the government delegation ended up organizing their own event, making plans to attend a separate ceremony on April 10th, while Donald Tusk and members of his centrist Civic Platform party proceeded with the original event on April 7th, which was hosted by Vladimir Putin.
2022 / WARSAW, Poland (AP) — A Polish government special commission has reinforced its earlier allegations that the 2010 plane crash that killed President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others in Russia was the result of Moscow’s assassination plan.
The latest of the commission’s reports, released Monday, alleges that an intentional detonation of planted explosives caused the April 10, 2010 crash of Soviet-made Tu-154M plane that killed Kaczynski, the First Lady and 94 other government and armed forces figures as well as many prominent Poles.
Their deaths were the result of an “act of unlawful interference by the Russian side,” the commission’s head Antoni Macierewicz told a news conference.
“The main and indisputable proof of the interference was an explosion in the left wing … followed by an explosion in the plane’s center,” said Macierewicz, who in 2015-2018 served as defense minister in Poland’s right-wing government.
He denied that any mistakes were made by the Polish pilots or crew members, despite bad weather at the time of the crash.
The report repeats many previous allegations made by the commission, appointed by the government whose key figure is the main ruling Law and Justice party leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the twin of the late president.
Theories that the plane was destroyed by a bomb are widespread on the internet and in certain segments of Polish society, and as time goes by they are increasing in popularity. As such, it is impossible to tell the story of the Smolensk Air Disaster without examining these theories, and the political and cultural forces which drive them.
Many Poles still believe the Smolensk air crash, in which President Lech Kaczyński died in 2010, was the result of Kremlin foul play.
Considering that Russia and Poland have had a fraught relationship for centuries, which has included such crimes against humanity as the Katyn Massacre, the death of the Polish president on Russian soil was always certain to spawn speculation that the crash was no accident, and indeed it would have been foolish not to investigate the possibility of foul play. Jerzy Miller’s investigation pulled out all the usual stops to detect signs of sabotage, such as testing for explosive residue, searching for pitting damage associated with explosions, and looking for shrapnel in the bodies of victims. None of these areas of inquiry yielded any evidence that a bomb exploded on board the plane.
Nevertheless, skepticism of these findings was widespread. Although some opposition politicians were also on the plane, most of the victims were allied with President Kaczyński and many of them were openly anti-Russian. Polish commentators called Jerzy Miller “naïve” for cooperating with the MAK at all. The biggest purveyor of these criticisms was none other than Jarosław Kaczyński, twin brother of the late Lech Kaczyński and leader of the Law and Justice Party.
In office, Kaczyński focused on educating Poles and the world about crimes committed against Poland by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. One of the most significant of these was the Katyn Massacre, a horrific atrocity carried out on the orders of Lavrentiy Beria, the chief of Stalin’s secret police (or NKVD), following the 1939 invasion of Poland. Seeking to eliminate an entire generation of Polish military expertise, the NKVD systematically executed around 22,000 Polish officers and intelligentsia throughout April of 1940, many of whom were subsequently buried in a mass grave in the Katyn Forest outside the city of Smolensk in western Russia. Soviet authorities would not admit their involvement in the massacre until 1989, when General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged that Beria and Stalin had ordered the killings and expressed “profound regret” for their actions.
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