The Ghosts of Katyn

Michael Weiss on current affairs and impact of the Katyn Forest massacre. An excerpt:

In studying Katyn one learns a great deal about the pathological mind of Stalin and the Soviet art of transforming guilt into political victory. The plan to commit mass murder was hatched, according to Russian investigations made the early 1990's, in the winter of 1940 at conference between the Gestapo and NKVD held in Zakopane in what was then German-occupied Poland. The joint Soviet-Nazi objective was to defeat resurgent Polish nationalism as a threat to either power's carve-up of Eastern Europe. So ebulliently was the massacre plotted that photos from the conference, released, too, in the last days of Communism, show Gestapo and NKVD agents sledding together in the snow in between sessions.