It has been noted that the recent plane crash over Smolensk that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and other leading ministers and intellectuals was due to the foggy conditions in western Russia, to an outdated plane, to Kaczynski’s stubborn desire to land a plane in a spot that Russian air traffic controllers had warned was too dangerous. And while it seems that all of these assertions are true and that there was no over-arching Russian conspiracy to take out Poland’s leadership, the heavy political baggage that has accompanied Russia’s horrendously slow reconciliation with Poland over the Katyn Massacre of 1940 – in which the Soviet NKVD murdered 22,000 of Poland’s best and brightest (both Jews and Gentiles) at an abandoned spa outside Smolensk – demands that Russia apologize not only for its involvement in this crime but in another, equally clandestine crime of World War II that remains a mystery even today.

The circumstances surrounding a Polish plane crash in 1943 off the coast of Gibraltar that killed General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the leader of Poland’s Government-in-Exile remain decidedly suspicious. Following a German broadcast in April of that year which noted the discovery of Polish corpses at Katyn, Sikorski had demanded an International Red Cross investigation of the area. For this response he became a pariah not only to Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union, but arguably also to Winston Churchill, who feared that Poland’s defense of its own rights would wreck Anglo-Soviet cooperation in defeating Hitler. So popular was Sikorski among the Poles (he had bravely fought the Soviets at the gates of Warsaw in 1920) that had he lived through the war, Poland very likely could have remained autonomous from foreign influence. During Sikorski’s stay at Gibraltar in early July 1943, the plane of Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador in London, also landed at the British-controlled airfield and pulled up quite close to Sikorski’s aircraft. This event was highly unusual, for Poland and the Soviet Union had already broken off relations with each other. When the plane carrying Sikorski crashed shortly after takeoff on the night of July 4th, 1943, the only survivor was Max Prchal, the pilot, who was already wearing his life jacket. If the Soviets did plan the murder of Sikorski that night, they would have had excellent intelligence: in charge of MI6’s Iberian Section at that time was Kim Philby, the NKVD’s most highly-placed mole in British Intelligence. Most glaringly, British Cabinet Office Reports in the 1960s revealed that a serious lapse in security had occurred from the time that Maisky’s plane landed at Gibraltar, and that a Soviet defector to Britain had asserted that Sikorski was indeed murdered by the NKVD. Additionally, most British Intelligence documents dealing with the crash remain classified. This evidence was stated here in an article for the London Times, and the truth is potentially sticky not just for the Russians, but for the British as well: if Churchill knew that the Soviets had a hit placed on Sikorski, he very well could have acquiesced to it, so desperate was his reliance on Soviet military victories against the Nazis at the time.

Thus, conspiracies often involve multiple parties that have converging interests. Even by the scant evidence available to the public, Sikorski’s death bears the markings of just such a conspiracy. More than sixty years after the end of World War II, it is time that the Russians admitted the extent of the Soviet government’s involvement in the events of July 4th, 1943. If the Soviets did indeed murder Sikorski, they arguably delayed Polish democracy by fifty years, for upon Sikorski’s death the Polish exile leadership splintered and steadily lost clout with its Allies. The murders of thousands committed at Katyn were very possibly links in a chain of Soviet treachery, that included the murder of General Sikorski, and that culminated in the Soviet military and political subjugation of Poland proper by 1945. On the Western side, it is expected for commentators to praise the development of Poland’s post-Communist democratic system in spite of tragedies that have occurred at Katyn and more recently at Smolensk. But such an analysis of events obstructs an understanding of the degree to which Poland’s democracy depends upon honesty about the past. Thus it is remarkable, but not sufficient, for Russia to atone for Soviet crimes committed at Katyn in 1940. Moscow must at some point present a full disclosure of what happened at Gibraltar in July of 1943, which will surely require the participation of the British government in declassifying certain files on the crash of Sikorski’s plane. For the Polish people to know that one of their greatest national heroes was murdered through the complicity of Soviet and British leaders would, in a drastic sense, emphasize the continuing validity of Polish national pride against the ever-expanding realm of a European Union which criticizes such narratives of national sovereignty and the policies they engender.