President Kaczynski of the Law and Justice Party, along with the plane’s 96 other passengers, died traveling to a ceremony to mark the 70th anniversary of the Soviet massacre of more than 20,000 Polish military officers at Katyn, Russia. The passengers included more than a dozen members of the Polish parliament, six of the Polish Armed Forces’ seven highest-ranking commanders, the president of the national bank and Anna Walentynowicz, a political activist who opposed Communism in the 1980s.
The plane crashed in a forest several hundred feet short of an airport runway near the city of Smolensk. A Russian military official said in an interview with The New York Times that the crash occurred in extremely foggy conditions and that the pilot attempted to land despite repeated advice to reroute to another airport.
Reacting to a tragedy
Aleksandra Wronecka ’08, who lives in Poland, said she was so shocked by the news that she first thought she was dreaming.
But for Wronecka and her compatriots, the realization that this is no dream has begun to sink in.
“There are white-and-red flags [everywhere]. People are so united in their grief — I have never experienced anything like this in Poland myself,” she said in an e-mail.
Kinga Skomra, who spent two years at the University as a member of the Class of 2009 and now attends the Warsaw School of Economics, said she doesn’t expect the country’s collective shock to wear off soon.
“People will be talking about this for months,” she said.
Skomra, who is a pilot herself, said that mourning for the president has united the Polish people. Traffic is blocked on the streets of Warsaw, with people flooding the city to pay respects to the president’s remains, she added.
“Polish society has this amazing ability of coming together during crisis,” she said. “You can see through all the wars and uprisings.”
Skomra described a shaken country where shops have closed and weddings have been postponed.
“Everything just stopped,” she explained. “People took time to think over things, come together, visit graves of relatives.” The country’s collective reaction has followed an arc similar to the period following the 2005 death of Pope John Paul II, who was of Polish origin, she added.
Though Kaczynski was not Poland’s most popular president, no one has any negative comments about him now, Sabina Hlavaty ’13 said. Hlavaty lived in Poland for three years, and her mother is Polish.
“[T]he worst part is that there were people on that plane who were related to the people who were murdered there 70 years before, and they were all going there just to remember,” she said.
“I have family friends who were planning on moving back, and now they’re questioning whether or not they should do that, because everything just seems so up in the air,” she added.
The future of Polish politics
Alexander Lanoszka GS, a Polish-Canadian studying politics and international relations, said the catastrophe will have far-reaching effects on the country’s politics. “The Law and Justice Party’s leadership was wiped out,” he said.
Lanoszka explained that Lech Kaczynski and his twin brother Jaroslaw Kaczynski, former prime minister and current chairman of the Law and Justice Party, were politically unpopular. Bronislaw Komorowski, the leader of the lower house of the Polish parliament and Poland’s acting president, has two weeks to announce new elections, which must be held within 60 days under Poland’s constitution.
Pawel Buczak ’10, who is Polish, expressed concerns that the tragedy’s political fallout might destabilize Poland.
“You don’t know where the country will go from here or whether the political system will continue to function as it should,” he said.
But some Poland-watchers were more optimistic. Peter Bogucki, the associate dean for undergraduate affairs at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, expressed faith in Polish democracy and said he believes that the country’s transition to a new president will be smooth.
“They have normal democratic institutions that have orderly plans of succession and clear ways of sorting things out,” he said, contrasting the succession process to the intrigues that marked transfers of power in the Soviet Union. “I think they’ll realize some form of national resiliency that they might not have known that they had.”
Bogucki has done archaeological research in Poland and is of Polish descent. His cousin’s father-in-law was on the plane.
Wronecka added that the Russian response to the tragedy could help to improve relations between the countries. Russia promptly investigated and returned the bodies from the wreckage.
“It seems the crash might bring the two countries closer together,” Wronecka explained.
Skomra echoed this sentiment, saying that the incident might make the relationship between the two nations “stronger and closer.”
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