“For decades, the massacres at Kalinin, Starobelsk, and Katyn had been a symbol for the Poles of Moscow’s cruelty and imperial grip. For a Pole merely to hint that the Soviet Union was responsible for the massacres was a radical, even suicidal act, for it made clear the speaker’s point of view: the “friendship of peoples,” the relationship between Moscow and Warsaw, was one based on violence, an occupier’s reign over its satellite.”
