Poland hails Russian blame for Stalin over WWII killings
Poland has hailed a Russian parliament declaration blaming Joseph Stalin for a World War II massacre of Polish troops, a week before Russia's president Dmitry Medvedev makes an official visit.
"This is a good step, and an important sign," Poland's speaker of parliament Grzegorz Schetyna told reporters, noting the timing of the acknowledgement that the Soviet dictator personally ordered the Katyn massacre of Polish officers in 1940.
"President Medvedev's visit will thus take place in a better atmosphere," said Mr Schetyna, a key ally of liberal prime minister Donald Tusk and president Bronislaw Komorowski.
Earlier, Russia's state duma lower house of parliament agreed a text that breaks several years of official reluctance to admit that Stalin and the Soviet leadership ordered the killings in 1940.
"We should welcome the fact that, little by little, these painful, difficult issues between Poland and Russia are being sorted out," Poland's communist-era opposition icon Lech Walesa was quoted as saying by the Polish news agency PAP.
"It's moving forward slowly, but it's moving forward. There are still a lot of steps ahead of us," said Mr Walesa, who was elected president after Poland's pro-Moscow communist regime crumbled in 1989.
About 22,000 Polish officers were executed in 1940 by the Soviet secret police around Katyn forest in western Russia and a number of other sites.
They had been captured after the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany sealed a pact to invade and carve up Poland in 1939.
Their mass graves were uncovered by the Nazis, who had ripped up the pact and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.
The massacre long strained Moscow's relations with Warsaw, all the more so because in post-war, communist-era Poland it could not be blamed publicly on the Soviets.
The Soviet Union pinned the murders on the Nazis and its guilt was only admitted by then-Kremlin leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, a year before the bloc collapsed.
But the crime was rarely again acknowledged in public until the April 10 air crash that killed Polish president Lech Kaczynski - as he was to attend a ceremony at Katyn - brought a new rapprochement in Warsaw-Moscow ties.
Mr Kaczynski's identical twin Jaroslaw Kaczynski, a former prime minister and leader of Poland's conservative opposition who is known for his mistrust of the Kremlin, gave the move a cautious welcome.
"It's a question of drawing the final conclusions, recognising guilt, asking for forgiveness and paying reparations," he told reporters.