Review article: Polish-Russian Difficult Matters

It might have seemed that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s presence at Westerplatte on 1 September 2009 and in Katyn on 7 April 2010 (after an earlier airing of Andrzej Wajda’s film on the subject by the Russian TV channel Kultura), a presence which no doubt reflected the diplomatic efforts by the Polish-Russian Group for Difficult Matters, would have led to at least a perceptible easing (if not stopping) of the Russophobic propaganda pursued by some political forces and a large part of the media in Poland. The compassion shown by Russians after the Smolensk tragedy and a repeated screening of Wajda’s Katyn (this time on channel two of Russian state television) offered hopes for a restoration of normalcy in Polish-Russian relations, both on the political stage and in the media.