Smolensk

Maria Plichta

Subproject 1 addresses conspiracy-based cultural imaginations regarding the 2010 crash of the Tupolev-Tu- 154M aircraft near Smolensk (Russia) in which president Lech Kaczyński died, along with his wife and more than 90 members of the Polish political and military elite. In public imagination, the tragedy immediately acquired historical proportions, primarily because the officials were on their way to a joint Polish-Russian commemoration ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre in which Soviet NKVD officers executed more than 20,000 Polish civilians and servicemen. Over the past decade, the 2010 catastrophe has spurred an exceptionally rich, memory-infused culture of conspiracy, which pivots on supposed Russian involvement in the crash. Since the victory of the conservative Law and Justice Party in the 2015 elections, such rumors have attained a high level of institutionalization (Applebaum 2018). With around a quarter of the Poles believing that the crash was an attack on their head of state (Sieradzka 2018), the event, moreover, has deeply divided the population.

Central in the Polish Smoleńsk conspiracy culture have been dozens of recently released documentary films, which are collectively typified by some commentators as representing a new “Smoleńsk disaster” genre in Polish cinema (Przylipiak 2016: 82). Their stories offer a multiplicity of Russia-related conspiracy scenarios. Even more influential to the political and social debate about the crash has been the feature film Smoleńsk (2016) directed by Antoni Krauze. Implicating Russian agents in the disaster, the film leaves no doubt about the historical echoes (or secret links) between “Smoleńsk” and “Katyń”. The film is a reminder of the extent to which conspiratorial interpretations of the 2010 catastrophe have recently crystallized into a “Smoleńsk religion” in popular and political culture, with its own martyrs, liturgy, symbols and rituals (Mikołejko & Bakalarska 2013; Napiórkowski 2014). Official annual commemoration rallies (and unofficial counterrallies), as well as monthly masses honoring the victims, play a central role in the sacralization of “Smoleńsk,” and some of these embodied and performative practices of remembrance will be considered for inclusion in the corpus.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are cultural imaginations with a markedly blasphemous intonation, including the Polish graphic novel Liquidator: The Truth About Smolensk (Ryszard Dąbrowski, 2011). Through a dizzying proliferation of conspiratorial images and plotlines (over which the memory of “Katyń” looms large), the book pushes the imagination of deceit and manipulation to the point of absurdity, ridiculing conspiratorial meaning-making while not countering its logic with an alternative explanation. Meanwhile, Russian perspectives have entered into dialogues with Polish conspiracy culture. The documentary Catastrophe (2011) by the Polish director Artur Żmijewski shows stunned responses by ordinary Russians to Polish allegations of conspiracy. And the Russian documentary The Katyn Syndrome, broadcast in 2010 by the Russian Channel 1, develops its own alternative, and historically contextualized, imaginations of the catastrophe and its impact on the Polish political landscape. Meant to debunk conspiracy theories, the film presents yet another discourse of distrust, asking who in Poland has profited from theories of a Russian-planned attack.

Image: still from Smoleńsk (dir. Antoni Krauze, 2016), Fundacja Smolensk 2010.

Works Cited

Applebaum, Anne. “A Warning from Europe: The Worst is Yet to Come.” The Atlantic, Oct. 2018, theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/poland-polarization/568324/.

Mikołejko, Zbigniew & Justyna Bakalarska. “Prof. Zbigniew Mikołejko: ‘Religia smoleńska’ to religia kryzysu I przegranych.” Polska Times, Aug. 2013.

Napiórkowski, Marcin. “Dlaczego wierzę w mitologię smoleńską?” Znak, Mar. 2014, miesiecznik.znak.com.pl/7062014marcin-napiorkowskidlaczego-wierze-w-mitologie-smolenska/.

Przylipiak, Mirosław. “’I’m Afraid of this Land’: The Representation of Russia in Polish Documentaries about the Smolensk Plane Crash.” Contested Interpretations of the Past in Polish, Russian and Ukrainian Film: Screen as Battlefield, edited by Sander Brouwer, Brill, 2016, pp. 77-93.