Our perennial problem is a lack of information: to be precise, a lack of reliable information. In the Soviet Union, we were simply told nothing. Today, the flow of information is so large that we drown in it, without always understanding what important parts of a story we may be missing. Unfortunately, the questions of most genuine interest often go unanswered.
On April 10, 2010, Polish president Lech Kaczynski died in a plane crash near Smolensk. He was one of 96 people who died during the landing of the Polish government plane. We know that the weather was not safe for flying, that the plane was an inferior Russian-made aircraft, and that the airport was not equipped to receive planes in abnormal conditions. It hardly takes an expert to conclude that the leaders of foreign states should not fly on Russian planes and land in provincial Russian airports.
But then we are shown this video. What are we to make of it? We do not trust the Russian government, just as we did not trust the Soviet government before it. Our task is to suspect, and the duty of any government is to dispel the suspicions of its citizens. We know that in the Soviet Union, the NKVD-KGB routinely finished off the victims of catastrophes to prevent the spread of rumors about plane and train crashes. Russia's security services are used to killing people (this was always a part of their duties), and they are used to finishing off the injured (this, too, was always a part of their duties). So when, on an amateur video, we hear sounds resembling gunshots and moans resembling the cries of injured people who are being finished off, and we see people who, if we are to believe the footage, are finishing off these survivors, whom can we ask to determine whether what we hear and see is true?
In addition, we learn that the person who made this video has been killed in Ukraine: first wounded with a knife, then delivered to a hospital, and then finished off at the hospital. How are we to find out the name of this person and whether the information about his death corresponds to reality? In light of the Russian security services’ recent operation in Kiev involving the kidnapping of opposition activist Leonid Razvozzhayev (charged by the Russian authorities with organizing unrest in Moscow), can we count on assistance from the Ukrainian government in uncovering information? Indeed, it is difficult to recall the last time that Russia's security services kidnapped people abroad. Razvozzhayev, one would think, is hardly General Kutepov (a White Russian general kidnapped by the OGPU in Paris in 1930).
If the FSB can kidnap a person in Kiev just as the OGPU once did in Europe, it is not hard to believe that the surviving Poles could have been finished off by the descendants of the butchers of Katyn. If anyone has trouble countenancing such a suggestion, they can take a look at the conclusions reached by an independent examination conducted in the United States on April 26, 2012 (watch in the video), which found traces of trinitrotoluene on the airplane wreckage. This examination may not mean much, since the bodies themselves (as well as the wreckage) should have been examined for traces of TNT, but this is a document that makes one stop and think—it cannot be simply ignored.
The Russian government has lost credibility. We suspect it always, on all subjects and in all situations—and we have reason to do so. Even if we are being told the truth, we will most likely not believe it. The problem examined here now is not only ours (although we are the ones who need reliable information), but also the Russian government's. History shows that, sooner or later, the truth comes out—but sometimes it takes decades. In the age of the Internet, we must know the whole truth today.
