A Polish friend mended this NYT piece by Roger Cohen reflecting on the most recent tragedy visited upon the Polish people. Cohen’s friend, Adam Michnik in Warsaw, “an intellectual imprisoned six times by the former puppet-Soviet Communist rulers,” had said to him in the past that:

…my obsession has been that we should have a revolution that does not resemble the French or Russian, but rather the American, in the sense that it be for something, not against something. A revolution for a constitution, not a paradise. An anti-utopian revolution. Because utopias lead to the guillotine and the gulag.

Cohen observes the smooth constitutional transition of power upon the death of the Polish head of state, and points hopefully toward the potential for reconciliation between Warsaw and Moscow. In Cohen’s words, the show of grief by Vladimir Putin upon the anniversary of the Katyn murders signifies “the miracle of a Europe whole and free been built. Now that Europe extends eastward toward the Urals.”