Lech Kaczynski

Lech Kaczynski was president of Poland and died with ninety-five other people when his aircraft crashed near Smolensk on the way to a memorial for the Katyn massacre. He and his identical twin Jaroslaw were child film stars in Poland, then lawyers, then advisers to Solidarity: Lech was interned under martial law, took part in the round-table talks, and served as a security official and then as head of the supreme audit office. As mayor of Warsaw from 2002 he was known for the museum of the Warsaw Rising, which he pushed through, and for banning the city's equality parade. He won the presidency in 2005 in the same season that the party the brothers founded, Law and Justice, won the parliament, and for two years Jaroslaw was prime minister while Lech was president. Their programme was lustration, a harder line on Russia and Germany, and the argument that the 1989 transition had left communist-era networks intact. He was an ally of Georgia during the 2008 war and flew to Tbilisi with other regional leaders in the middle of it. On 10 April 2010 he flew to Smolensk with a delegation including the last president of the government-in-exile, the army chief of staff, the central bank governor and relatives of the officers murdered at Katyn in 1940. The aircraft descended below minimums in heavy fog and struck trees short of the runway. Everyone aboard was killed. Polish and Russian investigations attributed it to crew error under pressure; a later Polish commission alleged an explosion, which the physical evidence has not supported, and the dispute has been a permanent feature of Polish politics since.

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