Poles shed the last of their public tears at President Lech Kaczynski’s funeral yesterday. It was a grand affair but, because of volcanic ash, not quite as grand as expected. Dozens of leaders, including Barack Obama, had planned to come and subtly transform the occasion into a kind of 19th-century Congress of Europe: an informal stock-taking, a first tentative appraisal of what is now East and what is now West.

Their instincts were right. The funeral did mark an historic moment. Not just because of the magnitude of the crash, but because in a week of mourning, something has shifted in the geopolitical landscape. Poles and Russians have become emotionally closer. This sudden Slavic bonding — above all a recognition by ordinary Russians that terrible Stalinist crimes were committed on their neighbours — might, of course, wither. But it could also change the way that Europe looks at itself, shift attention from institution-building to the pressing question of how to Europeanise Russia.

First we have to distinguish between the past, emotionally intense week, and a cautious process of reconciliation that has been under way for three years.

The President and the 95 other passengers died on their way to commemorate the thousands of Poles slaughtered by Soviet hitmen in 1940 in Katyn forest. The slaughter was denied for decades. Now the Russian Government — that is, Vladimir Putin — has declared that both Poland and Russia are the victims of Stalin, equal partners in victimhood. Mealy- mouthed, maybe, but a first step. “A big country is beginning to realise that a smaller country has its own historical point of view,” Bartek Nowak, of the Centre of International Relations in Warsaw, says. “Until now Russia hasn’t really understood why dialogue with Poland is so difficult, why the Poles keep coming back to their history.”

Now, it seems, the Russians do get it. President Medvedev was one of the heads of state who did make it to the funeral: he, too, understands that the Polish-Russian relationship is undergoing a substantial change.

But the process began earlier. Russia, its economy contracting by 10 per cent, needs freer access to the European Union. And it has trouble in the Caucasus and in its Central Asian borderlands. The last thing it wants is bickering on the western front; there is a Russia-friendly government in Ukraine, now it wants a friendly Poland. Warsaw takes over the EU presidency in July 2011: a Pole, Jerzy Buzek, is president of the increasingly influential European Parliament.

The Kremlin has also recognised that Poland has become a regional power: Mr Medvedev needed only to look around him in Wawel Cathedral. It was full of leaders from Central and Eastern Europe who had come by train, driven for hours or flown under the ash-cloud in shakey Cessnas to make the funeral.

Poland, too, sees the advantage of better relations. The West Europeans were nervous about enlargement in 2004 but it is only today that Poland has gained the confidence to become an EU heavyweight. “The promise offered up by enlargement is being fulfilled,” Mr Nowak says. “The larger Europe is addressing its largeness, there is real content.” The logical consequence is that Poland, rather than Germany, will become the champion of a more European-orientated Russia. Poland has modernised itself in an extraordinary fashion over the past few years. On friendly terms with the Kremlin and the Russian people, it could help to modernise Russia, too.

But all this has a knock-on effect throughout Europe. In Warsaw they say: Poland can do much with Germany, but nothing at all against Germany. Poles-Germans-Russians; that is the axis that will shape the next decade in Europe. The US, which under George W. Bush counted Poland as the standard-bearer for a New Atlanticist Europe, is happy with the idea of Europeanised Russia but unsure about what to make of Poland as a big EU player. France no longer seems to have a coherent policy towards Eastern Europe. And a Cameroonian Britain, judging by Conservative coalition-building in the European Parliament, seems set to miss the point. For the next few years, European policy is All About Russia, Stupid.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7101359.ece