After 70 years of denial, Russia’s leadership (if not yet ordinary Russians) were ready to admit that Joseph Stalin’s NKVD (precursor to the KGB) slaughtered more than 20,000 Polish officers, intellectuals, and clergy in the nearby Katyn forest in 1940. Indeed, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer himself, invited his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, to commemorate that tragedy together.