Last spring I co-authored a piece with “Anna Gryzmala-Busse”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~abusse/ in “The New Republic”:http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/transitions about the tragic plane crash near Smolensk of a plane carrying then Polish president Lech Kachzynski and many other high ranking Polish officials. At the end of the piece, we noted that the crash had given rise to talk of the possibility for an improvement in Polish-Russian relations because of the way both countries, but especially the Russian leadership and people, had reacted to the crash.
In a “recently published memo”:http://www.gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/assets/docs/pepm_111.pdf for the “PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo series”:http://www.gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/programs/ponars_memos.cfm, I revisited the topic from the perspective of Polish public opinion, looking to see whether attitudes towards Russia had changed in the intervening period. As it turned out, the only relevant post-Smolensk survey data I could find was from May, less than a month after the plane crash, so all conclusions must be taken as tentative. With that caveat in mind, here are the primary conclusions of my memo:
# Despite conventional wisdom, the Polish population has been amenable for at least the last decade to better relations with Russia.
# Prior to the Smolensk tragedy, most Polish citizens had been pessimistic about the state of Polish-Russian relations.
# Despite some aggressive rhetoric about conspiracy theories from the fringe of Polish politics, a large majority of Polish citizens approved of the way Russia handled the tragedy.
# In the aftermath of the tragedy, optimism about Polish-Russian relations among the Polish citizenry increased substantially.
The full memo can be “downloaded here”:http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/transitions. For those who are interested, I have reproduced the public opinion time series figures after the break.
