By Angela Stent, a nonresident senior fellow...

Will the tragic plane crash over Smolensk that killed 96 of Poland’s top political elite provide the opening for a less fraught and more productive Russian-Polish relationship? That would require both countries coming to terms with a contested history, and with policy differences over the joint EU- Russia neighborhood, pipeline politics and broader questions of Euro-Atlantic security. So far, the signs are promising, but major challenges lie ahead.

More than three centuries of ambivalent relations with often diametrically opposed historical narratives have confronted Russians and Poles in dealing with each other. One of the most sensitive of these “difficult questions” is the massacre of 22,000 of the Polish military and political elite by Soviet forces in 1940, which President Kacysnki and his colleagues were flying to commemorate when their plane went down.

In 1940, the Soviets wanted to eliminate the Polish elite that could have governed an independent

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