Ukraine And The Importance Of History

As readers will know, one of the sites I frequent for news on the Russia - Ukraine conflict is https://twitter.com/GeromanAT. This morning I found there this retweet, which GeromanAT characterized as “silly”:

Tony @Cyberspec1

🇵🇱🇷🇺 Monuments to fallen Soviet soldiers of WWII continue to be demolished in Poland ....can't understand the thinking behind this. Just complete lack of respect for the dead

I’ll also paste in two tweets in response to this, which reflect different degrees of understanding regarding what’s going on:

JimBim777 @KDima777

@Cyberspec1 @GeromanAT The Polish authorities decided to erase completely the memory of who liberated them from Nazi Germany and who gave millions of lives so that they could breathe freely now, as well as Poland decided to erase the memory of those who were cut out by the UPA …

Prime @A61741

@KDima777 @Cyberspec1 @GeromanAT It's important to understand that the post WW2 was not all nice and dandy in Poland. That built a lot of suppressed hate they can't get rid of their mental state (for the Germans and Russians). It's a real pity they prefer to live in the past instead of building a better future

I’ve been fairly outspoken in my criticism of what I regard as the foolish and shortsighted policies and behavior exhibited by the current Polish regime with regard to the Russia - Ukraine conflict. However, this tweet affords an opportunity to present what’s behind these Polish attitudes—there’s a history which many are unaware of, but which resists death. Poles remember, but many Russians still live in denial, preferring to regard Poles as ingrates who refuse to offer proper thanks to the sacrifices of Red Army soldiers in liberating Poland from the Nazis.

Now, there’s no question that Poles were better off as members of the Soviet Bloc and the Warsaw Pact than they were under the Government General of Warsaw or other parts of German occupied Poland. On the other hand, the narrative of the Red Army and the Soviet Union as “liberators” of Poland is unquestionably self serving—a form of historical denial. To begin with, the record of the Red Army in Poland during WW2 is far from unblemished. Considerable attention has been paid to the fate of ethnic Germans, but it’s also true that the Red Army behaved with great brutality toward ethnic Poles—who had already suffered enormously at the hands of the German authorities: Soviet war crimes.

Soviet war crimes against Poles actually fell during two periods—the first when Germany and the USSR partitioned Poland to kick off WW2, the second when the conquering Red Army rolled through Poland in 1944-45. Regarding the first period,

According to sociologist, Prof. Tadeusz Piotrowski, during the years from 1939 to 1941, nearly 1.5 million persons (including both local inhabitants and refugees from German-occupied Poland) were deported from the Soviet-controlled areas of former eastern Poland deep into the Soviet Union, of whom 58.0% were Poles, 19.4% Jews and the remainder other ethnic nationalities. Only a small number of these deportees returned to their homes after the war, when their homelands were annexed by the Soviet Union. According to American professor Carroll Quigley, at least one third of the 320,000 Polish prisoners of war captured by the Red Army in 1939 were murdered.

Regarding the second period, the short version runs like this:

In Poland, German Nazi atrocities ended by late 1944, but they were replaced by Soviet oppression with the advance of Red Army forces. Soviet soldiers often engaged in plunder, rape and other crimes against the Poles, causing the population to fear and hate the regime. …

The attitude of Soviet servicemen towards ethnic Poles was better than their attitude towards the Germans, but it was not entirely better.

To say that Poles disagree with the typical Russian narrative of the Red Army as “liberators” would be to put the matter mildly.

To make matters worse, the USSR proceeded to install a Communist government that was largely (not entirely) composed of persons who had spent the war in the USSR and who were then placed in charge of post war Poland. You can read about that process here: Establishment of communist-ruled Poland (1944–1948). Although, in a strictly comparative sense, the imposition of Communist government was not as violent as in other countries, there was no lack of violence and coercion of other sorts, in a country that was prostrate from the back and forth passage of two of the most brutal armed forces in history:

The communists consolidated power by gradually whittling away the rights of their non-communist foes, particularly by suppressing the leading opposition party – Mikołajczyk's PSL. In some widely publicized cases, the perceived enemies were sentenced to death on trumped up charges — among them Witold Pilecki, the organizer of the Auschwitz resistance. Leaders of the Home Army and of the Council of National Unity were persecuted. Many resistance [anti-Nazi] fighters were murdered extrajudicially or forced to exile.

Again, these are not memories that have led to warm feelings toward Russia.

However, the incident that encapsulates all of the ill feelings of Poles toward Russians is the Katyn massacre. This massacre of 22,000 Polish citizens was a Stalinist attempt to decapitate Polish society in preparation for the imposition of Communist rule, as described above:

The Katyn massacre[a] was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD ("People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs", the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940.

…

Since Poland's conscription system required every nonexempt university graduate to become a military reserve officer, the NKVD was able to round up a significant portion of the Polish educated class as prisoners of war.

Obviously this was a horrific and tragic event for Poles—not likely to be forgotten. What makes it much worse in terms of Polish - Russian relations is that the for decades the USSR attempted—against all evidence—to blame the massacre on the Germans and to deny responsibility. This continued up until 1989, but even after that the USSR was not very forthcoming when it came to documentation—which existed in abundance in Soviet archives. The Russian side also attempted to dredge up alleged Polish crimes from the past, so that it wasn’t until 1998 that memorials were erected. All of that means that Katyń is not ancient history—it remains a relatively current sore between the two countries:

In June 1998, Boris Yeltsin and Aleksander Kwaśniewski agreed to construct memorial complexes at Katyn and Mednoye, the two NKVD execution sites on Russian soil. In September of that year, the Russians also raised the issue of Soviet prisoner of war deaths in the camps for Russian prisoners and internees in Poland (1919–24). About 16,000 to 20,000 POWs died in those camps due to communicable diseases. Some Russian officials argued it was "a genocide comparable to Katyn". A similar claim was raised in 1994; such attempts are seen by some, particularly in Poland, as a highly provocative Russian attempt to create an "anti-Katyn" and "balance the historical equation".

It so happens that Vladimir Putin made an extraordinary attempt—in the context of usually bitter Russian - Polish relations—to reach out to Poles with regard to Katyń. That attempt turned into a tragedy that Poles regard as the worst tragedy since, well, since Katyń itself: Smolensk air disaster. To understand the following, it’s necessary to know that the two separate dates were a result of ill feeling between different factions of the Polish government, and that Lech Kaczynski was the brother of the current de facto Polish “head of state” and virulent anti-Russian, Jarosław Kaczyński.

On 4 February 2010, the Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin, invited his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk, to attend a Katyn memorial service in April. The visit took place on 7 April 2010, when Tusk and Putin together commemorated the 70th anniversary of the massacre. Before the visit, the 2007 film Katyń was shown on Russian state television for the first time. The Moscow Times commented that the film's premiere in Russia was likely a result of Putin's intervention.

On 10 April 2010, an aircraft carrying Polish President Lech Kaczyński with his wife and 87 other politicians and high-ranking army officers crashed in Smolensk, killing all 96 aboard the aircraft. The passengers were to attend a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre. The Polish nation was stunned; Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who was not on the plane, referred to the crash as "the most tragic Polish event since the war." In the aftermath, a number of conspiracy theories began to circulate.

Those conspiracy theories of a Russian assassination plot—which in my view are utterly unfounded—have been fanned by Jarosław Kaczyński and other Polish politicians. At the same time, and rubbing salt in Polish grievances, to coin a phrase, many Russian nationalists are Katyń denialists. Official Russian actions have done nothing to mollify Polish feelings:

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation and a number of other pro-Soviet Russian politicians and commentators claim that the story of Soviet guilt is a conspiracy and that the documents released in 1990 were forgeries. They insist that the original version of events, assigning guilt to the Nazis, is the correct version, and they call on the Russian government to start a new investigation that would revise the findings of 2004.

…

In 2021, however, the Russian Ministry of Culture downgraded the memorial complex at Katyn on its Register of Sites of Cultural Heritage from a place of federal to one of only regional importance. Such decisions, says the preface to the site, are made in consultation with the regional authorities, i.e. the Smolensk Region administration. More important, the Ministry altered the descriptive text to say, once more, that the "Polish officers were shot by the Hitlerites in 1941".

In assessing Putin as a person it may be helpful to review his actions in the aftermath of the Smolensk tragedy—actions and statements which were, at the time, well received in Poland:

After the aircraft crash, the state owned Russia Channel broadcast the film Katyń for the second time in Russia. The film, which was not distributed in Russia, was first shown in Russia on another state-owned channel, the less popular Kultura Channel on 2 April 2010. The first showing of Katyń was a political event, which was followed by a serious discussion of Polish-Russian relations by politicians and public figures, and drew high audience numbers for the smaller channel, with an estimated 100 million Russian viewers.

While Polish commentators saw Putin's participation in the ceremony held on 7 April as a symbolic gesture, they were touched when Putin and Tusk paid tribute and laid flowers at the site of the crash. Tusk knelt and briefly hid his face in his hands, then stood up as Putin patted him on the shoulder. The two hugged, then gave a joint press conference on the investigation into the crash. Polish commentators noted this was a human gesture, and a display of emotion that Poles had longed to see from their eastern neighbours.

On 11 April, holding a bouquet of red roses, Putin was reported to have appeared truly distressed as he escorted Kaczyński's body to a Warsaw-bound plane. Later Putin said in a Polish television interview: "This is of course first and foremost Poland's tragedy and that of the Polish people, but it is also our tragedy. We mourn with you".

The Russian response has been noted favourably by Poles, with talk of a thawing in the relationship between Russia and Poland.

One thing that ties into all this that I’ve noticed in Putin’s remarks about the West Ukrainian Nazis and the events of WW2 in Western Ukraine. In these remarks Putin naturally mentions the Ukro-Nazi participation in genocide against the Jews, but he also always includes Poles as victims of the Ukro-Nazis—and that in the face of determined and repeated provocations from the Kaczyński-led Polish government. Those references by Putin to Polish victims of the Nazis also come in the face of equally hostile anti-Polish statements from Russian nationalist politicians. I think this says something about Putin. There are depths to the man that the demonization has, intentionally, obscured. In contrast, American politicians have—in my view—cynically used historical Polish grievances for purposes that do Poland no good.