In recent years, relations between Poland and Russia have been marked by tensions over the interpretation of the history of the 20th century. Russia does not have a clear and attractive vision of its future, so it manipulates the past more and more boldly. But the Polish government also uses radical methods to force its own vision of history. What are the gains and losses from aggressive historical politics?
„By pursuing their particular, excessive ambitions, it was the politicians in interwar Poland who submitted their nation, the Polish nation, to the German war machine and generally contributed to the outbreak of World War II”. This is what the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, said on December 19th 2019, indicating Poland as responsible for starting the war in 1939. This statement by President Putin was an all-important moment in a Russian disinformation campaign aimed at undermining interpretations accepted by European historians over the past few decades that do not put the Soviet authorities in a favorable light. Historical revisionism has been a feature of Vladimir Putin’s rule from the start. However, until Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2014 it did not take such a radical form. While a “propaganda concert” was already under way, the lead came from Kremlin-serving journalists, pundits, or political activists outside the governmental structures. Vladimir Putin, as a conductor, preferred to stay in the shadows, but even he would condemn the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact when necessary. After 2014 other professionals joined the performance, all skilled in attacking Poland, Ukraine or the Baltic States: the then Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky, also head of the Russian Military Historical Society; Speaker of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin; the Head of the Foreign Intelligence Service Sergey Naryshkin; and Russian diplomats. Finally, in December 2019 on four occasions President Vladimir Putin himself openly took the lead. He drew on documents widely known to historians to prepare an amateurish indictment that accused inter-war Poland of making an alliance with Hitler, of complicity in ruining peace in Europe, and of anti-Semitism. Putin played down to vanishing point the totalitarian character of the USSR, its tactical cooperation with the Third Reich in shattering peace in Europe, and its aggression during the first part of World War II. Each month then brought new moves with Poland in mind. First, the removal of plaques in Tver commemorating victims of the Great Terror and Polish prisoners of war murdered in the USSR’s Katyn operation (nearly 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia were executed by the Soviet secret police in April and May of 1940). Soon thereafter the State Duma appeared ready to cancel the resolution adopted by the Congress of People’s Deputies in December 1989 which condemned the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Finally, President Putin assumed the role of a historian in addressing the Western audiences through an article in The National Interest, a US international affairs magazine. It featured characteristic neo-Stalinist interpretations of the causes of World War II as promoted by Russian diplomacy, with Poland presented as one of the main guilty parties.
Numbers don't lie
The influence of Russia's new historical policy is already visible today. Last year, a report called “The image of Poland in Russia through the prism of historical disputes” based on a public opinion poll carried out by the Levada Center in Russia for the Center for Polish-Russian Dialogue and Understanding was published and it brings a lot of interesting data. One of the questions was about the countries which were responsible for starting World War II. While more than 80% of Russians mention Germany in this context, one in five Russians points to the United Kingdom, one in seven mentions the USSR and USA, and one in ten indicates Poland, the very first victim of WW II, attacked in 1939 by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. “It is very likely that specifically the last number is a direct result of the Kremlin campaign that has been running for some time now, aiming to deny any Soviet responsibility for the start of WW II while blaming other countries for it”, the authors of the report write. Yet, it is worth highlighting that 15% of Russians see the USSR as one of the driving forces in the conflict.
The report reads: “From the Polish perspective, Russian awareness of the Katyn massacre is startling: only some half of Russians (54%) have heard about it at all. Who do they think murdered the Polish POWs? 43% of those who have heard about the Katyn massacre say Germany. In a Levada Center 2010 survey only 18% of the respondents attributed the crime to Germany. Only 14% (19% in 2010) of all respondents blame the USSR’s Stalinist authorities”. It took just 10 years for the average Russian's knowledge of this massive Soviet crime to change so dramatically.
At the same time, Putin’s “monument” propaganda finds fertile soil. Nearly 90% of Russians have heard about Poland removing monuments to Red Army soldiers, but Poland can count on only some 12% of Russians understanding why this is happening. “This issue has been used efficiently by the Russian authorities to stir up negative feelings against Poland among the Russian public”, highlights the report.
Who is the real enemy?
Why does the Kremlin need a new world history? Because it is the simplest and perhaps the only thing that can be offered at a time when Putin lacks a coherent domestic policy that gives hope for the development of the country. In the absence of a vision of Russia's future that could unite the nation, Moscow chooses to create a vision of the past that most Russians will gladly sign up to: we are the power that has won the victory over Nazism. Russian national identity in Putin's era is built on traditional and proven patterns (understandable and socially viable) referring to the international identity of Russia as a superpower which is close to a superhero. As one of the leading Russian officials Vyacheslav Volodin recently said, “Europe exists because Soviet soldiers and officers made it possible to develop at the cost of their own lives." The messianic myth of saving the world from absolute evil is meant to whiten or invalidate the dark pages of the history of the Soviet Union, to legitimize the authoritarian regime and all subsequent wars, including military interventions in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, up to participation in contemporary conflicts - aggression against Ukraine, annexation of Crimea and intervention in Syria. According to the modern, neo-Soviet interpretation, they were all defensive and justified by the external context. The actual apotheosis of the Yalta order and justification of violence in international politics are to serve the implementation of Moscow's contemporary strategic interests, which include primarily hegemony in the post-Soviet area and the reconstruction of European security architecture (which means limitations of the US presence and influence in Europe; the marginalization of the role of NATO, regarded by the Kremlin as the main enemy and a threat to Russia's survival; the creation of a security buffer zone in Central Europe and ensuring Moscow has a real right of veto in decision-making processes concerning European security). In this sense, "History" is a rather eclectic set of myths, a material from which any story can be formed, and new historical politics is part of state propaganda. Historical facts and their interpretations play a supporting role in relation to the political interests of decision-makers.
The defamation of Poland, suggesting that it was the party that provoked the outbreak of WWII and is responsible for the annihilation of Jews during the war, was probably meant to have a negative impact on Poland's already severely damaged relations with the European community. However, the European Union, despite the tensions between Brussels and Warsaw, expressed its full support for its Member. “The European Commission will not tolerate attacks on Poland and stands in solidarity with Poland and Polish citizens”, said Vera Jourova, vice-chairman of the European Commission. It is hard to expect that the Kremlin propaganda will somehow radically influence European public opinion, which is aware of Russia's ambiguous role in World War II, as well as of what Putin is up to in his disinformation warfare. As it turned out, the image of Poland in the world can be the most damaged by... the Polish government itself.
New Memory Law
We will only deal with foreign policy here, because a separate article should be written about how the new Polish approach to the history divided Poles. One thing seems certain: if Poland had not practiced historical revisionism itself, it would have been a much more difficult target for Putin. Law and Justice politicians began their rule with comments about Germany, such as those of the then Deputy Defense Minister Bartosz Kownacki who said that "the children and grandchildren of degenerates will not teach us" what a democratic country should look like. The head of the Ministry of the Interior, Mariusz Blaszczak, suggested that the Gate of Dawn in Vilnius (now located in Lithuania) and the cemetery of the Defenders of Lviv (today: Ukraine) should be placed on the cards of new Polish passports. Then came the idea of demanding compensation from Germany for losses suffered in World War II. The next step was to replace the director of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk and redesign the core exhibition under political dictation, so that it would show the "Polish" perspective of the war. It is primarily about minimizing or even neutralizing the problem of anti-Jewish pogroms perpetrated by Poles. At stake is not only preserving the status of a nation of victims, not perpetrators, and the resulting variant of collective identity, but also maintaining the narrative about a Jewish-friendly Poland. A country where Poles themselves did not commit pogroms, did not take part in the Holocaust, were hospitable to Jews and - looking at the number of trees in Yad Vashem (Poles make up the largest contingent of the “Righteous among the Nations”: non-Jews recognised by Yad Vashem for risking their lives for Jews during the Holocaust) - definitely helpful at the time of the trial.
The desire to whiten Polish pages of history led the far-right government to create Poland's new memory law in 2018. A bill introduces a penalty of up to three years imprisonment for "anyone who publicly and contrary to the facts accuses the Polish nation or the Polish state of responsibility or complicity in Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich (...) or any other war crimes, crimes against humanity or crimes against peace.” The proposed law was similar to one in Russia that makes it a crime to say that the Soviet Union was an aggressor during World War II, or to describe Soviet actions as war crimes. Polish authorities explained their move by the fact that concentration camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau run by the Nazis on Polish territory are often referred to as “Polish death camps” (such a term was used by Barack Obama during his speech in 2012). Opponents have predicted that the law would stifle free speech and put questions of historical accuracy into the hands of judges and prosecutors who may be more motivated by politics than scholarship. The new law provoked strong criticism in Poland and international repercussions. “We will accept no limitation on truthful historical research,” Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. The authorities of the USA, Israel and Ukraine protested the law. The procedure of forcing the act itself, with the omission of the legislative procedures provided for by the law, also provoked widespread criticism. Due to its crude historical policy, foreign newspapers wrote about Poland only in a negative context for six months. Finally, the Polish government withdrew the amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance.
A cunning plan?
This year, there was a lot of noise about a scientific work published in 2018. This was due to the trial brought against the authors of the 1700-page book “Night Without End”, in which historians from the Center for Holocaust Research analyzed the activities of the occupant: anti-Jewish persecution, the creation of ghettos, liquidation actions and hunting for survivors. The authors' priority was not to establish how many Poles had lent their hands to the operation of “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question" invented and initiated by Nazi Germany. And yet Barbara Engelking and Jan Grabowski were brought to trial by a niece of a wartime village mayor who, according to a Jewish survivor cited in a study coedited by the scholars, was complicit in the murder of 18 Jews who took shelter from the Nazis in a forest in eastern Poland. But the judge rejected a demand for damages of €21,500 by Filomena Leszczynska, who was supported in her legal action by a partly state-funded organization dedicated to protecting the “good name of Poland and that of the Polish nation.” The judge said she had ruled against awarding damages because court decisions “should not have a cooling effect on scientific research.” The judge ordered that the scholars send a written apology to Leszczynska.
Considering that all the leading newspapers in the West wrote about the case that concerned one small paragraph of an academic and niche publication, thus recalling the complicated Polish-Jewish relations, it is worth asking whether all this turmoil did Poland any good? There is only one answer: No.
In the case of Russia, which is guided by extreme isolationism in its relations with the West, lies and manipulations are arguably the best strategy, especially from the perspective of Russian domestic politics. They help to maintain the image of a strong, determined, proud and ready to defend its values nation. But in the case of a country belonging to the European Union and being its eastern border, waging a war for collective memory that excludes from the community seems to make no sense. For “home affairs”, it offers some short-term benefits: it strengthens polarization, cements the core electorate around symbols, and spreads a smokescreen over current problems. But in foreign policy, Poland, when playing solo (or with Viktor Orban, who closely cooperates with the Kremlin), makes you think that the Polish government is on the course straight to Polexit. Then what? Many commentators point out that, contrary to the anti-Russian narrative, the ruling Law and Justice party, by excluding Poland from the EU, would have only one solution - to fall into the arms of Vladimir Putin. It sounds perverse and scary but it's not impossible.
