Poland and Russia: 70 Years After the Invasion
Monday 14 September 2009By EU Reporter Correspondents
Seventy years ago today, the Soviet Red Army invaded a beleaguered Poland from the east, just seventeen days after the German invasion. The Polish army, outmanned and outgunned was quickly overwhelmed and the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact’s envisaged partition of Poland was complete. Everybody knows this course of events as marking the opening stages of the Second World War in Europe, or so it would seem.
“Some of the guilt for the start of the [war] lies with Poland, which is why they are now trying to falsify historical facts” said a prominent Russian intelligence official quoted by The Independent.
The comments referred to allegations recently made by certain Russian historians that Poland had been unsuccessfully courting Nazi Germany for an anti-Bolshevik alliance in the run up to the war. The historical spat emerged to obscure a more important historical event currently being hotly debated between Russian and Polish historians.
In 1940 Stalin and Lavrenti Beria planned and sanctioned the NKVD to carry out a massacre of Polish POWs. The location was the Katyn Forest, close to Smolensk and where 22,000 Polish officers, intellectuals, priests and others were massacred. At Katyn the cream of an entire generation and anything resembling a possible leadership for a Polish resistance was wiped out. Katyn represents one of history’s unresolved chapters where both closure and justice, some of the perpetuators are believed to still be alive, has been denied.
Katyn remains a taboo in Russia where many historians and politicians look back at the Second World War as a high point in Soviet history. The Soviet contribution in overcoming Nazi Germany is to be glorified, not tarnished by apologising for darker chapters. Polish director Andrej Wajda’s 2007 Katyn, which details the events of the massacre, was banned by Vladimir Putin. When challenged this week by a Polish journalist as to why historians were denied full access to the Russian archives Mr Putin responded with accusations of Polish war crimes.
There have been many attempts to downplay Katyn from outright denials of it ever taking place, or it never happened like that to the numbers game; less died, more died. The facts however, don’t change, the arguments for denial do and through their inconsistency confirm by negation. Historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet observes that cases of denying massacres follow a standard pattern; “it never happened, it happened but was justified, they did it to themselves, they did it to us”
The actual site of the massacre was discovered by German officers during the invasion of the Soviet Union. Goebbels saw it as a propaganda coup and an opportunity to undermine the Allied powers, Germany even went so far as to organise an international commission to investigate the site. When the Polish Government in Exile in London demanded an enquiry to be conducted under the auspices of the Red Cross they were denounced by Stalin as ‘fascist collaborators’ who claimed the victims had disappeared somewhere in Manchuria. When Katyn was recaptured by the Red Army Stalin ordered a cover up and Goebbels’ prediction that Katyn would be blamed upon Germany came true.
“Sadly, successive British governments accepted this fiction in the belief that appeasing a lie would help promote good relations with the Kremlin” recently wrote Denis MacShane, a British MP and former Minister for Europe. At the time the British government played down Katyn less it upset their Soviet allies although an unpublished British report stated that Soviet responsibility was a ‘near certainty’ proving George Orwell’s observation that massacres being “reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection.”
MacShane, himself the son of a Polish exile, mirrors sentiments of frustration all too evident in Poland itself. An editorial in the Krakow Post remarked Putin’s hope that history can be overlooked in favour of positive bilateral relations ignored that “most people in Poland realise this will not happen until the record is set truly straight in Russia.” Most Poles just want an apology.
Maybe the time for that apology is coming, albeit slowly. Denialists have reached the final stage on Vidal-Naquet’s model and Prime Minister Tusk and Prime Minister Putin have agreed to set up a joint historical commission to investigate what happened at Katyn, whether it can be described as a crime of genocide, the surviving perpetuators be brought to justice and perhaps have a glance at those closed archives. How such a commission will fare against Russia’s newly established “Commission to Prevent the Falsification of History to the Detriment of Russian Interests” invested with the power to prosecute historians remains to be seen.