The U.S. mainstream media continues to slant its coverage of Russia in the usual direction. A September 2nd New York Times article "Putin Praises Poland for Bravery During World War II" by Michael Schwirtz seemed headed into the unchartered waters of praising Russian prime minister and former president Vladimir Putin, acknowledging that he had made a conciliatory gesture toward Poland by recognizing that country's great role in resisting Nazi expansion and terrorism in World War II. However, soon everything fell into the usual line: Putin's conciliatory gesture "could have been intended to take advantage of Poland's frustration with Washington to repair the Kremlin's badly frayed relationship with Warsaw."
Schwirtz proceeds to couch Polish-Russian tensions in terms of Poles' disenchantment with Moscow's alleged failure to acknowledge the Soviets' murder of thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest in 1940. Putting aside the fact that Moscow acknowledged that crime and published relevant archival documents nearly 20 years ago during Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, the real historical contention of late has been the Poles' and the West's similar demand that Moscow acknowledge the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact's secret protocol and perfidy also acknowledged by Putin's predecessors in the Kremlin: Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
What the U.S. mainstream media and this article continue to omit from its pages is that the Katyn massacre was likely unjustified revenge for the Poles' murder of thousands of Soviet prisoners by starvation in concentration camps in 1920; something Putin brought up in his article published in the major Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza on the eve of his speech. Perhaps to avoid harming the Poles' image Schwirtz claims that "Mr. Putin seemed to step back from historical debates," thereby deleting Putin's challenge from the paper of record. He even managed to mention the Gazeta Wyborcza article without mentioning Putin's historical counterclaim.
The response of Poles and the U.S. mainstream media to the Russians' reach further back into the troubled history of Russian-Polish relations will be to mention the three partitions of Poland that the pre-Soviet Russian empire participated in during the 18th and 19th centuries. What Poles and the U.S. mainstream media would inevitably leave out in this historical outbidding is that the first offense in the Russian-Polish relationship was deep but non-governmental Polish support for the claim of an impostor, the so-called False Dmitry, to the Russian throne and the invasion and occupation of Muscovy Polish and Cossack forces he led to Moscow in 1604 in a bid by Polish gentry and Jesuits to Catholicize the Orthodox east. This brutal invasion was undertaken at a time of strife and famine in Russia helped bring hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths. This might be a minor historical point for the U.S. mainstream media but not for Russians or Russian-Polish relations.
The question after the Cold War was whether Poles, Russians, and Americans could turn to the future rather than past. NATO expansion awakened the ancient suspicions and distrust in the region and the inevitable reinterpretation of history to gain the moral high ground as justification for present policy; each party furiously churning up the past in an endless search for ways to blame potential allies for a war that ended 65 years ago.
Thus, the commemoration of World War II - when Russians, Poles, and the rest of the West could recall at least some unity in the face of a totalitarian enemy and the costs of disunity and draw lessons for the present day's totalitarian challenge of jihadism - became just another occasion to shout at each other over who cavorted with or underestimated the Nazi threat more and who was to blame for Hitler's temporary successes. In the West, the main goal for some seems to have been to blame today's Russia for Soviet war crimes in an effort to justify NATO expansion and a proposed anti-missile shield in the region. Moscow opposes both and used the commemoration to underscore this.
Meanwhile, jihadists kill and plan new terrorist attacks on
Americans, Russians and Poles.
Sound familiar? On the
anniversary of 9/11 it is pertinent to remember that one of the reasons we
failed to uncover the plot is that we ignored Russian warnings about the
Taliban regime and the presence of similar jihadists in Chechnya in the 1990s.
ARTICLE IN QUESTION:
New York Times
September 2, 2009
MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, in Poland to mark the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II, praised Polish soldiers and citizens on Tuesday for their wartime bravery, even as the Russian government unveiled what it said were previously classified documentsshowing prewar Polish cooperation with Nazi Germany. Mr. Putin’s remarks appeared aimed at dampening a row between Russia and Poland over each country’s role in the war, a dispute that grew heated in the weeks before the anniversary. “Russia has always respected the bravery and heroism of the Polish people, soldiers and officers, who stood up first against Nazism in 1939,” Mr. Putin said in a meeting with the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk, in the Baltic Sea resort town of Sopot. Mr. Tusk said Mr. Putin’s visit reflected a growing spirit of cooperation despite lingering disagreements. “Our meeting showed from the first minute that we are making another step toward strengthening confidence in the past so that we can build our future on it,” Mr. Tusk said in remarks translated into Russian on Mr. Putin’s Web site. The relative warmth stood in contrast to Polish frustrations with the United States; Mr. Tusk has taken pains to play down the fact that President Obama was represented at the memorial ceremonies by his national security adviser, which many Poles saw as a snub. Poland’s traditionally close relations with Washington are already being tested by reports that the Obama administration is reviewing the Bush administration’s plan to deploy parts of its antiballistic missile shield in Poland, as well as the Czech Republic, two Eastern European states eager for the American presence, particularly as Russia has grown more aggressive internationally. Moscow has opposed having the missile shield in Eastern Europe. Mr. Putin’s remarks on Tuesday could have been intended to exploit Poland’s frustration with Washington to repair the Kremlin’s relationship with Warsaw. Many in Poland are angered by what they see as Russia’s failure to acknowledge atrocities committed by the Soviet Union — including themassacre of Polish soldiers in the Katyn Forest and mass deportations — after its troops occupied eastern Poland weeks after the Nazis invaded the west of the country. At a service attended by Mr. Putin in Gdansk on Tuesday, Poland’s president, Lech Kaczynski, remarking on the Soviet invasion, said Moscow had “stuck a knife in the back of Poland,” according to Agence France-Presse. Such sentiments have incensed many Russians, who view World War II and the victory over the Nazis as a paramount event in their history. By some estimates, about 25 million Soviet citizens died in the war, and many here believe those sacrifices were made to liberate Eastern Europe, not occupy it. About two-thirds of Russians think the Soviet Union could have defeated Nazi Germany alone, according to a recent poll of 1,600 people by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center that had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus about three percentage points. Attempts by Poland and other former Communist bloc countries to equate Nazi crimes and Soviet actions during the war have prompted a Russian backlash. A documentary on Russian state television last week claimed that, in the 1930s, Poland conspired with Germany and Japan to invade the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, President Dmitri A. Medvedev has created a panel to fight what the government says are falsifications of history that harm Russia’s image. On Tuesday, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service unveiled archival documents said to show Polish cooperation with Nazi Germany before the war and Polish attempts to sow discord among the Soviet Union’s ethnic nationalities. “Without a doubt, a portion of the blame for unleashing the Second World War lies with Poland, which is why they are attempting to distort historical fact,” Lev F. Sotskov of the Foreign Intelligence Service told reporters in Moscow. Polish journalists challenged the documents’ authenticity, asking why the Russian government had waited decades to unveil them, only to do so during Mr. Putin’s visit. For those who questioned if the documents were genuine, Mr. Sotskov said, “It’s their problem.” In Poland, however, Mr. Putin seemed to step back from historical debates, describing a shared failure to prevent “the bloodiest, most horrible war in the history of humanity.” “All attempts between 1934 and 1939 to make peace with the Nazis, signing various agreements and pacts, were from a moral point of view unacceptable and from a practical point of view pointless, harmful and dangerous,” he said at the Gdansk memorial service. “It is necessary to admit these mistakes, and our country has done this.” The remarks followed an article by Mr. Putin published on Monday in the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, which characterized the Nazi-Soviet pact to divide Poland at the outset of World War II in 1939 as immoral. Mr. Putin’s performance in Poland drew praise from many erstwhile critics of Russia, if not completely fulfilling Polish demands for Russian accountability. “This is a very important and very symbolic visit,” said Andrzej Halicki, chairman of the Polish Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee. He said Mr. Putin’s statements left him optimistic about the future of their countries’ relations, but added, “This would have been a good occasion to say ‘sorry.’ ”
Not to be overlooked:
- are the tens of thousands of Poles who joined Napoleon in his attack on Russia in 1812
- Pilsudski's military and political maneuvers in 1919, that are discussed in a series of comments at the below hyperlink to the Eastern and Central European Forum
- the negative treatment many Orthodox Christians and other non-ethnic Poles faced under Polish rule between two world wars.
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I believe that it can be counterproductive to live too much in the past. At the same time, I loathe those who cherry pick certain historical instances, in a suggestive attempt to score propaganda points against others.
IMO, Russia at large should fully understand the mood in Poland and vice versa.
Posted by: Eastern and Central European Forum | September 15, 2009 at 11:11 PM