Poles see Red over Russian version of Second World War

Published on Sunday 14 June 2009 21:59

IN THE old Soviet Union, the future was always certain; only the past was liable to change without notice. The signal that it had changed was often the publication of a pseudo-scholarly article that denounced the "falsifications" of the existing version of history.

Here we go again. Last week Colonel Sergei Kovalev, director of the scientific research department at the Institute of Military History, published an article on the website of the Russian defence ministry entitled Fictions and Falsifications in Evaluating the USSR's Role On the Eve of the Second World War. He says it was the Poles who started the war in 1939, not the Nazis.

The British and French were to blame too, because earlier in 1939 they guaranteed Poland's independence if it stood up to Hitler's demands. That gave the Poles "delusions of grandeur," unfortunately, and misled them into rebuffing Germany's "very modest" requests.

Germany made two demands to Warsaw in 1939. One was the return of Danzig, a German-speaking city separated from Germany by the Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War. The other was a German road and rail corridor across a strip of territory giving the Poles access to the Baltic Sea, but separating eastern Germany from the rest of the country.

Poland's military rulers rejected the whole package, trusting in the Anglo-French guarantee to protect them. From the day the guarantee was issued in March 1939, they refused even to discuss it with the Germans.

This hardly explains why Col Kovalev blames Poland for causing the war, and why the Russian MoD put his article on its website. The reason for that, most likely, lies with its need to rewrite the history of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. That was the secret agreement of August 1939 in which Germany and the Soviet Union carved up eastern Europe. The Russians got eastern Poland, all of Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and parts of Romania. The Finns fought back and managed to save most of their country, but all the rest succumbed.

This deal has always been hard for the Russians to defend. They usually say they were trying to win time, but Stalin clearly fooled himself into believing that he had a real deal with the Nazis. He was recovering almost all the lands that had won their freedom from the Russian empire after the First World War.

Soviet secret police killed or deported hundreds of thousands of "politically unreliable" people in the newly conquered territories. So it's not surprising some people in the Baltic states welcomed German troops as liberators in 1941, and very few people anywhere in Eastern Europe saw Red Army troops as liberators when they came back in 1944. This has always infuriated Russians, who see the Red Army as heroes and liberators. Col Kovalev's article blaming the Poles for the war was bound to appeal to Russian patriots as much as it would appal Poles, Estonians, and all other Eastern Europeans who had to live for decades under the Soviet yoke.

The Polish ambassador in Moscow protested and Col Kovalev's article has been removed, but the broader trend in Russia is clearly to rewrite history in ways that rehabilitate the Soviet past. Indeed, last month Russian President Dmitri Medvedev ordered the creation of the Commission to Counteract the Falsification of History to the Detriment of Russian Interests.

Russia isn't planning to invade anybody, but it is feeling spectacularly touchy and grumpy at the moment. So far Mr Medvedev and Vladimir Putin are managing to ride the tiger, but if they fall off they could be eaten up in a flash.

&#149 Gwynne Dyer is a London-based journalist whose work has been published in 45 countries.