Putin condemns the Nazi-Soviet agreement that carved up Poland

Published on Monday 31 August 2009 22:02

RUSSIAN prime minister Vladimir Putin yesterday condemned Moscow's 1939 treaty with Berlin that carved up Europe as "immoral" – and attacked Britain and France for their earlier pact with Hitler.

In an unusual step, Mr Putin yesterday wrote an open letter to the leading Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza aimed at placating long-standing Polish anger over the Soviet Union's "stab in the back".

The prime minister described the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which carved Poland up between Hitler and Stalin, as immoral, and said he had a "duty to remove the burden of distrust and prejudice left from the past in Polish-Russian relations".

"Without a doubt there are full grounds to condemn the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939. But after all, a year earlier France and England signed a well-known agreement with Hitler in Munich, destroying all hope for a joint front for the fight against fascism," Mr Putin wrote.

Nazi Germany started the war by invading Poland on 1 September, 1939, a few days after its foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop signed a mutual non-aggression treaty with his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov. Soviet troops invaded Poland 16 days later.

A leading Polish historian and member of the Polish government committee overseeing anniversary events dismissed Mr Putin's letter.

Echoing widespread Polish views, Andrzej Przewoznik said that the Russian prime minister was repeating communist propaganda, especially when he compared the 1940 murder of 22,000 Polish prisoners by Stalin's secret police in Russia's Katyn forest with the deaths, most due to illness, of Red Army prisoners taken by Poland in the 1919-20 Soviet-Polish war.

The Second World War remains a raw nerve in Poland and any perceived attempt to deflect guilt for crimes inflicted on it is seen as a contemptuous insult to its wartime suffering.

Poles now hope that Mr Putin will show remorse over the role of the Soviet Union in 1939, which occupied eastern Poland and subjected the population to a campaign of mass murder, terror and ethnic cleansing, in a speech he is due to make today at official ceremonies at Westerplatte, near the Polish city of Gdansk, where the first shots of the conflict were fired.

His letter comes after recent Russian claims that the Poles planned to join forces with Germany and invade the Soviet Union, and that Jozef Beck, Poland's foreign minister in 1939, was a German agent.

Many Poles regard Russia's accusations as an attempt to claim the moral high ground and absolve Russia of any guilt ahead of today's official events.

An influential Russian historian sparked anger in Poland when she argued that there was German involvement in the Katyn massacre.

Warsaw has come under intense domestic pressure to respond to Russia, even facing calls to withdraw Mr Putin's invitation to today's ceremonies.

Warsaw has usually refused to rise to what it regards as Russia's bait. "The government shouldn't react to media debates, even one as unwise and unfair as the one on Russian TV," said Donald Tusk, Poland's prime minister.

"During the ceremonies at Westerplatte myself and President Kaczynski will present the Polish point of view, whether someone likes it or not. There will be no doubt who the victim was and who the perpetrator. This point of view doesn't have to be obligatory for everyone in the world but Poland has the right to its memory and no one will deprive us of it."

States throughout the region that were once part of the Soviet Union or in its sphere of influence frequently contradict the Russian version of history as they assert their own.

Many, especially the Baltic states, regard the Soviet Union as occupiers and equal in sin to Nazi Germany and emotions have become heated.

In a television interview on Sunday, Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, dismissed attempts to equate Stalin with Hitler as "cynical lies", before launching an attack on Russia's neighbours.

"We are seeing some astounding trends," he said. "Governments in the Baltic states and even Ukraine are now essentially pronouncing former Nazi accomplices to be their national heroes who fought for the liberation of their nations."