Why the russo-polish history wars are dangerous to peace in europe  | thearticle

The abuse of the past by politicians for present purposes has a habit of perpetuating prejudice. Bad history can even rekindle the embers of old conflicts. Something of the kind is going on

in a row between Russia and Poland about the origins of the Second World War. Because the legacy of that war in eastern and central Europe remains so toxic, this very public feud now

threatens to embroil other participants, including the United States and Germany. This latest round of the Russo-Polish vendetta was, not for the first time, provoked by Vladimir Putin. In a

press conference on December 19, he defended Stalin’s deal with Hitler, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939. Western historians see the pact as the prelude to the invasion of Poland

by the two dictators, under a secret protocol which divided the region between them. In the words of a European Parliament resolution to mark its 80th anniversary last September, the Pact

“paved the way for the outbreak of World War II”. For the Russian President, however, Stalin had merely signed a “non-aggression pact” after the West had been appeasing Hitler for years.

“Stalin did not contaminate himself by direct contact with Hitler, whereas the French and British leaders met him and signed documents,” he said. Putin was referring to the Munich agreement

of 1938, when Chamberlain and Daladier handed Hitler the Czech border region of Sudetenland. He later alleged that “today’s Europe wants to know nothing about it” and the “Munich betrayal”,

which led to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, was being “hushed up while they try to shift the blame — including the blame for starting the Second World War — from the Nazis to the

Communists”. Munich was indeed a betrayal — and Winston Churchill said so at the time. Far from being “hushed up”, appeasement has been the dirtiest of words in diplomacy ever since. But the

Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact a year later was far worse. Its secret protocol enabled Stalin to occupy the eastern half of Poland after Hitler had defeated the Polish army — which had won a

remarkable victory against the Red Army at Warsaw just twenty years before. The protocol also allowed Stalin to seize the three Baltic states.  Yet Putin implies that no such secret protocol

to the Pact existed. He insists that Soviet forces entered Poland in September 1939 “only after the Polish government lost control over their armed forces”. This is a barefaced lie; not

surprisingly, it has caused outrage in Poland and last Sunday it drew an official response.  The Polish Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said that Putin “has lied about Poland on numerous

occasions, and he has always done it deliberately”. The Pact, he declared, was “the prologue to unspeakable crimes…on both sides of the line”. Masowiecki was referring to the “line” of the

Nazi-Soviet partition of Poland; by “crimes” he meant not only the Holocaust but other massacres against Poles, including the murder of 20,000 officers at Katyn, which was blamed on the

Germans but was actually carried out by Soviet forces. Now the US Ambassador in Warsaw, Georgette Mosbacher, has intervened on the side of the Poles. “Dear President Putin,” she tweeted on

Monday, “Hitler and Stalin colluded to start WWII. That is a fact. Poland was a victim of this horrible conflict.”  Ambassador Mosbacher is correct, but she also knows that the Polish record

on anti-Semitism is not unblemished. Indeed, before she was appointed to Warsaw she criticised the controversial 2018 Polish law which criminalised not only the phrase “Polish death camps”

but any suggestion that Poles were complicit in Nazi crimes against Jews or bore any responsibility for the Holocaust. That law, which aroused strong objections from Israel and from

historians, was later amended to make such statements civil rather than criminal offences. But the issue remains sensitive in Poland, Israel and the United States. This explains Putin’s

seemingly irrelevant reference to the Polish ambassador to Berlin in 1939 as “an anti-Semitic pig” whose attitude to Jews was “in complete solidarity with Hitler”. The country that has tried

to stay out of this row is of course Germany. In his counterblast aimed at Putin, however, the Polish Prime Minister also took aim at the Russo-German Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. The Trump

administration has imposed sanctions on firms that participate in the project, thereby eliciting furious protests from Berlin as well as Moscow.  The Poles, who fear any collaboration

between the Germans and Russians, favour not only these sanctions but also others applied to Russia for its annexation of Crimea, invasion of Ukraine and doping of athletes. In his critique

of Putin, Morawiecki observed that the Russian leader was eager to distract attention from his failure to persuade the West to lift sanctions. But Morawiecki has been equally critical of

Angela Merkel. Last August, he demanded that Germany pay $777 billion in reparations for the damage caused by the Nazi wartime occupation. Mrs Merkel ignored Morawiecki, but in October his

Law and Justice Party won the Polish election. How long will Berlin stay out of the row between Warsaw, Washington and Moscow? History matters in politics, especially in the bloodsoaked

regions of central and eastern Europe. Hence historical revisionism will always be popular if it chimes with national interests, even — or especially— when it provokes angry ripostes. As

Samuel Johnson noted already in 1758: “Among the first calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity

encourages.” History wars don’t destroy nations, but they undermine trust between them.