A Reset with Russia Looms if We Fail to Learn
Prof. Andrzej NOWAK
At this crucial moment, people from my part of Europe – sandwiched between Russia and Germany – have good reason to remind others of the inconvenient truths that argue against any temptation to reconcile with Russia.
.Are we on the brink of a new reset with Putin’s Russia? Is the American president headed in this direction, given that we’ve seen him talking to Moscow about the terms of peace with Ukraine? And once that peace comes, will Germany be lured by the prospect of a return of the ‘golden days’ when cheap Russian gas fuelled its economy and German industrial exports flowed through Russia to China? Will France revert to its rhetoric about ‘NATO’s brain death’ and its timeless love for the ‘eternal Russia’? And will the two strongest countries of the European Union finally accept the Kremlin’s invitation to a geopolitical reckoning with the ‘cursed Yanks’, who have twice humiliated the ‘old Europe’ by saving it from itself in the First and Second World Wars?
At this crucial moment, people from my part of Europe – sandwiched between Russia and Germany – have good reason to remind others of the inconvenient truths that argue against any such temptations. Ukrainians now need to remind the world of what happened so recently in Bucha – war crimes committed on a massive scale by Putin’s soldiers as they ‘liberated’ the areas around Kyiv and the fate of thousands of children from eastern Ukraine, abducted and deported deep into Russia during that process. Several Eastern European countries – Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland and Romania – have a duty to constantly remind the world of the political act that paved Hitler’s way to the Second World War and allowed Stalin to seize the lands and peoples of these very nations in tandem with Germany. The act in question was the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 23 August 1939, whose secret protocol stipulated the division of Eastern Europe between the two criminal signatory states.
Stalin’s territorial gains from the pact were later recognised by his new Western allies, Churchill and Roosevelt. The leaders of the free world thus trampled on the principles they themselves had proclaimed just four years earlier in the Atlantic Charter. Its second point explicitly forbade any territorial changes without the consent of the nations concerned. The third ensured all nations’ right to self-determination and the return of independence to the states that had lost it during the war. That principle was buried at the Yalta Conference of the Big Three in February 1945. President Roosevelt did nothing to curb Stalin’s efforts to sovietise Poland and other countries – from Estonia to Bulgaria – which were then occupied by the Red Army.
What does it mean when an army invades a country to extend Moscow’s geopolitical dominance based on agreements with partners who divide Eastern Europe into spheres of influence? The experience of eastern Poland, ‘liberated’ in this manner by the Red Army in September 1939, provides the most brutal answer. And it is Poland’s duty to keep reminding the world of that experience. It is summed up – though by no means exhausted – by a single word: Katyn.
Katyn is a point on the map near Smolensk, halfway between Moscow and Minsk. It is one of the sites where, under orders from Soviet authorities, an act of genocide against the Polish elite was perpetrated in April 1940. Following the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939, several thousand Polish officers were taken prisoner. Most were reservists – teachers, doctors, lawyers, artists and officials – mobilised at the eleventh hour. Stalin’s plan was to decapitate Poland and replace its government with his own handpicked agents and loyalists. On 5 March 1940, the Politburo of the Communist Party led by Stalin decided to ‘execute them all’. That decision sealed the fate of 14,736 ‘former officers’ held in POW camps. The Politburo also ordered the execution of the majority of the over 11,000 ‘counter-revolutionaries’ arrested in occupied eastern Poland. This order was carried out in what became known as the Katyn Operation, named after the site where the graves of the murdered officers were discovered in 1943. Katyn, along with Kharkiv and Tver – revealed as execution sites only after 1989 – were the three primary locations of this crime, where a total of 22,000 people were murdered. Let’s not forget that the Germans were doing the same thing at the same time in the Polish territories under their control. From 1939 they carried out mass executions of tens of thousands of members of the Polish elite in the Intelligenzaktion. When in 1943 the Germans discovered the mass graves of the executed Polish officers near Smolensk, and a special Red Cross commission determined that the crime had been committed by the Soviets in 1940, Stalin not only denied it but accused the Poles and their legitimate government-in-exile in London of collaborating with the fascists.
Were the Allies unaware of this crime and its perpetrator? No, they were fully aware. President Roosevelt was informed about it in detail by his special envoy to the Balkans, George H. Earle. But, like Churchill, he refused to acknowledge it. Stalin himself reminded him of that. At the Tehran Conference in November 1943, he made a telling suggestion to his Anglo-Saxon colleagues: Why not execute 50,000 to 100,000 German officers? That would settle things with Germany… Roosevelt and Churchill did not respond.
Why should we recall all this today, 80 years later? Not to deny the brutal laws of the so-called political realism. If we truly want to stop the bloodshed – not ours, but that of the attacked Ukrainians – then either they must be ensured a swift and unequivocal victory or an agreement must be reached with the aggressor to jointly negotiate the terms of a truce – with Ukraine at the table, not on it. We must not, however, mistake the aggressor for a partner, nor accept a great lie as a condition for settlement. The lie involves obscuring criminal accountability and erasing the memory of both victims and perpetrators. Why does it matter? Because this memory tells the truth about the nature of a regime that has corrupted successive generations in Russia: a regime based on aggression against its neighbours, on covert or (more often) overt hatred of the West and on a constant drive to dismantle it, piece by piece. ‘Give us a slice of truth, a slice of memory, a slice of Eastern Europe, then Central Europe, and finally give yourselves to us completely – and we will help you defend yourselves against the terrible America…’ This is what the ‘salami tactics’ look like.
When Putin announced a new Cold War against the West at the Munich Conference in February 2007 and then militarily invaded Georgia in August of the following year, Polish President Lech Kaczyński tried to shake up Europe that had sunk into slumber. On the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, he wanted to remind the world not only of the crime itself but also of the disastrous consequences of a lie designed to obscure crimes and even shift responsibility onto the victims. However, neither he nor the other 96 members of the state delegation ever made it to the Katyn ceremony. His plane crashed near Smolensk on 10 April 2010, under circumstances that remain unexplained to this day. The Polish government at the time, led by Donald Tusk and entirely engaged (alongside Chancellor Merkel) in a reset with Putin, accepted the version of events established by the commission appointed by the Russian dictator – a commission of the finest specialists in deceit.
.Far from yielding positive results, it paved the way for Putin’s aggression. Political negotiations cannot mean a reset of memory, a compromise between truth and lies, because such a compromise invariably empowers the lie and emboldens the aggressor. The graves of Katyn are forever a cry of this truth.
This text is published as part of the global press project ‘Telling Poland to the World’, carried out by the Institute of New Media – publisher of ‘Wszystko co Najważniejsze’.
