Katyn update

The Kremlin is gradually sorting out (or at least defusing) its historical rows with the ex-captive nations. First it was Putin's visit to Hungary on the anniversary of '56 (see this report). Then it was Prague for 40 years after the 1968 invasion see this one, in Russian. Now comes Katyn, with official confirmation that Putin and Donald Tusk (the Polish prime minister) will be visiting jointly on April 7th. That follows a path-breaking visit to Gdansk in September to mark the outbreak of WW2.

What to make of that? First, it is clear that Putin is trying to wrongfoot the Polish president Lech Kaczynski. He will visit Katyn later, on April 10th. So Tusk will reap the benefits of his softly-softly approach to Russia. Kaczynski, who comes from the other bit of Poland's divided conservative politics, is more abrasive.

Second, it is highly commendable that Russian television viewers will hear their prime minister publicly accepting that Katyn was an NKVD/Stalin/Soviet crime, not a Nazi one. The revival of "Katyn denial" has been one of the most atrocious features of the revisionist approach to Soviet history which has gained so much ground under the Chekist revival. Publicly accepting the truth about Katyn does not stop that process, but it certainly impedes it.

Thirdly, the Balts are next. It may be either Latvia or Lithuania which is first, but I suspect that the Kremlin will offer a deal in which it accepts that the "annexation" (not "occupation" happened against the will of the citizenry, without outright condemning it as illegal. In return, the Baltic side will have to drop claims for compensation. If that happens, it will put the remaining Baltic states (and especially Estonia) in a tricky position, with appeasement-minded western countries saying "oh please hurry up and bury your tiresome historical differences so that we can all get on with worrying about important things like gas supplies and warship sales).

My worry about this is that the regime is getting off lightly. In his speeches at these events Mr Putin accepts (in rather qualified terms) "moral responsibility". IE bad things happened and some of them were done by Russians, and although the Russian Federation now is not the same as the USSR, we are still sorry about it.

But he also relativises it. So Molotov-Ribbentrop was bad, not least because it was mistaken. But other countries (including Poland) did bad things to. In that way, the deplorable but essentially trivial Polish annexation of Teschen/Czieszyn/Těšín
somehow ranks along with the dismemberment of Poland, and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is just the eastern version of Britain's shameful Munich agreement.

That seems to me to dodge two fundamental questions. One is the evil of the Stalinist regime, which is qualitatively different to anything else (except Hitler or Mao) in modern times. I am reminded of the late Jorg Haider, who used to denounce Nazism because it had brought bad results. That was true, but not the main reason for denouncing it. Putin denounces the Soviet Union mainly because it failed, rather than because it was based on lies and mass murder.

The second question that gets dodged is the way in which modern Russia still has not really dealt with the Stalin/Soviet legacy.


In an ahistorical age, where everyone cares a lot more about live deals than dead bodies, I fear that Putin is getting away with it. Scrutinise what he says at Katyn closely.
(Update). As Paul Goble highlights on his excellent "Window on Eurasia", the Russian human-rights organisation Memorial has urged Medvedev to condemn Katyn as a crime against humanity. And here , Memorial calls on the Russian president to declassify the Katyn documents, to renew the investigation of the Katyn case, and to rehabilitate by name “in correspondence with Russian law” all those who were shot by the decision of the Soviet leadership on March 5, 1940.

Putin in Gdansk

Russia, Poland and history

Mr Putin regrets
Sep 3rd 2009
From The Economist print edition


Russia bandages a wound in Poland




IT IS hard to imagine modern Germany haggling with Poland about opening wartime archives, let alone over who started the war. With Russia, it is different. Vladimir Putin’s visit to Gdansk, where a ceremony this week marked the first shots of the second world war in September 1939, was both a step forward and a depressing sign of continuing difficulties.

Polish officials struggled to stay polite before the Russian prime minister’s arrival. In June the Russian defence ministry website argued that Poland had caused the war by provoking Hitler. Last month a Kremlin-controlled television channel claimed that Poland had been conspiring with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. Russian intelligence echoed this in a new dossier. And Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, denied that the Soviet Union bore any responsibility for the outbreak of war.



Poles find such talk outrageous. The liberation of Poland from the Nazis, in which some 600,000 Soviet soldiers died, is seen as a mixed blessing, as it led to 45 years of ruinous and sometimes murderous communist rule. The country’s president, Lech Kaczynski, spoke for many when he reminded Mr Putin that the Soviet Union had “stabbed Poland in the back” with its own invasion on September 17th 1939. He compared the wartime Katyn massacre of 20,000 captured Polish officers by Stalin’s secret police to the Holocaust. When the president’s twin brother, Jaroslaw, was prime minister, such blunt talk put relations with Russia (and with similarly detested Germany) into the deep freeze.

Since he became prime minister in 2007, the emollient Donald Tusk has made friends with Germany and is now thawing relations with Russia too. He hoped that inviting Mr Putin to Gdansk with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, would make it impossible for the Russian leader to promote a Soviet-style version of history. Poland’s own account of its history may never quite chime with its neighbours’. But disagreements with Germany—chiefly over post-war expulsions of ethnic Germans—are manageable. With Russia, history is an open wound.

Mr Putin lightly bandaged it without admitting any responsibility. He called Katyn a “crime” and said that there were “good reasons” for condemning the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (secret protocols to that deal divided up eastern Europe). But he did not use the unambiguous language that Poles had hoped for. He said the pact was one mistake among many, likening it to the Munich agreement of 1938 when Britain and France bullied Czechoslovakia into accepting dismemberment (a dismemberment, Mr Putin spikily pointed out, in which Poland participated).

Today Munich is seen as a shameful low point in British diplomacy. Few Russians see the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that way. Indeed, no sooner had Mr Putin finished speaking than Konstantin Semin, a presenter on Russia’s official television station, said “we have nothing to repent of and we should not apologise to anyone: the pact was the only possible solution, which preserved the lives of Poles, among others.” He also doubted the authenticity of the pact’s secret protocols.

Even the hoped-for declassification of Soviet archives is proving inconclusive. Mr Putin said this would go ahead, but only on a strictly mutual basis. That may be tricky: Poland’s wartime archives are already declassified—and somewhat scanty, not least thanks to Russian visitors.

leading article on Russia and history from this week's Economist

Russia's past

The unhistory man
Sep 3rd 2009
From The Economist print edition

Russia should do more to condemn Stalin’s crimes—for its own sake



EVERY country highlights the good bits in its history and ignores the bad. Russia’s keenness that none should forget the great sacrifices its people made in the second world war—it did more than any other country to defeat the Nazis—is therefore understandable. Yet its determination to whitewash the darker bits of its past goes far beyond normal image-polishing and ranks among the most sinister features of Vladimir Putin’s ten years as Russia’s dominant political force.

At this week’s commemorative ceremonies in Gdansk, Mr Putin offered his Polish hosts some comfort (see article). Unlike Russian official media in recent weeks, he did not blame Poland for starting the war, or try to claim that the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland on September 17th 1939 was justified. Unlike several Russian commentators, he did not maintain that the Nazis rather than the Soviets had perpetrated the Katyn massacre of 20,000 Polish officers and intellectuals in 1940. And unlike official Russian history books, which talk mostly of the “Great Patriotic War” that started only when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, he accepted September 1939 as the beginning of the conflict.

Yet Mr Putin’s remarks still reflect a worrying blind spot. Under his leadership, Russia has rewritten history to reinstate the Stalinist version, in which the Soviet Union bears no guilt for the war or for the enslavement of eastern Europe. Mr Putin has been evasive about the iniquity of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the secret 1939 deal that led to the carve-up of Poland and other east European countries. And he has described the Soviet Union’s collapse as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century, which jars with those who see the end of communism as a blessed liberation. No wonder some in eastern Europe detect a worrying new revanchism.



As well as rewriting the past, Mr Putin has closed Russia’s archives again and criminalised attempts to rebut his version of history. Under a new law, anyone who “falsifies” the Kremlin’s version of history, for example by equating Hitler and Stalin, two of the 20th century’s worst mass murderers, may be prosecuted. Suggesting that 1945 brought not liberation but new occupation for eastern Europe is also banned.

All this marks a big step back from the 1990s, when Boris Yeltsin bravely came to terms with the horrors of Russia’s past. In 1991 he apologised to Estonia for its forcible annexation by the Soviet Union. He also opened up previously secret Soviet wartime archives. That put Russia on the same track as post-war Germany, which has spent decades in the commendable pursuit of reconciliation with victims of Nazism.


The biggest victims at home
Just as the Russians suffered most from communism, so the worst damage from revived Soviet-style history is done to Russia itself. It has become an ingredient in the toxic mix of xenophobia and chauvinism that the official Russian media, especially television, repeatedly serve up. The Kremlin uses history as a weapon to imply that east European countries which see the past differently are closet Nazis. It also tacitly justifies the loss of freedom at home as a price worth paying to defeat imaginary external enemies.

The renovation of Kurskaya metro station in Moscow last month restored a Soviet-era plaque glorifying Stalin for inspiring “labour and heroism”. The dictator’s rehabilitation is a shameful betrayal of ordinary Russians’ suffering. The Kremlin should admit that Stalin was Hitler’s accomplice before 1941, and that this nefarious alliance made the war far more dreadful than it otherwise would have been, not least for the people of the Soviet Union.

europe view 136 on history (again)

Europe.view

Let us have no lies
Jun 11th 2009
From Economist.com


Using the law to salve a guilty national conscience
YOU automatically lose an argument if you call the other person a Nazi, states an adage coined by Mike Godwin, a writer about the internet, in 1990. With that in mind, it is wise to proceed with caution when discussing analogies between the Holocaust and anything else. Yet as Russia’s draft law on criminalising challenges to the Stalinist version of history comes closer to reality, it is worth looking at the successes and failures of other attempts to make certain views of history illegal.

Germany, Austria and more than a dozen other European countries have laws that more or less ban “denial” of the Holocaust. Sometimes these are part of general prohibitions of Nazi activity. Sometimes they are more generally framed as anti-hatred laws.

How far that is justifiable in theory is debatable. Every country curbs free speech to some extent (look at American companies’ use of corporate libel laws, for example). Whether one particular set of sensitivities deserves more protection than another is a matter for public debate: if voters mind enough one way or another, the politicians will pass or repeal the laws concerned.

From that point of view, it is hard to quibble with Russia’s desire to protect and sanctify the memory of its millions of soldiers who fell in the fight against Nazism. As the western wartime allies wallow in nostalgia, it is worth remembering that more than ten times as many “Soviet” (admittedly a loose term) soldiers died in combat than British and American troops combined.

But it is also worth noting that Holocaust-denial laws have done little to restrict the pernicious myths peddled by those who think the Jews were the victors, not the victims, in the second world war. In fact, a bit of legal persecution is just what those advocating fringe history most want. They can argue that the authorities are trying to suppress the “truth” because they have no other answer to it. What is in reality little more than a bunch of quibbles, anomalies, loose ends and historical puzzles becomes a grand scheme of events, and thus more potent in attracting the gullible or prejudiced.

The best antidote to Holocaust denial is truth, such as the excellent nizkor.org, which provides a painstaking refutation of the mythmongers’ cases, backed up with meticulous documentation. (An enterprising group of researchers ought to provide a similar dossier to rebut the equally absurd claims of the 9/11 conspiracy theorists).

Of course, questioning the Stalinist version of history is not directly comparable to Holocaust denial. If anything, the label should be on the other side. When a Russian defence-ministry website can argue straightfacedly that it was Poland that started the second world war, it is hard to accept that the authorities in Moscow are really interested in nailing falsehoods, rather than—as they seem to be—promoting them.

But Poland has not responded by banning the import of modern Russian textbooks, or passing a law making the denial of the Katyn massacre (which Stalin ordered and then blamed on the Nazis) into a criminal offence.

Banning a particular version of history is usually a sign of a guilty conscience. In the case of continental Europe, it is to make amends for collaboration and perpetration during the darkest years of the last century. In Russia’s case, what should be a source of proud sorrow—the heroism of those who fought and defeated Hitler—is being used to cover up Stalin’s behaviour: both his bungling of the Soviet defences against Hitler’s attack, and before that conspiring with the Nazis to carve up the Baltics, Balkans and central Europe.

Europe view 134, history

EUROPE

Europe.view

Magistra vitae?
May 28th 2009
From Economist.com


The fine line between disagreement and propaganda
FORGET gas, nukes or Iran. The deep divide between Russia and its western neighbours is about history. President Dmitry Medvedev has set up a commission to look at “falsifications of history that damage Russia’s interests” (he should use a comma: this phrasing implies that other falsifications promote Russia’s interests). A draft law in the Duma would criminalise equating Stalin and Hitler, or denying that the Red Army “liberated” eastern Europe from fascism. Whether out of cynicism or nostalgia, Russia’s rulers have resurrected the Soviet view of history, itself a product of the Stalin era. For the countries of central and eastern Europe, this is not just obnoxious, but threatening.

It would of course be foolish to expect complete harmony between Russian and western views of history. British and French textbooks seem to describe utterly different events when the many wars between the two countries are concerned (as a schoolboy in Britain, your columnist could never quite work out why the hardy and heroic English won victory after victory—but ended up losing to the supposedly far inferior French).

AFP

History is in the telling


Moreover, no version of history is final and nothing should be taboo. Plenty of questions about the past century remain unanswered, not least about Britain’s role. How far did Neville Chamberlain’s shameful betrayal of Czechoslovakia in the Munich agreement prompt Stalin to intensify his friendship with Hitler? And how should blame for the catastrophe of the Warsaw Uprising be shared between the Polish military leadership on the ground, the government-in-exile in London, the British and American authorities, and the Soviet Union?

Similarly, different forms of collaboration during the war deserve more study. Should, for example, the émigré Cossack leaders such as Pyotr Krasnov who fought on Hitler’s side be counted in the same category as the Russian Liberation Army of General Andrei Vlasov, formed by captured Soviet soldiers? Tens of thousands of Russians fought alongside the Nazis, with mixed motives: deluded, desperate and despicable. How might they be compared with the Estonians and Latvians who fought the Soviet advance in 1944? It is easy to paint the past in simple brushstrokes of evil black and brilliant white. But adding carefully chosen shades of grey creates a more informative picture.

Sadly, Russia is not looking for such nuances. Indeed, it is demanding that other countries abandon complexity and fit their history into the Soviet straitjacket. This may resonate inside Russia but it rings the wrong bells abroad, particularly as grim anniversaries approach: the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Soviet attack on Poland, the annexation of the Baltic states and Western Ukraine, and the massacre of captured Polish officers at Katyn.

Soviet authorities found it hard enough to explain Stalin-era crimes convincingly, even with complete control over the media and the secret documents safely locked away in a Kremlin safe. It will be still harder for Russia to try to revive the same arguments now. Indeed, the more Russian propagandists insist, the more loudly other countries will shout their version. They may sound a bit hysterical to a western audience that finds history rather boring. But Russia will sound worse: bullying and mendacious.

Vladimir Putin’s remarks in Budapest on the anniversary of the 1956 Soviet invasion were a model of how to sound tactful and contrite without exactly apologising. That could have worked elsewhere. Poland has been trying softly-softly tactics on Katyn, hoping that it would make it easier for Russia to back down on issues such as opening the files. But the response was “What do we get in return?” Such an approach might be justified in trade negotiations. Applied to an unsolved case of mass murder, it sounds wrong.

History, again

Europe.view

Mentioning the war

Jun 4th 2009
From Economist.com

Misaligned histories in Britain and eastern Europe

BRITAIN is gripped by a feeling of historical injustice. The 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings has been hijacked by the ungrateful French and self-obsessed Americans. President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to grandstand with Barack Obama. Neither country wants to admit the role of British (and Canadian) forces in the victory in Normandy. The Queen (the only living head of state actually to have worn a uniform in the war) was not even properly invited.

Yet this is how the Poles usually feel when the war is discussed. And not only them. One of the most tiresome statements in the British mythography of the war goes along the lines of “Our island fortress fought alone—all of Europe was either conquered by Hitler, or stayed neutral.”

AP

They didn't surrender either

It is hard to find even the narrowest sense in which that is true. Britain never surrendered, but neither did many other countries; their governments-in-exile shared the delights of the Blitz with us in London. Few if any countries counted as truly “conquered”. The Nazis met systematic armed resistance in France, Norway, the Netherlands, Denmark, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia and other countries as well. By contrast, the Channel Islands, which were under German occupation during the war, were not exactly a hotbed of anti-Nazi resistance.

The most fatuous expression of this fatuous Britain-centred view of the war came when the xenophobic British National Party used a picture of a Spitfire in a poster. The party’s strategists presumably thought this epitomised British national pride. Unfortunately they failed to check the markings on the plane depicted. It actually flew in the RAF as part of the Polish 303 ("Kościuszko") squadron.

In short, if the British want their wartime history to be treated fairly by other countries, they need to make sure that they themselves present a balanced perspective. Admittedly, that process is in part underway. Your columnist’s bookshelves groan with two giant tomes examining Anglo-Polish wartime cooperation. The historians were given unprecedented access to the files of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (commonly known as MI6). They didn’t find much (spies tend to regard record-keeping as a menace, not a duty).

Some of the most interesting documents turned out to have survived, neglected and untouched, in cardboard boxes in the attic of the Sikorski Museum in London. It is nearly 20 years since the British Foreign Office finally acknowledged that the Katyn massacre was the work of the NKVD, not the Gestapo (disclosure: this newspaper covered the disclosure of Katyn abominably, demanding that the Polish government-in-exile sack those responsible for slandering the Soviet Union—see article).

Against that background, how should Britain deal with another looming snub: the planned Polish commemoration of the start of the war in Gdansk on September 1st? It is entirely reasonable for the Poles to highlight the unprovoked Nazi attack. It is touching that Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, is planning to attend to highlight Polish-German reconciliation (that has two strands—the epic process launched by Willy Brandt in 1970, and the more recent rapprochement caused by the change of government in Warsaw).

It is outright remarkable that Vladimir Putin is apparently planning to attend (thus distracting attention from the equally disgusting Soviet attack on Poland on September 17th 1939). The message is “Poland was attacked, but we survived and now we are all friends”. But what about the British, who declared war on Nazi Germany September 3rd in response to the invasion? Senior British figures will not want to provide the unacknowledged backdrop for a German-Polish-Russian love-fest. Will anyone notice if they don’t show up?

Katyn

Poland, Russia and history

Dead leaves in the wind

Jun 19th 2008 | WARSAW
From The Economist print edition

Russia inches towards reconciliation with Poland over the Katyn massacre

FEW things symbolised the Soviet attitude to truth more than the Katyn massacre: having shot 20,000 Polish officers in cold blood, the Kremlin then blamed it on the Nazis. And few things symbolise better modern Russia's lingering clinch with the Soviet past than the failure by relatives of the victims to get justice from the Russian legal system.

Last month a court in Moscow rejected a request to hear a case on two issues: the declassification of documents about Katyn and the judicial rehabilitation of the victims. That was shocking (imagine a German court telling Holocaust survivors that Auschwitz files were a military secret). But the Katyn relatives want to take their case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and for that other legal avenues must be exhausted first.

Last week, however, an appeal court overturned the lower court's ruling and ordered it to hear the case. Other signals coming from the top, including an interview given to a Polish newspaper by an adviser to former President Vladimir Putin who called Katyn a “political crime”, suggest that the Russians are changing their attitude. One risk for them is a defeat at Strasbourg. Another is the effect on public opinion of a new film, “Katyn”, by Andrzej Wajda, Poland's best-known director, that is filling cinemas in the West and in Russia.

Yet the signals remain mixed. Plenty of Russians still argue that Katyn has been exaggerated by the Poles. Some mainstream media have resurrected Soviet-era falsifications. In Russia's ally, Belarus, the defence ministry's magazine says that the whole thing is a slanderous plot to defame the heroic anti-fascist struggle. Another Moscow court recently brushed aside an attempt by Memorial, a Russian human-rights group, to declassify the Katyn files.

The relatives pursuing cases over Katyn insist that they do not want financial compensation from the Russians. “It is about honour and justice,” says Ireneusz Kaminski, a Cracow law professor who has masterminded their campaign. If Russia's new leadership wants to distance itself from the revisionist Soviet nostalgia of recent times, coming clean about Katyn would be a good start.

Piece for Fakt

Publicysta „The Economist” dla "Faktu"

piątek 8 lutego 2008 03:19

Lucas: Nie dajcie się oszukać Moskwie

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Spadkobiercy tajnej stalinowskiej policji rządzą dziś Rosją. Z ich prawdziwą naturą mieliśmy do czynienia w ubiegłym miesiącu, kiedy to pracownicy British Council byli wyciągani z łóżek w związku z "przestępstwem", jakim było zatrudnienie u zagranicznego pracodawcy. Jednak jeszcze wyraźniejszym sygnałem – przynajmniej w oczach Polaków – jest powrót do fałszowania historii - pisze w "Fakcie" Edward Lucas, publicysta tygodnika "The Economist".

Zapoczątkowała to w ubiegłym roku państwowa „Rossijskaja Gazieta”, powtórzyła masowa „Komsomolskaja Prawda”, a potem telewizja Centr faktycznie kontrolowana przez burmistrza Moskwy. Teraz w weekendowym dodatku powtórzyła to „Niezawisimaja Gazieta”, niegdyś ekskluzywny dziennik wielkoformatowy. Władimir Putin tego nie firmował. Jednak posunął się już niebezpiecznie daleko w innych próbach pisania historii na nowo. Twierdził, że pakt Ribbentrop-Mołotow był legalny. Nie widzi potrzeby przeproszenia ofiar stalinizmu w krajach bałtyckich, ani gdziekolwiek indziej. Rosyjskie media idą dalej. Oczywiście rosyjska prasa - przynajmniej w teorii - może pisać to, co jej się podoba. Trudno jednak wyobrazić sobie brak reakcji ze strony rządu Niemiec, gdyby niemieckie media utrzymywały, że Holocaust wymyślili Żydzi, lub że to Polska zaatakowała Niemcy w 1939 roku. Jeszcze dziwniejsze jest to, że ten wybuch antypolskiej rewizjonistycznej historii nie jest odpowiedzią na jakąś prowokację, lecz ma miejsce w sytuacji, gdy rząd w Warszawie wychodzi z siebie, aby załagodzić stosunki z Moskwą.

Nowy minister spraw zagranicznych Radek Sikorski, zadając kłam swojej reputacji bezkompromisowego bojownika zimnej wojny, odbył przyjacielskie spotkania ze swoim rosyjskim odpowiednikiem Siergiejem Ławrowem. W perspektywie był interes: Rosja zniesie pozostałe sankcje nałożone na import z Polski, a Polska w zamian przestanie się sprzeciwiać nowemu porozumieniu pomiędzy Unią Europejską i Rosją. Polska już odstąpiła od blokowania możliwości podjęcia przez Rosję negocjacji w sprawie przystąpienia do OECD. Nie należy z tego wysnuwać prostego wniosku, że nowy polski rząd jest „miękki wobec Rosji”. To nowe stanowisko wiąże się z wyraźną, nieoficjalną zachętą zarówno ze strony Ameryki, jak i Niemiec, które były zdania, że uprawiana przez poprzedni rząd szorstka polityka wobec Rosji stworzyła mnóstwo niepotrzebnych problemów. Dzięki miłej (a przynajmniej uprzejmej) postawie Polski wobec Kremla, Niemcy na powrót zaczną ją traktować jak poważnego partnera.

Jednak zarówno pora, jak i perspektywy sukcesu stoją pod znakiem zapytania. Mimo podejmowanych co jakiś czas kosmetycznych prób wymalowania uśmiechu na kremlowskich kopułach, Rosja sunie w złym kierunku. Ksenofobia, nacjonalizm, nostalgia za ZSRR i pogarda dla europejskich swobód politycznych nie tylko sączą się tak po prostu z kontrolowanych przez państwo środków masowego przekazu; one stopniowo wsiąkają w narodową rosyjską psychikę.

Podpisanie przez Rosję i Bułgarię nowego porozumienia w sprawie budowy rurociągu naftowego jedynie uwypukla słabość i brak jedności Europy w obliczu bezwzględnego monopolu energetycznego Rosji. A ostatnie pogróżki, że Rosja użyje sił jądrowych w przypadku jakiegokolwiek ataku, podobnie jak kolosalny wzrost nakładów na obronę w rosyjskim budżecie, to kolejne echo dawnej zimnej wojny.

Wydaje się, że informacja o tym, iż Polska i Stany Zjednoczone są bliskie zawarcia porozumienia w sprawie obrony antyrakietowej wykoleiła tę ofensywę umizgów do Wschodu. Pan Sikorski może przynajmniej powiedzieć, że się starał. Sedno tkwi jednak w tym, że przyjazna postawa wobec Rosji nie przynosi korzyści, lecz stwarza ryzyko. Kreml nie lubi, kiedy jego sąsiedzi sami stanowią o swoim bezpieczeństwie. Ma to przerażające konsekwencje dla wszystkich byłych krajów podbitych - oraz zachodnich sojuszy, do których należą. Wojskowi stratedzy z NATO już opracowują scenariusze na wypadek, gdyby sojusz musiał udzielić krajom bałtyckim pomocy w przypadku jakiejś rosyjskiej blokady - współczesną wersję berlińskiego mostu powietrznego. Kiedy wreszcie my, Europejczycy, przestaniemy trzeć zaspane oczy i zauważymy to monstrualne zagrożenie, które się czai u naszych drzwi?

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Katyn

Europe.view

In denial

Feb 7th 2008
From Economist.com

Russia revives a vicious lie

Get article background

IMAGINE Nazi rule in Germany surviving for decades, with Hitler undefeated in war and succeeded on his death in the early 1950s by a series of lacklustre party hacks who more or less disowned his “excesses”. Imagine then a “reform Nazi” (call him Michael Gorbach) coming to power in the 1980s and dismantling the National Socialist system, only to fall from power as the Third Reich collapsed in political and economic chaos.

Imagine a shrunken “German Federation” suffering ten years of upheaval, before an SS officer (call him Voldemar Puschnik) came to power, first as prime minister and then as president. Under eight years of rule by Herr Puschnik, Germany regains economic stability, largely thanks to a sky-high coal price.

AP

The Soviets did it

That would be distasteful to put it mildly. But it might be tolerable. The SS, for all its faults, attracted bright, ambitious people, and Mr Puschnik’s career in its external espionage division meant that he was not directly tainted by the crimes of the past. Better a stable Germany than a chaotic one. Any big country is going to have its own security interests, and the Dutch, Czechs, Danes and Poles would safeguard their regained independence best by trying to get along with Mr Puschnik, rather than harping on about the evils of Nazism.

It’s much the same in Russia. It would be quite wrong to blame modern Russians for Stalin-era crimes. Russia is not going to go away, and Poles, Balts and others should try not to provoke the Kremlin unnecessarily. The KGB had a dreadful history, but Mr Putin’s role was seemingly anodyne.

But that calculus holds only if modern day rulers show no hint of sympathy for their predecessors’ atrocities. If Herr Puschnik, our putative leader of a post-Nazi Germany, starts flirting with Holocaust denial, every alarm should ring.

Vladimir Putin has already come dangerously close to this in Russia. He has claimed that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was legal. He sees no need to apologise to Baltic victims of Stalinism.

But the Russian media is going further. In the past six months no fewer than four different outlets have revived the outrageous falsehood that it was the Nazis, not the Soviets, who murdered 20,000 captured Polish officers at Katyn in 1940. That Stalin-era lie, enforced at gun-point in post-war Poland, viciously aggravated the original crime. It was buried in 1990, with solemn Kremlin support.

The falsehoods are not in fringe publications. It started with Rossiiskaya Gazeta, a state-owned newspaper, on September 18th last year. It was repeated by the mass-market Komsomolskaya Pravda on October 22nd and again by TV Tsentr—a station in effect run by the Moscow Mayor’s office—on November 4th. Now it has been repeated again by what used to be an upmarket broadsheet, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, in its weekend supplement on military affairs.

This comes not in response to some Polish provocation, but at a time when the government in Warsaw has been bending over backwards to soothe relations with Moscow.

The Russian media—in theory at least—can print what it likes. But it is hard not to conclude that this outbreak of revisionist history comes with at least tacit official blessing.

The best way to dispel this would be for the Kremlin and the Russian foreign ministry to come out with a clear and forceful statement saying that from the official side at least, no doubt whatsoever exists that the Soviet secret police, acting on Stalin’s orders, carried out the Katyn massacre. Failure to do that suggests at best atrocious cynicism and at worst a nauseating sympathy with the perpetrators.

More Katyn denial

Just spotted this update from Poland's Gazeta newspaper. It lists no fewer than four occasions in past months in which Russian media have tried to rewrite the history of the Katyn massacre.

The first is from Rossiiskaya gazeta on 18th September 2007 and is already posted on this site (it never appeared on the rg.ru site as far as I can see).

Then came Komsomolskaya pravda on 22nd October which claimed that the Nazis did it and forced the Russians to blame the NKVD.

Then TV Tsentr (the Luzhkov station) reported on November 4th that the Stalin-era archival documents about the massacre were not authentic.

And now Nezavisimaya gazeta has, in its weekend supplement Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye claimed that the whole thing is impossible because the officers were shot with German bullets.

Anyone who could track down the URL the broadcast would be doing the cause of truth a favour.
Many thanks to those people who posted the links to the KP and NWO articles

Katyn lies

Here is a copy of the disgraceful Rossiiskaya Gazeta commentary on Katyn

Trumping denial

New film: “Katyn”

Unburied dead

Jan 24th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Poland's historical epic in the limelight

A CRIME and a lie are the twin strands in the shameful tragedy of Katyn: the massacre of 20,000 Polish officers by the Soviet secret police, and the cover-up that followed. Now Andrzej Wajda, Poland's leading film maker, has made his last film (he is 81) about what he calls the “unhealed wound” in his country's history.

Mr Wajda's own father, Jakub, was murdered at Katyn, as were family members of many of the production team. Those killings come in a gruelling, 15-minute final sequence. First, the film shows in sombre and claustrophobic detail the Polish POWs' travels to Golgotha; the occupation authorities' vengeance on their families, and flashes forward to the attempts by the country's post-war rulers to disguise and deface the historical record.

The film has been nominated for best foreign-language film at this year's Oscars. Those watching it should not expect to come away happily humming the dramatic theme music by Krzysztof Penderecki. “Katyn” is based on the letters and diaries of real-life victims—unearthed when the Nazis first came across the mass graves in 1943. The last entry records the Polish officers' arrival at the killing fields. “A thorough search. They didn't find my wedding ring. They took my belt, my penknife and my watch. It showed 0630 Polish time. What will happen to us?”

Expert cinematography, compelling acting, and a story that leaves the viewer both sorrowful and angry, are a strong combination. But they may not be quite enough to convince the judges. “Katyn” is filmed from an uncompromisingly Polish point of view. Some outsiders may find it confusing. One of the most powerful scenes, for example, is the mass arrest of the professors of Cracow University by the Germans. Those who already know about the upheaval that followed the German invasion of 1939 will see the point: the Soviets and the Nazis were accomplices. Others may puzzle.

The moral dilemmas of post-war Polish collaborators are better portrayed than those of the wartime occupiers. If honouring the dead means doom for your family—or for you—is it better to keep silent? Poles faced that choice again and again after 1945, as their new rulers used Katyn as a litmus test of loyalty. But barring one Red Army officer, impeccably played by a Ukrainian actor, Sergei Garmash, who saves his neighbours (an officer's widow and child) from deportation, the foreigners are so villainous as to be little more than sinister mannequins.

Melodrama is perhaps one fault of the film; an oddly sanitised picture of daily life is another. Teeth, complexions and clothes all evoke the prosperous Poland of today more than the squalor and hunger of 1945. Material deprivation brings out the worst and the best in people. But it needs to be shown to make the measure convincing.

Astonishingly, some in Russia are now reviving the lie that the murderers at Katyn were not by the NKVD, but the Nazis. That was maintained during the communist era, but only by punishing savagely those who tried to tell the truth. Last year, as Mr Wajda's film opened in Poland, a commentary in a Russian government newspaper, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, dismissed the evidence of Soviet involvement in Katyn as “unreliable”. An Oscar would be a good answer to that.