Ruslan LYNEV
Recently RIAN, the key Russian media outlet, hosted a presentation of
several books which, based on documentary evidence, shed new light on
the past conflict between Poland and the Soviet Union. In the process,
the authors – scholars and archive researchers – seemed ready to jointly
subscribe to the view that sober assessments are at last beginning to
prevail over selfish political motivations in the debates over the
history of the Polish-Soviet relations. This, however, was not what I
gathered from The White Spots – The Black Spots, a collection
of papers by Polish and Russian authors on the same theme. A detailed
analysis of the materials can be found in Issue 6 of the Novaya Polsha
journal. The ideas expressed therein essentially combine into a fairly
unconvincing attempt to build an academic framework around the point set
forth by Z. Brzeziński years ago in The Wall Street Journal:
the Russian administration, as he believes, has no right to avoid
pronouncing a judgment on Russia's past which the rest of the world
regards as criminal. The legitimate question in the context is: was
Poland constantly an innocent victim of the Soviet Union with no crimes
against the USSR on its own record?
Poland, not Russia, unleashed the 1919 Polish-Soviet war and, moreover,
most of the fighting at the time was on the territory of Ukraine. Józef
Beck, a veteran of the 1919 war who later became Poland's foreign
minister and as such a notorious proponent of rapprochement with Hitler
recalled „killing everybody and burning down everything at the first
suspicion”.
The Red Army repelled the aggression and in 1920 launched a
counter-attack during which the initial success caused the Soviet top
commanders to completely lose touch with reality. As a result, the Red
Army suffered a crushing defeat near Warsaw and Moscow was forced to
open peace talks which produced the Treaty of Rigagiving Poland large
chunks of Belarus and West Ukraine. In part, the talks revolved around
the fate of Soviet servicemen who were executed or taken captive by
Poland and perished in numbers in Polish camps due to inhumane
conditions, starvation, epidemics, and degrading treatment.
On September 6, 1921 Soviet commissar for foreign affairs G.
Chicherin sent a note to the Polish chargé d’affaires ad interim stating
that 60,000 of 130,000 Soviet POWs had died in captivity in Poland.
Much earlier, on January 29, 1921 Col. K. Habicht of Poland's medical
service who was involved in the Riga talks as an expert submitted to the
Polish army command a memorandum of the Russian-Ukrainian Commission
for the Repatriation of POWs accompanied by his own comments. One of the
latter read: „Since it would be difficult to formulate a meaningful
response to the charges we are facing, it makes sense to altogether
brush them off with a reference to the fact that generally POWs in
Russia are treated no better than in our country”.
As a part of the response pressure strategy, Poland confronted Russia
with a 1,495,192,042 marks bill for accommodating the Soviet inmates.
The Soviets reacted by pressing a four times bigger claim based on the
calculation of the costs of the inmates' forced labor, and the material
compensations issue was promptly dropped from the agenda.
The view broadcast over the past several years by the Polish media is
that the isolated incidents of war-time abuse in Poland, albeit real,
were nothing compared to the abuse perpetrated by the Soviet Union which
for decades pursued the strategy of subduing Poland. Yet, what is being
discussed were not isolated incidents. Poland's 1919 war veteran turned
foreign minister Józef Beck wrote rather revealingly: „As for Russia, I can't find enough words to describe our hate for it”.
Józef Piłsudski's calls for leaving nothing but death or captivity to
the retreating Red Army stemmed from the same sentiment. In
fact, Piłsudski used to tell that he dreamed to seize Moscow and to
leave an inscription on the Kremlin wall saying: „Speaking Russian is
prohibited!”. Were the incidents really isolated?
In the former Soviet Union, the overarching principle of the approach
to the history of Polish-Soviet relations was to maintain complete
silence on all potentially divisive issues and to carefully avoid
reviving old grievances.
Since the late 1980ies, the Polish political elites, historians, and
commentators started pushing for such relations with Russia that would
stop short of cutting off all ties with Moscow but would, as late Polish
president L. Kaczyński suggested, enable Poland to permanently draw
benefits from Russia.The „partnership” model affords flexibility in
handling historical problems to such an extent that Novaya Polsha could
even publish Ya. Podolsky's recollections of the Polish captivity,
though the material was tailored to the point of selling the Polish
Gulag as some kind of paradise.
The death toll among the Soviet POWs in Polish captivity remains the
key contentious issue. In a clear attempt to downplay the proportions of
the tragedy, Poland asserts that as of October 18, 1920 it held 110,000
Red Army servicemen (Novaya Polsha, № 11, 2005). Some 25,000
immediately switched their loyalty to the Polish army and joined the
Cossack and other White Army formations, and 65,797 eventually returned
to the Soviet Union. According, for example, to Polish historian Z.
Korzun, the rest – some 16,000 – 18,000 people – died in Poland of
injuries and epidemics which at the time raged across Europe, or of
severe conditions which were justifiable considering Poland's own
material embarrassments.
Russian researcher T. Matveev holds based on currently available
documentary sources that the number of Red Army servicemen taken captive
by the Polish forces was 157,000 instead of 110,000. I. Pikhutina puts
the figure at 165,550 with a reference to documents found in Soviet and
Polish archives. Finally, V. Filimoshin's estimate is 296,877. The
significant dispersion is owed to two circumstances. First, the
reporting of the delivery of inmates to Polish camps and of the deaths
in them used to be extremely incomplete. Secondly, whatever figures
available do not reflect those who were left on the battle fields or
killed on the spot, which at the time happened routinely. It is an open
secret that Red Army captives who were commissars, communists, or Jews
were subject to immediate execution in Poland. The number of Red Army
servicemen who died on the way from the places of captivity to camps
also remains unknown. Overall, the statistics fails to account for what
happened to some 40,000-50,000 Red Army servicemen.
The calculations performed by military historian V. Filimoshin
show that around 82,500 Red army servicemen died in Poland. In 1998,
Russia's attorney general asked his Polish counterpart to open a probe
into the causes of the deaths but heard back that no investigation into
“the alleged extermination of the Bolsheviks taken captive during the
1919-1920 war” would be conducted. In other words, Polandwants the Katyn
massacre to be condemned as an act of genocide but the concentration
camps it ran in Tuchola, Strzałkowo, Bialystok, and Brest – to be regarded as perfectly normal institutions.
In fact, the Red Army servicemen were not the only category of people
to face inhumane conditions in Poland. White movement leader A. Denikin
recalled that the White Army forces were similarly ill-treated in Polish
camps at the time. In the 1920ies, the triumphant Poland
launched a sweeping campaign of uprooting all things Russian. When the
Russian Cathedral of Saint Alexander of Neva, a shrine with artwork of
exceptional value, was looted and destroyed in Warsaw, a Polish
newspaper wrote that by this Poland had demonstrated moral superiority
over Russia.
In contrast, even L. Trotsky, otherwise renown for his ruthless
character, wrote in July, 1920 that the Red Army should treat captive
Poles generously, the reports of Polish atrocities notwithstanding.
These days, the EU intends to observe August 23 – the date of the
signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact - as the European Day of
Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. It is clear that as a
part of the event Moscow will be taking hammering and showered with
calls for recanting Russia's past and handing out various compensations,
while others will as usual remain insulated from criticism. On our
part, it would be a huge mistake to accept the approach to history as a
norm.
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