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Late-breaking Russian History: Poland started Second World War

05.06.2009

Full Comment's Araminta Wordsworth brings you a regular dose of international punditry at its finest. Today: Almost 70 years after the start of the Second World War, Russia is suddenly anxious to set the record straight. In a re-evaluation that smacks of Stalinist revisionism, a military historian blames Poland for triggering the conflict by not being nice to Hitler. His view is considered valid enough to be posted on the official Web site of the Russian Defence Ministry.

Perhaps it's no accident that General Sergei Kovalev's claim comes as Poles prepare to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their freedom from Communism, and by extension Russian rule. He's part of a new campaign to ensure Russia's past is correctly interpreted -- "correct" meaning whatever suits the Kremlin best.

Last month, Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian President, set up a commission to "struggle with falsifications of history that harm the interests of Russia." Moscow is upset that former Soviet satellites are portraying their years behind the Iron Curtain as similar to life under the Nazis. Attempts are also being made to smear former premier Nikita Khrushchev, whose enduring reputation as a reformer offends the current regime, while the mayor of Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave sandwiched between Poland and Latvia, asserted recently his town has never been anything but Russian, ignoring the inconvenient fact its German origin is reflected in its pre-Soviet name, Konigsberg.

In the latest controversy, Adrian Blomfield in The Daily Telegraph reports,
"Russia has accused Poland of provoking the outbreak of the Second World War by refusing to accede to the ‘very modest' demands of Nazi Germany ... Poland resisted Germany's ultimatums in 1939 only because it ‘wanted to obtain the status of a great power' ... ‘Anyone who has been minded to study the history of the Second World War knows it started because of Poland's refusal to meet Germany's requests,' the statement written by Colonel Sergei Kovalev, a senior researcher at the ministry, read.
‘The German demands were very modest. You could hardly call them unfounded.' "
The good colonel takes Germany's demands at face value - he says the Nazis were interested only in building transport links across the Polish Corridor to East Prussia and assuming control of Gdansk (Danzig in German), which had been designated a free city. Most residents would have wanted "reunification with their historical homeland," he claims.
In doing so, he ignores the likely results: Western historians believe Poland would have lost its independence had it acceded to the demands, pointing to Hitler's policies of Lebensbraum and the creation of a "Greater Germany."

In the English-language daily, The Moscow Times, Paul Goble says Russians themselves are well aware of the dangers of such revisionism.

"One of the most thoughtful reactions ... was provided by Ivan Sukhov in Thursday's issue of the Russian daily Vremya Novostei in which he points out that Kovalyov not only misuses sources in order to distort the past but seeks to justify what Hitler did in ways that the German Administration for the Defence of the Constitution would see as a violation of the law ...
Kovalyov's argument fits into the pattern of ‘hysteria' in certain Russian quarters about the removal of the Soviet war memorial from the centre of Tallinn, even as Russian companies move similar monuments within Russia in order to make profits from the real estate beneath them.
[His] argument also fits with the notion, now enshrined in a Russian history textbook, that ‘Joseph Stalin was ‘an effective manager.' According to Sukhov, texts like Kovalev's suggest that the time may come when some in Russia will decide to describe Adolf Hitler as ‘an effective manager' too.
But even before that happens, Sukhov suggests, the countries of Eastern Europe that experienced both ‘Soviet and Nazi ‘effective management' will be declared ‘guilty' of everything that happened to them."

It's all depressingly familiar. Subscribers to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia often obtained inadvertent insider information about who was in or out when they received new pages to paste into their copies. In this way, they learned of the fall of Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's dreaded police chief, when they were sent an article on Vitus Bering, discoverer of the Bering Straits. Photographs have always been a fruitful area of manipulation. Long before PhotoShop, Soviet artists were tinkering with the official "records," replacing a discredited leader with, say, a potted palm or moving the figures at a Kremlin parade seamlessly together.

As blogger Paul Koble notes on La Russophobe
"Being creative with history is an old Russian tradition, but during the Soviet Union, rewriting history became a real way of life. Small allied intervention forces at the end of World War I were creatively rewritten into huge invasion armies deliberately pushing Russia in a civil war. Bolshevist leaders who fell out with Stalin disappeared from pictures and were written out of the official history. An attack on Finland was made into a lethal threat coming from a country with about 40 times less citizens than the Soviet Union. Well-documented atrocities like Katyn or the famine in Ukraine never happened and so on. And when Stalin died, the whole thing was reversed ...
This peculiar way of dealing with history made the Soviet Union into the one country on earth with an always bright and certain future but with a completely unpredictable history."

The tradition continues.

Compiled by Araminta Wordsworth
awordsworth@nationalpost.com

Source: National Post

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