The New York Times
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favorovA Cool-Headed Look at 1939
By ANATOL LIEVEN
In the Polish-Russian dispute over what happened in 1939, rival myth-making is being driven by domestic political calculations on both sides. Polish right-wing politicians including the present president have used the memory of 1939 and the alleged continuity of Soviet and Russian policy to whip up nationalist feelings and bolster their support. In Russia, the Putin-Medvedev administration also has mobilized Russian nationalism and has avoided condemnation of many Soviet crimes, since it itself is largely based on institutions inherited from the Soviet Union, including the security services.
Viewed from one angle, the Polish side is more to blame for this unnecessary dispute. Russian governments have long since apologized both for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Katyn massacre. As for the idea of moral equivalence between the history of Nazi Germany and of the Soviet Union as a whole, that should have been laid to rest by the way in which the Soviet Union withdrew peacefully from Eastern Europe after 1989, and then imploded itself — remarkably peacefully for such a huge state. This is not something that one can imagine Nazi Germany doing.
Furthermore, it does need to be acknowledged that while Soviet victory in World War II imposed a dreadful Communist system on Poland, it also saved Poland from what would have been its infinitely more ghastly fate under Nazi rule — which we know from Hitler’s plans for the systematic destruction of the Poles as a national community.
However, viewed from another angle, the Russian government is more to blame in this dispute, because of its wider failure to address adequately the history of Soviet crimes. The fact that many of the foreign governments demanding this have completely failed to address the historical crimes of their own countries is a partial excuse for this but not an adequate one.
The Russian government owes it not just to foreign countries but to the Russian people themselves to examine and discuss these crimes, since (quite unlike in the case of the Nazis) such a high proportion of Stalin’s victims were ethnic Russians or inhabitants of what is now the Russian Federation. This is the crux of what I take to be a fair judgment on the present dispute over 1939. It is that Vladimir Putin is basically correct in his judgment on the strategic calculations of that year, but badly at fault in his judgment of the political systems of the time.
The Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, apologized this month for Poland’s role in Hitler’s partition of Czechoslovakia, stating that, “Poland’s participation in the annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938 was not only an error, but above all a sin.” He should have added that this built on an earlier criminal error, that of Poland’s nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany in 1934, which effectively demolished France’s alliance system in Eastern Europe, and made it much harder to prevent Nazi Germany’s expansion in the mid-1930s.
As for Britain and France, there have been frequent public acknowledgments of the obvious fact that not merely did they not fight for Czechoslovakia in 1938, but that although they declared war on Germany when Hitler attacked Poland in September 1939, they did virtually nothing to help Poland militarily. Allied action on the Western front during Hitler’s conquest of Poland was derisory. In Britain’s case it could not have been anything else, since at that stage Britain had only three divisions fully equipped and prepared to fight on the Continent.
This leads to the question: If Stalin had declared war or risked war with Germany in 1939, and Hitler had extended his attack on Poland to an invasion of the Soviet Union, what would Britain and France have done to help? The answer is blindingly obvious: Just what they did to help Poland — nothing. As for the United States, its own absence in 1939 does not allow its representatives any right to take any position on these issues. Mr. Putin and other Russian representatives are perfectly entitled to point this out.
In the case of a Soviet-German war in 1939, an additional factor would have been at play, which was the openly expressed desire of some conservative circles in both Britain and France for a war between Nazism and Communism that would destroy both.
So from the point of view of strategic calculation, Stalin’s actions in turning the tables on Britain and France were quite understandable, and would have been followed by most countries in the same circumstances. The same goes for the moves to increase Moscow’s strategic depth by the military occupation of eastern Poland and the Baltic States.
So far, so realistic. However, What Mr. Putin and other Russian representatives have not fully acknowledged and perhaps do not even fully understand is that while many regimes would have followed Stalin’s strategic actions in 1939, very few would have committed the monstrous crimes that accompanied those actions: the mass murder of Polish prisoners of war; the murder of sections of the ruling class and intelligentsia in the territories Stalin annexed; and the deportation and in many cases death by starvation and disease of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens. If these were not crimes on the scale of the Nazi Holocaust, they were nonetheless monstrous crimes, which followed on even more monstrous crimes committed against inhabitants of the Soviet Union.
Poles and others should drop the suggestion that the Soviet Union was the moral equivalent of Nazi Germany, and that contemporary Russia should acknowledge this. It is appallingly offensive to all Russians, and especially the vast number whose own families suffered terribly under Stalin. This approach virtually ensures a continuation of hostility between the Polish and Russian peoples, which every responsible leader should seek to diminish. Equally, Russians themselves, and everyone who has Russian interests at heart, should demand from the Russian government a much more searching public examination of the crimes of the Soviet Union against its own people and others.
Anatol Lieven is a professor in the War Studies Department of King’s College London and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation. He is currently working on a book about Pakistan.
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курсив мой
Date: 2009-09-06 10:53 am (UTC)Re: курсив мой
Date: 2009-09-06 11:56 am (UTC)Re: курсив мой
Date: 2009-09-06 02:24 pm (UTC)Re: курсив мой
Date: 2009-09-06 08:30 pm (UTC)Re: курсив мой
Date: 2009-09-06 09:34 pm (UTC)Re: курсив мой
Date: 2009-09-07 08:51 am (UTC)Re: курсив мой
Date: 2009-09-08 10:40 am (UTC)по-моему, вполне четкий такой кост-каттинг
Re: курсив мой
Date: 2009-09-08 10:43 am (UTC)а через 300 лет на все это будут смотреть как на давнюю историю, и вообще уже не будут препираться, и над нами, дискутирующими, будут смеяться :(
slightly OT
Date: 2009-09-06 08:08 pm (UTC)Re: slightly OT
Date: 2009-09-06 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-07 06:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-08 10:39 am (UTC)