It’s inhumane of Poland to obscure the memory of the ocean of blood the Soviet Army shed to defeat Hitler

Commemorations of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Warsaw by the Soviet army from Nazi occupation in WWII were supposed to bring people together. Instead, they are driving Poland and Russia apart in a new war of words.
On 29 December, the Polish Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, issued a blistering attack on President Putin, accusing him of “lying” about the history of the Second World War and about Poland’s role in it. Morawiecki claimed that the USSR “started” the Second World War by signing the non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany on 23 August 1939, and that Putin, by defending the Pact, was trying to rehabilitate Stalinism.

This spat originated in a resolution approved, on a Polish initiative, in the European Parliament in September. It alleged that the Second World War started “as an immediate result of the notorious Nazi-Soviet Treaty on Non-Aggression signed on 23 August 1939 … whereby two totalitarian regimes that shared the goal of world conquest divided Europe into two zones of influence.”

Putin had replied to this allegation, saying that Poland shared some of the responsibility for the outbreak of the war because its government had firmly rejected all attempts by Britain, France and the Soviet Union to agree on a collective security pact to stop Hitler. The Soviets had demanded that their troops be allowed to pass into Polish territory to meet any German advance and the Poles refused. It was to this claim by Putin that Morawiecki was reacting so fiercely.

Unfortunately, it is Putin who is right and Morawiecki and the Poles who are wrong. The events leading up to the outbreak of the war in Europe cannot be reduced to the signature of the Nazi-Soviet Pact alone. To argue, as the Poles do, that the war would not have broken out without it (that the Pact “started” the war or that it was “the immediate result” of it) is an absurd distortion of the truth which none of the actors of the time would have recognized.

The truth is that Hitler was bent on his goal of dominating Europe, a goal Joseph Stalin (unlike Lenin) did not share. Ever since he published Mein Kampf in 1925, Hitler never made any secret of his desire to overturn the Versailles treaty, to subjugate Eastern Europe to create Lebensraum ('living space') for Germans, to destroy Soviet Bolshevism and to make Germany into a world power. On 11 August 1939, Hitler told Carl Jacob Burckhardt, “Everything I undertake is directed against Russia. If the West is too stupid and too blind to comprehend that, I will be forced to come to an understanding with the Russians, to smash the West and then after its defeat, to turn against the Soviet Union.”