Hey Poland, We Were Only Trying to Help
Tomorrow marks the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II, when the German military launched its withering assault on Poland (the Soviets invaded from the east a few weeks later). In Moscow and Warsaw, editorial pages are percolating with defenses and condemnations of Stalin's behavior in the run up to the invasion. As the "anti-imperialist" Russophiles have surely noticed, and as The Guardian observes today, "Russia's claim of having 'privileged interests' in its post-Soviet neighbours" greatly influences its revisionist take of the Soviet Union's alliance with Nazi Germany. It is therefore important that those misunderstood, Sovietophilic, if-only-we-hadn't-allowed-previously-occupied-countries-to-join-NATO types in the Kremlin recast the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as a valient attempt to save Poland.
The Guardian has more:
Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, made his own explosive contribution to the debate, saying it was a "flat-out lie" to suggest that Stalin bore any responsibility for starting the second world war, which he described as "the 20th century's greatest catastrophe". According to Medvedev, it was Stalin who in fact "ultimately saved Europe".
And recall that Putin previously identified the collapse of the Soviet Union as the "biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." The director of Poland's Institute of National Remembrance launched a blistering attack on Russian revisionism here. And The Guardian highlights the new FBS (née KGB) commission to teach the Soviet version of Soviet history:
In May, Medvedev announced that he was setting up a new body to counter what he called the "falsification of history". The commission, dominated by members of Russia's FSB intelligence service rather than professional historians, would ensure that history teaching stressed Russia's heroic sacrifice during the war, Medvedev said, and it would combat foreign "revisionists", he said.
For the real story of Nazi-Soviet collusion in the war against Poland, check out the 2008 documentary The Soviet Story which, as The Economist explains, reveals that "Soviet radio transmitters guided German bombers in their attacks on Poland. A Soviet naval base near Murmansk helped the Nazi attack on Norway. The Soviet secret police helped train the Gestapo and discussed how to deal with the "Jewish question" in occupied Poland."
