German-Polish Reconciliation

Władysław Bartoszewski has just published his new book O Niemcach i Polakach. Wspomnienia. Nadzieje. Prognozy (with the help of Rafał Rogulski and Jan Rydel, Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2010) potentially roughly translated into About Germans and Poles. Memories. Hopes. Prospects. Few people have such credentials to write about Polish-German contacts as this survivor of Auschwitz, veteran of the Warsaw Uprising and activist in the underground Council to Aid Jews during the Second World War and later professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in the 1980s, Poland’s foreign minister in 1995 and currently the Polish government’s representative for Polish-German relations. His book traces the evolution of the interactions between the two nations from the war, through the visits to Poland of East German activists of Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste (an organisation confronting the legacy of Nazism) and the West German aid to the Polish Solidarity movement, to the Polish-German cooperation after 1989. As reviews of the book suggest, Bartoszewski confirms in it his reputation as a perceptive observer and great story-teller. One can find few more insightful pictures of how much changed between Poland and Germany in the last seventy years. A review of the book can be found here.

Poles and Jews during the Second World War

The passing year brought further contributions to the discussions about the attitudes of Catholic Poles towards the Jews during the Second World War, perhaps the most complex and controversial topic in modern Polish history and one of the most painful and politically charged aspects of collective memory in the country. After the most thoroughly researched Polish study of the Warsaw Ghetto (Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, Getto warszawskie: przewodnik po nieistniejącym mieście, 1st edn. Warsaw, 2001) became available in English owing to the translation by Emma Harris for Yale University Press (The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, New Haven, 2009), its co-author, Barbara Engelking, the director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, together with Dariusz Libionka, the director of the Research Department of the Majdanek State Museum, turned her attention to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Their book Żydzi w powstańczej Warszawie (Warsaw, 2009) explores the place of Jews and Polish freedom fighters’ attitudes towards them during the doomed attempt of the Polish Home Army to liberate Warsaw from the Nazis before its capture by the Red Army. As the authors explain in an interview with the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, their aim was to show “the entire spectrum of [Polish] responses” to the Jews (“My staramy się pokazać całe spektrum postaw”). They conclude that during “the last battle for free Poland, nobody had time for the Jews” (“Rozgrywała się ostatnia bitwa o wolną Polskę, nikt nie miał głowy do Żydów”). The interview can be found here on the website of Gazeta Wyborcza.

'Stalin's Back'

BBC's John Sweeney explores the contemporary rehabilitation of Stalin here. An interview with Aleksandr Filippov, author of the now-infamous textbook Istoriia Rossii 1945-2007, occurs at the 24-, 28-, 33-, and 38- minute marks.

The programme will be available until 9 December 09.

'A History of Twentieth-Century Russia, Warts and All'

Yesterday the New York Times covered the publication of a landmark two-volume history of twentieth-century Russia edited by Andrei Zubov. An excerpt from the article:

“This is one of the most important books [...] from Russia in the past 20 years,” said Andrzej Nowak, a historian from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. In an e-mail message, he praised “the exemplary way” it treated sensitive topics like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; the wartime agreement between Hitler and Stalin; the Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939; and the mass murder of Polish officers at Katyn. [...]

“Society is not satisfied,” [RIA Novosti columnist Aleksandr] Arkhangelsky said at the [book] presentation. “It is looking for an answer to the question: Who were we? [...] This means that very serious times await us, because in Russia historical mass consciousness becomes acute on the eve of major changes.”

President Medvedev on the Issue of Historical Memory

by Josephine von Zitzewitz

On 30 October, Russia commemorated the victims of political repression. The “Day of the Political Prisoner” was instituted by dissidents in 1974 and became an official “feast” day in 1991. This year, President Dmitrii Medvedev delivered a speech on his video blog, in which he expressed concern about the state of historical memory in contemporary Russia:

“Два года назад социологи провели опрос. Почти девяносто процентов наших граждан, молодых граждан в возрасте от 18 до 24 лет не смогли даже назвать фамилии известных людей, которые пострадали или погибли в те годы от репрессий. И это, конечно, не может не тревожить. <…> важно не допустить под видом восстановления исторической справедливости оправдания тех, кто уничтожал свой народ <…> Никто, кроме нас самих, не сохранит историческую память и не передаст ее новым поколениям.” (The full text can be found here.)

This emphasis on the personal responsibility of the Russian people in coming to terms with the negative aspects of the country’s past and present is in tune with another recent statement about shortcomings in the areas of economics and civil society, among other things. Medvedev’s appeal provides a refreshing contrast to government rhetoric presenting Stalin’s victims as the “collateral damage” of the creation of a mighty empire. Yet the speech has attracted little attention, both in Russia and in the West.

It is of course impossible to predict whether deeds will follow these words, such as the establishment of a museum of political repression, as demanded by the “Memorial” society – apparently a lively and positive correspondence with various government agencies is now under way – or a more liberal climate for historical research. But perhaps the President is testing the waters, and surely in this case the community of commentators and scholars out to encourage the tentative new course?

CRASSH Launches East European Memory Studies Research Group

Two exciting presentations recently launched the new research seminar series in East European Memory Studies at the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). Andrzej Nowak (Jagiellonian University, Krakow) surveyed two central trends of Polish memory connected to empire. The first trend involved the memory of ‘Polish empire' -- the Jagiellonian dynasty of late Middle Ages, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Second Polish Republic of Joseph Pilsudski, the 2003 Polish occupational zone in Iraq (with its capital in... Babylon) -- while the second involved the memory of 'Poland under empire.' Mark Bassin (University of Birmingham) explored the significance of the Battle of Kulikovo for Russian nationalism in the early 1980s, offering fresh insights into the work of Lev Gumilev and Olzhas Suleimenov.

Nearly a Century in the Making

Turkey and Armenia signed a historic reconciliation accord earlier today, not without some last-minute drama. Headlines in Turkish media are currently focusing on, among other things, the fact that no spoken comments were made on either side at the time of the signing, but the moment was nonetheless a remarkable achievement that bodes well for the future. The accord counts among its directives the creation of a historical commission to study the events of the World War I era slaughter of over one million Armenians, which the Turkish state still does not recognize as genocide.

History Lessons from Putin

by Alexander Etkind
Originally published in the 17 September 2009 edition of The Moscow Times

Soviet ideology was always about the future. By contrast, today’s official Russian ideology seems to be focused squarely on the past.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s recent article for the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza — written to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland — expresses his determination to make 20th-century European history a major part of the Russian government’s business. That article reflects the deep, unresolved problems of Putin’s era: the inability to distinguish between the Soviet past and the Russian present; an unscrupulous mix of political conservatism and historical revisionism; and indifference, bordering on incomprehension, with regard to the key values of democracy.

In his article, Putin did not mourn the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed, he even praised the democratic movements that buried the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence, and he expressed no sympathy for the 20th century’s revolutions, which he called “deep wounds” that humanity inflicted on itself.

What really worries Putin is the balancing of World War II and Stalinism in Soviet history. Calling for a “contextual” and “causal” view of history, he acknowledges the Stalinist terror but interprets it as a response to the extraordinary need to defeat Nazism.

Putin summarizes his understanding of the scale of the war by recalling the loss of “27 million lives of my compatriots.” That number has grown over the years, as Soviet officials broadened the definition of wartime deaths to mean total “population loss,” rather than direct military casualties. Official estimates of Soviet deaths in World War II thus rose from 7 million (the figure put forth under Stalin) to 20 million (Khrushchev) to 26.6 million (Gorbachev), with civilian deaths accounting for at least two-thirds of Putin’s estimate.

Unfortunately, Putin does not explain whom he counts as his compatriots. If he meant those who lived within Russia’s contemporary borders, the number would have been much lower. Instead, he includes all citizens of the Soviet Union who died during the war, including millions of Ukrainians, Belarussians, and others. And, when the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic countries, Königsberg, parts of Poland, Finland, Moldova, and Japan, their citizens, too, became Soviet compatriots.

Moreover, because Putin’s “contextual” history subordinates Soviet-era suffering to the purpose of fighting the Great Patriotic War, his number mixes those who died in battle fighting for the Soviet Union with those whom the Soviets killed through mass murder, deportation, and forced labor. By this logic, one could also reclassify the victims of the terror, collectivization, and famine of the 1930s in order to boost the number of Hitler’s casualties in the Soviet Union.

Putin connects two events that triggered World War II, the Munich Agreement of 1938 and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, in one causal construction. Both acts of collusion with Nazi Germany were immoral mistakes, writes Putin, but the latter was merely a response to the former. To be sure, Britain’s Neville Chamberlain and France’s Edouard Daladier signed a shameful treaty with Hitler and Mussolini in Munich. But when Hitler breached the treaty, both Chamberlain and Daladier lost popular support, and, by the start of World War II, neither was still in office. The dictators remained, however, Molotov and Stalin among them.

Moreover, while the Munich Agreement cynically blessed Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, it was a public document that meant what it said. But the truly important part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was its Secret Protocols, which divided Europe into two imperial domains, Stalin’s and Hitler’s, without the consent — or even the knowledge — of the nations consigned to them. Molotov, who remained in power throughout the war and until 1956, denied the existence of the Secret Protocols until his death 30 years later. Democracies make shameful mistakes, but they eventually correct them, or at least apologize for them. And they dethrone those who got them into trouble.

It is wrong, and even immoral, to equate democratic and dictatorial practices. But this is the new Russian equation.

Cover image from Peter Andrews, Reuters.

Yanukovych proposes World War II Liberator monument

During a visit today to the Donets'k oblast, Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych proposed to erect a monument to the World War II "Liberator" (Визволитель) on the border of Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. According to Ukrains'ka pravda, the leader of the Party of Regions said, "We know who brought freedom and peace to our land," adding in Kremlin-friendly language that he was against attempts to "rewrite history."

Jarosław Kaczyński: Putin 'spun a story'

A strong majority of Poles wanted Prime Minister Putin to apologise yesterday for the 17 September 1939 Soviet invasion of eastern Poland. He made no such apology, but offered a conciliatory hand to Polish readers (and the back of his hand to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko) in letter published yesterday in Gazeta Wyborcza. (The letter has been made available in English translation on Putin's website.) Here is the reaction of former Polish PM Jarosław Kaczyński this afternoon, referring to Putin as "prezydent":

Po pierwsze, nie było przeprosin... Putin snuł pewną opowieść, która jest właściwa dla nacjonalizmu. Rosja Stalina była przedstawiana jako zwykłe państwo. Były oczywiście jakieś przyjazne dla Polski akcenty, ale są one nie satysfakcjonujące.

First of all, there was no apology... Putin spun a story that was suitable for [Russian] nationalism. Stalin's Russia was presented as a normal state. There were some nice sentiments for Poland, but they were not enough.

Kaczyński went on to ask why Putin had been invited to Gdańsk in the first place.