Let's mention the war

The anniversary of the war’s end was marked in Poland by events before and during the visit of many political leaders – Poland’s president Aleksander Kwasniewski among them – to Moscow to participate in Russia’s commemoration of the event. Not a few leaders of central and eastern European states had declined to attend, citing their country’s ill-treatment, occupation or even absorption by the Soviet Union, an entity which was of course devised, driven and dominated by Russia.

The event, then, was bound to be controversial in this part of the world. The fact that Kwasniewski chose to attend, when other former Warsaw Pact states’ heads did not, was even more so. Certain sources stated that this was yet more proof that Kwasniewski – who had actually been a junior minister in the last Communist government which ceded power to the Solidarity organisation in 1989 – was still a ‘Muscovite’ at heart, unable to cut his ties with the power system that gave birth to his political career. Most public opinion has not held this against him, however; the people have other reproaches towards him, and it is probably fortunate that his second and constitutionally final term will soon expire.

Having arrived in Moscow for the ceremony, and dutifully laid flowers at the minuscule monument to the Polish war dead in Moscow, Kwasniewski then found himself seated several rows behind Russian president and master of ceremonies Vladimir Putin, far from the centre of attention. Polish newspapers printed prominent photos of an out-of-focus Kwasniewski looking owlishly towards the very in-focus Putin in the foreground. The perceived snub to the Polish president was reinforced, in leader writers’ eyes, by the fact that in his major set-piece speech, Putin made no reference to the Polish contribution to the war effort, while making at least passing mention of the roles of Britain, France and the United States. The headlines of several Polish papers were variations on the theme of ‘Nothing about Poland from Putin.’

The relations of a ‘free’ Poland with Russia were always going to be complex. The Soviet occupation and subsequent transformation of Poland into a remoulded client state, ethnically and territorially vastly different from its pre-war composition, was only the latest of a historical series of clashes between the two most populous and culturally important Slavic nations – clashes which the Poles almost always lost. The secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 between Stalin’s Soviet Russia and Hitler’s Third Reich, partitioning Poland between the two, had many precedents in Polish history, most notably when the end of the eighteenth century saw three concerted pushes by Prussia, Austria and Russia to dismember and annihilate the Polish state, leaving the map of Europe free of Poland’s name entirely for 123 years. (When Poland joined the European Union, some voices warned darkly of hordes of invading Germans buying back the land and property taken from them when their forefathers were expelled at the end of the war, forcing yet another de facto partition.)

With such a history behind them, then, the Second World War for the Poles is not merely an excuse for trotting out and dusting down assorted nostalgic national symbols, an irrelevance to anyone under fifty who has no living link with those times. The war, here, is a living, bleeding part of today’s social and political discourse. Last week’s newspapers contained a debate about whether equal honours (and pension rights) were due as much to former soldiers of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), the defence force of the pre-war Republic, as to those of the Polish Army (Wojsko Polskie), which was created and led by Soviet-trained officers in the second half of the war, and thereafter was the only acknowledged military force in ‘People’s’ Poland – to the extent that Home Army officers, who fought just as valiantly for their country’s freedom, were imprisoned as ‘Nazi collaborators’ by the Soviet-installed puppet government.

I have encountered some of this discourse myself, as an Englishman living in this part of the world for well over a decade. Perhaps I have served as a lightning rod for certain opinions; knowing the Polish language to a certain extent, I have been able to understand and (to some degree) exchange dialogue with people whose lack of English would otherwise have prevented them from expressing themselves to someone from my country.

One such opinion I encountered frequently in the first few years, expressed with various degrees of articulacy and hostility, is that "Churchill sold us to Stalin at Yalta." The reference is of course to the conference held there in February 1945 when Churchill, an ill US president Roosevelt and Stalin met to determine the extent of their spheres of influence in post-war Europe. The Poles feel aggrieved to this day that they were allotted to Soviet control; the Czechs may have similar reason to complain, as US troops entered and occupied the western part of their territory, as far as Plzen (Pilsen), and were an hour’s drive from Prague when told to roll back and let Soviet forces come in.

But in my opinion, the injured parties fail to realise an important fact, schooled as the older generation were on tales of Soviet heroism while the West ‘looked on in calculating idleness’, and as the younger generation have been on recrudescent, long-suppressed nationalist tales of brave yet futile defiance against all comers. It is this.

Stalin was not a democrat; he was the unchallenged master and ruler of more people (at that time – pre-Mao China was disunited and weak, India was still an imperial possession) than anyone else on Earth. Churchill and Roosevelt were leaders of (reasonably) democratic states, whose populations and economies were exhausted by five years of war. Western public opinion had been moulded (by a process of ‘manufactured consensus’, as was done in the USA before the invasion of Iraq in 2003) to regard the Soviets as allies; my oldest relatives remember the images of an avuncular, pipe-smoking ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin from newsreels. With the end of the war in sight, with the Reich on the run, were they suddenly to be told that their eastern ally was a new enemy, to be fought and struggled against? No democratic government could have carried that off. Stalin had no such brakes on his ambition; he had thrown twenty million and more of his people into the meat-grinder of war to achieve what he wanted, and was quite prepared to lose a further twenty million if necessary, US atomic threat or not. Compromise, the most hateful and most necessary element of diplomacy, was the only solution; and compromises within compromises, such as Yugoslavia and Finland, stemmed from that. The only alternative would have been a third, final war; Cuba in 1962 gave the world a foretaste of what that might have been like.

These geopolitical considerations take time to explain, however. My foregoing analysis is amateurish and incomplete, and has even so taken up too much server space. A full explanation of cause and effect is beyond my time and powers, and would require the efforts of learned people over many years.

And such explanations would mean nothing to the small man in his fifties whose parents found themselves on the wrong side of the border at the end of the war, as much of Poland’s east was ‘awarded’ to the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. His relatives – both immediate and in the wider, ethnic sense – would find themselves in a relatively democratic and prosperous Poland, whereas he found himself in alcoholic, unemployable poverty in a country frequently referred to as ‘Europe’s last dictatorship’. While visiting his daughter there in 1997, he subjected me to a tirade on Churchill having sold Poland at Yalta, and the perfidy of the West in leaving him in this state. His reasoning may have been false; his frustration and hopelessness were not.

Nor did such explanations hold much water with the bright, blonde, belligerent 20-year-old student of English who I encountered back in Poland, who asserted to me in a reasonable tone that Churchill had sold Poland at Yalta; Western policy had always been that of pusillanimous cowardice, letting Poland sink or swim as it would, and concerned with nothing but its own interest. Her association of cause and effect may have been faulty; her pride in her country and her feeling of resentment were genuine.

Nearly a decade later, the minds of the teenagers I work with seem to be less obsessed with this notion of self-centred Western treachery. Some of my students this year will have born in 1989, and thus will have no connection with even the tail end of the communist regime. Their generation, perhaps, or their children’s, may have the luxury of greater objectivity denied their predecessors. And then, perhaps, the Second World War might finally be over.