It is the latest episode in a bitter conflict over historical memory that is likely to intensify as the 75th anniversary of the victory over Nazism approaches next May.
Mateusz Morawiecki issued a four-page statement on Sunday accusing the Russian president of “repeated lies” over the history of the conflict. Earlier, the Polish foreign ministry said Putin’s words resembled “propaganda from the time of Stalinist totalitarianism”.
Morawiecki was responding to a speech by Putin at a summit of heads of former Soviet states in St Petersburg on 20 December. Putin gave the assembled leaders an hour-long history lecture, drawing on a sheaf of archival documents he had brought with him. The Russian president has also raised the issue at a number of other meetings in recent days, including a gathering of top army generals in which he called Poland’s ambassador to Nazi Germany “a scumbag and an antisemitic pig”.
Morawiecki said Putin was playing with history in order to distract from international pressure over issues such as sanctions and a doping ban for Russian athletes. “I consider president Putin’s words as an attempt to cover up these problems. The Russian leader is well aware that his accusations have nothing to do with reality.”
The Polish foreign ministry also summoned the Russian ambassador to complain to him about Putin’s comments last week.
Putin is particularly angry about a recent European parliament resolution that said the Soviet Union bore responsibility for starting the second world war, alongside Nazi Germany. That, in turn, came after a concerted effort from the Russian foreign ministry earlier this year to rehabilitate the 1939 Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact, which 10 years ago Putin had called “pointless, harmful and dangerous”. This year, Russia’s culture minister called it “a triumph of Soviet diplomacy”.
Putin, in his recent speech, insisted that the pact was born of Soviet defensive requirements and only came about after other western powers, including Poland, had signed their own agreements with the Nazis. Putin pointed to Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 Munich agreement in particular, saying war became inevitable after this point.
The key difference, glossed over by Putin, is that the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact had a secret protocol in which the two powers divided up territory. The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east two weeks after the Germans attacked from the west.
“Without Stalin’s complicity in the partition of Poland, and without the natural resources that Stalin supplied to Hitler, the Nazi German crime machine would not have taken control of Europe,” wrote Morawiecki in his statement.
Sergey Radchenko, professor of international relations at the University of Cardiff, said Putin’s claims were highly selective and historically dubious in places, but he also criticised the European parliament resolution for equating Nazi and Soviet guilt for the outbreak of the war.
“History is a complicated business, best left to professional historians. What we’ve seen in the last few months is not history, it’s absurd political theatre,” he said.
As the number of surviving veterans continues to shrink, the politicisation of the war’s legacy is gathering speed across Europe. In Poland, the nationalist ruling Law and Justice party has also been accused of creating an overly simplistic and nationalist version of the country’s history.
However, Donald Tusk, a former prime minister of Poland and a critic of the current government, who until recently was the president of the European council, said Poles should unite to rebut Putin’s claims.
“In view of President Putin’s brazen lies and Russian propaganda, a joint position of the Polish authorities and the opposition is needed. This is not the place and time for an internal dispute,” Tusk wrote on Twitter.
Over his two decades in charge of Russia, Putin has turned victory in the second world war, still referred to there as the Great Patriotic War, into the foundation stone of his rule, calling on all Russians to be proud of the immense Soviet sacrifice in the war and railing at western nations who downplay the Soviet war effort. Victory Day, 9 May, has become one of the main holidays in the Russian calendar, and is accompanied by nationalistic tub-thumping and a military parade.
At the 70th anniversary in 2015, almost all western leaders stayed away from the event in protest at the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine, which had been carried out using second world war symbols and rhetoric. Putin used his speech on the occasion to warn against a “unipolar world”, implicitly comparing the modern-day US with Nazi Germany.
A huge commemoration is again planned for the 75th anniversary, and the Kremlin hopes that Donald Trump will be in attendance. The US president said last month he appreciated the invite and “would love to go if I could”.
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