#“gifts” to poland from stalin

[lady-nightmare]

Google translation:

Putin's historical ravings. These are Stalin's real "gifts" to Poland Vladimir Putin said a few days ago that Poland should not forget about the "gift from Stalin", which is allegedly its western lands. Even a cursory analysis of history shows that it is not a gift. However, speaking of gifts, one cannot forget about other "gifts" that Poland received from Stalin and his team. Putin's historical ravings. These are Stalin's real "gifts" to Poland

Gift one: mass terror

On the basis of a special order No. 00485 issued by the head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov, on August 11, 1937, about 110,000 people were murdered. Poles living in the USSR. It was a typical act of mass genocide carried out by the Bolsheviks before Kristallnacht and the beginning of the Holocaust.

The second gift: the division of Poland

According to a secret protocol attached to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939, Stalin took over 55 percent of territory of then Poland, leaving Hitler a smaller part. Two aggressors divided Poland between them - and not only. In addition to the eastern part of this country, Stalin also occupied Estonia, Latvia, Finland and Bessarabia, Hitler - Lithuania and Vilnius district.

If we turn to the national composition of the voivodeships that Stalin took, only in three out of eight units were Ukrainians and Belarusians in the majority - in Volhynia (70 percent of Ukrainians), in Stanisławów (68.8 percent of Ukrainians) and in Polesie (74.1 percent of Ukrainians) . Belarusians and Ukrainians). In other voivodships, including Vilnius, Poles constituted the majority — from 49.3 percent to 49.3 percent. in Ternopil to 72 percent. in Bialystok. Division of Poland into spheres of influence of the USSR and the Third Reich according to the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939 (CC BY-SA 4.0) © Creative Commons Division of Poland into the spheres of influence of the USSR and the Third Reich in accordance with the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 23, 1939 (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In the provinces of Lublin and Warsaw (the eastern part), which also fell to the USSR under a secret document, the share of Poles was 85-90 percent, and the main minority were Jews. So there was no question of any "unification of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus". What happened was just a crude annexation of Polish territory.

On September 28, 1939, Ribbentrop flew to Moscow again and signed the "Treaty on Friendship and Border". Stalin gave away part of the Polish lands - the Warsaw and Lublin voivodships, but took over all of Lithuania (except for the Mariampol district) and the Vilnius district.

On October 31, Molotov said about Poland at the meeting of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR: "It was enough for a short attack, first by the German army, and then by the Red Army, to leave nothing of this ugly bastard of the Treaty of Versailles, living from the oppression of non-Polish nationalities."

Among the 35 million inhabitants of Poland (December 1938 census), Ukrainians accounted for 5 million, Belarusians 1.4 million, and Jews 3.4 million.

Gift three: repression, murder and confiscation

The Red Army took about 240,000 prisoners. Polish soldiers and officers. Many of them were released, but 25,000 were sent to road construction, and 12,000 — as free labor to the People's Commissariat of Defense Industry of the USSR. Special camps for Polish officers were set up in Starobielsk, Ostashkov and Kozielsk.

By the end of February 1940, 8,000 Jews remained in them. 376 officers and 6,000 192 policemen, border guards and equivalent military personnel. They were to be charged under Article 58-13 of the RSFSR's Criminal Code on persons who "combated the international labor movement" and sent to camps in Siberia and the Far East.

On March 5, 1940, the Politburo, following Beria's suggestion, decided to kill the prisoners of the officer camps, as well as other Poles (mainly representatives of the intelligentsia - teachers, professors, priests, engineers, factory workers, officials) who were in prisons in the occupied territories .

More than 21,000 convictions Poles were released by three: Iwan Bashtakov, Bogdan Kobułow and Wsievolod Mierkulov. Then they were personally signed by Joseph Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan and approved in absentia by Mikhail Kalinin and Lazar Kaganovich.

Thousands of Ukrainians and Belarusians, especially among the Polish intelligentsia, were also interned and killed. The murders of the Western Russian intelligentsia were carried out in Kuropaty near Minsk, the murders of the Ukrainian intelligentsia in the prisons of Western Ukrainian cities.

From April 3 to May 13, all convicted military men were killed in Katyn near Smolensk and near the village of Mednoye in the Tver region. Those who died in the Kharkov prison rest in the area of the present 6th Quarter of the Kharkiv Forest Park and elsewhere.

No more than 400 officers survived. Pursuant to the top-secret NKVD order No. 001365 of October 26, 1940, the executioners and others who organized this mass murder of Polish citizens were rewarded with large sums of money "for the successful completion of special tasks".

280 thousand Poles, including family members of the murdered, were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan. Few of them survived. Gift Four: "Western Lands"

Poland was a unique country during World War II. The Germans failed to create a collaborationist government here, as in France, or units within the Wehrmacht, as in the USSR, where a million Soviet citizens more or less voluntarily joined Hitler's military structures. Poles either endured the occupation with clenched teeth, or went to the forests and fought a fierce war with the Germans in the ranks of the Home Army.

Poland was perceived as a reliable ally by the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition. Polish divisions fought in Great Britain, Africa and Italy alongside the British and Americans, and General Sikorski's Polish government was based in London. Understandably, Poles did not want to hear that half of their country would remain under Soviet rule.

However, Stalin firmly stated that having got his hands on them under a deal with Hitler, he would never give them back. In order not to lose such a key ally as the USSR and to exclude the possibility of its behind-the-scenes negotiations with the Axis Powers, Roosevelt and Churchill secretly agreed during the Tehran Conference (November 28 - December 1, 1943) that Poland's eastern border should run approximately along the Curzon line. They also agreed to the population exchange.

As compensation for the territories lost in the east, Poland was to receive German lands along the Oder-Neisse border in the west and the southern part of East Prussia after the war. Most of these lands have not been part of the Polish state since the 11th century, i.e. for nine centuries, and were inhabited mainly by Germans.

The Yalta Conference, held February 4-11, 1945, confirmed and announced these agreements. Poland's new eastern frontier was slightly adjusted in her favour—Stalin agreed to return Bialystok and Przemyśl and their districts to the Poles, since they were west of the Curzon line. However, he retained 40 percent. former territory of the Polish state from 1939

This is the story of this "gift". The thief refused to return the stolen goods, but offered to compensate for the losses from "other sources" - not at his own expense, but at the expense of the defeated enemy. Fifth gift: rape and looting

"My hair stands on end when I hear about what the Soviets are doing to women in Silesia - mass rapes, many senseless murders, etc." — wrote the Russian Maria Vasilchikov in her "Berlin Diaries" on March 31, 1945.

A participant, though not very active, in the anti-Nazi resistance movement and an employee of the Reich Ministry of Foreign Affairs, she hastily left for the American occupation zone in Austria to avoid meeting her compatriots. She succeeded, but millions of Germans and Poles in East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania and the General Government of Warsaw did not.

It was another of Stalin's gifts, combined with the total robbery of the entire population. Sixth gift: murders and executions

78 thousand civilians from the new territories of Poland and 94,000 of the old ones were forcibly and illegally transported to the USSR to "construction sites of communism". Many of them died. Plus, from 80,000 up to 200 thousand Poles who fought in the Home Army or sympathized with the London government were arrested and mostly killed in NKVD detention centers. Among them were e.g. officers and generals who were invited by Moscow for alleged negotiations.

Gift seven: communist dictatorship

Finally, the last "gift" for Poland was the communist Stalinist dictatorship, established in violation of all the Tehran and Yalta agreements. This gift from Stalin cost the lives and happiness of entire generations of Poles and ended only with the fall of the communist regime in 1989.

I think Putin, as a KGB officer and history buff, is well aware of all these "gifts" and seems to approve of them. In fact, now offers exactly the same "gifts" to Ukraine.

Let's hope he doesn't manage to do what Stalin got away with.

[suratan-zir]

"Alyaksandr Lukashenko says at a meeting with Vladimir Putin that the Wagner wants to go west. To Warsaw and Rzeszów. "On a trip"."

In other words, Russian mercenaries threaten to attack Poland.

Before that, Putin said that the Polish territories were gifted to Poland by Stalin and that "if our Polish partners have forgotten about it, we will remind them." The same things he said about Ukraine back in 2022 when declared war: "Ukrainian land was a gift from Lenin."

You may not take his threats and deluded pseudo-history seriously. Russia is weakened by the ongoing war and certainly can't win a conventional war against NATO. But as long as Russia exists, it will try to cause chaos and harm the West by all means available to them. If not with missiles, then with bribery, hacker attacks, interference in elections and more.

[stillunusual]

Little pooty's big Polish tantrum…. On 21st July 2023, in a typically deranged rant, Muscovy's fascist dictator Vladimir Putin "reminded" Poland that its western territories were a "gift from Stalin" (among numerous other lies).

He began this particular outpouring of anti-Polish verbal vomit with some unsubstantiated claims that Poland was "hatching revanchist plans" to take territory from Ukraine and Belarus….

Claiming that Poland has ambitions to annex western Ukraine and Belarus, which before the Second World War (and for hundreds of years before the partitions of Poland) were part of the Polish state - and scaring the Russian population into believing that this could happen at any moment - has been a staple of the Kremlin's propaganda for a long time (and is frequently repeated by mindless vatniks and tankies all over social media). However, Russia has no evidence whatsoever to back up these baseless and nonsensical claims. It's true that Poland boosted security at the Polish-Belarusian border in July 2023, but this was in response to the arrival of Wagner Group mercenaries in Belarus, following their short-lived rebellion in Russia (after which their leader was killed in a mysterious plane crash, which I'm sure was a complete coincidence). Putin then went on to claim that Poland "took advantage" of the Russian civil war to "annex some historical Russian provinces"….

Not surprisingly, this was also lie. What actually happened is that after the First World War, newly independent Poland managed to reclaim some of the territory that was stolen by Prussia, Austria and Russia during the partitions of Poland at the end of the 18th century - and that included the aforementioned areas of Ukraine and Belarus, which were historically more Polish than Russian.

Much of what is now western Ukraine has been periodically incorporated into the Polish state ever since the beginning of the 11th century, at the time of the Kievan Rus. And the lands of present day Belarus and Ukraine were part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania when it was united with Poland towards the end of the 14th century. The entire territory of modern Belarus and most of Ukraine remained as part of the Polish-Lithuanian state until the end of the 18th century. Eastern Ukraine was ceded to Russia in the second half of the 17th century and Russia subsequently stole most of the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian state at the end of the 18th century when it conspired with Prussia and Austria to wipe Poland off the map (just like Hitler and Stalin did 150 years later). As well as most of the lands of present day Poland, Russia acquired all of what is now Belarus and more of Ukraine. The area of western Ukraine that was re-claimed by Poland after the First World War became part of Austria and was therefore never in Russia - let alone a "historical Russian province".

Today's Russian propagandists like to claim that Belarus, Ukraine and Russia have always been one nation, but the reality is that although all three had common origins in the Kievan Rus, they subsequently underwent hundreds of years of separate development before Belarus and Ukraine were incorporated into the Russian empire and subjected to prolonged periods of forced russification.

After regaining its independence and defeating the Soviets in the Polish-Soviet war, Poland and the newly formed Soviet state ended up dividing Ukraine and Belarus between them. The Treaty of Riga, which was signed in 1921, defined Poland's eastern border about half way between where the Polish-Russian border had been prior to the partitions of Poland and where Poland's eastern border is today. Poland basically managed to reclaim some of what it had previously lost. The Soviets renounced their claims to all territory to the west of the new border, but nevertheless they invaded and occupied it two decades later in 1939. Putin then started hypocritically whining about "Polonisation" policies in eastern Poland during the 1920s and 1930s….

Kremlin propagandists like to use tensions between Poland, Ukraine and Belarus over this historical period to create division. Poland had emerged from over a century of foreign rule by the partitioning powers, during which Prussia and Russia had done their best destroy the Polish language, culture and identity in the territories they stole from Poland, by adopting policies of forced germanisation and russification. So it's not surprising that the new Polish government wanted to reassert Polish identity after decades of struggle to regain national independence, which inevitably led to conflicts with Poland's minority populations. However, interwar Poland, for all its faults, was a relatively liberal society compared to its tyrannical neighbours, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Those Ukrainians and Belarusians who found themselves on the Polish side of the border with the USSR missed out on such delightful aspects of Soviet life as forced collectivisation, dekulakisation, the holodomor, the gulags, the Yezhovshchina (purges), the crippling poverty and backwardness, the brutal suppression of their religious and community life and the total lack of freedom. They may not have been overjoyed about living in Poland, but it was paradise in comparison.

Likewise, Poland's minorities were also much better off than, for example, Britain's colonial subjects all over the world and the USA's black and native American minorities. Putin then repeated his previous lies about Poland's "aggressive policy" in the interwar period causing the Second World War….

This is typical Kremlin historical revisionism, as well as being complete bullshit. In 1939, Hitler gifted eastern Poland to his ally Joseph Stalin in the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which was presented to the world as a simple non-aggression treaty, but was really a plan to carve up Europe between Germany and the USSR - involving the mutual invasion and partition of Poland, a free hand for Hitler to attack Western Europe and for Stalin to annex the Baltic states, Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, and to attack Finland. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact led directly to the outbreak of the Second World War almost immediately after it was signed, and was also the first step in a continuum of collaboration between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that lasted for the next two years, until Hitler broke the pact by launching Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Putin also claimed that Poland's "independence and statehood was restored thanks to the Soviet Union"….

This was a bit of a stretch, to put it mildly.

The USSR's occupation of eastern Poland was accompanied by mass looting, rape and murder. This territory had a mixed ethnic and religious population (mainly Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Jewish) which had existed for hundreds of years - until World War 2 - when Stalin and his collaborators killed or ethnically cleansed the Polish population (with a little help from Ukrainian fascists) and Hitler and his collaborators exterminated the Jews.

Between February 1940 and June 1941, Stalin deported hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens to Soviet camps, collective farms, exile villages and various outposts of the gulag system. In 1940 the NKVD carried out the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish army officers, police officers, university lecturers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, civic leaders, politicians, government officials, priests and other members of the “bourgeoisie”. Approximately 500,000 Polish citizens dubbed "enemies of the people" were also imprisoned without crime.

The imposition of Soviet rule was accompanied by a campaign of cultural genocide - monuments were destroyed, street names changed, libraries burned, bookshops closed and publishers shut down. The Soviet authorities replaced native teachers with Soviet teachers, introduced communist ideology into schools, forced pupils to learn Russian, limited instruction in Polish and banned the teaching of Polish history.

After the launch of Operation Barbarossa on 22nd June 1941, the NKVD executed thousands of prisoners en masse before running away from the invading Germans.

Nazi Germany's attack on the USSR initially went well, forcing a desperate Stalin to switch sides and join the alliance against Hitler, but the Soviets eventually prevailed (with a lot of help from the capitalist west) and drove the Germans all the way back to Berlin. However, in doing so they didn't restore Polish independence.

The USSR's re-occupation of Poland was accompanied by more looting, rape and murder (and this time the rapes were so extensive that they caused an epidemic of STDs). After the war Poland was trapped behind the iron curtain, subjected to a decade of Stalinist terror and a total of 45 years of Soviet-imposed communist rule. These were wasted years that left Poland bankrupt, destitute and decades behind the countries of western Europe by the time the Polish people were finally able to overthrow Moscow's puppet regime and restore their independence and statehood at the end of the 1980s. As for "reminding" Poland that its western territories were a "gift from Stalin"….

Putin seems to forget that Stalin gifted western Poland to his ally Adolf Hitler in the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, after which Nazi Germany invaded Poland from the west and the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, in September 1939.

What actually happened at the end of the Second World War is that Stalin turned Poland into a Soviet puppet state and redrew the borders between Germany, Poland and the USSR, incorporating eastern Polish lands (which he'd initially acquired as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) into the Soviet Union and a smaller area of eastern German lands into Poland, as "compensation". Almost the entire German population of what was now western Poland was then ethnically cleansed and sent to the newly formed Soviet puppet state of East Germany, after which the remaining Polish population living to the east of Poland's new border with the USSR was ethnically cleansed and sent to replace the departed Germans in the west. Apparently, being kicked out of your home after your country has been stolen, and then being forced to go and live in a destroyed and depopulated wasteland hundreds of miles away, is a "gift".

There's a reason why Poland and other countries that Russia invaded and plundered over the centuries, and were also invaded and plundered by the USSR during the Second World War (after which they were forced to live under Soviet occupation for the next half century), rushed to join NATO as soon as they could after overthrowing Soviet rule. It's because ever since the collapse of the USSR, Russia has repeatedly shown that it doesn't respect their right to exist, and it's clear that there can be no long term peace and stability in Europe while Russia still threatens its neighbours and harbours imperialistic ambitions to restore its former empire.

NATO is the main obstacle that prevents Russia from achieving this goal.

NATO poses no threat to Russia's internationally recognised borders, but it does - quite rightly - stand in the way of Russia's desire to expand them.

[mariacallous]

On the night of February 24, 2022, the sound of missiles jolted Viktor Marunyak awake. He saw flashes in the sky and billowing black smoke; then he got dressed and went to work. Marunyak is the mayor of Stara Zburjivka, a village just across the Dnipro River from Kherson, and he headed immediately to an emergency meeting with leaders of other nearby villages to discuss their options. They quickly realized that they were already too late to connect with the Ukrainian army. Their region was cut off. They were occupied.

Occupied. Marunyak had been expecting the war to break out, but he had no sense of what a Russian occupation of his village might mean. Like his colleagues, Marunyak is an elected official—genuinely elected, since 2006, under Ukrainian laws giving real power to local governments, not appointed following a falsified plebiscite, as a similar official might have been in the Soviet era or might be in modern Russia. That meant that when the occupation began, he felt an enormous responsibility to stay in Stara Zburjivka and help his constituents cope with a cascade of emergencies. “Already, within a few days, there were families lacking food,” he recalls. “There was no bread or flour, so I was trying to buy grain from the farmers … Many residents began contributing the food they could share, and so we created a fund, providing assistance on demand.”

Similar plans were made to locate and distribute medications. Because the Ukrainian police had ceased to function, citizens formed nighttime security patrols staffed with local volunteers. Marunyak prepared to negotiate with whoever the Russians sent to Stara Zburjivka. “I told people not to be afraid, saying, when the Russians would come, I’ll be the first to talk to them.”

He was. And he paid a horrific price for it.

The Russian soldiers who arrived in Kherson—like the Russian soldiers who occupied Bucha and Irpin, the Kharkiv region, Zaporizhzhya, or anywhere else in Ukraine—were not prepared to meet people like Marunyak. To the extent that the invaders had any understanding of where they were and what they were meant to be doing (some, initially, had none), they believed that they were entering Russian territory ruled by an insecure and unpopular Ukrainian elite. Their actions suggested that their immediate goal was to decapitate that elite: arrest them, deport them, kill them. They did not expect this to be difficult.

Their theory of occupation was not new. Soviet soldiers entering the territory of eastern Poland or the Baltic states during World War II also arrived with lists of the types of people they wanted to arrest. In May 1941, Stalin himself provided such a list for occupied Poland. To the Soviet dictator, anyone linked to the Polish state—police, army officers, leaders of political parties, civil servants, their families—was a “counter-revolutionary,” a “kulak,” a “bourgeois,” or, to put it more simply, an enemy to be eliminated.

Russia made similar lists before invading Ukraine a year ago, some of which have become known. Ukraine’s president, prime minister, and other leaders featured on them, as did well-known journalists and activists. But Russian soldiers were not prepared to encounter widespread resistance, and they certainly did not expect to find loyal, conscientious, popularly elected small-town and village mayors.

Perhaps that explains why Marunyak, age 60, was punished with such horrific cruelty after the Russians arrested him on March 21. Along with a few other local men, the Stara Zburjivka mayor was kept blindfolded and handcuffed for three days. Russian soldiers beat him. They gave him nothing to eat and little to drink. One time he was stripped naked and forced to stay in the cold for several hours. A gun was held to his head, and he was threatened with drowning. He was told that his wife and daughters would also be captured. Once, he said, the soldiers choked him until he lost consciousness. They kept demanding to know where he kept his weapons. Because Marunyak fit into no category that the Russians could recognize—perhaps even because his local patriotism and his civic-mindedness seemed strange to them—they decided he must be a secret member of a Ukrainian “sabotage group.” He was not. He had no weapons and no military skills.

Days into his detention, Marunyak was briefly able to see his wife, Kateryna Ohar, before he was transferred to Kherson. The soldiers told Ohar she would not see her husband for 20 years. He was then sent right into another torture chamber, where a different set of Russian soldiers tied wires to his thumbs. In this form of torture, wires are connected to a victim’s fingers, toes, or sometimes genitals. Electric shocks are then delivered using the battery of a field telephone—according to one witness, soldiers described it as “making a call to Putin.” The practice of electrocuting prisoners was used during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and in Russia’s Chechen wars, and it is now in use again throughout occupied Ukraine. But even when Marunyak was tortured and interrogated, he noticed that his captors never wrote anything down. Their questioning was sloppy; he could not work out what they actually wanted to learn. Possibly nothing. Eventually, after days of captivity with next to no food, he was freed, with nine broken ribs and pneumonia. He escaped the occupied zone.

Over the past 10 months, the Reckoning Project has deployed more than a dozen journalists and field researchers to record detailed testimonies of victims of and witnesses to atrocities in areas of Ukraine that are or were under Russian occupation. Lawyers and analysts then seek to verify these accounts, with the goal of providing evidence that will be admissible in future court proceedings. The organization has found that Marunyak’s experience was not unusual. Oleh Yakhniyenko, the mayor of Mylove, another village in the Kherson region, was detained twice. Olena Peleshok, the mayor of Zeleny Pod, was imprisoned for more than two months. Mykhailo Burak, the mayor of Bekhtery village, was detained and tortured. In the formerly occupied territory of Kharkiv alone, police investigators have evidence of 25 torture chambers. The Ukrainian government believes that mayors, deputy mayors, and other local leaders from a majority of the Kherson region’s 49 municipalities were arrested or kidnapped. Some have simply disappeared.

Many of their stories share not only gruesome details but also an atmosphere of unreality. Ukrainian captives were told that the Ukrainian state had discriminated against them for speaking Russian; now they were “free,” the invaders insisted. But when Russian-speaking mayors and other elected officials flatly explained that no one in Ukraine had harmed them for using their native language, or that Russian was widely spoken in the region, the soldiers didn’t have any response. Dmytro Vasyliev, the secretary of the city council of occupied Nova Kakhovka, recalled that his Russian was more fluent and more grammatical than the Russian of the soldier interrogating him. The soldier was a Kalmyk, one of Russia’s minority groups; Vasyliev had been born in Moscow. He considered himself a Ukrainian of ethnic Russian extraction, which confused them: “They couldn’t comprehend why I, Russian by ethnic origin, did not want to cooperate with them,” Vasyliev recalled. “I said, ‘How can I look into the eyes of my son, my colleagues, if I become a traitor?’ They just didn’t get it.” Since his interview with the Reckoning Project, Vasyliev has died.

But even as they inflicted pain on the most civic-minded Ukrainians, even as they assaulted local leaders, Russian soldiers seemed not to know how to replace them. Unlike their Soviet Communist forebears, who could at least name the ideology that had driven them into Poland, or Estonia, or Romania, the modern Russian army seems to have no coherent theory of government or administration, no concrete plans to run the region, even no clear idea of the meaning of Russkiy mir, the “Russian world” that some of President Vladimir Putin’s ideologues extol.

Russian forces do find collaborators to replace elected officials, but many appear to be completely random, unqualified people, with no discernible ideology or previous links to Russia. In some places the invaders have displayed Soviet symbols or flags, perhaps hoping that these older ideas will create some sympathy for Russia among the conquered Ukrainians. But mostly they’ve offered nothing: no explanation, no improvements to life, not even a competent administration. They do immense damage, but they don’t seem to know why.

After the mayors, town councilors, and other elected officials, the Ukrainians who disturb the occupiers most are volunteers: people who run charities, people who run civic organizations, people who spontaneously rush to help others. Perhaps they seem suspicious to Russian officials because their own country crushes spontaneity, independent associations, and grassroots movements. The Reckoning Project interviewed a man from Skadovsk, a part of Kherson province still under Russian control, whom we will call Volunteer A. (He requested anonymity because he fears for his family’s safety.) He had been a member of one of the neighborhood-watch groups that stepped in to replace the police, and had worked at a humanitarian-aid distribution center. After his father was arrested in April 2022, a few weeks into the occupation, Volunteer A went to find him—and was detained as well.

During the subsequent interrogation, Volunteer A was asked about other local activists and about his connection to the Ukrainian security services (none) and the CIA (even less), as well as (ludicrously) George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Like the Soviet officials who treated Boy Scout troops in occupied central Europe like members of a conspiracy, the Russians seemed incredulous that he was just a local volunteer, working with other local volunteers; their questions made it seem as if they had never heard of such a thing. He recalled being beaten simultaneously by four different men, struck by a baseball bat, tormented with electric shocks, and hit with a hammer in an effort to get him to admit he was part of a larger conspiracy. At least one of his ribs was broken. After the interrogation, he was told to make a video confession and to sign a statement declaring that he would not spread “fake news” about the Russian occupation. After a subsequent detention, he too escaped the region.

In another town in the Kherson region also still under occupation, Volunteer B, as we’ll call him (he also fears for his family), had a similar experience. Before Russian forces detained him, he had been running a makeshift pharmacy that collected medical-supply donations. He was interrogated and beaten and, like Volunteer A, asked repeatedly about the true purpose of his charitable work. Who was organizing it? Again, the Russian soldiers seemed unable to believe that no secret group was behind it, that ordinary people were spontaneously contributing to this common project, that information about it simply spread by word of mouth, on social media and on the radio, and not as the result of some dark plot. He was asked to jot down a description of how his group worked: “The way it worked,” he recalled writing, “was that people brought what they had and got what they needed. Provided that we have it.” The Russians kept pressing for more details of the nonexistent conspiracy. Then they confiscated the painkillers he had accumulated, which had been destined for cancer patients.

This man, who was also forced to leave his region, now believes that the interrogators’ real problem was that they feared volunteers were outside their control: “It really pisses [the Russians] off, annoys them,” he said, that anyone can be independent of the state and of the political system—any political system. This helps explain why the list of arrested and tortured volunteers is so long, and why their testimonies are so similar across the various zones of occupation. Ruslan Mashkov, a Ukrainian Red Cross volunteer, was detained by Russian soldiers north of Kyiv in March and interrogated. A woman in the Kherson region who had helped sort humanitarian-aid packages told an interviewer that she had been arrested, given electrical shocks, robbed of her money, and beaten. (She asked not to be identified by name.) Nakhmet Ismailov, another Kherson resident who had organized charity concerts and benefits before the war, was also tortured with electric shocks. Anyone who conducts any independent activity—anyone who engages with civil society or who might be described as a social entrepreneur—is at risk in an occupation zone run by men who may have never encountered a genuine charity or a genuine volunteer organization before at all.

The invaders’ nihilism is particularly notable in their incoherent approach to the Ukrainian educational system. In theory, schools and universities are the focus of careful Russian thought and planning, just as they were once the focus of careful Soviet thought and planning. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Red Army, in an utterly devastated occupied East Germany, took time away from food provision and road reconstruction to issue an edict banning private kindergartens and to set up curriculum-training sessions for new preschool teachers.

In the spring of 2022, Russian occupiers did signal their interest in transforming Ukrainian schools. In Melitopol, which is still occupied, the Russian military abducted a handful of school principals as well as the head of the local department of education, although later the principals were released. In Kakhovka, Viktor Pendalchuk, the director of School No. 1, was detained and interrogated for two weeks before escaping to Ukrainian-held territory.

Still, a large number of schools in occupied areas at first remained closed, or else operated online, as they had done during the early phases of the coronavirus pandemic. The occupiers pressured some educators to return. In one case investigated by the Reckoning Project, witnesses described a geography, math, and computer-science teacher—we are withholding his name because his village in the Kherson region is still occupied—whose home was visited by Russian soldiers in late June; they handcuffed his 18-year-old son, perhaps because he planned to go to university to study Ukrainian history. They put a bag over the teen’s head and then dragged him away. The teacher received a message, via an interlocutor, telling him that his son was alive, was being fed, and would be returned home if the teacher returned to his job. The teacher complied. The son did come back, and described being interrogated, threatened at gunpoint, and tortured with electric shocks.

By autumn, the occupiers had intensified their efforts to Russify the schools, causing a lot of distress among Ukrainian teachers who feared being accused of collaboration by their own compatriots if they showed up at work. But the process remained haphazard, differing from place to place. In at least one town in the Zaporizhzhya region, the Reckoning Project believes, all Ukrainian-language books were removed from schools, including children’s books; elsewhere, only upper-level Ukrainian books, on law and history, were removed. In one Zaporizhzhyan village, still under occupation, soldiers have forced schools to open by threatening to take children from their parents if they do not show up. Elsewhere, low attendance has been tolerated.

Residents of some areas have said that the occupiers imposed a Russian-language curriculum, but many of the lessons were poorly designed. In one school district, just four textbooks were assigned—on the Russian language, Russian history, math, and natural science—and all others were discarded. Asked what she had been doing in school during the time Kherson was occupied, a 14-year-old named Oleksandra recalled that students spent their time looking at their phones.

Higher education suffers from the same erratic policies. Russian soldiers physically occupied Kherson State University, Kherson State Maritime Academy, and Kherson State Agrarian and Economic University, but managed to hold only a small number of classes. In June, while the city was still occupied, the Russians announced that Dmytro Kruhly, one of the teachers at the Kherson State Maritime Academy, would become rector. Everyone else was fired. Kruhly, who previously taught classes about “global maritime distress and safety systems,” announced that the new task of the university was to build a shipyard, but few steps were taken in that direction. After the liberation of Kherson, Kruhly disappeared from the city, probably retreating with the Russians.

Substantial evidence suggests that Moscow had bigger plans for Ukrainian schools but the soldiers on the ground could not implement them. In Vovchansk, a small frontline town in the Kharkiv region, freed in September after six months of occupation, the Reckoning Project obtained a copy of a five-year education plan for schools in the city. The document runs to 140 pages of bureaucratic language, which appears to have been mostly copied and pasted from the educational plans given to schools in Russia, as if no special thought went into the needs of schools in newly occupied territories. It calls, for example, for an annual “Day of Solidarity in the Fight Against Terrorism” to commemorate the infamous 2004 attack on a school in Beslan, in Russia’s North Ossetia region; for lessons about the Nazi blockade of Leningrad in World War II; and for a course on the “basics of the spiritual-moral culture of the peoples of Russia.” The entire document contains only two lines about Vovchansk itself—about visits to the town’s “institutions of culture” and production sites.

Regardless of Moscow’s intentions, the Russians actually carrying out the occupation didn’t really seem to care what happened to the schools. There was no policy equivalent to the systematic Soviet imposition of Marxist language and history on central Europe in the 1940s, not even an equivalent to the imposition of a pro-Russian regime in Chechnya during the second Chechen War. In one occupied town in the Zaporizhzhya region, teachers were ordered to organize celebrations of May 9—the day Russia marks the anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. But the occupying authorities didn’t seem to mind whether attendance was high, or whether anyone learned anything about the war, or whether the celebrations were even real. “A couple of kids will be enough,” they were told. The ritual was for show. The point was to tell Moscow that it had happened, not to teach any real lessons about World War II.

In truth, each region of Ukraine does have its own history and traditions, and some of them are eerily relevant. In 1787, four years after Russia defeated the Ottoman empire and annexed the territory of what is now southern Ukraine and Crimea, the Russian empress Catherine the Great visited the region. The trip was organized by Grigory Potemkin, who was once her lover and remained her favorite minister, and it is from this journey that we have inherited the expression Potemkin village. According to the legend, Potemkin built facades along Catherine’s route and populated them with actors in costumes, pulling them down at the end of every day and putting them up again at the next village, so that the czarina would see only happy peasants and prosperous homes.

Historians doubt that this elaborate piece of theater really happened, but Potemkin’s connection to the region was real: He was buried in a crypt in Kherson, and before the Russians evacuated the city they removed his bones. And the Potemkin-village legend persists because it reflects a phenomenon we recognize: the courtier who creates a false reality to please the distant monarch. For Ukrainians who have lived under Russian occupation, the Potemkin story helps explain what they have experienced. Marunyak, the mayor of Stara Zburjivka, put it like this: “I am following their activities. They are all done for a camera shot in Russia. Even people who live in the occupation don’t believe it is for real. It’s like a huge Potemkin village. It can’t function. They try to glue it together, but it doesn’t work.”

The Potemkin story might also begin to explain the horrific violence that ordinary Russians have inflicted on ordinary Ukrainians. Over and over again, victims told the Reckoning Project that this extreme behavior came from nowhere. There was no provocation. Nothing that Ukrainians have done to Russians either in the distant past or in recent memory could explain the beatings, the electric shocks, the detention centers, the torture chambers in garages and basements, the utter disregard for Ukrainian life. Only the Russians’ frustration with their own incapacity—their inability to make the Ukrainians obey them; indeed, their inability to understand Ukraine at all—might offer a clue. They were told to transform the schools, but they do not know how. They were told to find secret Ukrainian organizations, but instead they found small-town mayors and local volunteers. On the one hand, they have to send a report back to Moscow, proving that they are in control. On the other hand, they are angry because they exercise so little control.

This incomprehension also fits into an older tradition. The Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vynnychenko wrote a letter in 1928 to the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, who had dismissed the Ukrainian language as a mere dialect. Ukraine, Vynnychenko told him, was real, whether or not Gorky wanted it to be real. “You can think that the Dnipro River flows into the Moscow River,” he said. But “the Dnipro will not flow into the Moscow River” just because you think so. Wishing Ukraine away will not make Ukraine go away. Rewriting history will not alter the historical memories of millions of people. Russia can try to alter the geography of the region, but that will not alter the geography of the region, no matter how many bodies are beaten or electric shocks are delivered.

The modern Russian occupation also belongs to the equally old, equally ugly traditions of Russian imperialism and Soviet genocide. Moscow wants to obliterate Ukraine as a separate country, and Ukrainian as a distinct identity. The occupiers thought that task would be easy, because, like Putin, they assumed that the Ukrainian state and Ukrainian society are weak. But they are not. That clash between assumption and reality has also forced the occupiers to broaden their use of violence. Wayne Jordash, a British barrister who documents Russian war crimes in Ukraine, argued in a Reckoning Project interview that the extraordinary number of detention centers in occupied Ukraine represent the Russian army’s attempt to fulfill its original plan, which was “to capture and kill all the leaders” of Ukraine. But as the occupation dragged on, “the idea of leaders got bigger. It was originally ‘Zelensky and the government,’ and it quite quickly, inevitably, became ‘local leaders,’ which includes everyone from military to civil servants to journalists, to teachers—anybody who had a connection with the Ukrainian state.”

Failure and incompetence lead to violence; violence creates more resistance; and resistance, so hard for the invaders to comprehend, creates wider, broader, ever more random destruction, pain, and suffering. This is the logic of genocide, and it is unfolding right now, in our time, in the occupied Ukrainian territories that have not yet been liberated, in the towns where Russian soldiers still arrest people arbitrarily on the street, in the villages where the Ukrainian state cannot yet count the torture chambers, let alone shut them down.

Stara Zburjivka itself remains under occupation, although Marunyak, its devoted mayor, now lives in exile in Latvia. From there he tries to keep in touch with his former constituents, to help if he can, to advise or to listen, to keep together the threads of a society that the Russians are cruelly, haphazardly unraveling. “They didn’t understand anything,” Marunyak says now, “but just spoiled people’s lives.” They discovered a world different from the one they knew. And so they smashed it up, hit back at it, and are still trying to destroy it forever.

[unhonestlymirror]

It's a shame that I, as a Ukrainian, never wrote what I think about russia's name in hetalia.

Because it's so damn lifeless. XD I see plenty of people referring to Ukraine as Katyusha (nickname made from russian Yekaterina, has nothing to do with Ukraine) and to Belarus as Natasha (russified nickname, which appeared, according to russian sources, in the 18th century, and according to American sources, in 1965, has nothing to do with Belarus) - but, for some reason, Great Russia doesn't want to have 100% russian name:

Ivan is the name of ancient Hebrew origin, which translates as "Mercy of God." It is formed from the ancient form of Ioann. This name is definitely older than russia itself. This name is commonly used in Ukrainian and Belaruthian folk songs, this name is used to refer to Ivana Kupala celebration: the name arose at a time when the Christian church wanted to replace a pagan holiday with a new religion.

Not even England has such an average name: it's like if they used John Brown instead of Arthur Kirkland.

Now about the surname: and I will use quotes from russian(!) sources:

The surname Braginsky belongs to a common type of Jewish surnames.

The Jews of the Russian Empire began to be given surnames at the end of the 18th century, after the western regions of Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic states were annexed to the Russian Empire - after the partition of Poland.

Then Catherine II "acquired" along with the western regions a huge number of Jews who historically did not have surnames, but only a first name and patronymic, for example, "Moishe, son of Shmelke."

And my favourite:

"So, the surname Braginsky owes its origin to the urban settlement of Bragin - at present, it is the regional centre of the Gomel region of the Republic of Belarus. The settlement was founded in the 16th century."

Gomel region? The region from which locals like to joke that they use Ukrainian with Belaruthian letters? (Lots of my relatives are from there, and some of them even identify themselves as Ukrainians).

What an interesting name for personification of russia to have. Especially considering how much russia hates both Jews, Ukrainians, and Belaruthians. This name literally screams: "Look, I am not a nazi." And I really doubt Hidekaz Himaruya, who clearly isn't versed in never-soviet countries' culture, would choose this name without influence from his sponsors.

If russia loves its culture so much, why did they choose what they chose? Why doesn't its personification have a perfectly russian name? I will even translate some of the greatest examples for you:

Dalis - Да здравствуют Ленин и Сталин!Long live Lenin and Stalin!

Delezh — Дело Ленина живёт! The deed of Lenin lives!

Deleor — Дело Ленина — Октябрьская революция! The deed of Lenin -- October Revolution!

Dazdrasen — Да здравствует Седьмое ноября! Long live November 7th!

Avtodor -- Общество содействия развитию автомобилизма и улучшению дорог. Society for the Promotion of Motoring and Road Improvement

Agitprop -- Отдел агитации и пропаганды при ЦК ВКП (б). Department of Agitation and Propaganda under the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks

Glasp -- гласность печати. Publicity of the press.

Karmiy -- Красная Армия. Red Army.

Kid -- коммунистический идеал. Communist ideal.

Kravasil -- Красная армия всех сильней!The Red Army is the strongest of all!

Kukutsapol -- "Кукуруза — царица полей!" Corn - the queen of the fields!

Piachegod -- "Пятилетку — в четыре года!" "Five-Year Plan - in four years!"

Revvol — революционная воля - revolutionary will

Revdar — революционный дар revolutionary gift

Yurgoz -- Юрий Гагарин облетел Землю -- Yuri Gagarin circled the Earth

Zamvil — заместитель В. И. Ленина -- Deputy of V. I. Lenin

Idlen -- Ideas of Lenin

Vidlen - Great ideas of Lenin

Vinun — "Владимир Ильич не умрёт никогда" -- "Vladimir Ilyich (Lenin) will never die"

Lunio – "Ленин умер, но идеи остались" - Lenin died, but the ideas remained!"

Lelud — Ленин любит детей -- Lenin loves children

Lengenmir -- "Ленин - гений мира!" -- "Lenin - the genius of the world!"

Lestak - Lenin, Stalin, communism!

Pofistal – Победитель фашизма Иосиф Сталин -- "The winner of fascism, Joseph Stalin."

Yausyaukh – "Я устал, я ухожу" - "I'm tired, I'm leaving."

Porof - Позор российскому футболу - Shame on Russian football.

Motevsor - мочить террористов в сортире - kill terrorists in the toilet.

Dogzeb -- "Догзеб – Доллар – грязная зеленая бумажка" - "Dollar is a dirty green paper"

And it's only a little part of what exists. If there are so many great, purely russian names, why to name russia after "stupid khokhols" (russian slur about Ukrainians) or "bulbashi" (russian slur about Belaruthians) or "zhydy"(russian slur about Jewish)?

[cyberbenb]

Warsaw summons Russian ambassador after Putin threatens Poland

Warsaw has summoned the Russian Ambassador to Poland after President Vladimir Putin threatened Poland and claimed it was eyeing territory in Ukraine and Belarus.     After the arrival of 5,000 Wagner fighters into Belarus following their short-lived mutiny, Poland said it would move troops to the border.     Putin reacted aggressively, saying Poland was about to occupy western parts of Ukraine and was “dreaming of Belarusian lands,” threatening to respond with force.

Number of Wagner fighters in Belarus reaches 5,000

About 5,000 Wagner mercenaries arrived in Belarus, according to Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service spokesman Andrii Demchenko. Their presence there does not present an immediate threat to Ukraine, he said.

The Kyiv IndependentIgor Kossov

“The western territories of present-day Poland are a gift from (Soviet tyrant Joseph) Stalin to the Poles, have our friends in Warsaw forgotten about this?” he added. “We will remind you.”

“Stalin was a war criminal responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Poles,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on July 21.

“The historical truth is not subject to discussion,” he added.

Russia has regularly threatened Poland and the Baltic states with military force. Putin has also been sabre-rattling using nuclear weapons on multiple occasions.

Poland has been one of the key backers of Ukraine in its defensive war agaisnt Russia.

Morawiecki said in an interview published by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on June 4 that Ukraine deserves a quick path to NATO membership given that it “fights in the interests of NATO."

According to Morawiecki, Ukraine fights on behalf of the military alliance “in the sense that they are defending against this brutal Russian force which would jeopardize many other NATO countries,” even though it is not yet a NATO member.

For this reason “they deserve to be presented with a very quick path to NATO,” the Polish Prime Minister said.

[alsjeblieft-zeg]

309 of 2023

How are you doing today?

Kinda tired, but okay. And cold.

What day of the week is it?

Tuesday.

What’s something you used to believe in that you don’t anymore?

That everyone is good.

What do you admire most in a person?

Honesty, being genuine, kindness, compassion.

What’s your favorite dinosaur?

I don’t give a fuck about dinosaurs.

Do you believe in reincarnation? If so, what would you like to be reincarnated as?

I have no opinion, but if it’s treally a thing, then I’d love to be reborn as someone’s beloved pet cat.

What are 3 scents that you like?

Cinnamon, vanilla, sea air.

Do you ever use the grounding technique 54321?

Never heard of it.

What’s the silliest thing you’ve gotten injured from?

Having sex lol.

What’s the weirdest food combination you enjoy?

I don’t know, really. Cheese with fruits?

Where would you relocate if you were forced to leave your place of residence?

Gladly.

Do you play any instruments?

I’m afraid you need two good hands to do it, so no.

What is an unpopular opinion you have?

Mango is disgusting.

Have you ever done a crazy dare?

Yeah, ate a bit of dry cat food. Tasted like nothing lol.

What’s your favorite type of cheese or cheese substitute?

Gouda lol. I don’t like any cheese substitutes.

What are things you still enjoy from your childhood?

The beach.

What smells better.. fresh baked bread or fresh brewed coffee?

Both, don’t make me choose.

What’s the oddest text you’ve received recently?

Something about a baloon-like object in Poland that fell somewhere and if I find it, I shall call the police lol.

What’s something you believe everyone should have?

Confidence.

What’s the first thing you do once you get home from a trip?

Probably pee.

What has been the worst kitchen mishap you’ve made?

Burning myself with boiliong water? I have no idea.

Do you know how your parents met?

Yeah, they’ve been knowing each other since my mum was 7.

Do you believe love is blind?

Sometimes. It might hurt.

If you could get away with it, what crime would you commit?

Lol what a question.

If you owned a restaurant, what would you serve?

Belgian food. It’s much more than fries and waffles.

Have you ever met a president?

I live in a kingdom.

What food tastes better than its appearance to you?

No idea.

Do you actively post on social media?

Only on YouTube and sometimes on Instagram.

What was your favorite childhood book?

Pelle Svanslös. It’s about a cat without tail.

Do you ever experience intrusive thoughts?

Yeah, sometimes. It’s a part of my OCD.

What do you consider to be the smartest animal?

Elephants. They’re incrediby smart.

What movies make you laugh the most?

I don’t watch movies.

What’s a product you use everyday that you wish you could get a lifetime supply of?

My medication lmao. If it doesn’t count, then deodorants and perfume.

What’s the best name you’ve heard a pet named?

I don’t know, honestly. I like human names for my cats. I think the funniest and the creepiest at the same time was Stalin.

What always makes your day better?

Train trips around the country.

Would you rather have multiple hobbies or 1 true passion?

I have two true passions and it feels amazing.

Coffee or tea?

Hot chocolate. Not gonna drink coffee anymore.

Do you listen to podcasts? Which ones?

I do, on Spotify. Mostly about unexplained mysteries and conspiracy theories.

Would you say you’re good at saving money?

Yes, but no. I spend much on train tickets.

Have you ever ridden in the front of a roller coaster?

I’ve never ridden in any and I don’t intend to.

Would you rather have free massages for a year or facials?

Massages, I think it would do me good as for my arm muscles.

When was the last time you’ve had an adrenaline rush?

Going to Poland for vacation, I was excited.

Have you ever used a whole chapstick?

I don’t use such things, apparently I’m not gay enough lol.

Has anyone ever given you a gag gift?

Not sure what this question means.

[socialistcurrent]

The EU is Rewriting WWII History to Demonize Russia | Dissident Voice

From 10/25/2019. The Soviets were NOT responsible for starting WWII and Europe is a nazi basket. Choice cut:

"Last month, on the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II, the European Parliament voted on a resolution entitled “On the Importance of European Remembrance for the Future of Europe.” The adopted document:

Stresses that the Second World War, the most devastating war in Europe’s history, was started as an immediate result of the notorious Nazi-Soviet Treaty on Non-Aggression of 23 August 1939, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and its secret protocols, whereby two totalitarian regimes that shared the goal of world conquest divided Europe into two zones of influence;

Recalls that the Nazi and communist regimes carried out mass murders, genocide and deportations and caused a loss of life and freedom in the 20th century on a scale unseen in human history, and recalls the horrific crime of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi regime; condemns in the strongest terms the acts of aggression, crimes against humanity and mass human rights violations perpetrated by the Nazi, communist and other totalitarian regimes.

For 75 years, we have been told that the war started on September 1st, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland, even though the Pacific Theater between Japan and China began two years earlier. Now we are to understand that it actually began eight days prior when the German foreign minister visited Moscow. Take no notice of the inherent doublespeak in the premise that a war could be the consequence of a peace agreement, which without any evidence provided is said to have contained “secret protocols”, not provisions. You see, unlike the other pacts signed between European countries and Nazi Germany — such as the Munich Betrayal of 1938 with France and Great Britain to which the Soviets were uninvited while Austria and Czechoslovakia were gifted to Hitler for the courtesy of attacking Moscow — Molotov-Ribbentrop was really a confidential agreement between Hitler and Stalin to conquer Europe and divide it between them.

This is pure mythology. The fact of the matter is that neither the Soviets or even Germany drew the dividing line in Poland in 1939, because it was a reinstatement of the border acknowledged by the League of Nations and Poland itself as put forward by the British following WWI. Even Winston Churchill during his first wartime radio broadcast later that year admitted:

Russia has pursued a cold policy of self-interest. We could have wished that the Russian Armies should be standing on their present line as the friends and allies of Poland, instead of as invaders. But that the Russian Armies should stand on this line was clearly necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace.

Yet according to the EU, even though Moscow was the last country to agree to a peace deal with Hitler, it was all part of a hidden plot between them. In that case, why then did Germany choose to invade the USSR in 1941? The EU leaves this question unanswered. Forget about its racial policies of enslaving slavs or that Hitler openly declared in Mein Kampf that Germany needed to conquer the East to secure theLebensraum. Nevermind that in the Spring of 1941, less than two months before Operation Barbarossa, Stalin gave a speech to the Kremlin at a state banquet for recent graduates of the Frunze Military Academy to give warning of an imminent attack:

War with Germany is inevitable. If comrade Molotov can manage to postpone the war for two or three months through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that will be our good fortune, but you yourselves must go off and take measures to raise the combat readiness of our forces.

The EU has redacted that the entire reason for the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact in August 1939 had been to buy time for the Red Army’s attrition warfare strategy to adequately prepare its armaments against a future invasion by the Wehrmacht. The Soviet leadership well understood that Germany would eventually renege on the agreement, considering that in 1936 it had signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan and Italy directed at the Communist International. For six years, the USSR was thwarted in its attempts to forge an equivalent anti-fascist coalition and to collectively defend Czechoslovakia by the British and the French, whose ruling classes were too busy courting and doing business with Germany. It had been the Soviets alone who defended the Spanish Republic from Franco in the final rehearsal before the worldwide conflict and only when all other recourses had run out did they finally agree to a deal with the Hitlerites.

Just a week prior to the signing of the neutrality treaty, Stalin gave a secret speech to the Politburo where he explained:

The question of war or peace has entered a critical phase for us. If we conclude a mutual assistance treaty with France and Great Britain, Germany will back off of Poland and seek a modus vivendi with the Western Powers. War would thus be prevented but future events could take a serious turn for the USSR. If we accept Germany’s proposal to conclude with it a non-aggression pact, Germany will then attack Poland and Europe will be thrown into serious acts of unrest and disorder. Under these circumstances we will have many chances of remaining out of the conflict while being able to hope for our own timely entrance into war.

This latest resolution is part of a long pattern of misrepresentation of WWII by the Anglo-Saxon empire, but is perhaps its most egregious falsification that truly desecrates the graves of the 27 million Soviet citizens who were 80% of the total Allied death toll. Earlier this year, for the commemoration on the 75th anniversary of the Normandy landings, Russia and its head of state were excluded from the events in Portsmouth, England. As if the ongoing absence of Western European leaders from the May 9th Victory Day ceremonies held annually in Russia weren’t insulting enough, while it’s true that the Eastern Front was not involved in Operation Overlord, Russian President Vladimir Putin had previously been in attendance at the 70th anniversary D-Day events in 2014. No doubt the increase in geopolitical tensions between the West and Moscow in the years since has given the EU license to write out Russia’s role in the Allied victory entirely with little public disapproval, though many of the families of those who volunteered in the International Brigades were rightly insulted by this tampering of history and voiced their objection.

The EU motion‘s real purpose is to fabricate the war’s history by giving credit to the United States for the liberation of Europe while absolving the Western democracies that opened the door for the rise of fascism and tried to use Germany to annihilate the USSR. History itself should always be open to debate and subject to study and revision, but the Atlanticists have made this formal change without any evidence to support it and entirely for political purposes. Like the founding of the EU project itself, the declared aim of the proposal is supposedly to prevent future atrocities from taking place, even though the superstate was designed by former Nazis like Walter Hallstein, the first President of the European Commission, who was a German lawyer in several Nazi Party law organizations and fought for the Wehrmacht in France until his capture as a POW after the invasion of Normandy.

Rather than preventing future crimes, the EU has committed one itself by deceptively modifying the historical record of communism to be parallel with that of the Third Reich. Even further, that they were two sides of the same coin of ‘totalitarianism’ and that for all the barbarity committed during the war, the Soviets were equally culpable — or judging by the amount of times the text cites the USSR versus Germany, even more so. It remains unclear whether we are now to completely disregard the previous conclusions reached by the military tribunals held by the Allies under international law at Nuremberg of which all 12 war criminals sentenced to death in 1946 were German, not Soviet."

[girlactionfigure]

Photographed Armenian Genocide

He stood up to Hitler

Armin Wegner was a German soldier stationed in the Ottoman Empire during World War I who was a witness to the Armenian Genocide. Disobeying orders, he gathered extensive documentation and took hundreds of photographs of atrocities committed against Armenians. Later, Armin became a fearless peace activist who was imprisoned for standing up to Hitler.

Armin was born in 1886 to an aristocratic Prussian family in the Rhineland area of Germany. He was educated at schools in Poland and Switzerland, and was a gifted poet, publishing his first volume of poetry, ���I Have Never Been Older than as a Sixteen-year-old” as a teenager. He attended law school, but had the soul of an artist and spent the next couple of years (in his own words) as a “farmer, dock-worker, student of drama (with Max Reinhardt), private tutor, editor, public speaker, lover and idler, filled with a deep desire for unraveling the mystery of things.”

When World War I broke out in 1914, Armin joined the German army, serving as a medic in Poland. He received the Iron Cross for rendering care under fire. Armin rose to rank of second lieutenant in the German Sanitary Corps and was sent to the Middle East as part of a detachment to assist the Ottoman Army.

Stationed along the Baghdad Railway in Syria and modern-day Iraq, Armin was shocked to witness death marches of thousands of emaciated Armenian refugees forced onto death marches by the Ottomans. The horrifying reality of what was happening to Armenians was being hidden, and Armin was ordered to keep quiet about what he saw as Germany did not want to alienate the Ottoman Empire, an important ally. Disobeying what he felt was a deeply unjust order, Armin went to great effort to collect proof about the systematic massacre of Armenians – the first modern genocide. Armin  was willing to risk his life to document what was happening, and his extensive photographic record remains the most important evidence of the atrocities that occurred.

The Ottomans eventually found out what Armin was doing, and he was arrested by the Germans and sent back to Germany. Some of his photographs were destroyed, but he was able to smuggle out many negatives hidden in his belt.

After the war, Armin became a successful journalist and prominent anti-war activist. In 1919 he published an “Open Letter to President Woodrow Wilson” urging the peace conference to create an independent Armenian state.

He wrote extensively about the Armenian Genocide and testified in court at the trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian who killed Talat Pasha, the Ottoman leader who orchestrated the atrocity. Armin’s testimony was so powerful that the court could not convict Tehirian for the assassination, even though there were many eyewitnesses. He was found not guilty for reason of temporary insanity.

Armin was a respected writer and cultural figure who co-created the German Expressionist movement in the mid-1920’s. After visiting the Soviet Union, including the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia with his wife, author Lola Landau, Armin wrote a book about his trip, which became a bestseller. It was a chilling account of the political violence endemic to Soviet Communist rule. At a time when many in the West were romanticizing the Bolsheviks, Armin was one of the few who could see where the situation was headed: totalitarian Stalinism.

Meanwhile in Germany, Hitler and the Nazi power gained power and in 1933 they urged a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses. As someone who witnessed the Armenian Genocide and had many Jewish friends, Armin could not remain silent. He wrote an open letter to Adolf Hitler identifying himself as a proud Prussian who could trace his roots in Germany back to the time of the Crusades. In clear language he told Hitler that his persecution of Germany’s Jews would destroy the country. “There is no Fatherland without justice!” he said. Armin was the only writer to speak out pubicly against Hitler. Swiftly, he was arrested by the Gestapo, tortured and imprisoned in harsh conditions for a year. In 1934 Armin was released, and immediately fled to Rome, where he changed his name and lived in hiding. His wife divorced him, leading Armin to later say, “Germany took everything from me… even my wife.” He never returned to his beloved homeland. For being the only cultural figure in Germany to speak out for the Jews, Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem honored Armin Wegner as Righteous Among the Nations in 1967.

Armin died alone in Rome in 1978, at age 92. Per his request, his gravestone contains a quote from Pope Gregory VII as he lay on his deathbed in 1085: “I loved justice and hated injustice/Therefore I die in exile.”

For bravely documenting the Armenian Genocide, and standing up to Hitler at great personal sacrifice, we honor Armin Wegner as this week’s Thursday Hero.

[panelki]

"Сталинские высотки" - это семь высотных зданий, построенных в Москве в 1947-1957 годах. Также "сталинскими высотками" называют здания, построенные в похожем стиле примерно в тот же период в ряде других советских городов и дружественных стран.

Дворец культуры и науки (1 фото) в Варшаве - самое высокое здание в Польше и самая высокая сталинская высотка за пределами СССР. Он был построен в качестве подарка Советского Союза польскому народу (построен на советские деньги советскими строителями). Жители Варшавы называют эту высотку "сувениром Сталина".

"Stalin skyscrapers" are seven high-rise buildings built in Moscow in 1947-1957. Also called "Stalin skyscrapers" are buildings built in a similar style during approximately the same period in a number of other Soviet cities and friendly countries.

The Palace of Culture and Science (1 photo) in Warsaw is the tallest building in Poland and the tallest Stalinist high-rise outside of the USSR. It was built as a gift from the Soviet Union to the Polish people (built with Soviet money by Soviet builders). Residents of Warsaw call this high-rise "a souvenir of Stalin.

[theculturedmarxist]

“You were right.”

This was a comment posted on my website this morning from a reader of my last essay “Meet the new Proactive Russia” posted on 16 February, though in light of the latest developments it now seems ages ago.

Yes, indeed, Mr. Putin yesterday moved on from the stalled talks with the USA and NATO over Russia’s 15 December draft treaties creating a new security architecture in Europe. As I had foreseen, he moved on to Plan B. He formally recognized the independence and sovereignty of the two breakaway provinces, Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk People’s Republics in Eastern Ukraine. Moreover, he signed treaties of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance with both.  What “mutual assistance” means was made clear immediately when the Russian President ordered his armed forces to move into the respective republics as “peace keepers.”

Barring some quixotic wish of Ukrainian president Zelensky to enter into armed conflict with Russia over the Donbas and face certain annihilation of his army and of his regime, it is probable that the smoldering war in Eastern Ukraine of eight years duration will now become a “frozen conflict,” in line with South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia, with Transdnistria in Moldova. Of course, that does not mean that Mr. Putin has resolved his broader problems with Ukraine, as I discuss below. But invasion would be the least effective way of addressing them, as we shall see. There are other options to get the job done without spilling blood and without giving the Collective West cause to impose the ‘sanctions from hell’ that still remain in abeyance.

Being “right” about any prospective development in Proactive Russia’s new dealings with the Collective West is not easy. But it is also not just idle guesswork. There are obvious thinking patterns and relevant past history of action by Vladimir Putin which make it easier to predict what comes next, which I will do in the last section of this essay.

*****

Let us look first at the speech itself to get into the mind of the Russian President.

At 22 typed pages of text, the speech is very long for an address intended to announce to the Russian public the treaties he had signed with the two Donbas republics earlier in the day.  One Western commentator remarked that it was a rambling speech. That is true in the sense that it covers a number of different subjects which are related to one another only in the context of Russia’s foreign policy priorities of the moment at different levels. These interrelationships would not be obvious to the general public.

Putin says right at the start that the purpose of the address is not merely to give the audience his perspective on where things stand at the moment with respect to the Donbas but also to inform the nation ��about possible further steps.”  That one statement makes it imperative to go through the document with a fine tooth comb.

The first 16 pages deal with Ukraine.  Putin offers an overview of the history of the modern Ukraine state going back to the early 1920s and the formation of the Soviet Union from the debris of what had been the Russian Empire, when the new Communist rulers consolidated their power by granting the appearance of sovereignty within a confederated union to satisfy the nationalist ambitions of Ukraine and other constituent Union republics. He explains how this loose federation was gutted by the centralizing policies of Stalin, through nationalization, the Terror and other compulsory means though the constitutional guarantees remained on paper. Then after WWII, Stalin added to the Ukrainian territories lands that he took from Hungary and Poland, to which Khrushchev contributed the gift of Crimea.

Putin’s point is to demonstrate that the Ukrainian state which emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 had been created from the top down, not from the bottom up and so was ill-prepared for statehood.

The Russian president then continued the post-Soviet history of Ukraine to explain the pauperization of the nation, the massive loss of population due to departures abroad of job seekers under conditions of economic ruin at home, the skimming of all wealth by oligarchic clans, and their deal making with foreign powers who established a virtual protectorate over the state in exchange for banking and other favors to that oligarchy.

From there he explains how the popular outrage over misrule which led to the Independence Square anti-government demonstrations was manipulated by radical nationalists with foreign help as cover for the coup d’état of February 2014 that brought to power those same nationalists. Together with neo-Nazi militants they were intent on building a Ukrainian identity based on rejection of everything Russian. What has followed is suppression of the Russian language in government institutions, in schools, in the media, even in shops and a vicious genocidal campaign against the two Donbas oblasts which, like Crimea, refused to accept rule by the illegitimate new powers in Kiev.

This background brings Putin to the key four pages in the speech on how the United States and NATO have worked with the anti-Russian regime that they helped to install in Kiev in 2014 to further their own interests. They are using the territory of Ukraine as a platform to forward position personnel and infrastructure threatening the security of Russia, even without any formal entry of Ukraine into the North Atlantic Alliance. He enumerates the Ukrainian airfields not far from the Russian border which now host NATO reconnaissance aircraft and drones that monitor all of Russian airspace to the Urals. He describes the potential of the US-built naval station at Ochakov, near Crimea, which is assuming the function of the base to monitor and potentially to neutralize the Russian Black Sea fleet that NATO had hoped in 2014 would be fulfilled by Sevastopol before the Crimea seceded from Ukraine and successfully joined the Russian Federation.

He explained how NATO is planning to station missiles in Ukraine that will be capable of delivering nuclear strikes across Russia to the Urals and beyond and would have flight times to target measured in as little as five minutes when the hypersonic variants are ready. He claimed that Ukrainian military units are already integrated into the NATO command structure to the point where they can be ordered about from NATO headquarters.  He spoke of the 10 large-scale military exercises planned by NATO to be held on Ukrainian territory during 2022. And he pointed to the training “missions” which NATO member states have set up in Ukraine, units which could otherwise be described as military bases and would then be seen to be in strict violation of article 17 of the Ukrainian constitution.

Finally, in this section of the speech Vladimir Putin raised an issue we have not seen in public discussion before, because it only surfaced when introduced by President Zelensky himself at the Munich Security Conference the week before: the possibility of Ukraine becoming a nuclear power. Putin said this was entirely possible, not just some act of bravado by the Ukrainian leader. After all, Ukraine possesses the technical documents on manufacture of the Soviet nuclear bombs, it possesses enrichment technology and has both aircraft and short range missiles capable of delivering tactical nuclear weapons.

I pause here to note that this lengthy explanation of the way Ukraine is now practically speaking a junior partner of NATO against Russia, of the way it can be used as an attack platform on Russia and of the country’s nuclear potential if it proceeds with withdrawal from the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 which denuclearized Ukraine – all of this is so utterly threatening to Russian state security that it is unthinkable Putin will not proceed to resolve this set of problems quite apart from whatever happens in and around the two Donbas republics that are now independent.

Unlike the past, these detailed complaints are not just idle words. They must be seen as justification for actions which Russia will be taking in coming days and months to remove the listed threats. I will mention how the Kremlin may go about this in the concluding section of this essay.

The other noteworthy section of the speech deals with the separate question of Russian relations with the United States. This comes to five pages out of the 22 pages in total. It begins with the familiar story of the broken promises of 1990 not to move NATO one inch to the east of the Elbe River once Germany was reunited.  It proceeds from the disappointments over the five successive waves of NATO expansion from 1997 to 2020.

This section of the speech ends with the US and NATO response to Russia’s calls for a rollback in the draft treatises sent to Washington and Brussels on 15 December 2021: by ignoring the three key points and only offering several ideas for discussion on secondary issues.

Some Western commentators have seen this as just more Russian whining about American treachery. But in the context of the newly Proactive Russia such a dismissive interpretation would be seriously erroneous.  I will suggest what Mr. Putin may be planning to deal with these issues in the days ahead.

*****

When Vladimir Putin presented his ultimatum to the United States and NATO in December some of my peers published shopping lists of measures the Kremlin might use to force capitulation.  These included various kinds of military action. Military action of the most violent nature was widely found in comments in the blogosphere.

Though from the beginning I had stressed Putin’s likely reliance on psychological rather than kinetic warfare to win his objectives, I also succumbed to the temptation of more dramatic methods. I eventually listed “surgical strikes” against offending infrastructure, like those ABM bases in Romania or the Ochakov naval installation in Ukraine.

However, we see so far that violence is not in Putin’s playbook.  The recognition of the two republics is, like the massing of troops earlier at the Ukrainian border, a way of preventing violence. Moreover, in diplomatic discourse, this recognition can be likened to the precedent that the United States and its NATO allies set when they recognized the independence of Kosovo from Yugoslavia. The justification then was alleged genocidal intentions of the Serbs, the very same issue that Putin has raised with regard to Kiev’s intentions in Donbas.

In these circumstances, how is Vladimir Putin going to respond to the security threats that Ukraine poses now and forestall the far greater threats it will pose in the future as NATO continues to build installations there, not to mention if Ukraine is allowed to develop a nuclear arsenal?

One solution mentioned in Russian television talk shows bears repeating:  by establishing a total economic blockade on Ukraine.  At present, Ukraine receives electricity, oil and gas transit revenues from Russia, and despite everything there is a substantial two way trade. This could all be halted at a moment’s notice with or without Zelensky’s possibly cutting diplomatic relations.  Russia can claim that Ukraine is a hostile nation and put an end to all commercial dealings.  Still more, Russia could impose a naval blockade just as the USA once did to Cuba to force the removal of Soviet missiles. All of this has historic precedent to support it.  Moreover, with its great love for draconian sanctions, the United States and its allies cannot say a word about any sanctions Russia chooses to impose on Ukraine. Obviously, the objective would be to destabilize the Kiev regime sufficiently to promote regime change.

With regard to the problem of NATO rollback, Vladimir Putin already alerted us that there is a Plan C: “Russia has the full right to take measures in turn to ensure our own safety. That is exactly how we will proceed.”  The possibilities were named by my peers back in December. What we missed was the proper sequencing of Russian actions. I have in mind two types of threat to America’s overblown sense of its invulnerability.  The first would be for Russia to position its latest hypersonic missiles and Poseidon deep sea drone  in international waters off the U.S. East and West coasts. Some ‘peek-a-boo’ surfacing of untracked Russian submarines carrying these super weapons off the coast would attract a good deal of media attention That would expose the American political establishment to the same kind of threat the Russians see coming from America’s various offensive missile systems targeting them with negligible warning times.

The other possible Russian counter measure that has been mentioned among analysts in Russia is the stationing of Russian strategic bombers and nuclear armed naval vessels on permanent watch in the Caribbean, making use of port facilities in Nicaragua, Venezuela and possibly Cuba.

Note that all of these measures have in common their reliance on precedents established by the USA and all may be categorized as psychological threats rather than military action which invites escalation and heads us off to Armageddon.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2022

[mariacallous]

Meduza: A new Kremlin propaganda guide

Dear readers: On Friday, Russia will mark the anniversary of the “Baptism of Rus” (the official adoption of Christianity by Kyivan Rus ruler Volodymyr the Great back in 988), and the Putin administration has sent out instructions for how its propaganda media should cover the occasion. Meduza’s Andrey Pertsev got his hands on a copy.

The Kremlin wants journalists to hit many of the same tired notes as usual: “brother nations,” the “satanist Kyiv regime,” and the like. At the same time, the expansionism dial seems to be turned up even higher than usual. Journalists are told to mention how “adversaries of Russia” sought to “destroy Orthodox Christianity” in Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland. Meanwhile, a reference to Polish kings “propagating Catholicism” on “occupied native Russian territories” echoes a speech Putin gave last week that called western Poland a “gift from Stalin to the Poles.”

The guide also devotes a notable amount of attention to Putin himself. The authors tell journalists to spread the message that the president is responsible for “restoring the church in Russia” — and that he’s the only one who can do the same in Ukraine. While the Kremlin’s propaganda guides always paint Putin in a positive light, they don’t always name him repeatedly like this. According to a source close to the Kremlin, however, we’ll see more of this as Russia’s 2024 presidential election approaches: “The president will be linked to every event.” Read more details here.

Meduza has obtained a copy of the Putin administration’s latest instructions for state-owned and pro-government news outlets. The document outlines exactly what the Kremlin wants its propaganda media to tell Russians about the upcoming anniversary of the “Baptism of Rus,” referring to the conversion of Kyivan Rus ruler Volodymyr the Great to Christianity in 988, which the country celebrates on July 28.

The guide tells journalists to refer to the event as a “key turning point in Russian history” and the “point of formation of Russia’s statehood.” It also instructs them to emphasize that having a “common faith” is what allowed the “East Slavic tribes” to become a “unified people.”

The document devotes particular attention to the “adversaries of Russia” that purportedly fought against Orthodox Christianity in Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland. In particular, it says that the “Polish kings planted Catholicism and Uniatism on the occupied native Russian territories in order to fracture and subjugate the people.”

Less than a week ago, Putin made similar territorial claims about Poland at a meeting of the Russian Security Council:

It was thanks to the Soviet Union, thanks to Stalin’s position, that Poland received significant tracts of land in the West, land that belonged to Germany. It’s true: the western territories of modern Poland were a gift from Stalin to the Poles. (Editor’s note: Putin chose not to mention that the USSR invaded Poland along with Germany in 1939.) Did our friends in Warsaw forget about this? We’ll remind them.

The propaganda guide is even more aggressive on the subject of Ukraine. Its authors refer to the Ukrainian government as an “apostate regime” that’s waging a war against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in order to “destroy the spiritual ties of brother nations.” The document does not mention that a Russian shelling attack in Odesa last week destroyed Ukraine’s historic Transfiguration Cathedral.

According to the guide, the only person who can rectify the situation facing Orthodox Christianity in Ukraine is, of course, Vladimir Putin. The propaganda media are tasked with explaining to Russians that their president can be credited with “restoring Russia’s role as the protector of the Orthodox faith”:

Today our country is battling a new satanic regime. The Kyiv regime is deliberately destroying Orthodox Christianity on the territory of Ukraine, applying direct pressure against priests and seizing churches.

The Nazi satanists have entrenched themselves in the holy Russian city of Kyiv, where Rus was baptized. Russia has come to the defense of the Orthodox faith and is crushing neo-Nazis who worship the occult ideas of Hitler and Bandera on the front.

The document also credits Putin with “supporting the rebirth of Orthodoxy” and “restoring the church” in Russia. A source close to the Kremlin told Meduza that the guide’s emphasis on Putin himself is no coincidence, and that the Russian media will increasingly mention him by name in the coming months: “This is important for the electoral campaign. The president will be linked to every development, so that his name is constantly being heard.”

[mynawyspie]

© Magierowski // The Cold-blooded War Hero Who Fought Soviet and Nazi Attempts to Enslave Europe

Let me tell you the story of a brilliant soldier and an unwavering Polish patriot, who relentlessy chased Germans during World War II.

Stanislaw Maczek is largely appreciated by historians as one of the most gifted commanders of that period. Maczek spent most of his adulthood fighting Russians first, and Germans afterwards. He was bent on confronting both murderous, totalitarian regimes, which were bent on conquering the entire continent to enslave Europeans.

The Polish warrior emerged victorious, although he never had the chance to liberate his own homeland.

Eighty years ago, on September 1st, 1939, Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany. Seventeen days later we were attacked by Soviet Russia. The two dictators, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, had a secret plan to carve up central and eastern Europe and share the spoils. At the time Maczek commanded a mechanized brigade.

After the September 1938 campaign, he escaped Poland with thousands of Polish soldiers, who vowed to keep fighting the Germans wherever and whenever they could. The general ended up in Scotland, where the Polish army was being reconstructed. He had traveled through Morocco, Portugal and Gibraltar, disguised in…Arab dress.

Five years later he set foot in France again, this time leading the 1st Polish Armored Division in the Battle of Normandy. Payback time had arrived. As the division’s emblem was a black-winged hussar, it quickly earned the nickname the "Black Devils." They were feared by the Germans, and the Allies admired their courage and efficiency. Maczek's pioneering tactuics were a precursor of modern tank warfare: he preferred speed and mobility over mass firepower.

The 1st Armored Division played a decisive role in the famous Battle of the Falaise Pocket, in 1944, in which the Allies encircled two German armies. The British general Montgomery, supreme commander of the ground forces in Operation Overlord, wrote after the war: "Under Falaise we locked the Germans like they were in a bottle, and the Polish Armored Division was the cork in this bottle."

In the autumn of 1944 the Black Devils continued their raids into Belgium, liberating Ypres and Ghent. Then they stormed Breda in the southern Netherlands, reconquering the town without any civilian casualties. Maczek reportedly insisted that no bomber aircraft be deployed in the assault, since he wished to preserve the unique architecture of the old city.

Breda’s citizens welcomed the liberators enthusiastically, displaying thank-you notes, written in Polish, in their windows. Years later residents of the city applied for Maczek to be granted honorary citizenship of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The petition was signed by 40,000 people.

The war ended. Maczek returned to Britain, his division was demobilized.

Then they came again. The Soviets.

First they liberated Poland from Nazi occupation, but soon they imposed their own bloody rule. As the communists hated those who had fought in the West, many soldiers who chose to go back to Poland immediately after Germany’s surrender were swiftly thrown into jail or summarily executed. Others were eventually barred from re-entering Poland.

Maczek, an honorary Dutch citizen, was stripped of his Polish citizenship. Since he was also deprived of retirement benefits, he had to work as a bartender in restaurants owned by Polish immigrants in Scotland. This time it was the Cold War which exacted its appalling toll.

In 1989, after the collapse of communism, the wartime lionheart was rehabilitated. The Polish government restored his citizenship. Five years later he was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, the highest Polish distinction.

Stanislaw Maczek died in Edinburgh in December 1994, at the age of 102. At his prior request he was buried in the Polish war cemetery in Breda, along with his brothers-in-arms.

He once said: "The Polish soldier fights for the freedom of all nations. But he dies only for Poland."

[ltraveladventure]

Day #6: Warsaw Ghetto

We arrived in the city of Warsaw, retrieved our luggage (!), and made it to our lodgings with such ease we were pleasantly surprised. They offered us a shuttle to our hotel, when we arrived the people were so kind and hospitable that we realized how much more we felt at home in Poland.

We woke up early to meet our guide, Eva, who was taking us on a walking tour of the Warsaw Ghetto and to show us the remnants of the wall and the Jewish Synagogue. Eva showed us the Palace of Science and Culture that Stalin built in the city as a gift to the Polish people. There was a lot of controversy about whether or not the building should remain after 1990, when Poland became a free state, but many of the local people saw the building as a part of their history and to raze it to the ground would be like erasing a part of their history.

Next to the Palace of Science and Culture is a modern building, whose architect designed it to show the sails, symbolizing that Polish Jews were finally set free. As we walked along the road, Eva told us that we were entering the smaller ghetto—there were two—and that the smaller ghetto still had a building that Mieczyslaw Jedruszczak did not want to tear down after the war. He said it was a landmark of their history and to keep it as a reminder of what had happened. The small brick building was once some kind of office, and the wall surrounded this part of the smaller ghetto. The locals call him “The Wall Keeper.” He passed away in March 2016.

We ventured farther east and Eva showed us the synagogue which was the only remaining building after the bombing in 1942. The Germans kept their horses in the synagogue, forbidding Jews to practice, of course, and therefore spared the synagogue because they valued their horses lives more than the lives of the 300,000 Jews who were murdered under Himmler’s orders.

We left the small ghetto and went to the larger ghetto and found the Polin Museum. Very beautiful museum detailing the lives of European Jewry from the 1200s. https://www.polin.pl/pl

One of the most interesting sites was Miła 18 Street (18 Pleasant Street). This place was once a bunker, where the resistance fighters hid weapons. Many people who chose to help in the resistance and smuggled in weapons and munitions. When this larger ghetto was bombed and set on fire, Miła 18 Street was destroyed. It became the largest grave of the resistance fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. There is a large mound of grass, where underneath lies a bunker where the fighters lay in their final resting place. Over 100 people—only some of whom were named.

The day was so interesting with so many stories that do not make the history books. I think one of their voices is calling to me to write it.

On our way now to Krakow by train. Internet is spotty, so expect some delays!

In Peace,

Leah

[scizlor]

Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science (also called "Stalin' penis" by the locals at the time of its construction, as it was an unwanted "gift" from the Soviet Union) and some nice views above the city from its 30th floor. #PałacKulturyiNauki #PKiN #architecture #architettura #arquitetura #arkitektur #building #edificio #palace #palazzo #soviet #sovietico #panorama #landscape #vista #view #fromabove #dallalto #Warsaw #Warszawa #Varsavia #Poland #Polska #Polonia #nofilter #nofiltro (presso Warsaw, Poland)