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stillunusual · 11 months ago

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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.

#vladimir putin #little pooty #history #russia #ussr #soviet union #joseph stalin #germany #poland #second world war #world war 2 #vatnik #tankie #historical revisionism #ethnic cleansing is a gift

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