The outbreak of World War II, which began on Sept. 1, 1939, with the invasion of Poland by the Nazi Third Reich, is one of the events annually commemorated throughout Europe.
However, Sept. 17, 1939, the date of the Soviet Union’s aggression against Poland, is not as widely known. This event needs to be remembered as it decided the fate of Poland and other countries of central and eastern Europe for the next half-century. Poles and other peoples of the region know Russia and understand its imperial ambitions through the historical experience symbolized by Sept. 17.
The Red Army’s incursion into Polish territory was the implementation of the secret part of the Nazi-Soviet pact signed on Aug. 23, 1939, by the heads of the two diplomacies, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov. Two totalitarian empires entered into an alliance and planned to divide the independent countries of central Europe among them.
The German sphere of influence was to include western Poland, Lithuania and Romania, while the Soviet control was to extend over eastern Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Finland.
For Poland, the most important consequence of the pact was the joint liquidation of the independent Polish state and the division of its territory between two occupying powers, Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. Other provisions of the treaty were partially modified in the following two years. Finland managed to protect its sovereignty in the winter war of 1940.
However, after an episode of relative independence, Lithuania was absorbed by the Soviet Union. Various detailed amendments did not affect the critical principle of the pact — imperialism by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were to decide the fate of the peoples and states of that part of Europe.
Under German occupation, Poland suffered enormous human and material losses. The Nazis killed 6 million citizens of the Republic of Poland, including nearly 3 million Polish Jews.
They destroyed and burned thousands of Polish towns and villages, as well as the country’s capital, Warsaw. They stole countless material possessions and cultural assets, which were never returned. Only a few of the perpetrators of German genocide, extermination, war crimes, mass terror and looting were brought before the tribunals in Nurnberg and Warsaw to suffer the punishment they deserved.
Although Nazi Germany’s crimes were morally condemned by the free world, this does not apply to the crimes of Communist Russia, which went unpunished and often forgotten.
The Soviet occupation of more than half of Poland’s pre-war territory entailed the Katyn Massacre — the extermination of 22,000 prisoners of war: Polish Army officers, policemen, soldiers, civil clerks and other political prisoners. They were shot because Stalin regarded them as patriots loyal to their homeland and implacable enemies of communism.
It also entailed the deportation of half a million Poles to gulags and forced settlements in Siberia and the Asian part of the Soviet Union, a vast number of whom never returned and died in exile.
It entailed brutal terror and ideological indoctrination by the Soviet police, attempts to crush the Polish national identity and tradition, the coercive instillation of communist principles in children and the forced renunciation of faith.
Poles are not the only ones to have suffered. The Baltic nations, Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, were equally afflicted. As were other nations that fell within the Soviet sphere of influence after Russia’s victory over the Third Reich.
The Nazi-Soviet pact collapsed less than two years after its conclusion, when Germany attacked Stalin’s Russia on June 22, 1941. Yet the fate of the central and eastern European countries was to be decided by the rulers of the imperial powers that remained in force.
The Soviets defeated the Nazis and in 1945 seized the entire territory of Poland and other states further to the west and south, as far as the rivers Elbe, Danube and Drava. Some of them were annexed directly to the Soviet Union as federal states — such was the fate of the Balts, Belarusians and Ukrainians.
In others, Russia installed puppet governments consisting of local communists subservient to Moscow — this happened in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and East Germany.
For the Poles, the defeat of the Third Reich did not bring freedom. The subjection to the Russian empire continued until the fall of communism — for another half-century.
It was not until the democratic changes initiated in 1989 by the Polish “Solidarity” movement that the Poles and other nations truly liberated themselves and regained the sovereignty of their states. Most gradually became full members of the EU and NATO.
However, the independence of any country from central and eastern Europe has always been a thorn in the Russian imperialists’ side.
As soon as Moscow recovered from the shock of losing its Stalinist sphere of influence, it started moving toward restoring the empire.
We remember the military assault on Georgia in 2008. We remember the brutal suppression of several freedom movements in Belarus and Ukraine.
We remember Russia’s hostile policy towards independent Ukraine, the military annexation of Crimea and Donbas in 2014, and the genocidal war against the sovereign Ukrainian state unleashed on Feb. 24 this year.
For people who remember the historical events symbolized by today’s date — Sept. 17 — there is no doubt that imperial Russia is seeking to take over other countries again.
It wants the same thing it wanted in 1939 and 1940, when it acted with Hitler’s Germany, and between 1945 and 1991, when it ruled those countries on its own.
Russia has always wanted to control central and eastern Europe, but a free Poland, a free Ukraine and all the other independent states in the region would never agree to it. It is a matter of life and death, of preserving identity and survival. It is a matter of future security and prosperity for us all.
Andrzej Duda is the president of Poland. This article was simultaneously published in the Polish monthly Wszystko Co Najwazniejsze as part of a project with the Institute of National Remembrance and the Polish National Foundation.
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